Remember the vows you made to your Mary,
Remember the bow'r where you vowed to be true

"Oh don't deceive me, oh, never leave me.
How could you use a poor maiden so!"

This was definitely his favorite dream.

Better than the one where he stumbled upon the left-over Initiative soldier-boys and tortured them for days while listening to the Clash.

Better than the one where Harris groveled at his feet and thanked him over and over for saving the world.

Better, even, than the one where he became a human while Angel, with his hair flat and lifeless, sat and stared in open mouthed shock.

He is, again, eight years old. He is curled up in his Mum's lap and she is stroking his hair and whispering bits of an old song into his ear. In-between parts of the song, she heaps praise upon him: telling him what a clever lad he is, so bright and brave and true. She tells him that he is her Sweet William, and someday he will grow up to be a knight of the round table, the strongest and most loyal. The fire cackles beside them and his Dad sits across the room from them, reading sections of the paper aloud from time to time. It is the last year that Dad would be alive, the last year the three of them would spend carefree evenings by the fire, reading, laughing, and singing.

It is definitely his favorite dream.

And usually, when he wakes up from it, he finds himself in the worst situations. Like the time he'd come out of it and found himself crawling on a basement floor, clawing at his own chest as voices howled in his ears. Or the morning the sun had pulled him from it when his hand caught on fire. That's why when he comes out of the dream this time, he is only marginally surprised to find himself bound in chains and sitting on a cold, concrete floor.

The first thought that enters his foggy brain immediately contradicts itself. He hurts, bloody hell he hurts, but he feels strangely numb. A tumble of information follows this realization. She's a slayer. She remembers him. She's psychotic. He stumbles trying to ask her what she's done to him and she closes in on him, babbling Dru-talk and brandishing a saw. It is right around that thought when it begins to dawn on him that there's something very, very wrong with his hands.

"Oh God, I can't feel my—"

He thinks about his mother, oh God, he's such a ponce, he's passing out and thinking of his mother.

A brief flash of black, a whisper of a song, "O don't deceive me! O do not leave me!" and then she snaps him back to the horrible reality of the moment by punching him in the face.

He is bargaining now, trying to take that tone that always made Dru calm down. If he can only get her to calm down, maybe he can, maybe he can, if he can only get her to see that he's not the one that hurt her, that someone else did all that, that this is all in her head, then maybe he can. . .

She's closing in on him now even faster and he knows he's really in trouble because she's begun to speak Chinese again.

She kneels in front of him and locks eyes with him. "You killed her."

He has to keep his voice level, don't spook her, don't try to explain the stupid soul, be calm. "Yes, but—"

It's not working, her voice raises an octave. "You killed them both."

A simple statement of fact, certainly not one he can argue, certainly not one he can argue to a brassed-off psychotic slayer who's cut off his, well, yes, he killed them both. He must try to get through to her, he must try to make her see.

Calm, logic, sense, order. Yet none of it accounts for what pops out of his mouth next. Looking into her feral eyes he blurts out the very thing he likes thinking about the least. "Yes, but, I saved another one."

Even then, it is not what he wanted to say. "Yes, but, I loved another one." But saying those words, even when he is chained and mutilated, just hurts too damn much.

He wants those words back. How could he have presumed to have, he didn't save Buffy, he didn't, he just put on a stupid necklace and stood still, that was all, it's not like he,

The girl's eyes roll back in her head and she emits a low, keening noise. She falls backwards, away from him. He almost doesn't catch the next words out of her mouth. "I've seen the best and the worst of you and I understand with perfect clarity exactly what you are. You are a hell of a woman. You're the one, Buffy."

And there it was, the name that hurt almost more than having his hands chopped off. She was remembering Buffy.

"It could never be you, don't want to be the one, the only chance you had with me was when I was unconscious," she was moaning now, rocking back and forth.

"No, I helped her, there's," but he doesn't know what to say, he doesn't know what parts of Buffy remembrances of him, of them, are filtering through this girl's poor mind. And part of him doesn't want to know. What if she finds herself next on a bathroom floor? She'd approach him with that saw and a vengeance, and he'd welcome them both.

She stops rocking and is still. Too still. "William the Bloody," she repeats, looking down to the concrete floor. "I'm sorry, William." And then her eyes meet his again and they are no longer wild and angry. They seem to be looking at him, seeing him.

And Spike pretends they are Buffy's eyes. It can't hurt, right, because at this point, he doesn't have any hands, he's chained up at the mercy of a crazy slayer, no one is sweeping in to his rescue, and he doesn't even have the courage to call Buffy and tell her, hell, tell her any-damn-thing, so he can pretend. Because it can't get worse.

She never takes her eyes away from him. Her words now are a frantic chant, tinged with the same misty tone he'd heard in her Chinese and in Nikki's voice. "I believe in you, I was there with you, I love you. You're in my heart, I told Angel you were but not you, you're in my heart, that means more than the rest of it, Spike, in my heart with my Mom and the gang, and a hot bath and new shoes, in my heart with the best of it, did you know, I should have said, oh, in my heart. I think you'd love Rome."

Just like that, it got worse.

She covers her face with her hands and begins to quietly sob.

Spike closes his eyes and wishes the pain away: his and hers and a thousand others that he was cause of and witness to. He wishes he could fall back into his dream, his favorite. He wishes for a Roman spring and open arms.

Not ten minutes later, that's how Angel finds them.