Disclaimer: Personally I love reading Buffy the Vampire Slayer fanfiction almost as much as I love watching the amazing show created my Joss Wheaton, who owns all rights to the characters of both Buffy and Angel, and I am in no way getting anything out of writing this, other than personal joy.

Authors Note: This is my first fanfiction and I hope you all like it! I am pretty sure that I want to continue writing it but I would love some reviews on if you guys like the idea. The prologue is just an intro because I needed to change the way the show ended a little, it has up through season 7 of Buffy spoilers but ignores almost all of Angel, especially season 5.

Rating: M for strong language I'm not much of a smutty author.

Prologue:

They had made it, if not all in one piece at least alive. Buffy barely registered that the others were talking. She felt so much lighter now than she had before the battle and she couldn't quite figure out why. Her mind raced by things like, maybe cause I'm not the only slayer anymore, and I always feel lighter after we end an apocalypse, but in her heart she knew the real reason. Half of her heart was gone, Spike was gone and he didn't even believe that she had loved him.

" Yeah Buffy what are we going to do now?" Dawn ripped her back into reality and she released the breath that she didn't know she had been holding. Turning slowly from the great gaping pit before her she looked into her friends faces. They were all looking as battle warn as her. They smiled just as warmly, despite the dirt and grime, as they did after every adverted disaster, all of them accept Xander. In his eye she could see her own grief mirrored back at her. Without words she walked over to her friend and held him close to her, and he leaned into the silent connection that only people who have lost their other half can know.

The smiles faded from the group's faces as they watched Buffy and Xander silently grieve together, as the weight of everything they had lost came back to them. Willow, Giles and Dawn all looked down at the pit in front of them and realized that somewhere down there the bodies of Tara, Jenny and Joyce were now gone, sucked down into hell with the rest of the town. Their childhood homes, the places that had become familiar to them, all of the places that they had laughed and cried together were now gone. Yet when they looked the two people who had lost the most, they knew that they had no knowledge of grief in this moment, they all remembered in though and they hurt with their friends. For a brief moment Giles remembered the joy in his heart when he walked into his home and saw rose petals and candles scattered around and soft music drifting down the stairs, and then the world coming down around him when he made it to the top floor only to see Jenny laying dead on his bed. Willows mind flashed back to Tara standing in front of her beaming warmth and light onto her, and then the sudden stab of pain when that warmth was replaced with the heat of Tara's blood on her face and neck. No one dared ask Buffy again what they would do next because at that moment they all knew that all Buffy wanted to do was die.

They turned away from everything that they had known and slowly got back onto the buss where Robin and Faith clung to each other. Xander pulled back from Buffy and tiled her chin up so that she was looking into his eye, "There's nothing down there for us anymore, we have to move on."

"I know Xan but there is something that I have to do before we leave. He… he didn't believe that I loved him, and now he's gone Xan. I know you didn't like him but… I … he…" Words failed her and the tears that she had been fighting back sprang up. Why hadn't he believed her, in the end she had let down all of her bariers and he still hadn't believed her. Maybe if he had, maybe if she had opened up earlier, things would have been different, she could have found a way to save him.

Thoughts raced in her mind faster than she would have thought possible and they all began run together. Then all at once her mind stopped and she knew what she had to do.

Walking over to the edge of the pit she came so close that Xander put his hand on her shoulder to make sure she didn't jump. She looked back at him, "It's ok Xan I know what I'm doing," Once he had taken a step back and she was alone once more, she reached back into her waistband and wrapped her hand around a steak that she always carried there and held it in front of her. The wood still looked like it had particles of dust on it from the last vampire she had dusted. Slowly she looked over the whole thing and blew the dust from the crevasses and divots in the wood until it was perfectly clean.

A breeze drifted in from somewhere in the east and on it she could still hear his words "Blood is life, lack-brain. Why do you think we eat it? It's what keeps you going. Makes you warm. Makes you hard. Makes you other than dead." Her hand gently touched the wound on her stomach, when it came away it was covered in her blood and she lightly brushed it all over the stake. "It makes you other than dead" she whispered softly to herself. She let the stake fall from her hand into the abyss, "other than dead" she repeated as she turned away from the place that had always been her true home.

As Xander wrapped her under his arm they both began to cry and neither of them realized that the stake never hit the ground.