Disclaimer: I really should have done this ages ago. Those of you who are very clever will have noticed I have already lifted and appropriated various quotes from past episodes of the show – trust me, they are all there for a reason (except the line from the middle of 'Intervention', which is there purely as an homage to one of my favourite bits of dialogue ever! Not the first slayer bit – the Buffy line from later on!)

Author's note: Poor Buffy, I know she's seemed a bit pre-menstrual (!) the last couple of chapters, but at last she gets a scene or two from her own pov. And about time. This was a very special chapter for me, it's been a labour of love for you, my lovely readers, I've been longing to write this one for ages and it didn't turn out at all in the way I expected! Please let me know whether I got it right.

Spelt Out in the Stars

Chapter 6

"Where are you going?" Giles put down his morning mug of tea just in time to catch a glint of fair hair in the hallway mirror.

"Out."

"Buffy – "

But the front door had already snapped shut behind her.

The morning was bright and busy as Buffy made her way through the steep, narrow streets of the town towards the cliff path. She climbed until she found a place to rest, high on the cliff top, and she sat and gave herself up to the view.

She remembered waking up looking into a sea of blue, a sea as deep, and as content as this. And she had sunk into it, basking in the heat of the light it threw back at her.

The clouds slid through the sky, ice in a long, cool glass of blue curaçao.

He was just another vampire. She could do it.

Death is your art. You make it with your hands, day after day.

Buffy lay back and closed her eyes. The grass was dry and sun-scorched and she felt it crackle against her skin.

Part of you is desperate to know: what's it like? The only reason you've lasted as long as you have is you've got ties to the world.

And there was the irony of it. He was part of her world. She could wrench him from it as she had done Angel, but she would wear the emptiness of it every day for the rest of her life.

Emotions are weakness, Buffy.

Beneath her, Buffy heard the sea as it teased the sand up the shore and back again. She knew what it was to feel; to laugh; to cry; to love; to doubt; to fear. But a Slayer is brave enough to feel, and to act; strong enough to question, and to overcome.

So long as you protect the key, the brotherhood will never stop until we destroy it and you. You are the Slayer, and we know what we must do.

Was this it? Was this what she had become? The same cold-blooded killer that she had fought with a love so powerful it had almost pulled the world apart? And yet a love so strong and so beyond self that it had saved that very same world from destruction.

My emotions give me power.

But that was Dawn, whom she loved unconditionally, endlessly, the same, unstoppable love that had saved Willow.

It was not what she felt for Spike. Spike was just there.

Spike was always just there.

And it mattered, somehow.

A tide of sunlight washed over her as she pictured in her mind one, wild night at the Bronze, when he had found her, lost in despair, and held her, still, in his gaze.

Life is just this. It's living.

She had seen it, even then, a lustre kindled by a life lived only for the moment, and every moment she had given him glowing back at her.

The hardest thing in this world ... is to live in it. Be brave. Live. For me.

He would have lived forever just for the memory of her. She knew it. She had known it the moment she saw him, that unforgettable one-hundred-and-forty-eighth day. But he had lived for her until she hardly knew if she owned her own life anymore.

You have to go on living. So one of us is living.

He was just another vampire. A parasite who sustained his own existence by feeding off the lives of others. Including hers.

I love you. You know I do.

Did it mean anything?

Buffy sat up, blinking at the brilliance of the light.

You are full of love. You love with all of your soul. It's brighter than the fire ... blinding. That's why you pull away from it.
I'm full of love? I'm not losing it?
Only if you reject it. Love is pain, and the Slayer forges strength from pain. Love ... give ... forgive. Risk the pain. It is your nature.

The sun from its height and the sea in its blue splendour looked on her and smiled knowingly. Because this Slayer knew her duty. And the emotions that she fought were not guilt, or nostalgia, or uncertainty. They were anger, and pain.

Love ... give ... forgive. Risk the pain.

It was late afternoon when Buffy returned to the guesthouse, and she found Dawn and Giles thick in what appeared to be some hilarious tale about –

"What is that doing here?" Buffy looked in disbelief at the wedding couple figurine. "Dawn? What, we had all of thirty minutes to pack and you managed to bring that?" She paused. "No, wait, I can see how that would happen."

Dawn smiled up at her sister. "Giles has been telling me all about it."

"Giles was blind. Giles cannot possibly know all about it."

Giles held up his hand in disagreement. "I can assure you, Buffy, even in audio, it was more than sufficiently graphic."

Dawn picked up the figurine and examined it curiously. "Spike wasn't blind. I bet he'd be happy to tell us what it was like on the inside."

Buffy raised her eyebrows at the expression, but her face clouded as she pleaded more seriously, "Dawn, listen to me, Spike is dangerous."

"Why did you take me to his crypt then?"

"That was before – Dawn, you have to understand, things have changed. No-chip Spike is like no-chip…em… something that's not good without chips."

"Spike?"

"Spike, for instance."

"It's a tautology." Giles interjected.

"It's not that bad, is it?"

"You can't compare Spike to Spike. It's not a useful analogy."

Buffy pouted. "Well you try."

"Fish." Dawn supplied helpfully.

"I'm sorry?"

"Goes with chips."

"Does it?" Buffy looked unconvinced.

"Whitby is renowned for its fish and chips," Giles explained, "so Dawn and I had some for lunch."

"Go with the cholesterol, Giles."

"Fries. English chips are what you would call fries."

"Again, go with the cholesterol Giles."

"We rode donkeys." Dawn added cheerfully.

"And this was useful research how?" Buffy demanded.

"Oh, and you spent the day battling evil sunbathers, did you?" Giles could muster biting sarcasm when the situation called for it.

"I was training. Special non-fighty-non-exercisey kind of training. I was developing my…em…spiritual side. What? It's the kind of thing you would come out with."

Giles paused for a moment, and then said, slowly, "Buffy, I've been thinking about what you said yesterday – about Spike's motives for being here? Think about it, Buffy, we bought our tickets at the airport two hours before the flight. Within an hour of our arrival in London you went out patrolling and ran into him. And we know that Spike was here in Whitby before we were. You can hardly accuse him of following you. If anything, it's the other way round."

Buffy's eyes widened. "I am not stalking Spike. But I'm starting to think you might be." She smiled, but said with renewed gravity, "We have to assume the worst, Giles. What should we tell Sylvia? Spike could come back here at any time."

Giles removed his glasses and appeared to devote all his attention to cleaning them. "There's not much chance of that. You're sleeping in his room."

Buffy opened her mouth to make an indignant retort, but thought better of it, and only said quietly. "I'll sort it, Giles. I'll go, and I will find Spike, and I will do whatever I have to do."

It was an understated sunset; a background sunset; a quiet-hued, ice cream sunset that melted into dusk behind a great grey sea that did not deign to notice. Spike had seen ten thousand sunsets, but he stopped, and watched, for the four times as many he had only dreamed. And as he stood, leaning on the rail at the end of the pier, cigarette smoke blowing into the pink mist before him, it got him. Joy. The sheer ecstasy of being alive. The poet William would have sought to catch it, to capture it in words that he might hold on to it forever. But the man Spike lived it and breathed it and wanted nothing more than now: to bask in this something so beyond him that it almost broke him. Beyond picture, beyond poem. It was a promise. And because in that moment truth was brighter than reason, he fashioned his hope, and he painted it green-eyed and golden-haired.

The footsteps behind him on the pier seemed somehow inevitable, and the voice that greeted him could not have been any other. "The sun sets and she appears." She rested her hands on the rail beside him. "Hello Spike."

He acknowledged her with a nod and a glance. Buffy noticed his eyes resting on the stake she was holding and smiled wryly. "I came to kill you."

"With that? Trust me. Won't help."

In the half-light she turned to look at him, because she caught it in his voice and part of her yearned to find it again in his eyes. That steady blue hold that had promised to keep her alive when no-one else in the world could give her a reason to go on.

Life is just this. It's living.

She remembered another evening, that night long ago when the world seemed about to crumble in her hands, and those same eyes had glittered into hers.

I told you. I want to save the world.

Buffy looked down, thoughtfully, as she turned the stake over in her hands. "You do remember that you're a vampire, right?"

The truth is, I like this world. It's all right here.

And she had seen it, that same sparkle, that same wicked pleasure in being alive, and knowing that she needed him.

"The things we remember aren't always the things that matter." Spike's eyes were fixed on the horizon, but he was more conscious of her standing there beside him than he was of his own heart beating.

"Who are you to stand there and tell me what matters?"

"I'm not what you think I am."

"Why should I listen to anything you say, Spike? After what you did to me – "

Spike could only suppose she was talking about their encounter in London, and he was stung by the disgust in her voice. "How can you say that? You asked for it."

Buffy rounded on him, incensed. "You're sick, do you know that? I admit, I messed you around. I know I treated you badly. But nobody asks for that, Spike."

If she had stood where she was, silent and seething, she would have wounded him. But her tiny hands against him, her dear, strong fingers digging into him as she smashed him back into the pier railing, were more comfort than pain. As he regained his balance she spoke, quietly.

"Spike, after what happened with Anya you came and you told me you were sorry. That meant something. Not just to you. To me. I needed you to mean it, Spike." She looked at him. "I thought you did. And then you – god, how could you?"

He caught her wrist as she aimed for his face, holding her long enough to ask, "What do you want?"

She blurted out her answer in frustration. "Don't you see? I need you to apologise. I need you to say you were wrong."

"How can I? I don't even know your name."

Buffy pulled away from him. "We can't pretend this didn't happen. You have to face up to what you did." She turned and stared intently out to sea. "Spike, we both do."

"What? What did I do that was so bad?"

He watched the colour drain from her face, and when she turned back to him she was shaking with anger. He managed to wrench the stake out of her hand as she launched towards him, but not before he felt the sharp, wooden point cut into the flesh on his hand. For one moment something like concern flickered across her face. But in a moment it was gone, and when she spoke her voice was almost breaking with the violence of her emotion.

"I can't stand this, I can't stand hating you like this."

Her eyes blazed her intent as she bent down to pick the stake up, and Spike moved instinctively behind to encircle her trembling body, pinning her arms to her sides.

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry if I hurt you."

Struggling in his grasp, Buffy punctuated each of her words with a sharp stab of her heel. "You didn't hurt me, Spike. You could never hurt me. You're beneath me. Heard that one before?" She continued, her words rushing out in an angry torrent. "Why can't you get it into your stupid head? There is nothing good or clean in you. You are dead inside. You can't make me feel anything real. I could never…forgive…you."

But the saltwater stinging her face was more than sea spray, and she faltered into silence, a silence broken only by the sound of the sea crushing the shore around them. And as she stood, pressed against him, catching her breath, she stopped, suddenly still, mesmerised. Because the soft pounding that rocked her was not her heart beating.

TBC