Odd to be alone, carrying out mundane tasks. She'd been with him barely a week but already she'd completely inverted day for night, and Spike had somehow become her whole world; leaving him alone gave her a pang. The ordinariness of the sunny day, small-town traffic, parking lots and bright stores, had an edge of the surreal. It couldn't be true, but looking around her as she did her errands, Buffy felt like the only person who was on her own, not part of some couple or family or at least chattering to someone else on a cell phone.


How long had it been since she'd finally dropped her old fantasies about 'the normal life'? She certainly hadn't been thinking that way since the fall of Sunnydale, and probably long before that. Since her resurrection. She could remember herself before, how preoccupied she'd once been with those longings, with her sharp sense of deprivation. But all it was now was a memory. Could it just be adulthood that had revised her, or was it that she'd been dead for months, and wasn't meant really to be alive again at all?


Some times, when she lay in bed waiting to doze, she would wonder if she really was. In the strictest sense.


She hurried. Willow would come to L.A. in a couple days, Spike might get his memory back at any moment. She didn't want to miss any more of her sweet time-out with him than was strictly necessary.


Later on, she'd want to cherish every bit of it.








She expected to hear the chatter of the TV when she came back in. In the silence, she assumed he'd fallen asleep while he was waiting. She put her purchases away, then went looking for him, first in the huge low-slung living room with its vast stone fireplace, where he might've dozed off on one of the sectionals. No Spike. She ran up to look in the bedroom. He wasn't there either.


The safe-house had once been the Big Sur retreat of a watcher, one of the Council high-ups who'd perished in the explosion, whose will had proved out later all in the Council's favor. Each room featured stuffed bookshelves, and one, the one with the least interesting view, conducive to getting down to work rather than lollygagging out the windows, was a study with two walls covered floor-to-ceiling in volumes. It was there she found him, books spread out on the huge work-table, not the novels or art tomes scattered through the rest of the rooms, but the kinds of volumes out of which much useful but nothing good ever came.


Demon compendiums. Watcher diaries.


She couldn't have snuck up on him, not with his senses. But he started guiltily when she spoke, and slammed shut the tome he'd been consulting.


"What are you doing?"


He cast a wary glance over the collection he'd pulled down.


"Are you researching?" she asked stupidly. "I don't think you're going to find much info about the amnesia in—" She started towards him. Spike sprang up, careened towards her, catching her hand, pulling her towards the door.


"Did you get beer?"


That's when she knew he didn't want her to see what he'd been reading.


She ducked past him and went to look.


He'd been reading about himself.


An image it took her a moment to register as him took up the left leaf of one of the outspread books. A young man in sepia-tone, wearing a bulky overcoat, sandy hair tumbling over his forehead, chin held high, defiant eye on the camera. Behind him, an improbable painted backdrop of a distant waterfall. It was the curled lip that registered on her first.


Another book reproduced, of all things, a photo-booth strip, four pictures of Spike and Drusilla, both wearing hats, mugging for the automatic camera in some dance hall or amusement park, sixty years ago. A slender dark moustache traced the outline of his mouth. Hers was open in hysterical mirth. The book he'd closed so hastily was A History With Commentary of the Vampire Clan of Aurelius.



"Oh, Spike." Had she only thought, she could've ... what? Locked him out of this room? Taken him elsewhere in the first place?


"Is any of this real?"


"What?"


"Not the books—books are solid. But you. Us."


"How can you ask me that?"


"Dunno. Stories you tell me ... they're pretty odd. Maybe don't add up."


He seemed scared, abashed. "I'm a notorious vampire an' you're a vampire slayer, an' here we are. Maybe you're torturin' me."


Her body felt like unmoored, like she was about to float up to catch on the ceiling. "This is torture?"


"Psychological, maybe. How do I know you've got nothin' to do with me losin' my mind? Maybe you done that. An' now you mean to pick me to bits, an' destroy me. No one around to hear me or help me."


Where had this paranoia come from?


"That isn't what vampire slayers do. We don't lull vamps, we don't pick them to bits, we just stake them. Clean and fast. It's not torture, and it's not psychological, and it's not why you and I are here. Everything I told you is the truth. I thought ... I thought you were in love with me."


"Maybe that's what you've done to me! Why aren't we enemies?" He was struggling, visibly, as if some disjointed bits of self-knowledge were bobbing up, incomprehensible, tormenting. "'Cordin' to these learned books, I'm overripe for punishment. I'm a right bad 'un."


"Not any more. You switched sides."


"Nothing's written here about that."


"Those are old books. Written long before you won back your soul."


"My soul? What's that? You really believe in such tosh? An' why would a vampire do that even if he could?" He was glancing around now, as if assessing the exits.


"William. Hush now." She made herself smile her sunniest smile, repressing fiercely the fear he was stirring up, that he'd flip out again, that she'd have to fight him. "Most vampires wouldn't. You're unique."


"That's bollocks. D'you really think I'd buy that?" He imitated her. "You're unique. It's all in the books—I'm a oner all right, at mayhem—" He sprang up then, rushing to the window. The house was mostly glass, but every wall of windows was outfitted with thick running drapes she'd carefully closed. Before she could stop him, Spike dragged the heavy material aside, taking the late morning sun full in his face.


Smoke had begun to curl off his skin like steam off a frying pan when she broke out of her shock and shoved him back.


"What are you doing?"


He snapped around with a snarl. The next thing she knew, he'd pinned her against the wall, fangs at her throat.


Her every instinct was to chop at him, free herself. She'd easily gotten out of worse encounters thousands of times. But that was what he wanted, or feared, at any rate expected. To be shown that he was a monster, this situation an elaborate deception intended to end in his destruction at her hands.


So she forced herself to remain still, and not just still, but loose, even as he bore down, serrated teeth cutting her flesh. Were he really in mindless kill mode, she knew, he'd tear at her with all the decision and thrust of a hungry lion, and they'd be bouncing each other off the walls now, balls-out.


The char of his singed skin filled her nostrils.


"Do it if you want to," she said. "Satisfy your curiosity. I trust you."


She could feel him thinking, parsing this. Her torn skin pulsed. "Maybe you'd say that." His voice muffled against her neck. Pressing in a little deeper, her whole left side responding to the pressure, tingling and stinging. She thought she could feel the individual pools of blood welling up around each fang—she could certainly see them in her mind's eye. Forced herself to take a deep breath, counteracting adrenaline by will.


"I trust you, Will. Trust me."


Another snarl, a sharper pain that freed her. Blue eyes in a pale face knit with remorse, swam before her. She filled her emptied lungs.


"It's okay," she said, before he could launch into any recriminations. "I'm impressed you held it together this long. This was bound to happen." Palm clapped to neck, but the bleeding wasn't bad, he'd been well clear of the artery.


He shook his head. "Wanted to. Still want to. S'what I am."


"It isn't all you are."


"How do you know!"


She moved past him, on her way to the bathroom, hoping he'd follow. She wanted him out of that study.


He did, still arguing, but with with less confidence as the rage and violence drained out. Just tears remaining, streaming down his blanched cheeks.


"Don't want to be this thing.. But there's Spike—William The Bloody—in all those books."


"Those books are old news. You are not a thing." Even though I used to call you one, and treat you like one. "Help me clean this, okay?"


He resisted looking at the wound he'd made, but when she tugged at him, he grew pensive, concentrated. Dabbed the torn skin with a hot washcloth, carefully fitted it with a large bandaid.


"It's not so bad," she assured him. "What got you going on this?"


He was more sheepish now than anything else. "Spooked me, bein' left on my own. My head ached."


"Will." She took his face in her hands, tip-toed to bring her face level with his. How weird was this, so weird, but what else could she do but treat him tenderly? "Listen, this is not some mind-game experiment. We are so not enemies. The stuff in those books, yes, it's about you," And probably understates the case, "but it was a long time ago. When you get your memory back, you'll know it. You're never going to be that way again. You are a hero, and a champion. A good man."


"Hero." He laughed dully. "Hero. Quite a word."


"It happens to be true."


"Goin' doo-lally. Scare myself."


"You're fine."


He drew away from her touch; slowly enough so the withdrawal didn't feel brusque, but he didn't seem to want her too close now. He gave her an oblique look out of glistening, red-edged eyes. "Why didn't you slay me when I bit you?"


"You call that a bite? Please. I've had hickies that were worse. C'mon, let's have a beer before bed."


"Bed. That's what I want." His eyes had gone unfocused; between one sentence and the next, he was nearly asleep, as if he'd been injected with some powerful soporific. Wandering out of the bathroom, he made it as far as the bottom of the stairs, where she had to catch him as he wobbled, and helped him climb. By time he pitched forward onto the bed, he was already asleep.