Previously


"Know fuck all!" He struck at the water, splashing her. She drew back.


"Okay. It's all right. It's probably temporary." Like your demise. She should call Giles. Recruit someone to take this over. This situation. She went to the door, and paused there.


"Back in the alley, when you found the sword hilt—how did you know where it would be?"


He stared at her, and the tears came down out of his eyes, but all he could do was shake his head.




He was a stranger. A stranger wearing the face of a departed colleague, someone she'd never sufficiently understood, never sufficiently credited, whom she'd finally been able to box away, undigested, unrecalled.


No point asking this confused, frustrated man the questions that belonged to Spike. And this was curiously a relief, because were she to ask him Why didn't you tell me you were still alive? there would be an implication that it mattered, that she cared, that there was something further she wanted. Yet she didn't want that implication to exist between them.


Probably, Buffy thought, that was why he'd never contacted her. The same instinctual recoil from anything that might jar the bruise.


Or indifference. Just indifference, really, could explain it all. Time passed, emotions cooled into effigies. He'd moved on, as she had.


The man who wasn't really Spike emerged from the bathroom wrapped in the terry robe, a towel slung round his neck. He moved slowly, uncertain of his welcome, looking around the spacious room as if wondering why there wasn't more of it. "I'm hungry."


"I have blood for you."


"Blood? Are we both going to sleep here?"


There were two double beds, separated by a night-stand. She'd thought of getting a second adjacent room, but was leery of leaving him alone, in case he flipped out again, in case he left it and went and killed someone, to satisfy his hunger, his urge for violence.


She rose, took up the coffee pot she'd poured the blood out into. "I think it's better we stay together. For now."


"This is awkward."


You think so? She poured out a cup. He cocked his head. The aroma. All the things he could smell. He sidled towards her.


"Is that for me?"


She offered it. Taking the cup, he looked into it, sniffed it. Hesitated. "I don't understand this."


"It's okay," Buffy said. "You're a blood drinker. This is what you need."


His eyes flashed gold, the ridges rising. He gave out a grunt, and felt at his face. "What's—what's happening—feels strange."


"It's all right," she said, trying to put even more gentleness into her voice. "Drink it."


He didn't drink. He held the cup out at an awkward angle from his body, and looked at her. "Who are you? How do we know each other?"


"We were once comrades at arms."


"Soldiers?"


"Kind of."


"I can't remember anything like that." He brought the cup beneath his nose again. Sniffed it. "I wouldn't think girls took up arms."


"Some do. Go on and drink, it's all right, really."


"Blood-drinker."


"Vampire," she said, soft, soft, as if the word might shock and offend him. "You're a vampire. You have been for a long long time. But you have a soul." She didn't know if this was still true, but it made her feel better to say it.


"That's why ...." He put the cup down, and his amber eyes rolled, like those of a rearing horse. "I want to—I've got this urge to—"


"But you're not going to hurt me," she said. "You know you can control yourself, and I know it too. Yes?"


Hesitantly, still exploring his face with his fingers, he nodded.


"We can just sit together and talk, and you can drink."


Slowly, he reached for the cup again, and this time, drained it. She approached him with the pot, poured out the rest. "Refill." She tried to smile, but he wasn't looking at her. "What do you remember? Anything at all?"


"We fought together in a war?"


"Yes. A while ago."


"Something must've happened to me then and that's why I'm lost."


"Not then. More recently. A different battle."


"When I try to think, it makes me feel sick. That can't be right."


"Sick how?"


"I don't know. Here," he touched his forehead. "And here." His belly. "I want to go outside. Hate bein' locked up."


It wasn't yet midnight. They left the hotel on foot. She noticed that being out in the night air, under open sky, seemed to ease his well-behaved anxiety.


They walked at random. After a while, he said, "What's my name?"


"You call yourself Spike. I don't know your real name." She was reluctant to say 'William', there was something in the word that embarrassed her now. No reason to share that.


She yawned. The jet-lag was catching up with her. Back in Scotland, she'd be training, teaching. Dawn and Willow and Xander felt very far away, not just because the air here was warm and dry whereas at the castle it was always cool and moist. Not just that.


They walked for a long time, aimlessly. She waited for him to speak, to ask questions, but he seemed instead to be reading the breeze, to be, perhaps, otherwise leery of finding things out. When they encountered people, he gazed after them sometimes with a longing look, but she wasn't sure if this was loneliness or appetite.


In a park, they were in time to interrupt another vampire's dinner. Looking up from the ashes, stake in hand, she met his horrified stare.


"What the fuck did you just do?"


"That vampire was going to kill that guy."


"You murdered him." Spike crept forward, put his boot out squeamishly to toe at the ashes in the grass. "Bloody hell."


"It isn't murder, it's a slay. It's what I do."


"I'm a vampire."


"You have a soul. Don't worry, as long as you control yourself, you won't get slain."


"Long's I control myself?"


She was afraid he was going to cry again, he looked so devastated. He sat down abruptly, face buried against his up-drawn knees. She waited a few moments. When he didn't move, she prodded him gently. "Hey, c'mon."


"Why should I go with you? This's well out of order."


She forced her temper down. "It really isn't. It's just because of the amnesia, that this doesn't make sense."


"You kill my kind. Shit. An' that's what I am? Some kind of animal that jumps punters in the dark an' drains 'em? I mean, that's normal?"


"You haven't done that in a long while, Spike."


"I'm called Spike. I have done it."


"Well, yes."


"Want to do it now." As he spoke, the ridges rose, his eyes flashed. "Would you come at me with that stake if I did?"


"You're not going to. Please, let it go. I know this is painful and hard for you, but it's got to just be temporary."


"So you say. Know nothin' of the sort."


"Well neither do I, but it's better to hope, right?"


At four in the morning they went into a diner. She ordered coffee and pie for both of them, but when it came, he pushed the pie away, and said, "Don't I take tea? I think I take tea."


When it came, he sipped and for a moment his expression smoothed into pleasure. Then his brows knit again. "Why are you here?"


"You need help."


"But why you?"


"I told you. We used to be—"


"Used to be. Not anymore."


It was hard to look at him, because his face was full of things she didn't like to recall, the house on Revello, the smell of cigarette smoke, her mother's voice, the loneliness before battle, the absence after resurrection. He was still blond, still had all the little expressions that came back to her now in an inventory of past ambivalence and attraction and revulsion, ultimately so jumbled up she couldn't make a decision about them.


If she'd known he was in Los Angeles, she wouldn't have sought him out. She was sure of that.


Dawn might have. But not her.


"I think everyone you were with lately ... I think they all perished. I think that's what happened in that alley."


When she brought up the alley again his eyes went vague and the corner of his mouth twitched, but he had nothing to say.







When they left the coffee shop it was time to get back. She was for calling a cab; she'd lost all sense of how they'd come. But he stopped her. "I know where we need to go."


"You know! Good. Something's coming back to you."


"No. But I can feel our way."


She followed him. He moved fast now, not like before, coursing along, keeping to the shadowy side of every block, tracing their route on the air. Long before she expected it, they were back at the hotel entrance. The wind had picked up. Spike turned and faced into it. "I can smell the sunrise coming. Makes me feel funny. Disappointed."


"Are you tired? I could sleep."


Eyes closed, he let the air bathe his face. "I don't know why I'm here. By myself. What am I supposed to be doing. It doesn't feel right."


"I'm here too." She reached for his hand, but he moved out of reach.


"It doesn't feel right," he said again, and went inside.







The earth opened under her feet, and the fire flared, her senses whirled, tilted, and delivered her back to her pillow, wet with tears. It took a moment for her to discern that the sobbing she heard wasn't her own. Slipping out of bed, she went to him. He was curled with his back to her, shoulders shaking. He didn't wake when she touched his arm, but as the warmth of her hand registered on him, his quaking eased. She crawled up onto the bed, fitted herself to his back, and slept again.