You may notice some familiar quotes in this chapter - these are from 4.8 "Pangs" and belong to the fabulous Joss Whedon and Co. not myself. Enjoy!

Four days later Spike had made good on his promise, leaving Buffy to share Thanksgiving with her Watcher and the Scooby gang while her mother was away meeting an art appraiser in La Tierra Flats. She'd gone to her gallery early on Tuesday morning to find three beautiful paintings waiting for her, anonymously donated alongside a necklace that was gaudy and horrible and looked terribly familiar, like a certain ring that Buffy could name. Joyce expressed suspicions that each of the four pieces would turn out to be worth a small fortune, but it was the sweetly hand-inked calligraphy of an apology poem tucked inside one of the frames that had appeared to touch her more.

Buffy'd read some of it…

"Think me not unkind and rude,

That I walk alone in grove and glen;

I go to the god of the wood,

To fetch his word to men."

She didn't get it.

But, her mother had assured her that it was a very lovely apology by someone called Ralph Waldo Emerson and she guessed that made some sense. The next day Joyce had come home with a grocery bag full of packages of hot chocolate mix, a bag of mini-marshmallows (which Buffy had commandeered for her yams) and a box of Wheetabix before placing a phone call and renting a hotel room for the holiday in the city, and to be honest Buffy didn't mind so much because she too was eager to learn just how much of a price Spike put on his having spooked her mother so badly.

Whatever the result, that was how she'd found herself standing at Giles' counter, shoulder to shoulder with the man she thought of as a father as he peeled a small mountain of potatoes. The turkey had gone safely into the oven only a short hour ago, and she'd already finished preparing the stuffing, the gravy, the cranberry sauce and peas. Willow was bringing the rolls and Xander and Anya would be arriving any minute, so really all that was left was to finish up the pumpkin pies so that they would be ready to go into the oven when the bird came out. There was some old jazz music playing softly in the background and the kitchen was warm and homey, full of enticing smells, and with Giles standing next to her she felt calm and happy and excited for dinner with her friends, so it was a bit of a surprise to her that her mind kept wandering back to certain master vampire.

She'd been mad at him at first, raging mad.

When she'd finally gotten her mother calmed down enough to get the story out of her, her stomach had turned to a block of ice and she'd practically seen red. Joyce had tried to calm her down in return, hadn't wanted to think that it had been Spike who'd frightened her, but what other thing with fangs and glowing, golden eyes had an invitation into their house? Still, even faced with that unyielding reality, her mother had tried to defend the vampire, explaining that she'd come home early and likely startled him, that he'd reacted before he'd recognized her. She also pointed out to Buffy that he hadn't come after her even though he could've, but it hadn't helped her to loosen the clench of her fists.

The terrible sense of betrayal needling at her insides was too strong.

It was that more than anything that had driven her out to find him the next night, the reason that she'd fully intended to kick his ass halfway cross the Hellmouth.

The only reason she hadn't carried a stake with her that night was because a part of her understood. Knew why he had freaked, why he'd panicked and torn her room apart. She was wigged too, by the unconventional friendship they'd pulled out of nothing and the… incident at the golf park. The one she was trying hard to put out of her mind.

And a small, small part of her too knew that he wouldn't have scared her mom on purpose. They liked each other, for whatever weird reason, and he seemed to respect her in that way that he respected Slayers, for simply being who they were and being the bloody, violent best at it.

Hadn't stopped her from getting a few good licks and kicks in though, working her angry energy out on his ribs and his stupid face, and it had felt right in a way that she hadn't felt in a long time. At least until he'd quit on her, a stillness coming over him that she knew somehow. And boy, had that rocketed her anger up to eleven. He was taking all the fun out of it with his contrition, and she'd been ready to punish him for that in itself, but then his face had shifted and she recognized the look, felt the hair on the back of her neck stand up and she'd moved without thought, following his barked order without a thought and reacting to him like they were puppets, connected by invisible wires that had each of them moving in perfect tandem as she pitched the sneaky fledge behind her up over her shoulder and into his deadly grip.

What had happened next was…

She didn't know.

It had been vicious and frightening and bloody, but it had also been viscerally beautiful, a strange sort of pride coming over her as she watched him snap the smaller vampire's arm and sink his teeth into his neck. It was gory and full of pain, more so than she'd ever gone in for herself, but she'd been struck by the heavy feeling that Spike had been making a statement with his brutality, declaring something to the demon world that she wasn't sure she understood. He'd snarled something in the fledge's ear that she hadn't quite caught through all the rage but it had sent an electric zing down her spine that had had some primal, instinctive feeling surging up in her, and she'd been hit hard by the desire to relive the incident again, to crush their mouths together in a vicious, bloody kiss that tasted of copper and power and angry claim, a warning to any other demons who were watching them from the dark not to mess with the best.

And that had scared the living hell out of her, even though she only understood half of the whole mess.

So she'd reacted with another kind of violence, saved them both from themselves, or maybe fed into it, she wasn't sure. Breaking his nose, throwing him back into the wall, it felt more like her, more like them, but then the jerk had had to go all wide-eyed and still and repentant. She'd believed him then when he'd said he would make it up to her mother - not so much when he'd promised to make it up to her.

Still, she was… curious to see if he would, anticipation curling round in her toes whenever she let her mind drift to the idea…

"Buffy?"

Buffy jerked, blinked. Giles was watching her with a cautious look on his face, holding a pot full of potatoes and cloudy water over the sink.

"Are you all right?" he asked.

"Oh, um sure," she replied, forcing all non-Thanksgiving thoughts out of her head. "Why?"

Giles nodded his chin towards the bowl and spatula in her hands with an amused grin, eyeing the splatter of pumpkin filling across the front of the "Kiss the Librarian" apron she'd wisely chosen to don. "I think it's done," he chuckled, and Buffy felt her cheeks heat.

"Right," she giggled nervously, reminding herself that there was no way her Watcher could have guessed at her preoccupation.

Reaching for the two pre-made pie shells she'd grabbed from the grocery store, she poured the filling out smooth, added a sprinkle of cinnamon and nutmeg to the top, and set them safely on top of the refrigerator to await their turn in the oven.

"Finished?" Giles asked hopefully as he set the potatoes on the stove to boil, but his face fell when he caught Buffy eyeing the enormous pile of dirty dishes filling the sink and littering the countertops. "Perhaps I should set the…"

Luckily, Buffy was saved by the bell as the buzzer at the door sounded.

"I'll get it!" she cheered, ignoring Giles' groan as she skipped for the door.

"Hey Buffy!" Willow greeted cheerfully, stepping inside when Buffy opened the door. "I brought the rolls!"

"Perfect!" Buffy grinned, but her smile dimmed as Willow took off her coat and unloaded the bag she was carrying, revealing a rather large stack of books along with the brown and serve bread. "And you brought homework…"

"Just some research on the Chumash tribe," she shrugged, like it wasn't twenty pounds of literature she was hauling around. On a holiday. "I figured it might help us figure out how to fix this whole thing with the spirits."

Buffy groaned, unhappy with the reminder of the dead priest and the guy with the missing ear.

"Can't I just stake 'em and get it over with?" she whined. "It's Thanksgiving - Giles gets the day off work, why don't I?"

"You can't just stake them Buffy," Willow yelped, sounding scandalized. "We should be helping them!"

"No, I think perhaps we won't be helping the angry spirit with his rape and pillage and murder," Giles replied sardonically from his position over the sink.

"Well ok, no," Willow conceded, "But we should help him redress his wrongs. Bring the atrocities to light."

"If those books are full of them, I'd say they already are," the librarian replied.

Apparently dish duty made him cranky. Maybe she should have…

"Then we should give his land back!" Willow declared.

"Not really ours to give," Buffy tossed in unwisely.

"I don't think you wanna help!" Willow accused, pointing a finger and swiveling it between them. "I think you just wanna slay the demon, then go lalalala…"

"And I think your sympathy to his plight has blinded you to certain urgent facts," Giles reprimanded. "He's killing. We have to stop this thing."

"Ok unfeeling guy," Willow muttered.

"Guys look!" Buffy jumped in, painfully aware that both of them were cranking up for a good fight, "I know this sucks, it sucks for me too ok? But Wills, there's nothing we can do about it, he's…"

Once again the doorbell chimed, saving her from having to come up with an explanation eloquent enough to convince her brainiac of a best friend. But thank god Xander was here. Xander was good at lightening the mood or making a joke, good at handling Willow when she got up on one of her soapboxes. Xander was...

"Dying!" Buffy squeaked.

"Happy Thanksgiving to you too Buff," the boy groaned, pale and sweaty and hanging from his girlfriend's arms.

"Oh my god Xander, what happened?" she asked, ushering them inside where Giles and Willow quickly joined her, all of them hovering around the sickly young man who immediately collapsed onto the couch.

"The doctor isn't sure," he replied groggily. "He said I have a lot of symptoms but none of them connect."

"Maybe they do," Willow proposed suddenly, leaping across the room to grab one her books from the pile. "One of the atrocities!"

"Atrocities!" Xander yelped.

"The Chumash were all herded into a mission and given a bunch of terrible European diseases."

"Terrible?" he gulped feebly. "A bunch? What exactly are we talkin' here?"

"Um, malaria, small pox… syphilis, but…"

"Syphilis?" Xander shrieked.

Anya planted a hand on his chest, shoving him back down to the couch as he tried to come rocketing up.

"Relax," she reassured him, "The syphilis won't kill you. The small pox will…"

"Oh god," Xander moaned. "I hate this guy. This isn't fair, I didn't give him syphilis!"

"No, but you freed his spirit," Giles corrected. "That accounts for you, but why the rest, why the others?"

"Does it matter?" Xander squawked helplessly. "We need to fix this! Buffy, is for to be slaying sometime soon, yes?"

"Well, that's kind of the question before the court," Buffy mumbled.

"Question?"

"There's two sides to every story," Willow said primly.

Buffy had all of the time for a single forlorn sigh and then suddenly everyone was squabbling, Giles and Willow going at each other, Xander making some awful comment about vengeance demons that had Anya flinching and going on the defensive, and as she sat back and watched her friends fight she wondered if maybe this was hard for her because she was thinking about Spike. She wasn't as sure as she used to be that demons were meant for slaying.

But…

"Stop!" she snapped, relief flooding through her when silence fell. "It's Thanksgiving, can we not fight? Please?"

"Sorry," came four contrite mumbles.

"But Buffy, you know we need to deal with this," Giles added softly.

"I know, ok?" she snapped, and all four of her friends' eyes widened at her tone, but she couldn't bring herself to take it back. "We will. But right now, I just want to have dinner, ok?"

Turning her back on four mutters of consent, she stalked over to the oven and gave the turkey a rather vicious poke, basted and closed the door again. The others were conspicuously silent behind her, and when she turned back around she found her Watcher leaning against the edge of his desk, looking contemplative as he pressed his glasses to his lips.

"What?" she whined.

"Hmm? Oh," he blinked, straightening up. "The victims," Giles he murmured, "Apart from Xander, Hus has targeted authority figures. Father Gabriel, the curator of the cultural center. Who else fits this pattern?"

"The dean," Buffy answered. "Dean Guerrero. I mean, he's the… king of us, and he was at the ground breaking ceremony."

"I think we should warn him."

"Crap," she moaned. "But the turkey! And the pie…"

"I'll go!" Anya immediately volunteered, anger glinting in her eyes as she got up from the couch and stepped away from Xander.

Buffy hesitated, grimaced. Anya wasn't exactly…

"I'll go too," Willow jumped in, frowning. "I need some air."

"Then I'm going to," Xander gasped, levering himself up off the couch.

"Are you sure you're up to it?" Buffy asked, taking a step forward in case her friend collapsed and needed catching.

Glancing in Anya's direction, Xander nodded. "Oh yeah. I'm up to it."

"Ok," she relented anxiously. "Be careful!"

It certainly hadn't been her plan to send them all off together, but at least this way she could get dinner finished without all of them under foot.

"Be back by six!"