Author's Note: OK, campers, those of you who are still with me through changes and redactions. First of all, I'm sorry to jerk you around--I know it's frustrating as a WIP reader to have over a dozen chapters just suddenly yanked. And that's what I've done. (The redacted chapters are still available on my insanejournal; they've been retagged as distance: redacted, and can still be read with their comments if you click on that tag in the journal sidebar.)

With the help of Only_Passenger and The Deadly Hook (whom I thank heartily herewith) and my own fevered dissatisfied brain, I've rethought where this story is going, and hereby resume it with good expectations for finishing it in a timely manner.

Now, on to the fic ....

~~~


Nothing here could be trusted.

He had to get back to the scene.

And he'd overslept—the sun was out again. Unless it was always out here. Maybe that was part of the place, this Wolfram & Hart construct, a Scotland where it was always sunny, 24/7. That would be one for the books.

In the kitchen, all of the girls looked at him, like he'd just strode into their locker room. Hundreds of slayers crammed in, stinking up the place with their girlsweat and their menstrual blood and their clashing perfumes. Most said hello. Some smiled. He ignored them.

A tall older woman appeared, apron on over a green cardigan, wooden spoon in hand. "You don't look like you're reportin' for work." She had the accent of the Orkneys, the ruddy cheeks to match.

"Guess I'm not, today."

Her lip curled a little. "I'm Mrs Ambler. This'll be about the fourth time I've introduced myself to you in the last—"

"Yeah, things're tough all over. Any chance of a hot cuppa blood?"

She gave him a marked once-over. "If you're not going to work, I'm not going to feed you!"

Before he could protest, she waved the spoon at the ceiling. "It's your bonnie lass up in the tower keeps your blood! Go ask her for your breakfast an' get out of my way if you're not goin' to be useful!"

"Bonnie? Who's Bonnie?"

Behind him, Dawn said, "That would be my sister."

Spike turned. He hated that they were using Dawn. It was hard, looking at her, to hold onto the conviction that this was all false. She was such a good facsimile.

"She's no lass of mine."

"Spike, you've got to talk to her." This Dawn gave out the patented Snacksize Eye-Candy Stare. The one she'd used to get him to spend his own beer and cigarette money on pizza and soda and trinkets for her, the one that she'd used to wheedle him into letting her stay up all night or doing her French homework so she could just copy it in her own writing. "I mean, c'mon, this is getting really stupid. Ancient history or not—you have amnesia, Spike. You don't know what you don't know. You have to see her."

None of this mattered. It was a waste of time, but then he knew what happened when the victim struggled in the trap—it got tighter and tighter. Stay relaxed, and one might get free.

He shrugged. "As you like, Bit."

The part about her being the lass in the tower came clear when, having followed the Dawn girl through what felt like a mile of drafty reception halls and corridors, she delivered him to the base of a steep winding stone stair. "Her apartment is at the top. She's in there. Just go in."

"How can I?"

"You're already invited. Just go talk to her."

He started up the stairs, but only—only, you Wolfram & Hart bastards—because he was hungry.

She was leaning against the sink, her back to the room, staring out the window with a mug of coffee clasped in her hands. No clothes on. He rapped a knuckle against the doorframe, and she jumped.

"Spike! Oh my God, what are you—" He saw her gaze dart towards the dishtowels hanging off the oven door, assessing and rejecting, before she drew herself up with a deep breath. "You should've knocked."

"Sis said it wasn't necessary."

"I know you've been avoiding me. She wasn't supposed to send you up here."

"No? I guess you'd say that."

"You guess I'd—?"

"Was told you had some blood. That's what I came for."

"Oh, you're hungry?" She got a kind of gleam in her eye then, put down the mug and went to lean against the refrigerator, arms crossed. "The blood is in the freezer. Why don't you come and take some?"

A parallelogram of sunlight spilled in through the window, but didn't quite reach where she was standing. It made the room, that smelled of coffee and her body, warm.
"You're the honey trap they put at the middle of this snare. They think all they need to do is show me Buffy's tits an' they'll have me."

Her eyebrows shot up. "Who's this they?"

What an act! "You belong to 'em!"

"Do I? Who?"

He couldn't say it without a sneer. "Wolfram an' Hart."

"The evil law firm? That Angel was heading up?"

"Was more to that than met the eye. But got no time to stand around tellin' you your own business. You might as well cover yourself up. Not interested."

She shook her head. "I'm a honey trap, huh? You think they'd've told me. I'd have combed my hair. Maybe put on some concealer. High-heeled shoes."

"Wouldn't have made any difference if you did." They didn't know their information on him—on what would move him, what would fuck him up—was obsolete.

It was curious though, that they'd set her out for him in this state. Did they imagine she made an attractive sight for him, looking like merchandise that some other vamp had already pawed over and rejected? With her hair scraped back in a sloppy ponytail, two black eyes and a purpled swollen nose. She was too thin, too pale, black-and-blues dotting her flesh all over. Her chest and breasts and arms covered in gooseflesh, blotchy with blushes.

There were recent bite scars on her neck.

Not at all a good likeness of the Buffy Summers who'd once obsessed him. They should've made her golden and tawny, with that little touch of puppyish roundness she'd had when he first knew her. Unblemished, inviolate, not beautiful but so stunningly pretty. That would've been a temptation. Not that he'd have succumbed, because he was onto their game. But he'd have been more interested in a good look.

She said, "I guess they were just counting on you being attracted to the power. To the Buffy-essence? The form not mattering so much? Except you don't seem to think I really am Buffy. I don't interest you. I don't even worry you. So why not just come over here and get the blood?"

"You're a slayer."

"I thought I was a Wolfram & Hart honey trap."

Something prickled through him as he looked at her, something that began at the base of his spine and radiated up and down all through him. Hesitancy, that corresponded to the airy dangling sensation, like when he'd been in The Deeper Well, gazing down through the hole in the world, confronting that massive absence.

Formidable.

Dreadful.

But this woman wasn't an absence. She was the entire opposite of that.

She was too deep to be a construct. To be merely running a script.

He blinked, tried to clear his head, to grasp again the firm feeling he'd come in with, that this was all a sham, a trick, a puzzle he could outfox to escape from this limbo.

But it wasn't working. Doubt took root. An infection eating away at the edges of his certainty, making space for confused images, voices, to bleed in from the extremities of his consciousness. He tried to refuse them, but they boiled away there, just beyond comprehension.

The Buffy went on, "You don't remember any of the time you've spent here at the castle. With me. You don't remember last night."

"Know I'm bein' tricked about. Kept out of the fight."

"You have amnesia. You keep phasing in and out. It's hell on both of us."

"So you lot keep tellin' me. Nice story."

"Something is affecting your mind. Before you didn't remember any of your past. Now ... you've lost the short term."

She was trying to sound so reasonable, putting on her little show. Standing there in her altogether. Like the real Buffy would ever do that. Even when she did fuck him, she'd never really let him get the kind of good long looks at her bare body that he really wanted. She was always covering herself up, not out of modesty but because she denied him everything that didn't directly pleasure herself.

He summoned his resolve. He'd come for blood, and she'd challenged him to take it. Well all right, then.

He strode forward. She didn't move. He stopped at conversation-distance. Her head tipped back a little to keep taking him in. Her frown was resolute, but he felt something pleading behind it. Well, he wasn't quite playing her game, was he? He reached past her head to take hold of the freezer door handle.

She still didn't move. Neither to make way for him, or to resist.

This close, he could smell her dried sweat and the fug of sex on her skin, her hair. She seemed awfully real, and he could remember the time when he'd been stirred by Buffy Summers—this girl here wasn't she—as he'd never been stirred by anything else in life or unlife. She'd put him on his path. He had the mission because of her. Still, loving her, wanting her, seemed like a long time ago, like something that had happened to some slightly other fellow than himself. A simpler one, who believed in destiny but had no worries about good and evil or the fate of the world.

She sighed. "They're crafty and powerful, Wolfram & Hart, I get that. But how could you really not grasp the truth here? Don't you smell me? Smell yourself on me?" She'd uncrossed her arms, instead spread a hand open over her heart, like she was giving a pledge.

He thought of his dream, if that was what it was. How he'd awakened with the aroma of her in his little bed. Maybe they'd drugged him and put them together. That would explain the smells.

Impatience and anger kicked up in his gut, hitting out at the invasion of doubt. "Like Buffy would be such a mess—bitten up an' knocked about! Dunno what that's about, but I'm not fallin' for it."

She held herself open. "This mess, as you call it, is what I need you to remember. The last few days, the last few weeks—how could you get everything back except that? It's all you. What I've gone through with you."

He blinked. "Me." He did it then, snapped up a fist into her face. With the blow came a sharp almost cheerful realization—he should've done this right away. What was there to lose, after all? War was on, battle was his element. Fighting was cleaner than talking. It made sense no matter what the illusive trappings it was wrapped up in. She wasn't Buffy, but she'd be slayer-strong. He hit her again. Blood started from her purple nose, and she feinted out of the way. She parried his next strike with a raised arm, but instead of hitting back, she only shoved him off.

"I'm not going to fight you." She pointed to her face. "You were the one who broke my nose, when you were angry and afraid, and I let it happen because I'd promised you that you'd never be my punching bag again, and I meant it."

He smiled, flexing his fists. "Seems like a stupid thing to promise. Buffy wouldn't."

"I don't think so. I want you to know things are different between us, that my respect and love are real. If that means taking your violence until you figure it out, I'm prepared to do that. When you're in your right mind again, you won't hurt me anymore. The rest of these marks, they're yours too. I'm glad to have them. Look." She held out her arms, showing off hickies in the turn of her elbows, in the soft curve of her armpits, along her breasts, "These are your kisses, where you've devoured me. And look," She thrust out her hips, so he could see not just her curly mons but the insides of her thighs, spotted with bruises, and the pinky-red inner pooch of her swollen sex. "We fucked last night so hard, so ... magnificently ... I'm still wearing it." She turned, showed him her behind, the violet imprints of his fingers still marking her hips and buttocks. "See where you took hold of me? But I'm not just talking about love-making." She pushed back the loose hair from her neck, "Here's where you bit and fed from me. I wanted you to have every bit of me I could give. All of this mess, you put it on me. Whether you want to believe it or not, I am Buffy. I'm yours."

Voices and faces and sensations bubbled like corrosive at the edges of his mind as she talked. Doubt rose, slopping over everything he needed to be sure. He told himself, even strange as this was, she was nothing that couldn't be counterfeited, faked. Wolfram & Hart could do anything.

They would, they could, do this, show him a girl with Buffy's face, who'd been mauled about, who would pretend it meant something more than that she was their puppet.

She had to be that, just some puppet. A construct.

He held hard to his conviction.

But the conviction, as she confronted him, all undefended, was already slipping. In the clear morning light, she was so distinct: pallid and contused, delicate, wounded, flushed and trembling. The aromas of her body bloomed out in the kitchen's still air. An ache started behind his eyes, and with it, a sense of unreality boiling in from the margins, or maybe it wasn't unreality. Maybe the shadows that moved in the corners of his mind were something else.

She was so calm and certain, talking to him. "You were the one who initiated this, when I came to you in L.A. You had amnesia, you didn't know me at all, but you were drawn to me, and I ... I couldn't resist you, couldn't resist myself. I was afraid you wouldn't want me when your memories returned, I was afraid you'd be angry at me for all of this," her hand again sweeping down her body, "And it looks like I was right to be afraid. But I love you Spike, I loved you in Sunnydale and I held back and I lost you. I just couldn't do that again."

She tipped up her chin. He saw the strength shining off her. All that strength and surety and Buffyness that he remembered. Her eyes, even staring out of bruises as they were, contained everything he'd ever known about her.

That's when it happened.

The voices, the moving suggestive sensations gathered force in his mind, so the very air of the room seemed to change, to take on a harder tangibility.

Inside him, the barrier cracked, began to collapse. He tried to preserve it—it was what composed his righteous determination to escape, to get back to the struggle.

The cracks strained against the great population of forgotten things. It was too much; with a sick rush, every certainty he was clinging to collapsed. Memory—everything—poured through.

This had nothing to do with Wolfram & Hart. This was real, and he was here because he was a fuck-up.

The battle was—not so much over as gone.

It had gone and he had failed to go with it.

Angel and the others had been dead for weeks.

And he, having conveniently forgotten everything that was most crucial to him, forgotten how he'd held back like some yellow cur while Angel surged forward, had been dallying away the days and nights since with Buffy.

Comprehension plunged him into an acid bath of fury and shame.

This was Buffy.

Buffy with something gone vitally wrong in her too. Because how else could she have fallen into this disgusting mistake?

How, having resisted him for so long, had she given way only when he was utterly ruined and broken, a coward, a stranger to himself?

The irony was incredible.

Somehow she'd played out some elaborate drama with someone she thought was him. Or ... no. She knew it wasn't him—that was the supreme joke of it. She was glad to have his body, his supernatural strength and prowess, all his old devotion, in a figure who was yet smooth and innocent and didn't want or know anything except her.

That was it.

She'd been talking to, trying to reach, that other Spike, the one who'd impressed her little body with all these marks and bruises, which she seemed to value as if they meant she'd made some kind of breakthrough.

All at once she was tugging at him and he realized that he'd sunk to the floor and she was kneeling, trying to get in his face. "Spike, stop it. Stop making that noise."

It took a few seconds for him to locate himself as the source of the jagged laughter that filled the room. This laughter was indistinguishable from drowning, but he wasn't going to drown, he wasn't going to get out of this the way he'd gotten out of that alley, slipping from cowardness to erasure.

How could things have come to this pass? He'd been ready to die, so why hadn't he? Since when had he been yellow? As for her—she'd never loved him, not really, not even at the end when, dazzled in the face of his extinction, she'd said her goodbye. So how did she get to this?

His love for her was a far-ago thing now. Beaten out against the hard rock of his exile in L.A., the mission with Angel, against the reality of having to continue when he'd thought he was finished. He could barely think about it now, the intimate intricacies of a love affair had nothing to do with what he'd been about just before ... before he'd dishonored himself, his mission, in that alley.

She must've read some clue in his face, because hers went still. She backed off a little, turning her gaze aside; he saw her profile, a blank stare, lips parted, outlined in the advancing sunlight. The light that reached him now, as she sprang up. He felt its hot tickle on his face and arms, started to stretch into it. But she went to the window, snapped down the shade.

"What just happened?" Her voice was sharp, high. It made him wince. He wanted to cover his ears with his hands. Hunker down, melt into the floor. Why hadn't he died there? He'd been ready. He'd been ready, he knew he was, to help save the world.

Her voice was a brittle bully. "Tell me where we are. What is this now?"

"Like you said. I'm Spike. You're Buffy. It's finished. This whole bloody charade."

"You remember—" She gasped, then froze. Her face was a mask. She was so carefully marshalling herself, he could see that she knew, that her worst fears were true, her happy little romance all burned down. He was a little sorry for her, for her pain, even though he still couldn't fathom how she'd gotten there. He recalled it all, every scene they'd played together in the last weeks, but it was only that, some kind of play that had been performed with his body. He couldn't feel it, couldn't inhabit it, except that it fired him with shame and he'd have forgotten it again if he could. Where was the sudden plunge into psychosis and escape when you really bloody wanted it?

Buffy said. "Oh." Then again, "Oh," hands fluttering to cover herself, like the dreamer who realizes she's naked in front of everyone. But it was no dream.

She ran out of the room.