Spike felt like he had been staked, when he saw the look on Buffy's face as she stood in the doorway. She may have come here strong and tough, ready for the fight, but what she had seen had taken all of that out of her. She was like a statue of herself now, her voice a caricature of horror and betrayal. Spike figured he knew that look, figured it to be the one that had been on his face ever time he had caught Dru with one of her demons. He had never meant to put that look on her face, had never wanted to see it there. She was meant for finer things and he began a litany of curses inside his head for causing her the one kind of pain she had never liked.
Buffy turned her eyes to Angel first, and when she spoke, there was not even a shadow of her strength in her voice. "Lying?" she forced out.
Angel looked away, shamed, and stayed silent. Spike didn't blame him. What could the bloke say that wouldn't make things worse?
The worst of it, Spike thought as he watched them like a voyeur while she stared at Angel with all the pain in the world evident in her face, was that he, Spike, might as well not exist in this little scene. It was Angel's betrayal that hurt, Angel's lies, Angel kissing someone else. Buffy might have found Angel with anyone, might have found him with no one, and if she had heard the word lie whispered by the rocks, her reaction would be the same. He stood by their show, the drama of their ever doomed romance, a story it would have pleased the bard himself to write, and waited for Buffy to condemn him for his faithlessness, waited for her to turn her scorn on him for finding him in her lover's arms. But she said nothing, did not even turn a spare insult his way, and the lack of it cut him more than any words or blows would have. They had always fought, as enemies, as allies, as lovers; the heart of all their relationships had always been the fight. Now, he was denied even that. He would not be able to stand it, if he was to come this far with her, only to lose her through goddamned Angel's stupidity. Without a fight, they had nothing.
Angel remained motionless in front of her, all silence and secrets. "You haven't answered me, Angel. What were you lying about, what could you tell Spike that you haven't been able to tell me?" Her voice caught a bit; Spike was sure that she hadn't wanted them to hear the sound, knew she would break something, probably their bones, if she thought they saw her as weak, and so he tried to ignore it and leave her pride intact at least. He had always loved her strength, could not bring himself to make her feel like less than she was. As badly as he wanted to comfort her, take some of this pain away from her, to acknowledge it was to weaken her and he could not do that. He hung his head in the shame of being such a witness to her pain and yet could not look away.
The sound, however, seemed to rip something free from Angel, some level of control that he had been able to hang on to until now. He made an inarticulate sound of pain, and took a half-step towards her, hand reaching for her, face drawn into mask of misery. Angel wasn't cut out for this kind of a soap opera, Spike figured. Not in this pure and soulful life he was trying to lead. Spike himself had been nothing but accustomed to the pain of loving Buffy, of seeing her hurt as a result of his actions. It had not what he had dreamed of, in his madness, not the love he thought they would share, but it had given him a strength it seemed Angel lacked.
Buffy said nothing, did nothing, simply stared at Angel's hand blankly until he dropped it. Her sheer passivity, so at odds with her normal behavior, seemed to force the words out of Angel. "I'm sorry, Buffy."
"For what?" she retorted, trying for cool and uncaring, but Spike could hear the pain, like a sliver of glass, ride through her voice.
Spike had known, when he first managed to get in the slayer's pants, that it would be an uphill battle to get her to forget Angel. Angel had been her first love. Had been, according to her, her only love, a story she had kept to even as she writhed beneath Spike, calling his name and never Angel's, begging for more and more and harder and harder. Never mind the way Angelus had tortured and killed her friends, never mind how he had tried to end the world, or the fact that, cursed as he was, he had no hope of making her feel the way that Spike did. It was Angel she loved, Angel she wanted, and Spike had been told, over and over, that he was just a poor substitute, a way to scratch an itch. She threw Angel in his face constantly, but he had tried to keep his temper about it. He had understood, he always had, how the first love felt, how it stayed with a person, be he monster or man, long past reason. Angel was to Buffy what Dru had been to Spike: perfection.
And now he wasn't.
"Angel, you fucking tell me what's going on here or swear to God, I won't be home when you get there and neither will Dawn." Her voice was steady now, but Spike could hear the pain under it and so could Angel.
Who knew if it was the threat of her going, or simply the pain in her voice, but Angel cracked. Shattered like an egg dropped from a high-rise. With a cry, he was across the room, on his knees before her, arms around her waist, with his head buried in the concave slope of her belly.
No, this hurt too much. Spike couldn't watch this, especially not if she went back to Angel. Shouldn't the fact that Spike was honest mean something? She loved him, Spike; she had told him. Why couldn't she just see his bastard of a sire was no good and leave him? How could Angel and Buffy both have turned away from him so easily, when so recently they had been wrapped around him, wanting him, needing him, his name in their mouth like fresh blood. Was there no place in this painful little dance for him? He couldn't stay here, couldn't watch any longer, he just couldn't. With a muffled curse, he shot back into the depths of crypt, hoping for some quiet in which to lick his wounds.
Buffy barely noticed when Spike left; he was barely a shadow to her in the face of Angel, who was still weeping blood red tears into her favorite shirt.
"What's going on, Angel?" she asked again, tired of the show. She was pleased to hear the anger in her voice. Anger she understood, she could handle. Yeah, she was angry. Much better than hurt and abandoned. If she wanted drama, she would have gone to the movies. This was getting old.
Angel dragged in a breath, using the familiar action to try and control his tears. They steadied him, all his little human acts did; they brought him back to what he wanted to be when he was around her. A liar. Pretending to be human, to be honest, to be all that she had ever wanted, all that destroyed in the instant she had heard Spike's words, so desperate, resonate with truth. Eyes filmy with blood, Angel looked up at her, took another breath. "I lied," he whispered.
"No shit?" she asked sarcastically. She was proud of herself, for being able to sound so uncaring. Inside, she felt annihilated, obliterated. She had made a life around this creature weeping into her belly. A dead, dusty shell of life, but a life still the same. "I pretty much knew that already. What did you lie about?"
"Everything."
She went cold. Nothing good could come from a statement like that. "You wanna clear that up for me some?"
"When I..." he hesitated, grimaced. "When I came back, I wasn't, I'm still not, will never be, what I told you I was."
"What did you tell me?" She was trying to remember back to Angel's return. The only thing she remembered clearly was that Angel told her he was a father, and somehow, looking at Conner, she doubted that was the everything he was talking about.
A longer pause; Angel couldn't bring himself to hold eye contact. Not a good sign.
"I let you... assume things. About me. Because it was easier." Another pause; it seemed to be getting harder for Angel to talk. After an interval so long she had started to wonder if he would ever talk again, he continued, slowly, brokenly. "The curse is gone. It's been gone since Willow returned my soul the last time."
She had not heard right. She could not have heard right. He had been back so long, had seemed so honest and faithful in his pained devotion to her, his celibate love, his apologies as she turned away from him, faking satisfaction. "Say that again."
He shuddered, hearing something in her voice that he didn't want to, maybe more even than she had wanted him to hear. "The curse is gone. But the demon, the demon is nearer than he's ever been. And he wants you too. Wants you in ways that scare me when they creep into my mind. God, the dreams... the way you bleed in them, under me, the way you let me drink-" he stopped himself, pulled himself under control with visible effort. "So I let you assume that the curse still held."
"So we could have..." she trailed off, stunned at the implications. A year and a half of her trying to do the right thing, of pretending that what they had was good enough, that there was nothing more she wanted or needed than this strange half love, a child's love, though she had been a woman for years. It was this kind of a life that he had left her because of, all those years ago. All of it for nothing, all of it a lie. "Did you just not want me?" she asked numbly. "Was it like you said after the first time, I just wasn't good enough?" The only man she had ever kept, had ever been the one to leave, she had kept through pain. She closed her eyes against the sting of Angel's words, the fear, sharp and bright, that it was Angelus who had been the honest one, when he told her she wasn't worth it.
"No!" Angel then, his voice interrupting her new obsession. "It was me. I didn't trust myself. I was afraid, if I got to close, if I let myself... I was scared I couldn't control it, couldn't control myself, my demon. I was scared I would hurt you."
"Spike hurt me all the time," she said in a dead voice, remembering so many times, the bites, the bruises. Remembering that morning. She had never been fragile, or breakable, or pure to Spike. She had never been on his pedestal. She had never been in doubt of his honesty with her. "I wanted him to hurt me. I liked how it made me feel."
Angel cringed, aghast and agape that she would say that and she took advantage of that moment of inattention to push him off of her. He went down in an ungainly sprawl at her touch, as if all his strength and control had left him. Good, at least she wasn't the only one. She looked down at him, so angry she could barely focus, and when she began yelling, it was such a relief to let the anger go, to let it soar out of her, a living thing, that she was almost afraid she wouldn't be able to stop. "Why the hell would you not tell me this? Why the hell would you lie to me so long? Do you think what we had was easy to find, that everyone had it, that you were so willing to waste it? What did you think our love was worth, that you figured it was better to lie than to risk telling the truth?"
"I was afraid I would lose you." Seeming to abase himself, he stayed on the ground before her, his face hidden by his hands so that his words were muffled by his shame. "Because I wasn't who I used to be. I wasn't the guy you fell in love with. I was scared you wouldn't love me anymore if you knew the things I was capable of."
Anger broke and crackled like lightening inside of her, electric bursts of rage followed by a slow rumble of thunderous despair. "Bullshit. I've always known what you were capable of. I've known since you killed Jenny. You were the one so obsessed with the fucking past. You were the one who wanted things to be just like they always were. You were the one who wanted to pretend like nothing had ever changed. And you were the one who could go and tell Spike first thing, tell him things it's clear that you never intended to tell me. Spike! I always thought you hated Spike! Or I thought that till last night. But it wasn't hate, was it? You loved the bastard, must have love him more than you love me."
"I love you more than anything!" Empty words. How could she trust him now?
"Just not enough to be honest with me." She wanted to throw things, she wanted to go out and kill something. To think that she had come here because she was worried the two of them would kill each other. Because she felt guilty as hell for cheating on Angel, felt scared for Spike. What a joke
Christ, this was a damned mess. Why couldn't she be like other girls? Why couldn't she have fallen in love with some nice, normal, human guy, spawned a couple of rug-rats? The principal at the high school had sure tried. But no, she fell in love with vampires. With dead guys who lied.
Spike was a jerk, but at least he had always been an honest jerk. Shit. She had always thought that Angel was honest. That the love they had was enough to get through everything. Now what was she supposed to do? She couldn't remember ever having felt like this before, couldn't remember anything that hurt quite this badly. In a daze, she turned away from Angel to try to find Spike in the crypt. He had been honest, hadn't he? And when Angel had kissed him, he had stopped it. Spike. But as she looked around, she saw he was gone, that she was alone except for the shattered bits of her life. Even Spike had left her now.