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Author's Chapter Notes:
I hope the title is self explanatory. There is a huge time gap between end of Season 3 and beginning of 4 when all sorts of things could have happened.
Never Ever Tell by Lilachigh

Meeting 10 Moving On

The bus dropped her off a couple of blocks from the huge
old hotel. She’d heard this was where he was living in Los Angeles. It was a far cry from Sunnydale.
Buffy didn’t know why she’d come. They were finished. Angel had walked away without a backward glance.
She was due to start at college soon. She should have been at home, packing, organising, gossiping to Willow, spending time with her mother before the big goodbye-I’m-leaving-home bit happened.
But she needed - what? To talk to him? What good was that going to do? She was ashamed of herself for saying she was going to patrol and getting on a bus heading for Los Angeles instead.
But she was so angry that he hadn’t tried to fight harder for their future.
She’d had no chance to tell him how she felt. It was all bottled up inside her and only came out in the mad killing sprees she’d been on every evening this summer.
No, she didn’t want to talk, she just needed to see how his life was without her. She knew he’d be desperately unhappy. And that hurt her, too.
Spike leapt across the shadowy rooftops towards the hotel. Posh sort of place his grandsire was living in. Made a dirty crypt seem very second rate.
But of course that was what always happened, wasn’t it? Had been happening for years. One of them got all the goodies; the girl and the easy living - even a rotten soul.
And he got - a crypt, a mad girlfriend who dumped him and a sex crazy newbie vamp who was surprised when a jewelled cross stolen from her supper burnt her skin.
So why was he here? To talk? What would he say? Hey, Peaches,I’m family. Why didn’t you ask me to join your poncy detective gang?
OK, Spike thought with a flash of honesty, I wouldn’t soddin’ well join his groupies if you paid me in free blood for centuries, but...
It would have been nice to be asked. Just once. To sense that you belonged. God, how he hated him!
Buffy had stared at the front entrance of the hotel and knew she couldn’t knock and go in, unannounced. She didn’t want Angel to know she was there.
She swung herself up the side of the building, climbing from ledge to ledge, found a window half open and squeezed inside.
Spike reached the roof the hotel, forced open the door to the service steps and silently strode down a long corridor towards the main stairway. He was getting irritated with himself now, spoiling for a fight, wanting to feel his fists crash into Liam’s stupid fat face.
Hidden behind a pillar, Buffy stared down into the great hall beneath her. There he was, sitting, talking to someone still hidden by the pillar. He looked - well, actually he looked fine!
Her heart jolted. No great sadness and heartache here, then. He was smiling and, even as she watched, the person he was talking to stood up and crossed to his side. Angel looked up at her and laughed.
It was Cordelia.
In that split second Buffy grew up. Later she even thought she remembered a sort of click in her head when she switched from love-sick teenager to clear-eyed adult.
It didn’t prevent the tears from running down her face, but they were washing away betrayal and could do her no harm.
Spike smelt the tears before he saw her. Later he thought that was weird. Slayer blood he could understand, but he had smelt her crying.
In the dark of the following night, inside his head, the part of him called William escaped captivity and began to write a poem called Tears of a Slayer until Spike overpowered him and locked him back in his cage.
He could see Buffy now, staring down into the hall, gazing at Angel probably. Spike couldn’t have cared less.
He knew if he wanted to live she mustn’t see him here. But he was too late; she turned, looked at him, her big green eyes wet with hurt.
But oddly, she didn’t go for her stake. Didn’t spit out sarcastic words or even punch him in the face. She just looked at him, as if she was somehow disappointed.
Suddenly, even though she was the Slayer and so he loathed her, it was desperately important that she didn’t think he lived here, that she knew he wasn’t part of this poxy set-up. And he could cheerfully have killed Liam for doing this to her.
“Come to fight him,” he blurted out.
For a second, a strange relief crossed her face, then she shrugged and he realised a woman was looking at him tonight, not a girl.
“Move on, Spike,” she said quietly. “Just - move on.”

another meeting follows shortly.





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