I'm glad Buffy wants to have Spike back and not to kill him.
Spike is really different, threatening to kill Dawn.
And the kills he talks of that he and Dru did? Why is he so skinny then? Doesn't make a lot of sense or he is lying or imaging it.
Looking forward to more!

What an interesting story. Really enjoying this.

Cata clysmic meeting between the two, on familiar territory, with familiar animosity and violence and speed and spite - and everything, too, too familiar. He knows her, she knows him, despite this cold, deeply cold facade made all the more damning as he treats her to a grinning litany of cruel invective: he figuratively stamps on her Achilles Heel. Dawn.

He goads her. God, it's so effective, that she beats him. And just like once before, he lets her. This time, he's obviously hoping she'll kill him; after all, he's just threatened the most awful, bloody ending for her beloved sister -

The soul, or lack of it, is not the problem, here. Buffy has just assumed that the vampire with a soul is not a vampire through and through, any more. Humans have a soul - and every last one of us is humane, right? Wrong.

Her problem with her beloved bleach boy is not so black and white. It's whether anything can be gleaned from him, resolved or retrieved, before the fang and the fist surrender either to the bite, or the dust.

Your story is bone-jarringly good.