Disclaimer: I do not own any of the characters of BtVS or AtS.

Rating: A high PG-13 here. Or probably not even, I'm just being cautious.

Pairing: Slight B/S angst in this chapter.

Feedback: Yes please! It's like a drug! And no matter what anyone says, it is probably the biggest driving force behind inspiration. The more reviews I get, the more ideas! You can also email me at Buggers267@aol.com

Distribution: Only ask.

Author's Note: To any readers of "Baby You Don't Even Know" or "Fortunate Son", sorry for the hold-up in updating, I'll try and churn out new chapters for each.

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Chapter 1: Love's Lost Ones

He had been traveling for a long time without respite. His whole body felt tired and haggard under the weight of the voices, whispering and trickling into his ears in a chaotic race. They tore his head apart and left him screaming silently in pain.

And he was lonely. Despite the troops of people that constantly haunted and taunted him, he had no friend past self-loathing. He thought that when he had found the missing piece, he would suddenly fit. He would suddenly be worthy of love. If anything, it made him more unworthy.

He hugged the sheets around his bare chest and rocked in the bed, dampening his pillow with frustrated tears. "I'm sorry . . ." he croaked. "God, I'm so sorry." He didn't even know who he was talking to.

"Shhh." She shifted her weight in the bed beside him so that she was nestled into his back. Curling her arm around his shoulder, she smoothed his forehead comfortingly. "It's alright," she purred to him, stroking his bare arm lovingly. "I'm here with you."

He turned his tear-streaked face to her, drowning in the cascade of golden locks that framed her smile. "Are you really?" he asked, hesitating.

She leaned down and kissed him. "Of course I am, shagwit." She admonished his fear by wrinkling her nose.

A grin broke through the tears and he reached out to brush away her hair. "Shagwit?" he repeated, amused.

"What can I say? You're a bad influence. You've got me 'buggering' up the yin-yang."

He laughed softly. "Yeah, well give us another 'snog', then."

She chuckled cattily and pressed another soft kiss to his lips, settling herself more comfortably in his arms. He moaned as she pressed herself closer to his chest, suddenly raising herself above him so that she was staring down at him. Looking deeply into his stormy pacific-blue eyes, she swept away the hair from her neck and lowered it near to him. He wavered.

"What are you doing?"

She stared at him innocently. "What do you mean?"

"That . . ." His voice was uncontrollably shaky. "Y-your . . . your neck."

She gave him uncharacteristically snarkish grin. "Yeah?" She bared it to him more grandly, bowing her head out of the way to display the smooth golden vessel. "Isn't it what you want?"

"N-no . . . no . . . I don't want . . . I-I can't want . . ."

She roughly straddled him and grabbed him by the hair, dragging him up to her. She pushed his face into the crook of her neck, laughing again, but with a hint of something that filled him with dread.

"You know you want it."

He struggled to scramble out of her grasp, but the scent of her blood and her skin kept him chained. "No . . ." he pleaded. "Stop."

"Stop what? Stop what you've always dreamed of? You want it . . . I want it. Don't ever think that you're better than wanting this."

"Buffy, I love you----"

A guttural, menacingly laugh escaped her. "You don't know even know the word." She thrust him closer to her jugular. "Drink."

He hesitated, but gingerly inserted a fang, allowing a heady ruby-colored liquid to pool out onto his tongue.

"Yes," she hissed, closing her eyes and clinging onto him desperately.

His mind was screaming at him to stop, but he couldn't. He began to gulp in earnest now and blood streamed down her shoulder.

"Drink," she chanted again and again, in rhythm to his voracious gulps. "Drink, drink, drink, drink----"

"Drink!"

Spike jolted awake, gasping helplessly. He sat up and clutched the sheets around him to force himself out of the nightmare. Overcome with panicked breaths, he stared up at Buffy, who stood by his bedside, holding out a mug of blood with a frown. "I said here's your drink. Man, I leave you for a few minutes and another band of imaginary beasties come to plague you." She handed the mug to him indifferently.

"I . . . I dreamt I was here . . . with you." He awkwardly glanced down at the bed strewn with sheets and Buffy timidly turned red in response.

"The visions are getting pretty deceptive, aren't they?" she murmured quietly in response.

He was still shaking. "More than that . . . I dreamt . . . I dreamt I bit you."

She unconsciously backed away with him. She paused for a long time, what seemed like an eternity to Spike, then said, "But it was just a dream."

Quivering, he nodded unconvincingly. "Just a dream."

Another pause, but he looked up at her with lost, fragile eyes. She didn't know what to do, so she began to walk out of the room. "I've got to go downstairs."

"Wait!" He stood up, wrapping a sheet around his slender frame. "Don't go. Please. I'm still shaky from the . . . can't you . . . just sit here with me?"

It was such a heartbreaking plea. Conflicted, she stared at him. "I . . . I need to get things ready."

He furrowed his brows. "Get things ready for what?"

"A houseguest is coming over and we have to get ready." She paled and motioned towards the bed guiltily. "Which reminds me, we have to move you down to the basement. We'll be needing the guestroom for him."

Spike glanced around the room confoundedly. "A guest? Him? What are you runnin', a boarding house?"

"He's a friend of a friend," she explained. "And I'm really sorry that it's a little cramped here, but this all happened on kind of a short notice----"

"You're apologizing?" Spike said abruptly, so brusquely that it almost alarmed her.

"Well . . . yeah. I know it kind of sucks to be stuck in a dank basement that has a tendency to flood come every Thursday. I just want everyone to be comfortable-----"

"I'm a vampire, Buffy," he stated bluntly. "Making me comfortable shouldn't be your main priority right now."

Pause again, thick silence once more. "Yeah well, Xander's helping me set up the sofa bed downstairs. You remember it. From Xander's own days as a basement dweller?"

Before, he would have made a face and a cutting comment about how he didn't want to wallow in the whelp's old filth, but now, he just nodded passively. "Sounds fine."

There was something so despondent in his smirkless tone that made her want to cry. "I know this is weird----"

"It's not. It's not weird at all. I . . . I should be thanking you for taking me in like this . . . into your home . . . into your life." He emphasized the last word with a glimmer of hope.

It was too much to see him sitting there, staring up at her with such boyish love and adoration and expectation. So she curtly replied, "Yeah," and sped downstairs, leaving him alone once more.

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"He wants to send who to the what-what?!"

Buffy sighed, shaking out the linen sheet. "Angel wants to send Conner here. His son."

Xander held his hands up dramatically. "First off, the whole 'Angel-having-a-son' thing? The question "How, in God's name, how" does not even begin to cover it. And second of all, why is he sending him here? And to stay with you? He thinks he can go off, have a fate-defying kid and proceed to dump him in your lap? Rat Bastard, thy name is Angel."

She gave him a reprimanding frown. "It's not that bad," she replied. "Angel is having some . . . problems with Conner and thinks Sunnydale would be a better environment for him."

"Yeah but isn't that a little . . . irresponsible? Okay, so kids are difficult, but you don't abandon them every time they have a temper tantrum."

She wagged an eyebrow at him. "He's not a kid, Xander."

"Oh that's right. With his father being dead for more than a century and all, you'd figure his genetics would be a little messed. So what is he? Two-headed monster? Bat-winged fang boy?"

"Close. Try an eighteen-year old teenager."

This was beyond Xander's comprehension. He summed up his response to the situation in three words: "Great Galloping Garfinkal."

"Yeah, that was basically how I reacted when Angel called. But he explained everything, not to mention why he thinks Conner should come here, and I agreed and thought it was a good idea."

"Good idea? Buffy, the Macerena seems like a good idea compared to this. You've already got a colorful amount of people residing in your home, why add the son of your former lover into the mix?"

Buffy smoothed the sheet and tucked it into the sofa bed. She grew quiet and began to somberly pick at the printed purple heliotropes on the sheet. Spike once said heliotropes were his favorite flowers. He had talked about how his mother grew the prized flowers in their English garden long ago and had lavished more affection and attention on them then she had ever bestowed on her son. As a young boy, he often wished that he could be a heliotrope just to garner the same kind of consideration from his mother. When he repeated this to his father, he was severely beaten after being commanded, "No son of mine shall ever carry on such poofish tendencies." He loved the flowers nonetheless.

When he told her the story, she had no patience for any reminiscing he had about his previous life. There was to be no speaking involved in their interaction, just aggressive violence and cathartic sex. But now she remembered. She remembered like never before. And it made her think of the way he had looked at her earlier in his bedroom, all broken and tired and loving at the same time. And it made her compassionate in a way she had been lacking.

"Because he's lost, Xander. And I want to help find him."

And she wasn't sure if she was talking about Spike or Conner, but she knew she meant it.

TBC……Yes all your reviews did it! Thank you so much, I was surprised over how many people were interested in a Connor-centric fic. Well, it isn't Conner-centric in this chapter, I was thinking that I would alternate the Spike-Conner sub-plots with each chapter, but everything I'm writing thus far is coming straight out of my ass, so we'll see how it goes.