Buffy hated laundry days. With the two new slayers who had taken up temporary residence in the attic room, six people were crammed into Giles’ far from spacious house; the only way to manage things was a rota, and today was Buffy’s day for the laundry. She stomped moodily around the empty house, collecting up laundry bags and lugging them down to the washing machine. No fair! The others were all over at the Council offices doing fun stuff like training and researching and… hell, even cataloguing was better than this! No-one to talk to, or make her coffee, or give her an excuse not to do her chores. She’d even welcome Andrew’s presence, but he had taken himself off back home to sort out some highly spurious-sounding family crisis. Like a family in crisis would send for Andrew. Buffy snorted. She hesitated at Andrew’s door, drew a deep breath and went inside.
The room was surprisingly tidy, despite every available surface being covered with strange little figurines and models. She picked one up and peered at it. What the heck was a Boba Fett anyway? She shook her head, carefully replaced the figure and looked around for Andrew’s laundry bag. No sign. Muttering to herself she dropped to her knees to look under the bed. Nope. No bag, but her eye was caught by a pile of papers. She looked guiltily over her shoulder and pulled them out, confidently expecting to find some of Andrew’s ‘special’ magazines. Last time she’d looked there were some pretty hot guys in them. But it wasn’t a magazine. She felt a sudden clutching pain in her chest. Grasped in her hand, somewhat more worn and dog-eared than she remembered it, was the thesis on Spike.
She’d been working hard on not thinking about him; not acknowledging to herself or anyone how much she missed having him around. Sometimes she almost convinced herself it didn't hurt. She flicked through the thesis slowly, her eyes travelling almost unseeingly over the pages, until the unexpected handwriting caught her eye. She frowned. So, Andrew had been making his own notes; extensive ones too. She sat, back to the bed, and began to read.
******
Hours later, Dawn found Buffy sitting at the kitchen table, pale faced and staring at nothing. A long-cold cup of coffee sat on the table next to a pile of papers.
“Buffy?” Dawn frowned. “You OK?”
Buffy blinked and turned her head slowly to look at Dawn. “OK?” She seemed a million miles away, her eyes unfocussed. “I…” She looked down at the papers. “Have you seen these?”
Dawn sat opposite her. “It’s the stuff about Spike; the thesis thingy.” She frowned. “I thought Giles told Andrew to get rid of that…”
“Well, he didn’t.” Buffy turned the pages slowly. “Actually, he’s been adding to it.” She found a handwritten page and turned it for Dawn to see. “Look.”
“Oh.” Dawn swallowed. “Well, you know Andrew - vivid imagination and all.”
“I want you to read it.” Her voice was eerily calm.
“Buffy, I…”
“Please.” Buffy said softly. “Read it.”
Dawn looked at her pleadingly. “Buffy…” Buffy locked eyes with her, her face set. With a sigh, Dawn began to read.
They sat in complete silence, broken only by the noise of turning pages. Dawn felt her heart sink as she read. Andrew played storyteller, biographer for the vampire hero. She read Andrew’s theories about Spike and Buffy’s history, about Spike’s return and their final months in Sunnydale, of the way Buffy had trusted and relied on Spike, and the heroism of his end in the horror of the Hellmouth. His memory for the facts and fantasies, truths and half-truths he’d picked up about Spike was remarkable. Despite occasional forays into romance and melodrama, Andrew had been nothing if not thorough. And now Buffy had read this. Dawn turned the last page feeling sick to the heart, staring blankly at it long after she’d finished reading.
“Well?” Buffy’s voice was taut with tension.
Dawn shrugged. “Like I said – Andrew has a vivid imagination. This is good! They could probably make a TV show out of it or something. ‘Spike – Vampire with a Soul’. Probably get itself a cult following.” She tried a smile.
“Don’t.” There was the glint of tears in Buffy’s eyes. “Don’t lie to me. Is this true?”
Dawn looked at the conflict and hurt in Buffy’s eyes and felt like the worse sort of traitor. Enough. “Well, there wasn’t quite so much posing heroically against the moonlight, and a bit less of the bare-chested fighting, but…” She closed her eyes briefly. “Yes. It’s true.”
“I don’t remember.” Buffy’s voice shook.
“Oh, God, Buffy, I’m sorry…”
“How could I not remember this?” There was an edge of hysteria in her voice. “What’s happened to me?”
“I’ll get Giles…” Dawn moved to stand.
"Dawn..."
"Buffy, it's just... it might be dangerous... I need..." Dawn took a step toward the door.
“No! I don't want Giles and I don't care about dangerous!” Buffy’s voice was sharp. “No. You tell me.” Tears started in her eyes. “I want you to tell me.”
So Dawn did. Head down and feeling sick to the soul she told Buffy about The Immortal’s spell, about his warning and their decision not to try and reverse it, about Spike’s distress, about how he’d finally accepted the need to wait. Buffy listened in silence, her eyes locked on Dawn, forcing her to continue each time she hesitated, giving no quarter. Eventually Dawn stumbled to a halt and there was only the sound of the kitchen clock ticking solemnly. Dawn looked over at her sister. She was staring at her hands folded in front of her on the table top, her body tense.
"Are... are you OK?" Dawn asked worriedly.
"Is my mind falling apart because you told me?" Buffy gave a small, tight shake of her head. “God, Dawn, I needed to kow this. The dreams… I thought I was losing my mind.” She looked at Dawn, her face etched with lines of stress. “I saw it. No,” she frowned “I – felt it. The dreams were so vivid, so confusing… I couldn’t understand. And Spike... the way I felt about him, the… the strength of it...” She gave a bitter laugh. “Have you any idea how hard that was?”
“It didn’t need to be hard…”
“Didn’t need? I’m the slayer. Remember? She who kills the evil, undead, pointy-toothed ones? That’s who I am. So, along comes a vampire I know nothing about and I’m not with the slaying and I’m feeling…” she shook her head in frustration, “I don’t know what I’m feeling, because what I think I’m feeling doesn’t make any sort of sense – it’s wrong on all sorts of levels.”
“Why? Why was it wrong?”
Buffy shook her head in disbelief. “How can you ask me that? Dawn, he’s a vampire. Worse, he kills slayers.”
“He killed slayers. Past tense. He changed.”
“Because he has a soul. He has a soul! Why did no-one think to tell me that?”
“The soul? Spike isn’t just his soul! You didn’t know he had a soul and still…” Dawn closed her eyes and took a calming breath. Now was hardly the time. She started again, her voice subdued. “Spike didn’t want us to. He didn’t want to explain. It would have been so complicated. Buffy…”
“Explain? Why would it matter? It’s not like I haven’t met the odd vampire with a soul before.”
“Spike was different. It wasn’t just a lame old gypsy curse; he chose to get his soul.” Dawn sighed. “He got it for you.” She looked up at her sister’s stunned expression. “Buffy, you and Spike… you had a history, before all this stuff in here. I mean,” She picked up Andrew’s notes, “Andrew hints at it, but he doesn’t know. I’m not sure any of us knows the whole story.”
“History? He got a soul for me? Why?” Buffy was struggling to cope.
“Buffy, I can’t… please.” Dawn looked down at her hands unhappily.
Buffy’s voice took on a brittle, forced lightness. “So – I have a history with a formerly evil, undead ex-killer of slayers who got a soul for me, and… and then died to save the world. And a history that apparently involved a certain degree of smoochiness. Something tells me that can’t possibly be an uncomplicated story.” She laughed harshly. “And you all didn’t think I deserved to have those memories?”
Dawn winced. “I’m sorry.”
Buffy was silent for a moment. “This is a spell, right? So, Willow can break it.”
“We don’t know if she can.” Dawn wrung her hands unhappily. “Willow said there are risks. Big risks. And the Immortal warned us that if we interfered it might be bad and so Giles thought we should wait until we…”
“Giles thought?” Buffy looked at Dawn, her eyes hard. “Giles had no right. None of you had the right to decide what I was and was not allowed to remember.”
“We did what we thought was best.” Giles said quietly from the kitchen doorway.
Buffy’s voice was tightly controlled. “How long have you been there?”
“Long enough.” Giles sighed heavily and came over to the table. He picked up Andrew’s notes, flicking through the pages. “Someone needs to teach the boy basic punctuation; I despair of the American high school system...”
Buffy stopped him. “Willow has to reverse this.”
Giles sat down opposite her. “Willow isn’t sure she can. We have discussed this in great detail – we are still discussing it. There is a… a great deal of risk in breaking the spell. If anything goes wrong it could prove disastrous.”
“Disastrous?”
Giles looked at her intently. “There is a risk that it could cause irreparable damage to your memory. At worst, there is a real possibility it could destroy your mind.”
“Could? Care to quantify ‘could’?”
“Willow has been working with the coven to try and find a way of performing the spell safely and there have been some advances but… but the risk still stands. There is a real possibility that you will suffer some form of permanent damage.”
Buffy sat in silence staring at Andrew’s writing, a small frown creasing her forehead. “And there is a real possibility that I won’t and that I’ll remember all of this,” she said eventually.
“Yes…” Giles allowed grudgingly, “but…”
“Then I need to talk to Willow.” Buffy stood up. “We need to do this.”
Giles looked at her in dismay. “You’re prepared to put your mind in jeopardy for this? For… for him? There is no need to take the risk. We can tell you what happened and then if…”
Buffy shook her head. “This isn’t just about Spike! I don’t want your second-hand memories. I want mine!” She glared at Giles and her voice was ice-cold. “You had no right.”
Giles sighed and closed his eyes. “I did what I thought was best for you.”
Buffy looked at him for a long moment. “You were wrong,” she said eventually. Turning her back on the watcher she faced Dawn. “Call Willow. I want her here. Soon as she can.” Dawn nodded wordlessly. Without a backward glance, Buffy left the room. There was the sound of her footsteps on the stairs and the slam of her bedroom door, and then silence.
Eventually Giles sighed. “Even now her feelings for him are colouring her judgement. This is madness. I don’t want…”
“Don’t.” Dawn refused to meet his eye. “Don’t even.” She stood up. “I’m going to call Willow. It’s time we straightened out this mess.” She paused at the doorway. “And Giles?” She looked back at the watcher. “You will not screw this up. You hear?” She turned and left him.
Alone in the empty kitchen, Giles took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. Why was it where Spike was concerned, Buffy refused to see sense? Years of training, all her ingrained slayer instincts, all his teaching, his advice – ignored. He sighed. Despite everything, there was still a connection – try as he might he couldn’t pretend he hadn’t seen it. And that way lies a future filled with pain. I don't want that for you. He felt a bitter stab of pain. If only Wood had succeeded. He opened his eyes. In front of him on the table, Andrew’s account of the fight at the Hellmouth stared up at him. But if he had…? It occurred to him he didn’t really know what had truly happened; he had been assiduous in his avoidance of the subject other than the briefest of outlines for the Watcher’s records. He had wanted to spare Buffy, to avoid her having to relive what even he had to accept must have been a painful experience. But honestly? He avoided the subject… he avoided Spike’s role... to spare himself. Slowly he replaced his glasses, and began to read.
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