"...remember always that I love you."
Buffy's eyes shot open as the very first rays of morning light hit her pillow. Fragments of a conversation flittered through her mind.
"...remember always that I love you."
The conversation seemed unnatural, as if it had only occurred in a dream. Buffy had trained herself to recall her dreams with crystal clarity, as the Slayer dreams were often prophetic, but this one seemed to dance around her, just out of grasp. She tried to shake the fuzzy feeling in her head, but it refused to nudge. Glancing at her clock, she realized she had time for a shower before she needed to wake up Dawn for school.
"Why did you cut your beautiful hair?"
'Probably not a prophetic dream,' Buffy thought as she stumbled to the bathroom. 'Prophetic dreams are all death and evil; they don't care about my hair.' She slipped out of the tank top and shorts she had worn to bed, letting them drop to the floor. A quick glance in the mirror turned into a longer inspection of her hair. She had to admit to herself that she regretted cutting it so impulsively. 'The only thing good to come out of that was my accidentally being turned invisible on the way out of the salon,' she thought to herself. 'That was some fun invisible sex!' Buffy allowed herself to ignore the contradictions -- she cut her hair in an attempt to dissuade Spike, and then slept with him the very same day.
She tossed her head, watching the short strands swirl around with the motion. As her hair shifted, the scar on her neck came into view.
"When did Angelus bite you?"
She ran a finger lightly over the raised imprints of fangs, shuddered in the remembrance of that night. In that one night, she had faced the possibility of losing Angel once again, she had stabbed Faith in an attempt to heal him, and she had been painfully drained by Angel when her attempt to retrieve Faith's blood failed. She had thought Angel would be gentle, turning the drinking into some sort of erotic share time -- she had heard about the euphoria then, although she didn't experience it until Dracula's bite. Instead, Angel had been vicious, and the drawing on her veins had been excruciating.
Wanting to abandon that train of remembrance, she turned her eyes away from the scar and towards the shower. She adjusted the knobs, letting the water run to warm. When she stepped into the spray of water, it was soothing and more than a little sensual. 'I just won't think about that dream,' she told herself, enjoying the feel of the water that caressed her scalp. 'That dream was just bad ramblings from my head.' She reached for her bottle of vanilla-scented shampoo, popped open the cap, and inhaled the sweet fragrance.
"Sweet, twisted Drusilla."
'Okay, that did not come from my head,' she thought, highly disturbed. 'Drusilla twisted? Definitely. Sweet? Never!' She poured a generous amount of the shampoo into her palm and scrubbed her hair harshly, as if she could wash the strange dream from her mind. Her mind obeyed, at least for a while, and she rinsed her hair and lathered herself from neck to toes with vanilla-scented body wash without any more memories. As she rinsed the soapy substance from her body, she heard another fragment, this one clearly in Spike's voice.
"Angelus helped Drusilla turn me."
Buffy froze still, wondering for a moment if Spike was standing right outside the shower curtain. She had heard his voice so clearly... She pulled the edge of the shower curtain aside, peeking out into the steamy room. A shadowy reflection of her face, short dripping hair and all, looked back from the fogged-up mirror, but otherwise the room was empty. Highly agitated, she made a quick end to her shower and dried off.
Wrapped tightly in a towel, she searched her room for signs of a hiding Spike. "No Spike in the closet," she mumbled. "No Spike under the bed. What the hell is wrong with me?" Convinced that he was gone, she finally dressed. Another glance at the clock told her she was now running late.
"Dawn!" she yelled as she slipped into clean undergarments and relatively clean sweat pants and T-shirt. "You had better be up now!" She stepped into the hallway and knocked loudly on Dawn's door. "Are you up yet?"
Dawn's reply was mumbled, and then the squeaking of mattress springs let Buffy know that Dawn was on her feet. "I'll have some cereal and juice on the table for you," Buffy continued before making the trek downstairs on the quest of coffee.
Minutes later Dawn entered the kitchen. She slipped her coltish frame into a chair and took a large gulp of orange juice before attacking her cereal. "I have a history paper due tomorrow," she told Buffy, who was giving her second cup of coffee worshipful attention. "I want to stop by Spike's crypt after school so he can look it over."
"Can't," Buffy answered automatically. "He's out of town." Buffy put more cream into her coffee and gave her mug a little swirl, watching the patterns the cream made before dispersing.
"Since when?" Dawn asked, upset.
Buffy looked up. "Since when what?" she asked.
"Since when is Spike out of town? I saw him just yesterday!"
Buffy thought for a moment. 'Why did I say he was out of town?' she wondered.
"I'll be leaving Sunnyhell for a few days, but don't concern yourself with my absence..."
'That stupid dream again,' Buffy thought. "Um, I think he left last night."
"Well, where did he go?" Dawn wanted to know. "When will he be back?"
"I intend to come back, but if I don't, remember always that I love you."
Buffy's stomach did a funny little flip, and she put her coffee down, no longer interested in its caffeine magic. Aloud she said, "What, is that a new Slayer duty? Keep track of Spike? I don't know where he went." She paused, and then continued, softening her tone. "I think he'll be back in a few days."
Dawn gave her a strange look before shrugging, putting her cereal bowl and glass in the sink, and scampering upstairs to finish getting ready. Buffy was caught up in concerns about the dream and worries about Spike, so she barely noticed when Dawn finally left for school. In a sort of daze she made her way to Spike's crypt, wanting to see if he was really gone. His TV and collection of books were all in place, and there was blood in the refrigerator, but his duster and car keys were gone.
"I intend to come back, but if I don't, remember always that I love you."
Now Buffy had to consider that this strange conversation might have really happened, and might have been really important. She laid back on the cool, hard stone of the sarcophagus.
"...don't concern yourself with my absence...
'If this conversation really took place,' she thought, watching motes of dust dance in the hazy sunlight that came in through the high windows, 'then why was Spike asking me all those questions, and why can't I remember answering any of them?'
She allowed all of the bits and pieces she remembered to roll around in her head as she tried to piece together some meaning. Since Spike was really gone, she decided to accept -- for now, at least -- the fragments she could recall as being true. "So Drusilla is more incompetent than I thought, and Angel helped Sire Spike," she muttered to herself. Just one more disturbing connection between her two vampire lovers, past and more recent past, as she didn't plan on returning to Spike's erotic embrace. "Spike left Sunnydale for a few days, and he isn't sure if he'll be able to return." She had mixed feelings about that; it would make her decision to stay away from him a lot more feasible, but Dawn would miss him... and so would she.
'Nope,' she thought, 'still no meaning.'
Buffy then closed her eyes, clearing her mind, and tried meditating. It seemed strange, trying to reach a meditative state in a vampire's crypt, but she had had years of training from Giles, and sooner than she had expected she was relaxed, her mind opened. More bits of the dream -- or was it a real conversation with Spike? -- came to her conscious mind.
"When did Angel bite you?"
"When did Angelus bite you?"
"When did my Sire bite you?"
"When were you claimed?"
"Close your eyes now and go to sleep. When you awaken in the morning your free will shall be restored, and this will all seem but a dream."
"Be in me."
Buffy's eyes shot open, bolting upright on the sarcophagus. "The bastard!" she cried. She gripped the hair by her temples, pulling until she felt the roots straining. "The bastard got into my f*cking head!" She remembered Giles' description of his thrall under Drusilla.
"Be in me."
She considered smashing up his crypt in retaliation. "He's lucky he left Sunnydale!" she raged, jumping off of the sarcophagus. "When I see him next I'm going to..." The rant went unfinished as the fractured pieces of her enthralled conversation connected to form a finished puzzle, the final picture clear. Spike had enthralled her to find out something specific, something about Angel biting her and her being claimed. "Claimed?" she wondered aloud as she turned to leave the crypt, stepping into the mid-morning sun. "I think we are going to have a Scooby meeting tonight -- after I call Giles!"