Spike stood stunned. Dru? But... how? Angel had killed her. Hadn't he? He should have known by now that nothing was impossible when it came to Drucilla.

Buffy touched his arm and broke him out of his wondrous daze.

"Spike," she said gently. "Bella... she... she has to..."

He bowed his head and turned away from the Slayer. He knew what Bella had to do. And he knew that he was a coward, but he was glad that he didn't have to do it. Maybe that meant that he hadn't loved her as much as he once did. Her leaving him for a fungus demon, of course, figured into it heavily.

"I doubt she feels very good about it," Willow offered. A strange thing, sympathy in her throat for for him.

Didn't make him feel any better. But he nodded in appreciation of her sentiment. He felt tears of anger and loss welling up in eyes. Stop it you damned fool, he told himself. Didn't even know she was alive until a few moments ago and now this sickening feeling of emptiness. He felt so stupid.

Buffy moved to put an arm cautiously around him. She understood his history, as fucked up as it was, with Drucilla. He had loved her for a very long time. And he had the same deep love for Angel or he wouldn't hate him as much as he did.

"Aw, Bloody Hell. I got to go... I can't let Bella go after Dru on her own. Dru... she's sick. She's completely off her bird... Bella, she can't go at her alone."

Buffy nodded. She knew that wasn't true. Yes, Drusilla was out of her mind. But she had no worries about Bella annhilating her. She knew why Spike needed to go. And she let him, to Willow's gaped-mouth surprise.

"Go ahead, Spike. We understand."

He was gone in an instant. Sometimes it amazed her the speed at which vampires could travel when they wanted.

"Okay, I so did not understand. I need you to explain to me why you just let -- no, sent him to help off Bella." Willow accused.

"That's not why he wanted to go, Willow," Buffy told her friend. She did know a thing or two about Spike, even though she hated to admit it at times. "He needed to be there... to... to be a man. He needed to face this head-on. He needed to see it through...and I don't think he wanted her to die alone."

"Oh," Willow said, still a little confused. She tried to put herself in Spike's place. She had been Big Bad not too long ago. She could have been killed. And even if it were for the best, she knows that it would have torn Tara up. But she also knows that Tara wouldn't have let her die alone. She would have at least been there to make sure that the last person she saw loved her. Oh, God... Tara. Oh, it still tore at her heart and turned it inside out to think of how they were having a conversation one moment and Tara's flame was extinguished in the next. Yes. She understood.

"Do... do you think he'll be al -- no, of course he won't. Do people... do they pray for vampires?" Willow asked.

"No, I don't think they do. But they do pray for their friends."

They bowed their heads and closed their eyes.

Bella had found Dru in an abandoned house just a few blocks from the cemetery. She couldn't get a line into her head, but figured that was just as well. She could smell her, though. The lilacky sweetness of death and insanity bathed Dru from head to toe.

"My, my, my. Aren't you just the proverbial cat with nine lives," Bella said, eyes fixed on Dru's slender back. She was a throw-back to the Victorian era. All ringlets, corsets and lace. "Or, in your case, nine deaths."

Dru turned to her with a spacy smile. "I can still smell him, floating all around you. And he will come to me, burning baby fish swimming all around in his head... and then where will you go?" she asked. She had no idea that she should be scared of Bella. None at all.

"Drusilla, I'm not here to reunite you with your dead lover. And I'm not here to walk down memory lane with you--"

Dru was at her side, sniffing her hair. Cigarette smoke mingled with a spicy scent. But there was no heartbeat. No heat radiating from the girl she circled.

"Did he turn you?" she asked Bella, circling her in a raptorial pace.

"No."

Bella could see that she was clearly psychotic. She didn't want to play these games with Dru. She wanted to get this done. But a part of her couldn't help but be curious about this demon whom Spike had loved so much that he had allowed her to treat him like a pathetic dog, always nipping at her heels, taking up her scraps, doing her bidding in hopes for just a bit of affection from her.

"Do you love him?" Dru asked as if in a world all her own. Her eyes glittered as she moved dreamily.

"Love?" Bella laughed, a whiskey-rasped laugh of 'what the fuck' more than anything else. "I think you have bigger things to worry about than who I love." I don't even know how to grasp a feeling like love... I don't even think that I want to grasp the feeling if this is what it does to you... makes you all whacked out and evil, she thought.

Drusilla stopped moving in circles and went into game face. "Oh, your facae is a poem. I can read it," she growled.

"Then I guess you already know why I'm here," Bella told her, her hand wrapped around the stake she concealed under her jacket.

She was ready to take Dru when she felt him. Goddammit, Spike! But she couldn't have expected that he could stay away. Like a trainwreck. Had to see it to believe it. He was scared. He was stunned. But he wasn't going to get in her way. She knew that much. The stake was in her hands, she was poised above Dru, ready to take her. Then he saw her stop.

"How, Dru? How... how did...?" He was choking on the lump in his throat. Bella had the decency to step back and let him go to Dru. His arms were around her. "You're... you're here... but how? The fire..."

"Take more than a fire to get rid of me, my King of Cups" she drawled, nestling her head in the crook of his neck. He would take her away from this crazy bitch with the bit. They would take her together and then have a celabratory fuck, she smiled remembering celebratory fucks from not so long ago.

Spike suddenly tensed. No. No. He didn't want this. He couldn't let Dru pull him in. Not at all. "Shall we tie her up, play with her a little first?" she smiled dreamily at Spike. Bella watched from the shadows.

Spike pulled away from her and turned to Bella, scrubbing at his eyes with fists in a fit of confusion... and then of clarity. He knew what he had to do. He walked to Bella and pulled her to him. He held her close and she could feel him shaking with grief. All at once she understood.

"We can be together for all of eternity, my Love. We'll sleep naked, like the animals and walk this world together, like King and Queen tasting something new and wonderful every night," Dru pleaded.

He turned back to her and she was reaching out to him, her arms open and her game face promising him return, without question, to the life he had forsaken long before Bella had arrived. He moved toward her. He opened an arm to her, kept the other close to his body. Dru smiled and crushed herself into his chest.

"I'll love you to the moon and stars and back again... and you'll love me," she purred.

He squeezed his eyes shut to keep back the tears. "That's where you're wrong, Love," he told her. " And it's because I do love you, Dru." He saw the look of realization and then horror move across her troubled eyes as he drove the stake through her.

He stood motionless, stake still in his hand. He'd slipped it away from Bella when he had gone to her. He stared down at the remains of Dru. What a way to fuck up the night, he thought sadly. It seemed like a dream, the moment he saw her until the moment she was gone.

"Collect the ashes," he told Bella in a cracking whisper. "Scatter them. Scatter them so that she can't ever come back."

She reached inside her jacket and retrieved her satchel. She started to bend to scoop up the pile of Dru's remains, but he caught her by the elbow on her way down. She looked up at him, so wounded. So lost. That soul of his was eating him up in the worst way. She could feel how broken he was as she took him in her arms, pulling his head down on her strong, small shoulder.

"Shhh... shhh... you did the right thing. You... oh, baby." She stroked his hair, trying her best to soothe him. She remembered the horrific look on her mother's face as Artemius took her life. Her own eyes had begin to well up with stinging tears. "Shh... It will be alright. Let me make this right."

He sniffed back his tears. How had he become so close to Bella so quickly? It was almost within a breath. It took him by surprise, the intense feeling he suddenly had for her. Neediness. Needy damned vampire. Could... could fall in love with her. He leaned against the wall behind her, watched as she stood over Dru's ashes.

She moved her hands slowly over the pile of what was once Dru, speaking quietly in Latin, and it rose like a tiny tornado. "Scatter!" she told it and with a brisk, quick gust they were gone.

"I think... I think I could use that drink now... if you want to join me," she told Spike.

"Yeah..." he said, nodding in a semi-detached way.

"Yeah?" she asked, taking his hand in hers.

"Yeah."