Disclaimer: See chapter one.

A/N: Again, it's been a while, but here's the last chapter of I Wish I May. I hope you enjoyed this fic, because, as difficult as it was to write it, I really like how it's turned out. Please let me know what you think!

Also, slight Richard Bach homage at the end.

Chapter Six

I am frozen.

Spike stands up and walks to the door. He pauses next to my mother, and whispers something to her. I can't hear what he says, which startles me. I am so used to hearing everything.

When Spike disappears, my mother tiptoes towards me with a strange expression on her face. She leaves the envelope on my bedside table and leaves without a word.

After she leaves, I sit up. I look at the envelope for what seems like a lifetime, before snatching it up with more energy than I though I would ever possess again.

'Dear Buffy…'

I clench my eyes closed. It's almost too much to bear.

'I miss you…' 'Sorry to have missed your party…' 'I think of you often…'

'I'll see you soon.'

I look at that last sentence for a long time, before I register its meaning.

He's coming here.

The postmark reads almost three weeks ago.

I stand up; my legs are trembling beneath me. I walk to the window and I look outside, at the garden. It's overgrown and slowly dying – there's plant life everywhere; my father's carefully tended garden is a wilderness.

Except…

Except the narrow path which Spike has created by struggling through every day.

As I am staring, I see a figure approach the house.

Angel's face is clear to me even at this distance. My heart swells, and tears spring to my eyes.

He opens the gate, and steps into the overgrown garden. I watch him as he walks up the path Spike uses…

It's not a struggle for him.

He reaches the front door, and knocks three times.

My mother lets him in and I hear him slowly make his way upstairs.

He arrives at my door.

I am still at the window.

My mother is behind him, she looks stunned to see me standing.

'Buffy,' he smiles.

I try to return the smile.

My mother runs towards me, knocking Angel out of the way.

'Buffy, you're – you're standing! You're – are you better?'

I try to tell her I am. I try to tell her that I can speak again, that I can be happy again, that I've told the whole sorry tale already, that I can begin a new life and put Parker behind me.

But I can't. Angel's here…but I don't feel anything.

And suddenly, images of the last few months flash in front of my eyes. Spike carrying me here. My mother bringing the doctor to my bedside. Spike's leather jacket slung on the chair. My aunts visiting, speaking in hushed tones. Spike holding my hands. Spike telling me stories. Spike ordering me to speak.

And I realise.

I have been waiting for Angel. But not for the reasons I thought I was.

He walks towards me, and takes my face in his hands.

'I'm here, Buffy,' he whispers to me.

I reach up and take his hands away from my face.

'You're not the cure,' I whisper back, and I walk out of the room, out of my prison, and I come face to face with the man waiting outside. The man who's been here the whole time.

'I thought I had to wait for him,' I say, 'but you made me see.'

'Made you see what?' Spike asks, brushing my hair away from my face.

'You made me see that only I could break the spell,' I say. 'And you made me see that you were the cure after all.'

'The cure?' Spike asks.

'You made me tell the story. The last story. Now I'm free.'

'To start a new one?' he smiles shyly.

'To start a new one,' I agree, and he kisses me, and finally, I feel alive.

XXXXX

Finally, at last, there is nothing keeping me in my room, my secret little cave. Finally, my house, my home is waking up again. My father is outside morning 'til night, cutting and pruning and sprucing until our beautiful garden is at last rid of its thorns.

My mother is painting again, and the house is once more filled with the smell of oil paints and turpentine.

I feel as if my life has begun again. Spike is here, he's here all day now; we walk round the gardens, and we talk about everything. Things that have happened, but also things that will happen. We talk sometimes of Angel, of how after our first kiss, I had returned to my bedroom to speak with him.

I thanked him for coming to see me, and I told him how grateful I was for the brief time we'd spent together. I told him that sometimes it was purely thinking of him that got me through the nights…but that it had been Spike who got me through the days. And during the day, there's nowhere to hide, no dark corner in which to bury yourself. The days are bright, and harsh, and much, much harder to get through. He smiled at my admission, and he smiled at Spike, and then, after promising to visit some other time, he left.

Xander and Willow have been to see me, or rather, us; as Spike rarely leaves my side.

'We've been so worried!' Xander exclaimed when he first saw me. 'They told us you were in a kind of coma – we didn't know if we should visit!'

'Yeah, I don't know if you know, but we came to the house every day to see if there'd been an improvement in your – condition,' Willow adds, beaming at me.

I smiled at both of them. 'I knew – I just couldn't – I couldn't.'

They both smile encouragingly at me, and the talk turns to Xander's love life. I never told him that Spike had told me about his recent romantic failures, but I am pleased to hear that he is currently with a woman called Nancy, who apparently has a dog called Rocky.

As it sat with my friends, I could feel myself slipping back into the easy way of talking I once had. The quirky language my friends used was eking back into my system, and my mind no longer whispered riddles to me.

Willow informed me proudly that she'd been in rehab for a couple of weeks now, and was doing so well they had allowed her these special visitation privileges. I looked curiously at Spike when she told me, but she informed me that she'd been keeping it a secret, and had merely told people she was sick. She'd wanted to wait 'til I was awake to tell people, she said.

Through all of this, Spike was sitting next to me, just looking at me. He said afterwards that he'd been drinking me in. I know what he means. I can't stop looking at him. This solid, stalwart figure, around for so long... and yet it took so much for me to finally realise. I didn't need a mythic warrior, a soldier, an Angel to rescue me. I needed the man who beat a path through the wilderness every day, until it was second nature to find me. Spike says that the reason he visited me every day was that he couldn't imagine not seeing me all the time. The reason he made me speak; he couldn't imagine life without my stories. The reason he kissed me; that he couldn't imagine another second of his life where he couldn't just kiss me when he wanted to.

That same day that we kissed, the aunts all managed to convene in my living room, at the call of my mother, and waited, in a kind of deathly hush, for Spike and I to walk into the room.

There was an uproar like you've never heard. Harmony was babbling, fussing over my hair and cooing over Spike, Cordelia swooped down and hugged me like I was the last girl on earth. Faith grinned her approval at me and greeted Spike with a mock punch and a handshake. Anya hugged us both, and made a quick remark about his income before I batted her away. Kendra smiled warmly at both of us, and dragged Harmony away from Spike, and Tara, whom I'd been looking forward to seeing the most, embraced me tightly, and whispered something to me I will never forget.

'True love stories never have endings.'

A/N: Okay, so after well over a year, I'm finally finished! It's neither as long nor as perfectly perfect as I would have hoped, but I really hope you enjoyed it, and I, personally, am so glad to be able to put this one to bed.

So please review, and as I seem to be in a place for it right now, keep a lookout for any more updates!