Disclaimers: I do not own the characters or anything from the world of Buffy. They belong to Joss and Mutant Enemy. I am making no money from this story, it's just for my and other fans enjoyment.

Summary: After a long period of separation from Buffy and the Scoobies, Spike is suddenly thrust back into their lives after he goes through a startling transformation.


Rating: R (I don't think it will reach NC-17, but you never know. Will provide link to my site if it happens and continue posting the story there.)


Authors Note: The story takes place after "Crush" and a little AU for "I Was Made To Love You" and everything following that episode. In the Magic Box they're a tad bit harsher to Spike and he doesn't go out and get the Bot made. The rest of the season is the basically the same just without Spike being there for all of it and Buffy didn't have to jump on the tower so she never died in my story (didn't want depressed Buffy). Spike remains alone and isolated the whole time from "I Was Made To Love You" all the way up to "The Gift". The story starts off a week or so after the fight with Glory.


Special Thanks: To Saka, Newydd, Wynn, and Dsdragon.

Chapter 3

Spike had made it as far as one of the newer cemeteries on the outskirts of town when he saw them. Three vampires. One was newly risen, but the other two were obviously veterans of the Hellmouth. He moved to avoid being seen; he was in no shape to fight and the last thing he needed was for the demon community to find out about his recently acquired heartbeat. They'd try to kill him for sure, and if he were going to die it wasn't going to be by the hands of useless gits like these. He tried to hide behind one of the larger monuments, but his damaged body was slow and he was covered with fresh blood from a large gash on his shoulder that had reopened on the walk back into town. He had almost made it to cover when they turned to look at him, the smell of his blood catching their attention.

"Well, well, well, what do we have here? If it isn't William the Bloody himself, or would you prefer Spike?" The tallest of the vampires moved toward him with the others in tow. They stopped a few feet from him and Spike knew he was in trouble. There was no way he could bluff his way out of this. Even if he didn't have the problem of the heartbeat, his injuries were too obvious to try and hide and at least one of the vamps knew who he was. In short, he was screwed.

"I heard you'd managed to sink even lower, but I hadn't really believed it 'til now." The taller vamp leered at Spike, his yellow eyes mocking. "My, how the mighty have fallen. I just wish I had a camera, 'cause I don't wanna be forgetting this."

"Sod off," Spike growled. He searched for some way to escape, a weapon, anything, but he was well and truly buggered.

The fledgling vamp spoke. "You mean this is the freak that kills his own kind? I kinda expected a little more, I mean, this is what everyone's been afraid of?" He looked at Spike with disgust, "Fuck, he doesn't even smell like a real demon. What, did you roll in something?" The other veteran vampire reached into his coat and pulled out a small dagger, speaking to Spike as the other two moved to circle around the blonde vamp. "You know, I was worried this night was going to be boring. I can't tell you how glad I am to be wrong."

With that, the vamp with the dagger leapt forward, slashing at Spike's face. The bleached blond tried to dodge, but as he moved to jump out of the way, his right leg gave out beneath him. The broken limb was in no shape to walk, let alone leap from danger. He fell to the ground as the blade sliced across his forehead, causing a flow of fresh blood to course down his face and into his eyes. He struggled to his knees as one of his attackers kicked him in the ribs, causing him to fall backwards, his head striking the hard ground.

Before he knew it, they were on him, viciously beating him. He could feel his bones breaking and skin splitting as they struck him, the burning pain of the dagger as it was first drawn across his chest in long stinging gashes and then plunged through his left hand, pinning it to the ground. He screamed in agony. He could tell they wanted to draw his suffering out as long as possible. He closed his eyes, trying to block out the pain, he was weakening faster than he was used to. Must have something to do with all the blood loss.

All of a sudden the attack stopped. As he began to slip into unconsciousness, Spike could swear he could almost hear the Slayer's voice .

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"Spike! Shit! Spike, wake up!" Buffy knelt beside Spike, her heart still pounding from the fight and the sight of the beaten vampire. His face was a bloody mass of cuts and bruises and she could only guess how bad the rest of his body would look. His clothes were cut and torn and wet with blood. One of his legs was obviously broken and it looked as if his right arm might be as well. They had used a dagger to pin his left hand to the ground, stabbing him right through the palm. She reached for the dagger, pulling it out in one swift motion. Blood started to pour from the wound so she tore a strip from his already shredded shirt to bind the wound. As she wrapped the cloth around his hand she noticed the warmth of his flesh and the steady flow of the blood. At that moment Giles joined her beside Spike, the others just having caught up to her after her mad dash to reach Spike's screams of pain.

"Giles, he's….warm," She whispered.

"What?"

"He's warm. Giles. Like alive warm. And he's bleeding a lot. Vampires don't bleed like this!"

"That can't be." The Watcher knelt down opposite Buffy and placed his hand on Spike's arm. He could feel the same strange warmth as Buffy and noted the unusually large blood loss. An odd thought suddenly occurred to him. He placed his shaking hand at Spike's neck, and found a pulse. Weak but steady.

Spike was alive!

Giles had no idea how or why, but if the vampire was alive, then the injuries he'd suffered would be much more deadly than the Watcher had previously thought.

He looked at Buffy, trying to get her attention. "Buffy, he has a pulse. He's alive. I don't bloody well know how, but we have to get him out of here and treat his wounds or he could die."

Giles looked up at Xander, who had been standing by with Willow and Tara waiting to be told what to do. "Xander, go and fetch your car and bring it as close to the cemetery gates as you can. Willow, you go with him. Tara, you stay here. We're going to have to move Spike and we may need your help."

Xander nodded. "Right. Will, come on." Xander quickly headed off with Willow to get his car.

"What do you want me to do?" Tara asked, concern etching her voice.

"I may need you to do some kind of sleeping spell or something similar. He may wake up and I would rather he be kept asleep, as we have no idea how he will react upon awakening. Not to mention the fact that he will most assuredly be in a great deal of pain and we don't know what's happened to him. Until we do it's best if we take every precaution."

He began assessing Spike's injuries. The vamp had lost a lot of blood but appeared to be stable. He was suffering from multiple broken bones, but none that Giles did not know how to treat himself. He was covered in cuts and gashes, some fresh and bleeding, others that had all ready started to heal and looked to be anywhere from a few days to a few weeks old. He was a mess, covered in dirt and blood, his own as well as a multicoloured variety from various other demons. With his new living status he was now susceptible to infection; they would now have to take extra care to keep his wounds clean.

"Giles, how bad is he?" Buffy had been kneeling beside Spike, putting pressure on the wound the dagger had inflicted on his hand, as she watched Giles examination.

"He's been hurt quite badly, but if we get him somewhere safe and treat his injuries I believe he will pull through."

Tara stood beside them as she looked down at Spike's badly beaten form. "Shouldn't we take him to a hospital? You said he's alive: that means he's human, right?" she asked, a knot of worry pulling at her stomach. She had never seen anyone so badly hurt before, and she feared what would have happened to him had they not arrived when they did. She glanced about, praying that no other demons would appear before they could manage to get Spike out of danger.

"No. I'm afraid not. We have no idea what has happened to him, and there is no way to be sure if at present he is still a demon or has somehow become human. For all we know, all this is only temporary. If we take him to the hospital we run the risk of the doctors finding something unusual. In doing that we would be placing him in more danger than he is in currently. I promise you, if his condition becomes too serious we will take him there. Regardless of the risk."

Moments later, Xander and Willow arrived. They exited the car in a hurried rush and they moved to join the others gathered around the prone form of the suffering vampire.

"Okay, Giles, what do want us to do now?" Xander asked, as he and Willow stopped to stare down at Spike's broken form.

Giles stood up. "We'll move Spike into your car, it has more room than mine. You and Willow take my car and head to the Magic Box. Tell Anya and Dawn what's happened. Xander, I'll need you to bring me all the medical supplies you can find. I keep them stored in the training room. Do you remember where?"

"Yeah, sure thing. Medical stuff, training room. Gotcha."

Giles continued, "Willow, I'll need you to get whatever magic books and supplies you think we might need. I'll leave it to your discretion; you'll know what to bring. We'll take Spike to Buffy's; it's closest and we need to act fast. When your done, bring Dawn and Anya and meet us there. All right?"

They agreed, and after some exchanging of car keys they were off to fetch his car and head to the shop.

Giles turned back to address the Slayer. "Buffy, we need to move him to the car but we have to be careful to avoid doing him any more harm. Tara, be ready in case he starts to wake up. All right. I'll take his legs. Be mindful of his arm. Ready?"

"Ready." God Spike, I hope you don't feel this.

She hooked her hands under his armpits and on a signal from Giles they gently lifted him off the blood splattered ground. She could hear him groaning, she realized he must be feeling the pain even through the thick haze of unconsciousness. As they carried him to the car, he continued to moan in pain but remained still, his arms and legs hanging limp and lifeless. Even as they placed him in the back seat with Buffy, as she gingerly laid his head on her lap, he continued to lie still as death.

She placed one hand on his chest, carefully avoiding the numerous cuts that decorated his pale skin. She could feel his heartbeat and the steady rise and fall of his chest as he continued to take the breaths that he should not need to take. She placed her other hand on his head and gently began to run her fingers though his hair in an unconscious attempt to sooth.

The situation was still too unreal to her. He could not be alive; It made no sense. How had it happened? How long had he been like this? Did this have something to do with the horrible state of his crypt? Why hadn't he come to them? Why hadn't he asked for their help?

She shook her head: of course he had not come to them. The last time any of them had seen him they had made it quite apparent that they had wanted nothing more to do with him. Their words had been harsh and their actions clear, and for once he had gotten the message. Now she could see that they might have gone too far. If she were going to let him live, and not just here in Sunnydale but at all, she should have been prepared to keep an eye on him.

He was a vampire, she, the Slayer. It was her duty to kill his kind and when she had decided to let him live she had taken the responsibility of his continuing existence into her hands. If she did not want it she should have just staked him, instead of just leaving him in the strange, trapped existence that he had been forced into since the chip. Now months after they had abandoned him, here he lay beaten, with a pulse, slowly bleeding to death.

He was supposedly the evil, uncaring thing, and here they were the ones who had callously abandoned him when he had needed and depended on them. Whether or not any of them wanted to admit it, including Spike himself. With the chip he had become cut off from the demon world, the only thing that had kept him from killing himself had been his discovery of his ability to harm demons. Which not only severed his remaining ties with the demon world but left him with a lot of enemies. Then there were his ties to her and her friends. Once the demons had realised they had cut off their contact with him, the small amount of protection that they had given him had disappeared. He must have been a walking target.

Not only that, but they had been his only ties to the human world and therefore their abandonment of him had cut him off from that world as well. The one time they had seen him at the Bronze, they had made it clear they didn't want him hanging around anywhere that they might frequent. So they had managed to isolate him even further.

God, they had been callous, and they were supposed to be the good guys. They hadn't even thought of how their actions would affect him, and to be honest, if they had bothered to think about it, they wouldn't have cared. No, they had to wait until it had gotten this far to even care, and if it hadn't been for Dawn they wouldn't have noticed anything was wrong. They would never have been looking for him tonight and he would already be dead. They would never have known.

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The motion of the car pulling into the driveway snapped Buffy's mind out of it's internal wanderings. She lifted Spike's head from her lap and slowly got out of the car as she heard Giles tell Tara to go in first and prepare the living room to be used as a make-shift first-aid station.

By the time they'd managed to get Spike out of the car and into the house, Tara had already moved the coffee table out of the way, and the now-vacant space of the living room floor was covered with a light blue sheet from the linen closet. They carried Spike in, and gently laid him down on the sheet. Spike's moans had become quieter and less frequent as he continued to weaken. Just then, Tara emerged from the kitchen with a pair of scissors, a couple of wash cloths, and a bowl filled with water. She sat down on his left while Buffy sat on his right.

When Giles spoke, the strain of the night's event were evident in his voice. "I'll see what I can find for us to use to help patch him up until the others arrive with the supplies," he said and then left the living room in search of anything that could be of use.

Tara started to work, carefully cutting the soiled, blood-covered garments off Spike's battered body, trying to avoid harming him any further. "We're going to have to get these clothes off him. You start on his coat, I'll get the rest."

It was a bit of a struggle getting him out of his duster without jarring him: his arm was broken, and blood was still seeping from a large gash on his left shoulder, but he was soon free of all the torn and soiled garments. They laid his duster off to the side so that it could be cleaned and mended while his t-shirt and jeans lay shredded in a pile by his feet waiting to be thrown away.

They sat looking at him, his body bare of its coverings except for a towel Tara had draped across his hips, and they could truly see for the first time the full scope of his injuries. His body was a mass of bruises, some having already begun to fade, others bright and fresh. Purple, blue and yellow stood out harshly against the pale white skin that was the natural canvas of his once-dead body. Cuts both deep and shallow were scattered in random patterns across his chest, breaking up the once pristine expanse of his ageless form. Dried blood covered him in flaking patches of red; his hair was sticky with it.

Soon they were working to clean off the worst of the blood and dirt from Spike's body. They worked quickly, trying to be as gentle as possible as they washed his body. Giles returned, his arms laden with towels and Buffy's first aid kit. He set his burden down and after checking Spike's vitals he pulled out some iodine from the kit and began to clean the unconscious blonde's wounds.

Moments later the others arrived, their arms full of supplies. Buffy got up and went to Dawn who stood motionless in the entryway staring at Spike's battered form. Buffy brought her hand up and placed it on her sisters shoulder.

Dawn snapped out of her daze and looked up at Buffy, tears beginning to pool in her eyes. "Buffy, is he going to be okay?"

"I'm not sure, Dawn. But we're going to do everything we can to help him."

"What happened to him?"

"We're not sure. When I found him he was getting attacked by some vamps, but it looks like he was hurt pretty bad before they got to him." Buffy took the younger Summers' arm and lead her to the kitchen. "And that's not all."

Buffy sat down on a stool and motioned for Dawn to join her. She sat silently, looking down at her hands as Dawn waited for her to continue.

When it appeared that Buffy had drifted off, Dawn asked, "What's not all?"

Buffy looked up from her hands. "Sorry, its just…it's just we're not sure what to make of it ourselves. You see, when we found Spike.. he, well… he had a pulse, and he was warm. We have no idea why, but now being all blood losing and broken of bone is worse for him than when he was dead…undead…uh, you, you know what I mean."

Dawn's eyes grew wide at her sister's explanation. "You mean he's alive! Like human! That is so cool!" Suddenly her face fell and she looked in the direction of the living room, "Then why aren't we taking him to a hospital? He was so beat up…" She trailed off as she turned back to her sister. Her eyes once again filled with tears. "What if he dies! You told me you would help him."

"We are helping him." Buffy took Dawn's face in her hands, "We don't know for sure that he's once again a card carrying member of the human race, and until we know for sure we can't take him to the hospital. Not until we have to. If he's still all demony than we can't let any doctors near him."

Dawn looked into Buffy's eyes for what seemed like an eternity and then pulled away and began to wipe the tears from her face. "Ok. Then what can I do to help?"

Buffy breathed a sigh of relief that Dawn seemed to understand and then went on to explain. "I don't think there's any more you can do for him now, but you could go and get my room ready for him. I have a feeling he's going to be staying here for a while. I don't think he'll be going anywhere anytime soon."

"Right. I can do that." With that Dawn got up and headed for Buffy's room. Ready to do whatever she could to help.

Buffy turned and put her head in her hands, her elbows resting against the island. God, what am I going to do? When will I ever get a break?

After a moment she got up and headed into the living room. Willow and Anya were sitting on the couch but otherwise the room was empty, save for the blood-covered sheet on the floor. Willow looked up when Buffy entered the room, but Anya continued to stare at her hands. She appeared deep in thought., a small frown on her face.

Buffy looked around "Where's Spike? Did Giles…."

Willow stood up, nervously pulling on her fingers. "Giles decided that it would be better to clean and fix Spike up in the bathroom, so they took him upstairs. He has to be cleaned up really well or his wounds could get all infected." She started to look anywhere but at Buffy. "He also said…he said Spike would have to stay here cause he doesn't want to move him and you have the room and I know you don't like him but he's really hurt and I think…" She continued to nervously ramble until Buffy interrupted.

"Willow! Willow it's okay. I already told Dawn to get my room ready for him. I figured that he wasn't in any shape to be going anywhere." Buffy said with a trace of a smile on her face. "Don't worry. I'm not that much of a bitch that I'd throw an injured vampire...uh…well guy out on the street."

Willow looked apologetic as she walked up to Buffy. "Oh no! I didn't mean it like that. It's just I know how you feel about Spike right now. I thought you'd be upset."

"Honestly Will, after tonight I'm not really sure what to feel about Spike." Buffy sat down at the end of the couch. "I mean I was furious at him, never wanted to see him again, but now…"

Willow sat down on the couch between Buffy and Anya. She placed her hand on top of Buffy's. "And now you can't help but be all worried about him and want to help."

"Yeah. Something like that." Buffy said as she closed her eyes and leaned back into the couch.

Suddenly Anya broke her silence "Is he going to die?"

Buffy and Willow both turned towards her, startled by her sudden question.

"I mean, if he's going to die, will we be giving him a funeral? He shouldn't turn to dust now, right? So there will be a body , and you have to bury a body." Her eyes started to water and she looked to be on the verge of crying. "I… I just…I don't want to go through this again. The getting sick, the hurt, the eventual dying; it just doesn't make any sense. Why would he be made alive again if he's just going to die because of it?" She started to wave her hand around frantically as she continued. "It's, it's just so stupid. He was nice for a vampire, and I know I've met enough of them, so why would…why would…" All of a sudden Anya got up wiping at her eyes and quickly walked into the kitchen.

"Wow." Buffy looked at Willow. "What was that?"

"You didn't see her right after your Mom died. She was really upset then to. I think it bothers her so much 'cause she never had to think about death like this when she was still all demoney." She looked towards the kitchen. "She kept saying she didn't understand, and we couldn't help her 'cause it's not like were big on the understanding ourselves."

"Should we check on her? Make sure she's okay?"

"No. Let's give her a minute." Willow laid back on the couch with her eyes closed mimicking Buffy's previous position. Buffy looked at her for a second, and then she too lay back, glad to enjoy a moment of peace. She was sure there wasn't going to be to many more of them for a while.