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Author's Chapter Notes:
DISCLAIMER: I don’t make any money from this, just like making the Spuffy world a little nicer. Any quotes taken from the show are with the understanding of the readers, that they are used to assign a point of reference or are an attempt to keep canon. No plagiarism is meant.


This story pretty much maintains canon, except Spike isn’t resurrected on Angel. Also, Buffy didn’t do that whole smiling thing at the end of Chosen…because, my God, Spike just died. What was Joss thinking?!


**Regular text = quotes, Italic text = a person’s thoughts
“Gotta move, lamb. I think it's fair to say school's out for bloody summer.”
“Spike!”
“I mean it! I gotta do this.”
“I love you.”
“No, you don't. But thanks for saying it…I wanna see how it ends.”



Prologue:




To most people, death was a permanent situation. A fact of life. You were born, you lived, and then you died. For her however, she’d not only died once, but twice, and rose from both occasions. Her continuous resurrections gave her a false security of the world around her. Even when her skewed sense of life and death became apparent as she watched the horror of Tara’s death reflected not only in Willow’s eyes but also the eyes of her baby sister, as Dawn stood vigil over Tara’s lifeless body. Even then she did not understand.

But death became very real for her when she felt the heat of his hand etching his eternal mark into the palm of her hand. His whispered plea to leave him there to die, to let him finish his task, to atone, and his denial…continued to burn within her at every turn. Sometimes she would stare at the scars marring the flesh of her hand. A never-ending testimony to the pain that wrought from her experiences with him. They wouldn’t heal up, no matter how long it had been. Slayer-healing an all, should have done the trick, but the faint pink scars remained there. Willow once said that she could magic them away, but then, what silent testimony would be left of his existence? Everything had burned at the bottle of the hellmouth. And besides…the scars were kinds of like him…rough around the edges, but always there, ever present, never leaving her like he never did…until now.

The others didn’t understand her pain though; even if they could see how it marred her once golden features. To Giles, her eyes showed the loss of her one and only Chosen status, to her friends, the loss of her home. But Dawn knew the truth and knew why her sister wept at night.

At times she tried to think of the words in her mind…to take the knowledge that she knew to be true and form the words. Spike is dead. But she was forced to stop every time. She couldn’t do it. Even if her brain did manage those words, for only a fleeting second, that was all it took to break her heart anew.

Despite the horror that was brought to her soul, her deepest regret was that he had died not believing her. He’d faced his first death unloved as a human and his second unloved by her. He had told her once that Dru had never loved him and that the only love he’d ever known in his existence was that of his mother, but for reasons he wouldn’t disclose, he believed he’d lost her love as well.

She loved him so much in that moment, and if she was truthful, for years before. Perhaps the first inkling was with his cocky “hello cutie,” but in all reality it started when he sat on the back porch with her the night her mother had to go to the hospital. She’d felt so safe with him, realizing for perhaps the first time, that on occasion, someone else could be the strong one.

Her admiration for him had continued to grow when he took the beating from Glory. She could tell in that moment how worried he was for Dawn and for her, his remaining Summers women. It allowed her to etch away just one more layer of the Big Bad persona and see the hints of William that had clung to him throughout the years and refused to die from Drusilla’s stinging bite.

She might even have completely loved him during her experimentation with alcohol in his crypt after Willow brought her back. It was during those times that she got to witness one of Spike’s real true smiles. She made the *bleeack* noise extra loud because his smile was too good to pass up.

But now he was Gone. Dead. Dust. And he didn’t believe her…

But the worst part was that she was going to have to live forever with that knowledge. That her soulmate, her lover, her everything didn’t know how much he meant to her.

Maybe it was intuition, maybe it was part of the slayer package, but she knew. She knew she was confined to this world. Whatever forces Willow had used to bring her back from beyond, bound her to this place. Who knows? Maybe Willow did everything right. Maybe it was the destruction of the Urn of Osiris by the hellions that left her unable to move on. She’d never know. All she knew was that she couldn’t die. The sword through her gut during the final battle had proven that, along with the other odd scrapes she’d gotten herself into over the past few months.

So that meant never dying, never getting peace, never finding any solace from those last precious moments she had with Spike. She wasn’t sure how to contend with that. She’d always assumed that the greatest regret of her life would have been killing Angel. How she thought, so foolishly during her time in L.A., that her heart would break from the sheer torture of having killed him. But now, she understood the real definition of regret. She’d killed Spike. Oh, maybe not by the most conventional of standards, but she’d killed him just the same. She was the one who put that amulet in his hand. But the part that truly ate away at her was never giving the best man she’d ever known the love that he so deserved, that he’d sought, actively, from her.

She knew, somewhere deep inside…she had to make it right. She had to make him see that he was deeply loved and that there was no one else to love him better.

And she knew exactly how to get that…

Willow.


Chapter End Notes:
Well, what do you think guys? Shall I continue? Leave me a review and let me know! Thanks for reading. -Inara



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