The Only Love I Know

And here is the dawn,
(Until death do us part);
And here is your death,
In your daughter's heart.

-Leonard Cohen "Here It Is"

"Slayer? C'mon, pet, wake up, I promised the witch I would see you home and I don't want her coming after me. She's a little too off these days, know what I mean?"

I roll over to see his face, pale in the darkness, all harsh lines and sudden shadows. We both made promises, I know. But I finally feel quiet now, at rest, and this feeling is too rare, too fleeting, for me to want to give it up easily. It's the dark of new twilight in Spike's crypt, quiet as death long past. I can only see him in shadow, washed in all the blues of the faded sun. The dream whispers through me, of what Spike would look like in the sun, of what its beams would look like, bright and unforgiving, against all that pale, sculpted flesh. I have only the briefest memory of what he looked like when the day wouldn't kill him- we were too wrapped up in trying to find death for the other. We didn't know then all the things that we would be to each other, didn't see what we had fought so hard to hide from ourselves. I don't know when our hate turned to whatever it is that we have now. I don't know if it was ever hate, don't know if there are words for what this is now.

"Don't want to go." With Spike, I can be young again. A child, petulant and demanding and as bad as I am, he only laughs. This is how we were meant to be together.

He stands up, giving me a moment to admire his body, the sleek lines, the hard muscles, the healing scratches, then reaches down to give me his hand, and hauls me out of bed, back into the cold, empty world.

"Let's go. Get your clothes on."

"Thought you liked me better this way."

"Goldilocks, there's no way that I don't like you. But I don't fancy dying tonight, so I better get you back to the home front. The witch is waiting on you, you know she is."

"What am I going to say?" What is there to say?

"Why do you want to explain anything to her? What business of hers is it, what you and I do when we're all alone? C'mon, never pegged you for being yellow."

I don't know when it was that the living turned to ghosts and that Spike and I, old hands at death, became the only real things in it. I watch all my friends, and I remember the love I had for them like I'm watching it through a window. It's so clear, so vivid, but when I reach out and try to touch it, there's something cold and hard in the way. I'm not part of them anymore; I'm not part of anything. I try and try, and each day, I feel it slip farther and farther away from me. But Spike is watching me as I sit on his bed and do nothing, and I can tell by the look in his eyes that he's going to drag me home whether or not I want to go, that for some reason it actually matters to him that I have this talk with Willow. Me, I think I would rather face Glory again, a thousand Glories. Willow has seen the truth now- I doubt anything like Spike and I could seem real to her when it was all just words, but now she's seen it and I don't think I could take it if she tries to take away the only thing that I have left.

"Why do you want me to do this?"

"You're stalling. C'mon, I don't wanna incinerate on the way back to your place."

"Why are you playing the gentleman, anyway?" I ask sullenly, dragging my clothes off the floor, doing anything I can think of to delay.

"Maybe it's the pleasure of your company," he shoots back sarcastically, and I shrug. Murmuring sweet nothings has never really been our style. We've always made each other bleed; the only thing that's changed is the nature of the blood.

His eyes are on me as I get dressed, hot and a little wild, and I drag it out slowly, a reverse strip tease. He's so easy to drive crazy, so easy to make mine.

We're silent as we walk back to the house in the dying night. I'm so used to the night now, so used the many shades of shadow that make up Sunnydale when the stars come out, that I think I can almost feel the sun waiting on the horizon, straining to rise. No wonder there are so many myths about where the sun goes after it sets. The darkness feels so complete, so real, that it's easy to see how people might think the light would never come back. People say that midnight is the witching hour, but the ones who say that have never been out at four a.m., when there's nothing in the air but silence, when I can hear Spike's and my footsteps for miles. We could be the only two creatures on the planet.

He leaves me at the steps to the house that used to be my home, before my mother died, before I died, before I came back and found everything changed. Before I changed, a change deeper and darker than anything that any of us could have imagined. He leaves without a word, and I watch him go, just as silent. I don't know what Willow is planning on telling me, but I know she is still up, still and quiet in the light trapped behind the closed doors between us, but I know that I am not what I was. As Spike disappears into the deeper darkness, as my body comes to the abrupt realization that he is no longer here with me, I know that whatever it is I've changed into has more to do with him than whatever waits for me in the safety of my house. But my memories are still clear to me, even if my humanity is just a dim echo in my blood, and the woman who is trying so hard not to look out the window at us was once my best friend. She wants to be again, has been trying in her own way, and enough of me is lonely that I turn away from the man that has become the only real thing in my unlife and let myself into the house.

She's sitting on the couch, wrapped in a blanket, looking for all the world like a child. When did I get so old, that everything looks young to me now?

Willow smiles awkwardly when she sees me, and I can see in her face that she's having a hard time putting the thought of Spike and I together out of her mind. But she pats the piece of couch closest to her, and looks at me hopefully and she's trying so hard that I know that I need to as well.

"You, um..." she's fixated on the flowers, staring at them like she didn't see them in my hair hours ago, "you have a good time?" She winces as she says the last, but she's not sick and she's not screaming and I think that may be the best that I'm going to get here, so I nod quietly. She doesn't want details, and I don't want to share any, so we're all good there. "Any occasion?" she finally asks, and I touch the flower again, remembering the defensiveness in Spike's voice as he gave them to me. They're dying with the night, dying like him, dying like me. We're none of us made for the sun.

"Month."

She swallows hard. "Gee, a boyfriend who remembers anniversaries." Damn, she's trying. She's trying so hard that it hurts me to look at her, to hear her. She hates this; she hates every part of it. She hates that he marks me, she hates that he does me, she hates that I went with him and not her when we broke up the patrol, and she' still sitting here trying to be okay with everything. Maybe there is a chance here, maybe there is something left between us to build a bridge over all the ways that we've hurt each other since I died. She was there when Angel left. She was there the first time I died. She stood next to me at my mother's funeral. There are lives and lives and lives between us, a thousand times when we've saved each other.

Deep inside me, in a part of myself that I can barely feel anymore, a part that I forget is real, I feel something break apart, fill with pain.

"Wouldn't say boyfriend. We're not that friendly and he's not so much of a boy." I try to say it so that it's not hurtful, but there are no easy words for Spike and I, and it's not in me to let her forget that. I don't know I feel so driven to say these things, don't know why I just can't take the easy escape that she offers me.

Maybe I just don't understand kindness anymore. Maybe being nice is a trait only humans have. Maybe I'm a bitch. Looking at her, I almost feel like two people, mirrors of each other, both trying to punch out of my skin. I loved this woman, and yet, now, when I look at her, everything is outlined in pain, and it's so hard not to lash back with everything I feel. When I first came back, when I looked at Sunnydale in flames, when I heard the bikes roar and saw myself being torn apart by demons, I thought I was in hell. I still do. I don't know what Sunnydale was meant to be, but the Hellmouth has finally claimed its first living victim. The rest of this town may live in a comfortable state of denial, but I am forever wrapped in the fires of hell.

"Yeah, well..." Willow's voice trails off. Polite chitchat done now, I guess. Maybe we can get to something real. "I, um... I think I found something today. In some of the books in the Magick Box."

"Yeah?" What I am supposed to say? When she practices magick, she's scary as all hell, and when she researches, I keep remembering all the dark places that too much knowledge took her in the first place. Wouldn't it be ironic if all this were not her fault but mine? If I had never come here, if Willow had never met me, she'd probably be at MIT or Caltech or something right now. She wouldn't be so wrapped in pain that it looks like it's eating her alive.

"Yeah, it's about the spell..."

"The one you did to bring me back?" No way to say that nice. The best I can hope for is dispassionate.

"No, actually. Um, the ones the monks did. The spell they did to make Dawn."

I can feel an eyebrow quirk up. Too much time spent with Spike. "That spell's written down anywhere?"

"Well, not exactly, but some that look real similar. And see, how they do the memories, how they make the form... how they make things real…" There's something in her voice that I can't identify, an eagerness mixed with worry. She's tripping over her own words and she hasn't done that since before we left high school.

"C'mon, Willow, what are you trying to say?"

"It wasn't me," she said finally. "It wasn't my spell that changed you. It wasn't bringing you back from the dead that made you into... whatever you are. It was the monks. To make Dawn real... they gave her part of your soul."