Disclaimer: Joss owns the people and their lives (or unlives)
Spoilers: Seasons 1-7, including the finale
A/N: This chapter focuses on the first half of season 6, and the changes in Buffy's relationships with the Scoobies and Spike. And, although I agree that Buffy was responsible for the house and Dawn, as her Watcher, Giles was responsible for Buffy. I disagree with the way he handled his departure and the fact that he left her without a Watcher.
Chapter 2: Coming Back
"Why now, Giles?" Buffy asked.
"Because, after what happened I think that it is important to update his story. And I think that we should do it now, while it's still fresh in your mind."
"The memories aren't going anywhere, Giles." Buffy pinned him with a meaningful look.
"No, of course not. And I'm not suggesting that you will forget him or what he did, but details, even ones that sometimes seem insignificant, can often turn out to be quite important. Unfortunately, they are also the very things that are most easily forgotten over time.
"Now, I'm sure that you never thought you'd hear these words from my mouth, but I think that Spike's story needs to be told. I believe that the new Slayers, and the ones who will come after them, need to hear it. And since he's not here, you are the person best qualified to tell his story."
He leaned forward and put his hand over Buffy's hand.
"After all, you believed in him when no one else did. And your trust in him proved to be quite well founded. You are the only person who can tell the rest of his story."
Buffy nodded, unable to keep the tears from sliding down her cheeks.
"Okay, you're right. People should know about Spike. It's not always pretty, but in the end he made the right choices. What do you want to know?"
"Well, I had already updated through the fight with Glory, his participation in it, and his reaction to your uh- well.."
"My death, Giles." Buffy prodded gently. "You can say it. I was there."
"I know, it's just a dif-difficult subject." He pulled his glasses off and began cleaning them.
He put his glasses back on and cleared his throat.
"So, perhaps you could begin with when you came back. I noticed when I returned that you and Spike already seemed to have a-a comfortable camaraderie, even while your demeanor with the others seemed to be a-almost forced cheerfulness. At the time I put it down to post-traumatic stress. But of course that wasn't it."
"No, when I first came back, I was afraid to tell anyone where I'd really been. I was afraid that they'd all feel so guilty that they'd just be falling all over themselves, and me, trying to make me feel better. I didn't want that. I didn't want to deal with that. It was too much. I just wanted quiet, and I thought that if they thought I was okay, they'd leave me alone a little more.
"But I couldn't keep it to myself; I had to talk to someone. Spike could see something was wrong, he asked if I wanted to talk about it. He'd been dead and come back, and he wasn't one of the people who'd torn me out of Heaven. So, I told him. I told him they could never know, and he kept my secret."
She shook her head slightly.
"It wasn't just because he loved me, though. It was also because he felt guilty about my death. He felt like he'd failed me. You know the night I came back, I asked him how long I'd been gone and do you know what his answer was?"
Giles shook his head.
"A hundred and forty-seven days. Not almost four months, not a little over three months, it was a hundred and forty-seven days. Later he told me that he wanted me to know that he did save me, not when it counted, but every night since then."
She looked at Giles, "Did you guys know that he felt responsible for my death? That the guilt was eating him up?"
Giles shook his head again.
"No, we all felt terrible, we all felt guilty."
She nodded. "Well, I guess between the fact the he was in love with me and the guilt he was feeling, he decided to take it upon himself to be my guardian, my savior. He just kept showing up, or just being there, whenever I needed someone to talk to."
"He showed up at my house the night you came back. Made me smile. He was the only one at that point who could get a smile out of me. Then after the supergeeks started messing with my life, with the evil lint, and getting me fired because of the demons at Xander's construction site, and the evil Mummy hand loop-de-loop, he listened to me whine, and let me steal his alcohol."
Giles gave her an exasperated look.
She snickered and rolled her eyes.
"Okay, the getting drunk part wasn't so great, but it felt good to have somebody listen to me and say 'you're right, that sucks, let's go find out who's messing with you and kick their ass'. Of course he said it with an accent and alot more British slang, but it was still nice."
The waitress returned with their food and they ate while they continued their conversation.
"I just got to be more comfortable around Spike than around the rest of you. All of you were being so nice, and you were worried about me, but you also obviously didn't want to be worried about me. You know? You wanted me to figure out what I was going to do, go back to school or get a job, then settle down, be Dawn's guardian, be the Slayer, go back to the way things were, and just be grateful that I wasn't stuck in some Hell dimension anymore.
"The problem was, I wasn't grateful, I was miserable, and I didn't know what I wanted to do, or how to do it. And I wasn't sure how to tell you guys what was wrong, so I kept trying to pretend that everything was okay so you wouldn't worry. But with Spike, I didn't have to pretend. He knew things weren't okay, and he knew why, and even though he worried, he was as good at hiding it as I was at hiding the fact that I'd been in Heaven."
Giles shook his head as he thought about those months. He'd been so frustrated with his Slayer for not taking her responsibilities seriously, and even after finding out where she'd been, he'd still believed that what she really needed was to stand on her own. Of course he hadn't really listened to her when she tried to tell him that she needed him, he hadn't really wanted to. It had all been too much for him to bear.
Seeing her die a second time and then burying her had been terribly hard for him. Watching her come back, unattached, showing little interest in anyone or anything, had been painful for him. Finding out that she had been torn out of Heaven, and as a result no longer found any joy, or purpose, in life had been the final straw. He believed she had given up on life and couldn't bear to watch it.
But, apparently Spike had not given up on her. He had continued trying to get through to her, had even managed to make her smile when no one else could; he'd done something to lift her spirits, however slightly, when the rest of her friends had been making demands on her.
It was really no surprise that things had gone so dramatically wrong that year.
"He even showed up on patrol sometimes," Buffy continued. " You know, it's kind of weird, I didn't really think about it too much, but in high school, even in college, especially when my mom got sick, I had alot of help on patrol. Alot of times Willow and Xander would come along, or Angel would show up, then Faith was around, then Riley.
"But last year, I patrolled alone almost every night. Once in a while Spike would help, but he was the only one, no one else ever showed up. That might be another reason that we fell into that pattern. I could talk to him away from everyone, because no one was out there with me anymore. It was just the two of us."
She fell silent for a moment as she ate.
Giles took the time to eat a few bites of his food while he thought about what she said. It was true. While she frequently patrolled alone, she did often have help from her friends and boyfriends, but that year, he could not remember patrolling with her, or seeing any of her friends patrol with her. He assumed that she probably discouraged it, given her tendency to want to be alone after her return.
"I never asked anyone to patrol with me, and to be honest, it was easier to patrol without worrying about them, but it was still sort of new, you know. That they didn't patrol with me even once. And that just left that many more opportunities for running into Spike."
She shrugged, then continued.
"Anyway, we were getting along really well; I could talk to him easier than anyone else. I could say anything, and even if I kind of hurt his feelings, he wouldn't say anything. He'd just let me get it out. He didn't let me know if he took things personally, you know."
Giles was pretty sure he did know. He had seen the way she treated the vampire in the past, and the way he had still remained loyal to her, even in the face of Glory's torture and Buffy's death.
"But then Xander summoned that musical demon," She spat the words out. " and everything went to hell."
Giles recalled some of the unpleasant truths that were revealed during that spell. Then he remembered Buffy reminding Spike that he sang something about wanting her to stay away from him.
"Buffy, wh-what did Spike sing to you?"
She sighed.
"He sang about how hard it was for him to be with me when all I wanted was to talk to him, tell him things I couldn't tell my friends. He sang that he loved me, but I wouldn't let him 'rest in peace'. He sang that he wanted me to stay away until I was ready to 'misbehave'. That was pretty much when everything between us started going wrong.
"The one person I thought I could count on to not put any pressure on me suddenly tells me that unless I'm ready to start sleeping with him, he doesn't really want me around. I was so hurt and angry. Then I let the cat out of the bag about Heaven. All in all, not my favorite night."
She laughed sadly, and Giles chuckled bitterly at the memory. That night was not one of his favorites either.
"That was the first time I kissed him, you know."
Giles looked at her in shock.
"I..uh..seem to recall several er..um.."
"First real kiss, Giles, not engagement-spell kissing. And not 'thank you for protecting my sister' kissing. I just wanted to feel something, something real. And Spike was there, and his feelings were real. No matter how much I pretended that his feelings weren't real, that musical demon did one thing. He made us tell the truth. And one thing that Spike kept singing in his song, besides the fact that he wanted to sleep with me, was that he loved me. It was real, so I kissed him."
Giles was surprised. He hadn't realized that their relationship had begun right under his nose. He had assumed that they had begun after he had left to return to England, but apparently they had already taken the first steps in that direction even before he had told Buffy of his decision.
"Then he wanted to talk about it, but I was being avoido-girl, and then Willow's little forget-me spell made us both forget for a while. But it all came back. And then I had to deal with you leaving."
She paused before telling him what she'd been needing to say for over a year.
"You were wrong, you know." She told him pointedly. "When you said you taught me everything about being a Slayer. You didn't teach me how to do it all alone. You told me about Slayers who fought Master Vampires, Slayers who forged their own weapons, Slayers who fought all kinds of evil, but you never told me about Slayers who answered their calling without a Watcher to guide them.
"And you never told me about Slayers who had to fulfill their sacred duty while holding down a day job, paying a mortgage, raising a kid, and keeping Social Services off their backs."
She smiled sadly at him.
"I know that when you're training a Slayer, it's a sink or swim kind of thing. You take her out to the cemetery, you set her down on a fresh grave, you give her a stake, and you wait for the vamp to rise, then she either stakes him, or he bites her, but..." she trailed off.
She paused as if thinking about what to say next.
"You know what it was like? Not just you leaving, but the whole year, it was like Titanic. You know how after the ship starts sinking there are all those people in the water screaming for help, but no one is coming to get them. Well, that was me, Willow, and Dawn. We were all drowning, and no one could help us.
"Then there were those people inside who were pretending nothing was wrong, they weren't wearing their life vests, and they were trying to order drinks, all while the ship is sinking. That was Xander and Anya. Everyone around them is floundering, everything is going wrong, they are about to go down, too, but they're pretending nothing's wrong. They still ended up there with us.
"And Tara, she was like the guy who designed the ship; the first one to figure out that something was wrong and there wasn't really any way to fix it. That the only thing to do was try to find some way to just deal with it. And hope that some us come through it okay. And she didn't make it out, either."
Tears welled up in Buffy's eyes at the thought of the friend she'd lost, but she brushed them away.
"Then there was that Ismay guy. You know, the one who told everybody the ship was unsinkable, everything would be fine? He helped out a little bit, and then he just got onto one of the lifeboats and left. That would be you."
Giles' eyes flicked to the tabletop, he couldn't look her in the eye, because she was right. She had been his responsibility and he had failed her. After accusing her of failing in her responsibilities.
"Then you came back later, like that guy at the end of the movie who brought the lifeboat back to save the few people who survived, but by then, it was almost too late."
"What about Spike?"
"Hmmm. I guess Spike would be kind of like the crew. Trying to do the right thing alot of the time, or at least what he thought was the right thing. And trying to help some of us. But also making some pretty big mistakes, too, the kind that could really hurt people. Some really good, and some pretty bad, but he doesn't really fit into any one role."
Giles considered everything she had said.
"Actually, I believe that's an accurate metaphor for what you all went through that year and my own behavior as well. And you're right. I didn't handle the situation as well as I could have.
"Although, you do seem to have matured considerably, so some good has come of it."
"Yeah, eventually. And you're right, things are better now. But the night you left, I ended up kissing Spike again. Every time things got tough, I ended up macking on Spike.
"Then one night it got to be too much and I punched him. Then he hit me back. I don't even know why, with the chip and everything. He never used to hit back. But I guess he forgot, and just reacted. I don't think I had hit him since the whole chaining me in his crypt creepiness. Anyway, he found out that he could hit me without the chip firing."
"WHAT!?"
"Giles, calm down. I had Tara research it. It turns out that the spell Willow used to bring me back altered my molecular structure just enough that Spike's chip didn't recognize me as human."
"Dear Lord. Do you mean to tell me that he was able to harm you even before you had the chip removed and you didn't tell me?"
"Giles, I didn't tell anyone. At first, I thought something was wrong with me, Spike even said that I must have come back wrong. I mean he couldn't hit anyone else, only me. I sure felt wrong, and I thought that the fact that he could hit me just proved that. Then I realized that he wasn't going to hurt me, not really. Nothing I didn't want at least. So, I didn't tell anyone."
She noticed Giles' telltale blush as he cleaned his glasses yet again. She smirked, in a fashion somewhat reminiscent of the man they were discussing.
"You know, Giles, I won't go into graphic details, but if we're going to talk about my relationship with Spike, you might want to stop cleaning your glasses every time I say something shocking. Because I have a feeling you might end up polishing them into a powder."
Giles cleared his throat again and looked back at Buffy.
She smiled, "We're both adults, right?"
He nodded.
"Okay, well after Spike realized that he could hurt me, he cornered me, then goaded me into a fight, hit me, told me I came back wrong, and we got into a knock-down, drag-out fight. The kind of fight we used to have before he got the chip, only better, because we weren't trying to kill each other. We were getting stuff out. You know? The crap I couldn't unload on anyone else because they weren't strong enough to take it, and the crap he couldn't take out on anyone else because he couldn't hurt humans. We could both dish it out and take it in a way no one else could, and I ended up kissing him again, only this time I didn't stop with kissing."
Giles coughed and tried to cover it up by taking a quick gulp of scotch.
Buffy shook her head sadly.
"After that things went from bad to worse. I'm done here." She said gesturing to her empty plate. "Can we go?"
Giles nodded and motioned to the waitress for the bill.
Buffy waited quietly while Giles paid the bill.
"Let's head over to the park. I could use some fresh air. Then I can tell you the next part of the story."
TBC
