Giles was taking the whole thing very seriously.
“Well obviously the excretions of the granoral demon caused this to happen. We just need to find a spell that will reverse the effects. It shouldn’t be too hard...”
He quickly gave them all jobs to do. To Buffys absolute disgust, and Spikes absolute delight Dawn’s stupid nicknames had caught on.
“Spuffy, you can read this book.” Giles indicated a very hefty and very boring looking book.
“Don’t wanna”.
“You’re going to help, whether you want to or not.”
Spike said, in a very accurate impression of what he called Buffy’s ‘holier than thou’ voice “I’m the slayer, I won’t do anything I don’t want to. So there.”
“Spike, please.” At Buffy’s defeated tone Spikes smile disappeared for the first time all day.
When, some time and no progress later, she went off into to kitchen Spike followed.
“Slayer? you ok?”
When she replied she sounded near tears. “No Spike, I’m not ok.”
Spike tilted Buffy’s head to one side. “What’s wrong?”
Buffy let out a harsh, humourless laugh. “Other than being stuck in the body of a soulless evil vampire? Nothing.”
Buffy called Spike soulless and evil at least once a week, and usually he didn’t react in anything other than a snarky way. This time, for a reason beyond Buffy, he seemed hurt.
“Thanks slayer”.
Buffy smiled, “Come on Spike, you know what you are.”
Spike looked at her intently. It was strange to see that look through her own hazel eyes. “Yeah Buffy, I know what I am. I wonder though whether you ever will.”
He walked off leaving behind a very confused Buffy.
After what felt like hours Willow got very animated. “Giles, Giles! I think this is a spell we could use!”
Giles eagerly, and not very politely, snatched the book off Willow and poured over it. After a minute he started nodding his head in a borderline manic way. “Yes! Yes this will do it.”
Buffy sat up straight in her chair and leaned forward excitedly. Spike, who had been subdued all afternoon, didn’t react beyond a lift of the eyebrows.
Giles face fell. “Ah, oh. Dear. Um there might be a problem.”
“Why?” Buffy demanded.
Giles took his glasses off and for at least the fiftieth time that day gave them an unneeded polish.
“Well this spell would restore you to your correct bodies, but it requires the swapping of... um... souls and...”
“I don’t have one.”
To everyone else Spikes tone seemed bored, disinterested. Only Buffy, who knew him a lot better then she’d ever realised, understood that he was upset.
“Hang on Giles” Willow was using her most excited breathless voice. “The spell calls for an ‘exchanging of what’s within’, it doesn’t say souls specifically. We can still use it, I’m sure we can!”
Giles and Willow then began debating back and forth the spells potential, then its difficultly and then the ingredients they needed.
Xanders’ constant jokes, that all that was within Spike was a) An idiot b) A lot of absorbed bleach c) Dust, etc etc fell on deaf ears.
Buffy wasnt listening at all. Though she wasn’t aware of it her eyes never left Spike. She had never ever wondered before whether Spike wanted a soul. He’d always seemed to love being soulless and care free. She had wondered once or twice why he helped her so much and so often. He might not be able to hurt humans but he was far from powerless. He had a huge reputation in the demon world, and that meant a lot. But instead of heading up his own evil army, or getting as far away from the slayer he couldn’t fight against as he could he’d stayed in Sunnydale. He’d stayed and he’d fought on her side. By her side.
She knew he claimed to love her, and he probably did in his own twisted way. It wasn’t real love, it couldn’t be, no matter how much he claimed otherwise. She thought it more likely that his love of violence had made him join their fight. She knew it wasn’t an adequate explanation but it was the only one she could think of that made sense.
It was impossible for someone without a soul to want one. Angel had a soul, and he spent half his time resenting it and half the time trying to prove himself worthy of it. There was no way Spike, with his carefree, bite-first-ask-questions-later attitude to unlife would want the burden of a soul. No way.
“Buffy? Are you ready to try it?”
“Hmm?”
Giles sighed. Quite often he wondered whether Buffy listened to more than half of what he said. “We’ve assembled what we need for the spell, are you willing to try it?”
“Is Spike?”
Her question seemed to take Giles by surprise. “Does it matter if Spikes willing?” He was even more surprised by Buffy’s determined reply.
“Yes”
Spike widened the eyes he was currently in control of. “You know me, up for anything slayer”
Buffy smiled at his lame attempt at innuendo.
“What will happen?”
It was Willow who answered. “Well, if we do this right, and we will! We totally will! Well your essences, what makes you you, will leave your bodies. They’ll touch-“
“They’ll what?”
“They’ll touch, they’ll recognise the imprint of where their supposed to be and they’ll trade places.”
“If its that bloody simple then lets get to it eh?”
Giles and Willow exchanged a glance which was lost on Buffy and Spike. Non magic people never appreciated how complicated magic was.
“Right, well uh, you have to sit here, and here. And I’ll draw a circle around you, like this. And then I burn this... and then I chant.”
Willow began to chant a string of unintelligible words. Buffy gave Spike a reassuring smile. He gave her a small one in return. It seemed for ages that nothing was going to happen and then-
“Oh my god.”
Dawns exclamation seemed to voice the feelings of the group.
Buffy and Spike had gone rigid, their heads thrust back, their eyes wide and unseeing. Through their open mouths shimmering streaks of light had begun to sneak. Buffy’s light was a pure, luminous white. Spikes was a richer more metallic bronze. Once the light streams were free of the bodies they began to move towards each other, until they eventually touched.
The minute they did they began to move more violently,
swirling together until it was impossible to distinguish one from the other. For those watching that was all there was to see. For Buffy and Spike it was not.
Buffy and Spike saw each other.
They really saw each other.
They saw what was within, what had been and what was. Thoughts, feelings, memories, everything each owned was exposed to the other. It was frightening and exhilarating and so much more besides.
Buffy couldn’t believe what she was seeing. Spike. Human Spike. Or William to be more exact. He wasn’t a big bad. He wasn’t a swaggering vampire oozing with power. He was just a man. A man who felt more than most, and loved stronger than any.
She saw his love for a woman. Saw how she spurned and rejected and broke him. She hated the woman.
She saw Drusilla, coming out of the darkness to take him away from the life which had rejected him. She made him strong, made him powerful, made him feel like anything was possible. She saw how, for the first time in his life, William felt as though he was somebody. She saw why he had loved Drusilla so. She had chosen him. It made her heart ache.
Buffy saw him as a new vampire. He was still so much the man he had been, he felt so much. The love he felt for his mother, even after his demon should have driven away all trace of his humanity, mirrored so strongly what she had felt for her own mother that she felt his pain as her own. She saw him turn his mother, to spare her pain and death, and she saw how he was rewarded, with humiliation and rejection once again.
She saw his path into darkness, saw how Angel had helped him on his way. She saw how Angel had treated him. She now knew why Spike hated him so much, and was even surprised that he didn’t hate him more.
Buffy saw Drusilla pick Angel over Spike time and time again. Each time she did a bit of the humanity he kept without realising was consumed by the darkness.
Buffy saw all the bad he had done, all the acts of evil he had committed, but in amongst it there were flashes of good, of actions and feelings too human to belong to a vampire.
Buffy saw herself through Spikes eyes.
He saw her power first. He saw her as an enemy, a worthy enemy. He respected her even as he was planning to kill her. But then he saw beyond her power.
She saw herself through Spikes eyes and she was stunned. She seemed so beautiful, so passionate so graceful and so sure. He saw her faults but made them virtues. He admitted to himself that she was not perfect, but he loved her imperfections too.
She found, in the darkest recesses of his being, that he had a plan forming. He wanted to be what he thought she deserved. He wanted to make himself worthy of her.
He wanted to get a soul for her.
He loved her. He really loved her. Not in the twisted way she had thought was all he was capable of. He didn’t love her as a Vampire loves a Slayer. He loved her. As a man loves a woman. As William loves Elizabeth.
She saw his love and the depth and intensity of it didn’t scare her. It electrified her.
Buffy had never felt so sure of herself as then, seeing herself through the eyes of one who truly knew her. One who truly loved her. Spike was not the vampire she had thought him. He was not the soulless creature she had treated him as. His human lived as strongly within him as his demon. He controlled his bloodlust, his thirst for violence, not because he had to, but because he wanted to. He was her equal, physically, mentally, he was her perfect match.
He was a hell of a man.
He was the one.
Spike had always wondered what Buffy had been like, before she was the slayer.
Now he knew. The way she had been made him laugh, made him pained for the innocence she had lost, made him proud of the way she had progressed, of all she had become.
He felt her confusion, her rage, her resentment when she found out about her calling. He felt her reluctance, the reluctance she still carried with her, to be the chosen one, to give up a normal life.
He watched her grow, from the insecure but outwardly cocky girl he had first met, to the radiant, resourceful woman she had become.
He felt her pain, understood the rejection she felt, when the men she let into her life, the men she loved, let her down. He saw now why she guarded her heart so carefully. She had repaired it so often she wasn’t sure it could withstand being broken again.
He saw the great poofter, pretending he was leaving for her own good, never mind the fact that any ninny could see it was killing her to say goodbye.
He saw the farm boy, too puffed up with his own importance to go the distance when things got tough.
He saw the weight she carried with her everywhere. The pressure she felt to exceed the stupidly high expectations her friends and her damn watcher had of her.
He saw her struggling to cope with finding out about Dawns true origins. She had barely faltered. Finding out her love for her sister was false did not take it away, but seemed to make it stronger. He knew Buffy would die for her sister, and he loved her even more for it.
He relived Joyce’s death through her. He felt her pain and knew it well. He saw what was behind the mask she wore for others. She still grieved, far more than anyone knew, but she couldn’t disappoint anyone, let anyone down, so she had to do her crying alone. She cried a lot.
Spike saw himself through Buffy’s eyes. The physical desire for him had been there from the start. The connection she always denied they had, she did feel it too. She hated him. She couldn’t kill him. He was the enemy she wanted to keep, the one constant in her life she wouldn’t be without, but wasn’t quite sure why that was so.
She didn’t hate him anymore. She loved to pretend she did though.
She respected him. She was so grateful to him. She trusted him.
He made her laugh. She could be herself with him; the pressures of the world didn’t feel so great when he was by her side to help her carry them.
He was in her heart, but she didn’t know quite what he was doing there yet.
He was her Spike. He was unique, one of a kind. A complex mystery of a vamp.
Spike saw Buffy.
She was a hell of a woman.
She was the one.
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