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Author's Chapter Notes:
either today or Tuesday will be my last update until after the holidays :( We have family coming to visit (and then other supposed to be here family going away, leaving me to entertain the visiting family) so I don't think I'll be able to update again until probably just after New Year's...

I'll try to sneak in a quick Christmas 113 Times or other XMas fic update, but I'm not sure I'll be able to do that either

If I am in fact completely gone until after the new year.....have a happy and safe holiday time and enjoy whomever you spend it with :)
Chapter 14

“Walk me home?” She explained when he looked at her questioningly, “so I can get cleaned up before I go talk to Mom.”

He wasn’t ready for her to leave yet, but well, “Sure, luv.” He laid a steadying arm across her back as she stood up.

And had to make himself keep walking when, with one touch of her small hand, she stopped him from taking his hand away.

“I still feel kinda…shaky,” she explained, sounding embarrassed.

“Buffy?” he asked, still walking her out of the crypt.

“Huh?”

“You’re not weak, pet.”

Well that was unexpected; and untrue, “Yeah, I am Spike.”

“No,” he tried to think of a way to explain it to her. “If you’re holding up something real heavy, then you know you’re strong, right?”

“Yeah,” she really wished she would know where he was going with these things.

“Now it might not be easy to do it, but you’re strong so you can. But then if something starts pushing down on the thing a little bit it gets a bit heavier feeling even though it’s the same as before, right?”

“Right…”

“So you’re still just as strong because you can still do what you could before, it’s just the extra bit that’s making it kind of hard. And the more something pushes down on it, the harder it is to keep up, right?”

“Right,” she agreed again, still reluctant.

“But the thing you’ve been holding up has stayed the same the entire time so at the end there when it’s so hard to hold up, you’re still holding up the same thing that made you strong in the first place, it’s just the added pressure that messed it up, yeah?”

“I don’t—“ They were just outside his crypt and he stopped to look at her as he continued.

“If you take away that extra pressure and give yourself a bit of time to adjust and recover then you’re back to being able to hold the whole thing up just fine; but the entire time you were still holding that same thing up, right?”

How was it that she never knew where he was going until the end? He never gave her a chance to come up with a reason as to why he was wrong because she was never entirely sure just what it is he was supposed to be wrong about until the end.

And, she wondered, why was it that he was the only one who had anything to say to her that made even the slightest bit of sense?

“But if, at some point, I drop it,” she countered, “then I’ve still dropped it.”

“Won’t drop it,” he sounded so sure, “not if you get someone to help you until its back to being just what it was before.”

“Doesn’t needing help make me weak in a way?”

“Wouldn’t have expected that from a Slayer who gets so much help,” he mused. “But no, Buffy, it doesn’t; not being able to ask for help when you need it, that’s being weak.”

“Don’t have to be...”

They walked in silence until they were at her house, “Don’t leave just yet?”

“Of course,” he agreed readily. “You want to go in or keep walking?”

“Can we go sit on the back steps? I don’t think I’m ready to go back inside yet and….I don’t think I can walk anymore,” she admitted reluctantly. She probably would have pushed it if it had been Xander or even Giles walking with her; she still wanted them to see her as the Slayer and knew…

Little things like this would make her look less like the Slayer in their eyes—it was already doing so as a matter of fact—but with Spike….he just understood that it was what she needed. She was still very much the Slayer, she was just going through some stuff at the moment that meant she couldn’t do as much.

She nearly yelped in surprise as Spike picked her up as soon as she’d provided her answer.

“I didn’t mean I couldn’t walk anymore at all, I just meant—“

“Know what you meant, but it’s not like it’ll hurt matters any.”

Buffy wasn’t sure why she didn’t care, even though she knew he was probably doing it at least partially for selfish reasons. She didn’t know why she didn’t care, but she did know it felt good to be off her feet again.

They sat on her back steps and she remembered the last time they’d done this.

“I don’t think if anything happens to my Mom that I’m going to be able to sit on these steps again.”

“Yeah, you will, pet. Not saying anything’s happening to Mum but if…you will.”

“Your mother was alive when you…right?”

“When Dru turned me? Yeah, but she’d been sick for a long while.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s alright, pet. Should have learned to deal with it better though.”

“I’m sure you dealt with it just fine, Spike;” he sure knew how to help her.

“No I didn’t. Turning her wasn’t dealing with it fine.”

“You….?” So she would never have guessed that one.

“Yeah. I thought…I thought it would make her better, you know? End all the pain she was in. Didn’t quite work out so well, though.”

Buffy could tell that whatever happened still bothered him to this day. Not sure if she should ask anymore she just moved a bit closer to him and leaned her head against his shoulder. He really was still William always had been. She hadn’t understood how that could be given how different Angel and Angelus were, but…

“You’re still him, aren’t you?”

“That nancy boy, William?” he knew instinctively what she was talking about. “Hardly!”

“Yeah you are. You’re Spike too, but…You still loved your mother enough to not want her to suffer and…How’d it happen?”

“My mother or William?” he wasn’t ready to answer one of them and still wasn’t sure yet which it was.

“You keeping a bit of William?”

“I just did. First thing I was supposed to do—Angelus’ orders—was kill all my family. It was only my mum, mind you, but I told him she wad dead. Which worked out real well when a week later I brought her in all vamped.”

“Why only you?” she asked and he knew it wasn’t anything against him, she was merely wondering why Angelus hadn’t been capable of acting civil—or at least not torturous—without his soul.

“Haven’t ever figured that one out. Sometimes I’ve hated it…knowing I loved Dru with a demon’s heart and a human’s when she only had the demon in her to love me back…Not really a conscience or anything, but I never could…Never could do some things. Grateful for that now, though.”

“Really?”

“Be a hell of a lot harder to get you to see I can be good if I had as much on my plate as say…Angelus.”

“Right,” she said disbelievingly, “so which part didn’t you do? The murdering? The torturing? The raping?”

“Only did a bit of the second one and I’ve only ever had sex with three women.””

Not sure how they got n this topic, she continued anyway, “Spike, it’s easy to not count rape as sex—if you want to.”

“Buffy,” he said sincerely, pushing her to sit up so he could see her face while he talked to her, “I said it before and I’ll say it again, I’m love’s bitch. I never did get off on stuff like that—guess it’s that William bit of me, but….I messed around enough when Angelus or Darla was in the room to keep them placated, but I never actually…Dru, Darla—one time, and Harmony are the only ones.”

“Really?” strangely, unexpectedly she found herself believing him.

“I loved Dru so anything else didn’t exactly appeal to me. She’d want other girls sometimes, but I never would—Think that’s part of why she loved her ‘daddy’. He did a right good job of messing her up that way. She was going to become a nun, you know?”

“Really?” Buffy knew she was asking that a lot, but she couldn’t come up with anything better as she tried to picture the vampire she knew as Drusilla as a nun.

“Course that as before Angelus broke her, but…I think she’s still trying to prove to him that she’s a good girl. Maybe some remote, tiny part of her mind thinks if she can just do that, that it’ll all be okay again….I don’t know, maybe I’m putting too much reason in something that’s completely without reason but…I can’t think that…I like to think that she’s still her somewhere under all that; that she’s not just going to be singing to her birdies and lost to the world entirely some day.”

Buffy rested her head against his shoulder before asking her next question, not wanting to see his face when he did answer, “You really love her don’t you?”

“I was with her, sexually with her, for over a century so it’s not exactly...but…sometimes it’s more like…like a big sister or mother, I guess. I want to take care of her, keep her safe, make her better, and…I want to be good enough for her, do whatever I need to do to please her.”

“That’s not really an answer…just something to make me worry you’ll go kill people next time she’s in town.”

“I loved Dru as best I knew how for over one hundred years but she never loved me back the same way so that made it easier to let go. Falling in love with you helped too,” he hoped she didn’t hit him for that one. “Now I can see that what she wants from me and what you want from me…I can’t do both and…I messed up last time. It was the easy way out and so I took it. But now I know it’s not what I want.”

“Spike you can’t just go from being what she wants to what you think I want—at some point in there you have to be you.” Why was she giving motivational speeches to a vampire?

“Can’t that be it?”

“Relationships are the way they are because each person is just that, their own person. If one person is just doing what the other person wants all the time….eventually they begin to resent them.”

“I’d never, ever resent you.”

“I’m not saying we’d have a relationship,” she countered. “But Spike…I think that from when you weren’t trying to get Dru back, when you….when you let yourself feel and do what you wanted…I think you really do know who you are, you just have to…be him.”

Spike thought about that for several moments.

“Alright, so you’re right. Now, tell me about your mum and what’s got you out on a kamikaze mission and then I’ll be me.”

The last bit worried to her as to what exactly it was he was talking about but she needed to tell someone her feelings about her mother and…and Spike was the only one she felt could take it and give her real answers, not ‘make Buffy feel better’ answers.

“Okay…”



TBC.........please review


and if you want a Christmas fic to read now, you should go read Brat's 'Taming of a Scrooge'...it's 6 chapters--complete and everything :)





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