Time: Takes place during Normal Again, season six

Rating: Adult

Pairing: William/Buffy, Spike/Buffy

Other: Semi-AU, Semi-Cannon

Summary: Buffy never managed to go back home. When she tried to return, she found she couldn't. She's trapped in a different world with the person she hated more than any other. But, things are different… and she's falling for the man she never got to see.

Prologue

"Goodbye," Buffy whispered, her eyes shining with tears as she stared up at her mother, as she stared up at the one that had loved her. That would never leave her memory. The look of Joyce's fear was scarred into her retinas. She would never be able to get her mother's face when she realized that her daughter had left her out of her head. Her eyes closed, she had made up her mind, her friends needed her. Even if Buffy could have her mother, life would be nothing without the people she had grown up with in one way or another. "I'm sorry…" tears fell from behind her eyelashes as she took a deep breath, and opened her eyes…

…only to see her mother staring back at her worriedly.

"Mom?" she muttered as her eyes widened. The breath caught in her throat. The panic was rushing back… rushing… rushing… it was filling her head with memories, fears, and the realization that she had killed her friends… and without them tethering her to that world, she had no way of returning to them. "No… nonononononono!" her voice rose with each 'no' as she clutched at her hair, tears spilling from her eyes even more. They were gone… everyone she loved was gone… "Oh god… Xander… Dawn… Willow… Tara…"

"Buffy? Honey?" Joyce muttered, scooting closer to her daughter and placing a hand on her shoulder. The younger blonde shied away from the elder woman, and Joyce gazed at her daughter sadly. She was loosing her, the light of Joyce's world, once again.

"Spike…" Buffy gasped out, holding her head and letting out a low moan. It was over, it was true, she was crazy… the friends she had were nothing more than figments… and she had killed the only ones she really knew. "Gone… all gone… oh god… what have I done?"

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"It has been three days since she came out of it, Mrs. Summers," the doctor's voice echoed from the other side of the door, and Buffy allowed her tear-stained face to raise up. She hated feeling weak, she hated being like this, but the world she had known was gone… gone forever, and there was nothing she could do about it. She was only a scared little girl in a psych ward… she wasn't a Slayer with vampire lovers and a witch for a best friend… she was just a girl sitting on a bed crying for lost figments of her imagination.

A wry smile crossed her face as she listened to the doctor drone on and on. They always thought they knew everything didn't they? He had said something about her not being able to cope with coming out of the comatose state she had been in, but she was going to prove him wrong. If there was one thing that her time hidden deep within her mind proved to her, it was that she was a stubborn person. After all, who else could resist Spike's advances, as tempting as they were? Sure, she had given in to him in the end, but he was hot… that was just too tempting to pass up.

"Mr. Grant!" Buffy's attention was brought back to the door as she tiled her head to the side, listening to the doctor as a crash from the hall sounded. One of the people in the nearby rooms started wailing, which just added to the noise in the hall. She winced, but resisted covering her ears. "Watch where you're going, you delinquent! I don't care if you were the pope of Rome, young man, don't upset the patients!"

The doctor's voice dropped, and when the noise all but quieted down the door slowly opened. Buffy's eyes were trained on the door, looking for the mom she knew wasn't her own. Instead of the familiar dirty-blonde hair on an elderly body, she was greeted with bleached blonde hair with black tips, heavily lined eyes, and piercings lining the ears of the boy in front of her. She blinked, noticing that he was muttering to himself heatedly, a scowl on his face as he moved across the room, seeming to just ignore her all together.

"H… hello?" she called out to him, her voice timid as her body shook in something akin to fear. The boy paused, and turned around, an eyebrow with a single piercing raising up. She shivered in a sense of de ja vous as she noticed that the same eyebrow had a moon shaped scar cutting through it.

"Oh," he said, placing whatever he had picked up back on the desk she hadn't noticed was there. "You're not normally awake, huh? Sorry, just… passing through…" he cleared his throat, turning around. Buffy could notice the nervousness tensing up his shoulders, so she relaxed slightly. There was something about this boy… no… young man, that made her feel at ease.

"What… what's your name?" her voice was still soft and timid, and she hated herself for it, but since the boy turned around again, his blue eyes surveying her untidy, grimy form from beneath his black lined eyes. She thought she could see a healing bruise on his forehead, but dismissed it. She could tell by his appearance that he wasn't the nicest boy in school.

"Will… Will Grant," he said, brow furrowing together as he frowned at Buffy. "Do I know you?"

Buffy opened her mouth to reply, the shaking having completely gone away, when the door opened again and the pale light of the hallway hit Will's pale flesh. Her words became a sharp inhale as the light hit his face just right, shading the hallows of his cheeks and his eyes, causing the blue to burn out from the shadows at her. The light made his face look pale, and she made a slight groaning sound. There was no way this was coincidence, but if she told the doctor about Will's resemblance to Spike he may make the boy go somewhere else in the hospital.

"Buffy?" Dr. Hamilton asked, stepping into the room and turning almost angry eyes on Will. "Did Mr. Grant here do anything to you?"

"Oh bloody hell!" Will fumed, the accent Buffy hadn't noticed earlier thickening his words as he turned on the doctor, glaring. "I'm here to pay off my debt, not make it worse. Why would I go and harass her?"

"You tell me," the doctor said, eyes narrowing suspiciously at Will. "You're needed in the A wing, jump to it."

"Don't worry, I'll jump… Hell… I know I'll get jumped… more than I can say for you… soddin' wanker," Will muttered, just soft enough for Hamilton to miss it, but loud enough to get a hastily stifled giggle out of Buffy. Will spared her a look and a half-smirk as he ducked out the door, escaping from Hamilton's death glare.

"That kid," the doctor sighed irritably before turning to a still giggling Buffy and smiling softly. "Are you doing better Miss Summers?"

"I'm getting there," Buffy said, giggling stopping as shivering took over again. She huddled back into a ball, staring up at the doctor under the tangled mess she liked to call hair. "Who was he?"

"A delinquent," the doctor scoffed, moving to sit down on the edge of the bed and gesturing for Buffy to come closer. She obeyed and held out an arm, wincing slightly and whimpering as he injected a shot into the outstretched limb. "He tried to lift some drugs from here, was caught, and is paying us back by working here. Trust him about as far as I can throw him… and it would be pretty hard to throw a squirming, kicking, punching twenty-five-year-old," he sighed, letting Buffy take her arm back. "We're moving you, Buffy… I think you'd do much better with the lesser cases. After all, we're slowly easing you into reality… and now that you're here with us we can start to re-assimilate you to the rest of the human race. It will be a slow, but steady process. You ready Buffy?"

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The front wings of the mental ward were reserved for non-chronic cases. There were some that saw things, others that had mental tics, and even more that were just there because they had temperaments different from the rest of humanity. All in all, it was fairly scary for Buffy. She had gotten used to the whitewashed walls of her room and the silence of the intensive care cases that the constant babble and moaning of the people in this part of the mental institution was starting to weird her out. It was hard enough trying to get over the fact that the life she had known hadn't been her own, but she didn't feel safe around anyone there. Buffy had already had four mental breakdowns in the first week out of her room, but now she was breakdown-free for almost three days, and she didn't start crying and shuddering whenever that one patient with an English accent started speaking.

However… as much as she was trying to put her hallucinations behind her, Will's face – Spike's face – kept coming to mind. She hadn't seen the man since that one day, and it was starting to get her irritated. For some reason all fear, all sadness was diminished in his familiar presence, and without seeing him, she doubted that she would be able to cope.

So there she sat in front of an easel, holding the pencil between her hands as she stared at the canvas blankly as the instructor for the therapy session droned on about how it would help their emotions to just draw what they were thinking. Buffy was about to place the pencil on paper when a rough voice called out through the near-silence during one of the instructor's pauses.

"Oi, Mrs. Cunnon? We have permission to take Miss Summers for personal therapy today. Mind sparing us the bird?" Buffy couldn't help but feel her heart leap as she turned her head, taking in the smirking bleached blonde looking so out of place with his piercings, eyeliner, and goth nail polish clashing against the nurse outfit someone had shoved on him.

"Call one of our patients bird again, Mr. Grant, and you'll find your ass in jail before you can blink," the instructor hissed, but nodded to Buffy. The blonde in turn just tilted her head to the side, entertained and curious about Mrs. Cunnon's anger. It was a common British saying, so why was it getting on her nerves so much? "Buffy honey you can go with Will now," Mrs. Cunnon helping her out of her chair and guiding her towards the door called Buffy back into reality. For some reason, she couldn't get her feet to work, so she accepted the woman's help, and Will's help as he guided her down the hall with a hand on her shoulder and another at the small of her back. Despite his rough appearance, Buffy could feel his gentleness as he helped her into a large room and seated her in a chair. There was another man in there, but seeing how he was dressed in jeans and a plaid shirt she didn't think that he was the doctor.

"Alex? Why the hell are you here?" Will asked, placing his hands on his hips and glaring at the now smirking boy.

"Oh, Willy, admit you're glad to see me," the other boy, tanner with dark brown hair snickered at the simmering platinum blonde. "Actually, mum sent me to tell you that we're in charge of helping Buffy today. Another case came up that the doctors had to take care of. Some schizo patient went off the deep end. So this is her, huh?"

Alex pushed himself out of the swivel chair he had been seated in and stopped in front of Buffy, who couldn't help but whimper and shrink back into the chair.

"Bloody he- … god…" he muttered, cutting off the British saying and switching to American colloquialisms. "Sorry, I'm Alexander Grant," he said softly, squatting down so he was just below Buffy's line of vision, looking up at her. "The stupid English one's brother. Our mum's one of the doctors here… which is why Will got off so easy. I promise, you're safe with us."

Something clicked as Alex kept talking, something that made Buffy's mouth open slightly as she stared into those eerily familiar brown eyes. There was no mistaking it… Will had been eerie enough, but this… this was insanity.

"Xander?" she whispered, brow furrowing as she stared at the new man in front of her. "Is that you?"

Alex blinked at Buffy, and then turned to Will, who shrugged at him.

"Do I… know you?" the brunette asked, tilting his head to the side slightly. "I haven't been called that since kindergarten… how did you know?"

"This is gonna sound stupid," Buffy muttered, closing her eyes. "So I'm not going to say it," her eyes opened again, shimmering with unshed tears. "I… I wanna go home… when…?" she trailed off as a doctor entered the room, pouting prettily as she scanned the clipboard.

"And the most beautiful bird enters the cuckoo nest!" Will piped up, causing Alex to snicker along with his brother. "What brings you to this neck of the woods Cord?"

"Keeping miscreants like you away from innocent young ladies like Miss Summers," Cordelia said, hitting Alex away from Buffy's knees with her clipboard. "To respond to your question, Miss Summers, you can actually go home in one more week. However, I'm going to need someone to make regular visits to your abode to make sure you're adjusting well. Since you're twenty-two, right? Right, we'll just assume that you'll be wanting to enter school again soon. Well, the only person that we can spare who's close to your age would be young William here, but I'm not sure how much you'd want to hang around with him… he's kind of…"

"Handsome? Suave?" Will put in, earning another chuckle from Alex. Cordelia just have them a look.

"Immature," she finished before turning back to Buffy, who had long since uncurled from her little ball in the chair. "Sweetie, if you don't feel ready, don't feel pressured into doing anything. We can go as slow as you want."

Buffy could suddenly feel all the stress of the past nine days weighing down on her as she looked into Dr. Chase's eyes. She didn't even know the doctor's name, but she felt the same familiarity with her as she did with Alex and Will. Something strange was going on, that was for sure, and it was bringing back memories of her other world that were bombarding her subconscious. Her hazel eyes automatically searched for Will's blue eyes to find comfort in, and when she found him facing away from her, the last connection with her mind and sanity broke and a wail tore from her throat as she grabbed her hair, sobbing as she huddled into a ball, chanting her mantra over and over again, oblivious to everything else in the world.

"Not real. Not real. It's not real."

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Five days was all that it took for Buffy to leave the hospital, holding her mother's hand like it was the only thing tethering her to the earth. Her hospital clothes had been traded in for a sweatpant/sweatshirt combo that kept her warm in the chill of the late October air. The breakdown had been brief, but it had separated her from Will once again. She was supposed to be riding to her house with him, seeing as both of her parents had to stay and sign paperwork and talk with the doctor, and neither Joyce nor Hank were happy with that.

"Oi! Mrs. Summers!" the familiar cockney accent rang out, and Joyce turned towards it before Buffy could, blocking her view of Will. Her mother groaned and Buffy turned her eyes to her mother's face, smiling slightly as she saw the look of horror on her face. "Hank! Alex says thanks for the tools," Will's voice was closer, and when Buffy leaned around Joyce to get a look at the approaching twenty-five year-old her breath caught in her throat and her eyes widened slightly.

Will's hair still had the black tips she remembered, but it was shorter and gelled up in short spikes. He had a lip ring in and his eyebrow ring, but neither of them made him look menacing. His eyes were lined with the black eyeliner she had seen on him earlier and his ears were so full of metal she thought it impossible for them to still be attached to his head. He was wearing a black tank top with a red silk shirt over it and baggy black jeans. The English man seemed oblivious to the cold, seeing as the sleeves of his shirt were pushed up, exposing his sturdy, but thin and pale arms to her gaze. Buffy took all of him in with a hungry gleam in her eyes. This was more like the Spike she knew in her mind… and it looked better than the nurse uniform they had given him.

"It was no problem," Hank said, sighing. Buffy spared a glance at her father and smiled reassuringly. "Don't drive to fast, right? And do us a favor and stay with her until we get back, okay?"

"Will do Mr. Summers," Will said, saluting and reaching out to take Buffy's hand. The younger blonde obliged without a word, marveling in the feel of his hand, so unlike the dead flesh of the Spike she knew. He had warmth that made her shiver, staring at their joined skin in wonder. "Anything to miss History… we have a lecture today."

"You're in college?" Buffy asked, her voice still wary and soft.

Will waited until he had led her to a black convertible to answer. "Yeah, Alex and me both. That's how I know your mum an' dad. Alex is takin' an architecture course from Hank and Joyce used to help my 'rents by babysittin the nibblet."

"Nibblet?" Buffy echoed, recognizing Spike's normal nickname for Dawn.

"Yeah, Marie. Lil' sister. Adorable thing really… if you like demons from bloody hell," Spike scoffed, moving around the car to open the driver's door and slide in. "You picked one hell of a time to come out of your mind, you know. Joyce and Hank have to take off for New York to deal with legal issues on something or other, so I'll be checking in with out off and on all week. You'll be okay, right? I mean, I'm gonna be there every waking moment I'm not at school and your episodes have calmed down enough."

"Do you always talk this much?" Buffy said, allowing a slight smile to spread across her face. She hadn't smiled much since she came back to this world, and the only people that managed to worm out a smile from her had been Will himself, and his brother Alexander.

"Eh, you'll get used to it," Spike shrugged, turning on the car as Buffy got in and put on her seat belt. "Now hold on, I think that American speed limits are complete crock."

With that stated, Will hit the gas and with a sharp turn of the wheel he got Buffy holding onto the door and seat for dear life as he whirled out of the parking lot. Within minutes, he had parked the car and was laughing at Buffy's white knuckles and shell-shocked expression.

"Sorry luv, did I push you into your mind again?" he asked, stilling his laughter slightly. When she didn't answer, he frowned, leaning forward into her face as his brow furrowed. "Buffy? Honestly, did that scare you that much? I was only going ten over!"

Buffy blinked slowly at Will's face three inches away from hers, and when her eyes met his blue ones nothing else mattered. She just saw herself and Spike in any reality, in any time, and she almost leaned forward those couple of inches and pressed her lips to his. But, instead she pulled back, undid her seatbelt, and got out of the car as her cheeks started flushing.

"I… I'm fine… can we just go inside?" her arms lifted slightly, hugging herself as a shiver went through her body. She wasn't cold, but the memories were becoming too much again, and she really didn't want to break down on the front lawn of her parent's place.

"Sure," Will said, locking the car and moving ahead of Buffy to unlock the door. When they were both inside, he waited as Buffy looked around, and followed her into each room she explored, pointing out closets and doors as they went.

"Well, I've got to get to class… you gonna be okay here?" he finally asked, obviously fidgety. As soon as the words left his mouth, he regretted them, because Buffy looked at him with eyes full of pain and fear. "I'll take that as a no," he sighed, throwing his keys down on a table. "Hungry?" she shook her head, not speaking again. "Tired?" a nod this time. "Go lay down on the couch, kay? I'll get some blankets for you."

As Buffy obeyed him, she watched Will as he got the blanket and carefully covered her.

"You're a lot nicer than you look," she muttered, exhaustion nearly claiming her body. Will spared her a sad smile.

"My sister nearly died last year," he said, voice just as soft. "I had to take care of her for a couple of months… it really made me grow up. I'll get over it though, it's just a phase."

Buffy chuckled again, and within seconds she was asleep.

Will sighed, watching as the rise and fall of Buffy's chest became a steady rhythm. "What is it? Why are you so familiar?" he muttered, reaching over and tucking a loose strand of tangled hair behind her ear. "Just who are you?"