“Get thee behind me, Satan!” screeched Andrew, flinging his arms up in front of his face, his comics flying.
“What?” said Spike in surprise.
“What?” repeated Andrew stupidly.
“For god’s sake,” muttered Spike. You never can do things the easy way, can you? he berated himself. No, you always have to do things in the most unpleasant manner possible. Lose your girlfriend to your grandsire, get hardware implanted in your head, fall in love with the Slayer—the Slayer, for god’s sake!—get a soul shoved back into you, and now you can’t just find Buffy, no, first you have to deal with the world’s oldest living virgin and his overactive imagination.
Although since Spike had regained his humanity, that probably meant he was the unlucky holder of that title. Ah, even better.
Really though, it could have been worse. The demon could have resurrected him wearing one of Harris’s shirts; then he would have prayed for death. Which of course he wouldn’t have gotten, but it would have been one more thing to be pissed about.
“Aren’t you dead?” exclaimed Andrew.
“What’s it look like?” returned Spike testily.
“Well, you look alive,” Andrew allowed. “But the First can do that, so how do I know you’re real?”
Spike bent over, picked up one of Andrew’s comic books and bounced it off the boy’s chest. “Real enough for you?”
Andrew teared up. It was a miracle! Spike had somehow survived the cataclysm that had claimed the town of Sunnydale and the lives of so many valiant warriors. “How did you survive?” he asked in watery amazement. “The whole town collapsed!”
Spike rolled his eyes. Was it his imagination, or was the boy getting stupider? Was that even possible? “I didn’t survive, you git. Notice anything?” he asked sardonically.
Andrew looked at him warily. “Well, you do seem a bit taller—”
“I am not taller, I’m standing in sunlight,” Spike growled.
“Oh. Then you … okay, wait, I don’t know what that means.”
“It means I’m human.”
Andrew’s eyes grew big and his mouth formed an astonished “O.” Then he crumpled into a polite little pile at Spike’s feet, nicely framed by his comic books.
***
Willow could tell Kennedy didn’t hear her when she said goodbye. Kennedy was on the phone, talking with Giles—well, arguing—when Willow said bye in a perfectly normal, not at all hushed voice, then grabbed her jacket and hurried out the door before Kennedy could register what she was doing.
It felt kind of wrong, but being away from the fighting? Felt really, really good. And she shouldn’t feel guilty about that … right?
Willow started down the sidewalk at a brisk pace. Okay, it wasn’t like she could outrun Kennedy, and she wouldn’t even try. But after Kennedy argued with the others, she always bitched about them, and god, Willow just wanted a little peace. She was supposed to be researching a paper for school, but she’d happily stay up a few hours later if she could have some peace now.
Willow wasn’t sure she should even be surprised by how things were. She still marveled at the way Kennedy had pursued her the year before; everywhere Willow turned Kennedy had been there, looking at her. Smiling into her eyes, touching her hand. Willow had been a little unnerved by the attention—not because it was, you know, attention, but because Kennedy was so … well, she was kind of Cordelia-like. Pretty and confident, a natural leader. She wasn’t like anyone Willow had been involved with before. Which, considering that her “before” consisted of two people, maybe didn’t mean much.
Tara and Oz hadn’t been much alike on the surface, but they were both all … wind beneath my wing-y for Willow. They were strong inside; they didn’t care if anyone deferred to them, or listened to them, or even looked at them. They didn’t need reassurance from anyone else.
Kennedy wasn’t like that. She was always pushing, especially Buffy. She wanted to be heard, respected. She wanted to be a leader. She hadn’t wanted to wait her turn when she was a Potential, and now that she was a Slayer, she thought it was her right to butt into private talks between Buffy and Giles, and that it was okay to flare up if they didn’t agree with her. Once, after a Kennedy blowup, Xander had called her Faith Lite—“all the drama, but now psychosis-free!” And for one horrifying moment, before she caught herself, Willow had started to nod.
Thank god Kennedy had already stormed from the room.
Sometimes Willow felt she could outline her days in the ups and downs of Kennedy’s voice, soft and tender at night when they were in bed together, shrill and demanding with others during the day. She was always tender with Willow, unless they were arguing about the others.
But they couldn’t stay in bed forever.
Something Buffy had said to her out of the blue during the summer popped back into her head out of nowhere: “You don’t have to become involved with somebody just because they want to.” Willow had asked what she meant, but Buffy had backtracked and then started babbling. Like it was just a random thought.
But now Willow was trapped with Kennedy—no, living, not trapped; no one was making her stay there, she reminded herself—while the others were together in their big comfy house, having fun all the time, together all day, all snuggling up in their jammies at bedtime and sipping cocoa. Well, okay, not cocoa, it was still warm at night, but the point was they were together, and she was across town with Kennedy, because the stress was too much to take when they were all together. Kennedy had been after her for weeks to get their own place, and finally Willow agreed. Buffy hadn’t argued nearly as much as Willow wanted her to.
God, Willow wished she was there, not here.
It was ridiculous to feel trapped. Unreasonable.
So why couldn’t she stop? She thought the tension would ease since Kennedy had become a Slayer and Buffy didn’t have as much pressure on her anymore—didn’t feel that the whole world and every one of the Potentials were relying on her.
What a joke! They argued more and more, and even when they were alone, Willow found herself avoiding talking about Buffy or Giles or the others. Because if she didn’t take Kennedy’s side, it was a betrayal. So instead of being with the friends she loved, she was across town, walking on eggshells. She didn’t want to hurt Kennedy.
But mostly? She didn’t want to have to try anymore.
***
The thumping at the door was insistent, and Buffy hurried across the living room to open it.
Then she stopped dead, stunned by the sight of Spike standing before her, dressed in his customary attire of black jeans, black T-shirt, and duster. Spike, who’d been gone for months, whose cool flesh had been engulfed in flames even before she left him to die in the school’s basement.
He’d come back. Like Angel. Like her.
“Spi—ke?” she breathed.
He stared at her, re-memorizing the fall of her hair, the glossy pink of her lips. The lines around her eyes, deeper than any 22-year-old should have. He’d thought, when she’d first told him her plan for the Potentials, that those lines would ease when she was not the only one who was chosen, but instead they were deeper.
“Hello, love,” he said softly.
“Are you—real?” she asked after a moment. Didn’t sound stupid at all when she said it, he thought.
“That I am.” He shifted Andrew, draped across his shoulder in a fireman’s hold. The kid may have been skinny, but carrying him a few blocks and then just standing there holding him was enough to make Spike’s arms ache. Time was he could have hauled a big strapping man or well-fed milkmaid miles if he needed to find a good place to dispose of the body. But that was then, when he didn’t have a heartbeat. Or a soul. Yeah, he was just full of humanity now; it was about ready to pour out his ears.
“Do you mind if I put the kid down?” he asked awkwardly. Buffy was still blinking at him as if she was trying to clear her eyes, and he didn’t want to punctuate his exceedingly graceless re-entrance into her life by dropping the boy.
“Yeah, I’m actually conscious now,” piped up Andrew. Buffy hastily moved back, and Spike swung Andrew down. The reedy blond wavered for a few moments before throwing himself down on the couch with an attitude of exhaustion. “He gave me the scare of my life!” he told Buffy with a shudder. “And not only that, he hit me with my own graphic novel! And then he—oh my god, where are they?” he suddenly screamed, turning to Spike. “Where, where?”
“Where’s what?” protested Spike.
“My graphic novels, my graphic novels—my comic books!” he exclaimed at Spike’s blank look.
Spike shrugged. “They’re on the ground back where you lost it, I’d say.”
“Oh! That’s just—oh, forget it! I’ll get them myself! Don’t forget to hold dinner,” Andrew exclaimed to Buffy, rushing out the front door.
Buffy managed a weak smile. “He has to rescue his babies,” she told Spike.
For a moment they just looked at each other, then she stepped closer and raised a hand to touch his face gently. With wonder, the way she never had before, when he would have given everything for a kind touch from her.
No, not never. She’d touched him like that at the end, in the days leading up to the big fight and his show-stopping immolation. At the end, he wasn’t just a thing to her.
“It’s really you,” she whispered. He shut his eyes, drinking in her touch.
“In the flesh,” he murmured. He didn’t want to startle her, didn’t want to break the fragile mood. He reached up and covered her hand with his, and she let him. For once, her flesh didn’t sear him, didn’t burn. Didn’t cleanse.
And his didn’t chill hers.
“You’re—human,” she realized after a long moment. “How did it happen?”
“The demon I told you about last year—that one that gave me the soul?” She nodded. “After I went up in flames, I woke up there. Thought it was the afterlife. Thought I’d be pushing boulders for all eternity, but it was just a test, the whole thing. Having the soul. Getting tortured by the First, too, I guess. He said this was what I earned.”
“And you came here?” she probed softly.
Spike shrugged. “Sunnydale’s even more of a hole now, I hear,” he said casually. “Thought I might as well branch out. Weather’s nice in California, and this seemed as good a town as any.” God, he was a liar. Didn’t give a shit about sunny California—as far as he was concerned, the only difference between it and yogurt was that yogurt had an actual culture. There was only one reason for him to go to Santa Rita, and it was the same reason he’d gone back to Sunnydale after his first trip to Africa.
God, he was an idiot.
And she knew it, apparently. “How’d you find me?” Buffy asked, still a little dazed. “I mean, you can’t do the smelling thing anymore, right?”
“Yeah, no super-smelling sense anymore. ‘Course, it never worked over distances larger than, say, Rhode Island, so it wouldn’t have worked here anyway,” Spike noted dryly.
“So, how’d you…?”
“I have my ways,” Spike said dismissively.
“Did you ask Angel?” asked Buffy, beginning to regain her equilibrium. A few years ago—a year ago, even—she knew she wouldn’t have said Angel’s name so comfortably, but there was a lot of water under the bridge. Or perhaps she was becoming calloused, as she’d long suspected.
Or maybe she was just growing up.
Spike grimaced in response to her question. She’d always known how to make him jump, sometimes not in a good way. “No, I did not ask Angel,” he returned a little shortly. As if he’d ever ask that lummox anything, except where he bought his clothes. Had to know where not to shop.
“Then where—”
“Your father,” Spike broke in. Now it was her turn to flinch. “Called him up and told him I had something of yours.”
Buffy smiled faintly. “I guess being human isn’t a guarantee of truthfulness,” she observed after a moment.
Spike didn’t look away, and finally she glanced down. She knew what he meant.
She always had.
***
“So, school? How was it?”
Dawn shrugged. “It was school,” she told Xander, but that was kind of a lie. She was in a private school now, thanks to Andrew, and it was so much better than public school it wasn’t funny. She was enjoying her subjects for the first time in years—Buffy had said, when she’d seen the results of Dawn’s first few tests, that she’d forgotten that Dawn used to be a really good student.
Okay, maybe the good student stuff was something the monks programmed into her, but she was still enjoying it. Even if the uniform sucked. Her teachers were so cool, and kids were encouraged to pursue what they were interested in, rather than just going along with the class. And the best thing was, all her school records had been destroyed when Sunnydale went bam, so she had a clean slate and her counselor hadn’t lectured her once.
Xander’s nice car from pre-Sunnydale destruction was gone, but he’d gotten another one, this time an SUV like her mom’s. Big enough for everyone in the house, and perfect for the owner of a construction company, also thanks to Andrew. Xander couldn’t do the precise hands-on work he used to, not with one eye, so Andrew had given him start-up money, and Xander found some of the guys he used to work with in Sunnydale and set up his own firm. Now he was in charge of building a new subdivision, and could take off every day at three so that he could take Dawn home. He usually came in with her, had a snack, and went right back to work, because he said he wanted the guys to see that although he was the boss, he still worked hard.
Xander parked in the driveway and went down to the sidewalk mailbox as Dawn rummaged through her purse for the key. As Dawn opened the door, she could hear the muffled sounds of the television inside, which was weird, because Buffy and Giles hardly ever watched TV. Of course, Andrew loved it, but he usually liked to watch on the big-screen in the game room, not the normal-size set in the living room. Lately he’d been yammering about putting in a home theater with a projection TV, but Dawn’s new friend Sarah had one, and the remote looked like something out of “Star Trek,” which—come to think of it, that would probably make Andrew extra happy.
It was time for “Melrose Place,” apparently. “Oh come on, Kimberly, you can do so much better than Michael,” grumbled the person on the couch. Which was Spike.
Dawn came to a dead stop and dropped her bookbag. Xander, walking slowly behind her while flipping through the mail, bumped into her and gave her a puzzled nudge. “What’s the hold-up?” he prodded.
“H—h—hhh,” stuttered Dawn, gesturing vaguely towards Spike.
Xander took one look and jumped. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, doesn’t anyone stay dead around here?” he barked.
In the kitchen, Buffy hurriedly plated the sandwiches she’d made for Spike, who had to be hungry after returning from the dead. Dammit, dammit, she should have let him come into the kitchen with her like he’d wanted to, but she’d wanted a minute to compose herself. It wasn’t like somebody came back from the dead every day.
More like every third.
“He’s fine, don’t kill him,” she shouted, rushing from the kitchen. Xander hadn’t seemed to have a problem with Spike for the last few months before he died, but sometimes he reacted first and thought later. It was kind of a Scooby trait, really.
“He’s alive,” Buffy blurted out, skidding to a halt in the living room, where the other three stood, staring at each other. She shoved the plate at Spike and he took it automatically. “Alive, as in human. Not a vampire.”
Xander and Dawn turned to Spike and stared at him, until he finally began to squirm under their inspection. Wasn’t like them to look at him for so long; he was kind of used to most of them ignoring him, actually.
“He’s real. Really real,” Buffy assured them. “It was part of getting his soul, he just got the whole thing now. The whole human/soul thing.”
The others were silent for a minute, studying him.
“That’s—wow, that’s just, uh—again with the wow,” Xander finally said. He was probably less surprised than he should have been, but then again, maybe these things shouldn’t surprise him at all anymore. “Another resurrection, huh?”
“You’re real?” asked Dawn carefully, moving over next to Spike. She stood beside him, surprisingly tall, and narrowed her eyes at him suspiciously. “How can we tell?”
Buffy shook her head. What, Dawn thought she could stand right next to a ghost and not realize it? Or the First? She had super Slayer senses, she could tell these things. “He’s corporeal, Dawn. Touch him if you don’t believe me.”
“Well, I might just—”
Buffy and Dawn were focusing on each other now, and Spike was staring at the two of them like they were all he wanted to see; none of them noticed Xander slipping from the room and heading up the stairs. As he started down the second floor hall he could hear an exclamation from below, followed by Spike complaining, “Bloody hell, Bit, she said touch, not pinch!”
Then he was in his room, and maybe he could get some actual answers.
He usually wasn’t home so early, and her face showed her surprise. “Anya,” he asked without preamble, “did you know Spike was back?”
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