Mom is angry. She can tell because she keeps breaking her glass. Her hands come together and the glass shatters, falling in a glistening diamond rain to the floor, accented by the bright rubies of Mom's blood. Then she's holding another one, overflowing with something so alcoholic she can almost feel herself getting drunk off the fumes. Mom's yelling and screaming at her, get out of my house get out of my house but it's her house too and she doesn't want to go. So she starts yelling back, get out of my house get out of my house which makes no sense but then Mom turns around and walks out. She doesn't look sad or angry or hurt, just blank, like the person inside her is already dead and she knows she killed her.

Angel's hand on her shoulder whips her around to face him. How could you do that to me? His blood pours from a gaping wound in his chest. The sword burns hot in her hand. Then suddenly it's in Angel's hand and he thrusts it through her chest. She stumbles back, flees the revulsion and hatred in his eyes, and tumbles backwards into Hell.

Her friends stand surrounding her, their backs turned. Voices rise, tumbling over each other, a cacophony reminiscent of lunchtime at school – hey did you hear you'll never believe got French and then she said going out failed the History need another and his girlfriend just get look at this how could you – her friends take up the last cry, how could you how could you and they're always asking things of her and she just wants them to stop. The sword's in her hand again, shining with Angel's blood – or it is her blood – and she thrusts it through Willow's back. Willow explodes in a swirl of magic. None of the others move as she steps up behind Oz. The sword enters and keeps going, tearing through nothing more than fur that falls to the floor. Cordelia follows, her empty clothes collapsing under the weight of makeup cases and hairbrushes. Her hand tightens on the sword as she runs it through Xander's back, and she's hurled away by a fountain of blood.

The sword floats on the river of blood as it pushes her back past her house, past the school, along the freeway and up to a hotel. Spike's standing outside and he pulls her from the flood and shouts into her face. Buffy! he yells, shaking her. Buffy!

"Buffy! Damn it, wake up!"

Buffy mumbled some incoherent reply and pushed his hands off her shoulders. "Get off me, I'm fine." Her throat ached like fire and speaking had only made it worse.

"Bollocks you're fine. Screamin' fit to wake the dead, more like. Which you actually did, by the way."

"Oh. Sorry."

Buffy pushed his surprisingly gentle hands from her face and sat up, pulling the blankets up around her shoulders. Sleep-haze still floated in her mind, but not enough to fog the alarm screaming this-is-not-okay! She knew it was there but it just didn't seem to matter enough. Somehow, the alarm was wrong. Everything was just fine. There was no problem with Spike comforting her after a nightmare, no problem with him being in her bedroom.

"S'alright. Not like I need to sleep, anyway. I jus' like to. Not sure if I would, though, if I had nightmares like yours."

"It was nothing special. I killed everybody but I've had much worse than that before."

"You killed everybody?"

"Well, first I threw Mom out of the house. And then Angel killed me, and then I stabbed all my friends in the back, one by one. And then you woke me up." Even reported blandly, it still sounded awful to her ears. Images swam through her mind, Mom's face contorted in disappointment and disgust, her friends dying without fighting her, Angel's revenge. She knew from past experience that this dream would hang around with her for days.

Spike shuddered and sat down on the bed beside her. A few days ago she would have shrieked and fled to the opposite side – of the room, most likely. Now she didn't want him to be anywhere else. "And you say that's nothin' special? Sounds bloody awful."

"It is, but I've had worse. Prophecy dreams. I get to see blood and death and apocalypse, and then get told to stop it all. I wonder if I'll still get those. Well, even if I do, I'm not doing anything about it. The Buffy-phone is officially off the hook."

Her hands were trembling and she pushed them into the blanket. Of course, she would be a lot worse off if she were alone. Buffy was very much a member of the 'talking about it makes it better' school, and if she'd had nobody to talk to it would have just stayed locked up inside her, and she probably would have had the same dream the next night, and the next, and the next…

There was a low, keening wail from next door. Buffy shivered and Spike's head jerked up at the sound.

"That's Dru. I've got to go." He stood up but remained hovering awkwardly next to her bed. "Sorry," he mumbled. "But I've really got to…"

"Yeah, sure, go," Buffy said. But as Spike left through the connecting door she was surprised to feel something – an actual emotion – surging through her chest. She hadn't felt it this strong since seeing Angel with Cordelia at the Bronze.

She was jealous.

Of Drusilla.

Over Spike.

Ever since she'd begun to fight vampires every night, the words reality check had pretty much lost their meaning. All the same, looking at her life right now would require admitting that she and Spike were practically friends, she had no desire to stake Drusilla for killing Kendra, she had renounced her calling and she had abandoned her friends.

Oh, and that she was jealous of Drusilla over Spike.

Hello! Buffy to brain, are you receiving me? Buffy shook her head. Now was not the time for anything of that nature. She really didn't need another vampire love. Especially not a soulless one.

Then again, according to Spike, the soul didn't actually make that much difference. It wasn't the infallible safeguard she had imagined. A soul was simply a conscience – a mechanism to cause guilt. It was chilling to think of Angel being capable of Angelus's monstrosities, that the only thing preventing him was how bad he would feel about it. But once she thought it through she could see having a soul didn't make up a saint. Humans were perfectly able to commit crimes on par with Angelus's. She remembered names from History class that were far, far worse than his. And as much as she would like to take the easy way out and declare them all demons, she knew they were human. Their souls hadn't stopped them. A soul wasn't a guarantee of good behaviour; it wasn't a parental filter or anything like that. It was, at best, unreliable. And yet, she had relied on Angel's soul to prevent him from being Angelus.

Buffy shook her head again, more forcefully this time. She'd been so careful to keep Angel and Angelus separate in her head. If Spike was right, they weren't separate at all. Everything Angelus was, Angel was too. And all the tenderness and kindness she'd loved so much in Angel was still there in Angelus. They were the same person. It was nowhere near as clean as a Jekyll and Hyde situation.

Maybe she was soulless. That would explain a lot of things. Why she didn't feel bad about abandoning her sacred duty to protect the world. Why she didn't care that her friends were probably worried to death. Why she really hadn't thought about going back home. It was like Angel had taken her soul with him as he fell into Hell.

No, be honest. As she threw him in.

Then again, she wasn't totally over it. If somebody offered up her friends, her mother, Angel and reenrollment at Sunnydale High she'd take them with both hands. She just wouldn't do anything to get them back herself. And she was okay with that.

Buffy exhaled and sank back into the bed. For the first time since sending Angel to Hell she actually felt all right. The mess that she called a head was sorted out, more or less; dreams notwithstanding, she'd had the best sleep she'd had for years; and she wouldn't deny it was better to be in a swanky hotel than almost anywhere else she could think of. Including back home in her own bed. Buffy was an adult, a free adult, and she could have her own life.

Although, Spike seemed to be doing a pretty good job of taking care of her. He could keep doing that for… honestly, as long as he wanted. Buffy wouldn't have thought it possible, but there was a heart beneath that vampiric exterior. And she wanted to get to know it better.

Of course, right now it was in the other room tending to the person it really belonged to.

Suddenly she wasn't chilled anymore, she was burning with jealousy again. It was ridiculous how strong it felt, how much she wanted to be in Drusilla's place. To have a guy so totally devoted to you, a guy who was actually interesting, who actually had depths that could be reached.

In other words, everything Angel wasn't.

Angel, despite knowing him since coming to Sunnydale and dating him for almost that long, was still a total mystery to her. Sure, he was dark and enigmatic, cute and caring, but sometimes she wished he wouldn't treat her like porcelain. Sometimes she'd like him to crack a joke, make a pun after slaying a vamp, like she did. Even a smile for no reason, or to quietly lace his fingers through hers when they were out walking, would be nice.

Something to remind her that he was human.

The problem was that, soul or not, he wasn't human, and he didn't make an effort to disguise it. No, he buried himself in philosophy, ethics and morals, brooding over what he'd done in the past. Yes, he was tender. Yes, he loved her – had loved her. But tenderness and love were also to be found in cats, dogs, fish, and turtles. In other words, animals.

She didn't want to think of Angel as an animal, but sometimes it seemed like she had no other choice.

Spike, on the other hand, very much wrapped himself in a human exterior. The smoking, the bleached hair – she'd have bet good money he drank like a sponge – Spike wore his humanity and his vampirism in equal pride. In fact, she'd seen the one far outdo the other. In the church, when trying to restore Drusilla, he'd abandoned the fight with Buffy to get his love to safety. He hadn't gone ahead and killed her – something that was well within his abilities – and he hadn't killed Angel in passing. He'd grabbed the woman he loved and ran.

It was something very human, to choose escape over mayhem. Something she hadn't expected to see in any vampire. And while Spike seemed to get into causing pain in others as much as the next vamp, in that regard he was hardly on par with Angelus or some of the other vampires she'd faced. Despite his exceptional fighting skills, his plans had been surprisingly easy to unwind. Ruining parent/teacher night? Attacking a bunch of idiots who wanted to be vampires in the first place? Come on!

Spike was somehow more likable than Angel. Even though they were supposedly enemies, that fact was remarkably easy to put aside when they both wanted to. And she could hardly picture herself telling Angel of all the torment she'd lived through in the past two years.

Oh, by the way, remember when the Master drowned me? I'm still terrified of going into water, including the bath.

That's nice Buffy, but it's time to decipher this prophecy and put yourself in mortal danger now.

Yes, that was very close to what she'd actually get from Angel. Compare that to Spike – a hug, and a promise of safety, and a prompt to keep talking because he was actually interested in what she had to say.

She couldn't remember a time when she'd cried in front of Angel.

Yet somehow it was so easy to let her control go when she was around Spike. Somehow she didn't feel judged or embarrassed to show weakness. She should have felt like he would jump on it and exploit it, use it to bring her down, but somehow she'd rather feel vulnerable in front of an enemy than in front of her friends.

How was it that Spike was there for her when nobody else was?

No. The question should be, why was nobody else there for her?

Why couldn't see confide in her friends, or her mom, or even her Watcher? That was supposed to be his job, after all, but she couldn't see herself breaking down in front of him any more than Angel.

Maybe it was because Spike didn't need her to be somebody. Everyone else needed her to be strong and perfect and infallible. Spike didn't need her to be somebody she wasn't. He was just taking care of her, whoever she was.

And she really believed he wanted to. He'd looked so distressed when he'd left her to be with Drusilla, and he hadn't killed her despite her assurances she wouldn't even fight him. Maybe he'd only wanted to kill the Slayer. Maybe he'd never had anything against Buffy. And since she wasn't the Slayer anymore, she had no more right to hate him for being a vampire than he had to hate her for being human.

It would be so easy to like him. So easy to find the man hidden inside – a man that wanted to come out. Buffy was half-afraid she already did like him.

The other half was afraid that she could love him.