Tara closes the door to Dawn's room quietly behind her. She casts a last look back, hearing the soft snuffling mewls still trickling underneath the door, but they sound significantly less desperate now.

She bites her lip, uncertain of whether she should go back in, and nearly bumps straight into Giles as he leaves Buffy's room. She tries to smile, but the calm exterior she'd maintained as she'd soothed Dawn finally slips, a grimace of anger twisting her face that is unusual on her naturally mild features.

Giles motions for Tara to follow him as he moves to descend down into the scene of destruction below-

…Of which there isn't one.

The coffee table sparkles in arrogant newness, not a speck of dust or scratch on its surface. No debris litters the floor, and no splinters of wood barb the carpet. No marks on the walls to indicate the coffee table's trajectory into the wallpaper.

Willow stands in the center, sheepishly wringing her hands under Giles' burning glower.

"You see, I-I fixed it?" She gestures weakly at the immaculate living room. "Good as new? A-and I can fix the rest, I just-"

"Pack a bag," Giles cuts her off coldly.

Willow blinks, slightly stunned by the furious look in his eyes. "Of… supplies?"

"Of your clothes, Willow," he growls, barely keeping his voice in a civil register as his fingers tighten around the leather of Spike's coat still clenched in his hand. "You'll have to stay with me whilst I contact a coven in Devon-"

"Devon?" Willow blurts, taking a step back

"I'll need to see if they have room for you-"

"I'm not going to Devon!"

"You need help." He takes his glasses to clean them so he doesn't lose control as he desperately feels he might. "We can get you help, but you cannot stay in this house-"

"So-so what, you're just going to frogmarch me out?!" Willow all but shouts. "I said I'd fix it, and I did. It's just- it's just a spell gone wrong and a smashed coffee table and I wasn't even the one who-"

"YOU'RE OUT OF CONTROL!" Tara screams from behind Giles, making Willow jump at the sudden lurch in volume. "You act like everything and everyone is just a problem to solve because it's not exactly how you want it!"

"Tara! I was just—"

"If you dare tell me you were just trying to help—" Tara stops herself, taking a hard, hurting breath in as she presses her fists into her eyes to stop angry tears from leaking out. "If you don't go now, then we have to be over. This has to end. Either you go and get help, or—"

"No! Tara!" Willow makes an exasperated huff like she's surrounded by five-year-olds demanding she go to jail for some imagined slight. "Baby, don't say that, I know you're angry, but- I- I didn't mean to upset anyone, I was just trying to-"

Tara takes a step back out of Willow's reach, batting her hands back as Willow tries to bring her into an embrace. "You-you have no respect for any of us, Willow." Her voice trembles, climbing out of its normally subdued register.

"That's not true!"

"You can't just invade someone's mind like that! Haven't you ever heard of consent?!"

"Tara- stop! You're acting like I raped her or something—"

"You did in a way." Giles sighs and readjusts the coat in his hands. "You've misused your power to extremes I never fathomed possible."

Blood rises in Willow's face. "What?!"

Magic crackles in her fingers as Giles meets her eyes with an incredulous scowl, watching spidery black lines wriggle in the pale skin around her eyes.

"You should never have even approached the magics you did, and what you've done now is beyond deplorable. There are consequences to using magic, and you cannot spell them away."

"I bought her back!" Willow snaps, stuttering defenses dying on her tongue as anger pitches forward. "Buffy was in HELL and I bought her BACK! How can you stand there and tell me I was wrong!?"

"I wasn't in hell."

Buffy's monotonous voice from the top of the stairs fractures the argument immediately as all three whip their heads up to her.

Willow's eyebrows furrow, her dizzy, magic-drunk mind assuming the spell is still affecting Buffy's memories. "No, you-you were, but it's ok, we got you out again-"

"I wasn't in hell, Will," Buffy repeats, staring down at them with hollow eyes.

"Where…" Willow starts, still clinging to the idea that Buffy might offer some sort of redemption for the blame placed squarely on her shoulders over the entire unpleasant ordeal. "Where were you?"

Buffy's gaze is steady, a flutter of her eyelashes for less than a second the only indication of the pain beneath her statuesque exterior.

She shrugs. "Somewhere better than here."

In the corner of her eye, Willow catches a look of outrage as it overtakes Giles' face before he carefully squashes it, biting it down until he looks merely…. sorrowful.

"I think you should go." Buffy's voice cracks a little, but she still doesn't look away. Willow shakes her head, ready to pull together more excuses.

"Buffy—"

"Please just go."

There's no room in her tone for argument. Cold and flat and dead, as if emotion can't reach her anymore. Like a little switch has been flicked off inside.

Willow swallows, her eyes darting from Tara to Giles to Buffy and finding no compassion in any of them.

The magic crackling in her fingers itches, like ants in the skin, insisting that she can fix it all, it can be just the way she wants it, everything can be just as it's supposed to be if she just-

And for once, she doesn't listen.

"...Alright."

She climbs the stairs, awkwardly sliding past Buffy down to her room to collect a handful of her things, eyes already drowning in tears.


Spike rubs his temples, trying to alleviate the tension in his brain that can't seem to settle around the feeling of all his memories suddenly being shoved back in. Over a century of memories. Surely brains aren't supposed to hold so much…

After the warmth of Buffy's house, the crypt feels frigid and stale. And achingly lonely. There's no sounds of Dawn playing her music as she studies. No conversation between Tara and Willow in the next room. No soft Buffy breathing next to him.

Just a heavy, stretching silence that seems endless and eternal until it's interrupted by the screech of the crypt door's metal hinges.

"Might I have a word?"

The clipped steely voice settles too loud in Spike's head, pushing the headache he's had for the last hour higher into his frontal lobe. He turns stiffly in his armchair. It takes effort, as he's half slumped into the ratty, stained upholstery.

"Christ," Spike mutters as he groggily focuses on Giles in the crypt doorway. He pulls himself up by his elbows. "Make yourself at home, watcher." He says with a flick of his wrist at the dusty, cold interior of the crypt.

"How gracious of you," Giles huffs as he steps down from the doorway. He holds out the duster in his hand to Spike. "Yours, I believe?"

Spike stares at the coat for a few tense seconds, looking for all the world like a defendant on trial as the jury is asked to please direct their attention to exhibit A.

He grits his teeth and begrudgingly takes the coat, fishing in the pockets for a pack of cigarettes, drawing one out and lighting it with a flick of his zippo.

After taking in the expression on Giles' face he offers him the packet.

Giles' eyes narrow before some little half-buried-behind-books-and-archives voice says fuck it and takes one, lighting it with Spike's lighter.

He takes a drag like he did when he was a teenager, cigarette pinched between thumb and forefinger, and it hits the same as it did then. The smoke settles easily into his lungs like a familiar acquaintance.

He flicks the ash to the floor and leans against the crypt's pillar, eyes glancing over the coat now draped across the arm of Spike's chair.

"You mind awfully telling me what it was doing in Buffy's room?" Giles asks, pulling in another drag without taking his eyes off Spike.

Spike's eyes focus on the end of his slowly burning down cigarette as he avoids the watcher's gaze.

"Is she alright?" he croaks, fidgeting uncomfortably under Giles' glower.

"I won't ask twice, Spike."

Rather than answer, Spike sucks more smoke into his lungs as he leans on his knees, refusing to meet Giles' eyes. What more could he possibly be threatened with?

Giles lets the smoke of his own cigarette out of his nostrils slowly, reading Spike's self-pitying hopelessness clearly in the slump of his shoulders.

He clears his throat.

"We never thanked you," he says quietly, deciding to allow just a seed of compassion to flower in the dark, barren wasteland of patience he holds for Spike. "For what you did for Dawn."

That got Spike's attention. Bewildered blue eyes under furrowed brows focus fully on him for the first time.

"Believe me when I say that thanking you does not come naturally to any of us." Giles flicks more ash off the butt between his fingers. "But I do recognize that it wasn't through coercion you decided to stay for her. That means something. Though I'm not sure specifically what." He finishes the cigarette and grinds it out underneath his patent leather shoes, taking the opportunity to break away from those penetrating blue eyes that seem to burn in the dark. "So, here it is. A one-time, never to be repeated offer for the benefit of the doubt. Why were you there?"

Spike swallows, daunted by Giles' words but too dazed by the entire ordeal to fully process them. He lets the smoke uncurl from his mouth in a long, slow sigh, rubbing a bit more dried blood off his top lip.

"She was having nightmares," he says eventually, leaning back into the armchair, vaguely remembering the screaming horror Buffy had woken up from on the sofa the morning before. How her eyes hadn't been all the way closed. "More like night terrors, really. And day ones… asked me to stay over."

Giles glares suspiciously. "Why you?"

Yeah. Why me? Spike thinks not for the first time that day, pinching his lips into a tight line of bitterness.

"Think she just wanted not to be the only one in the room who'd crawled out of a grave."

They're silent together for a moment or two. Not uncomfortably so, but not relaxed either.

"What does the witch have to say for herself?" Spike asks after a while.

Giles tucks his hands into his pockets and squares his shoulders against the concrete pillar. It's faint, but Spike can almost see the young man he was. Angry, full of vengeance waiting to be aimed at someone. Something. Anything.

They called him Ripper for a reason, I guess…

"She's staying with me whilst I try and find her some help," Giles answers, but his words don't sound fatherly or compassionate at all. "There's a coven in Devon that might be a good fit."

"Bit of a commute," Spike says, grinding out the cigarette butt under his boot.

Giles nods stiffly. "I'll have to go with her if she agrees to it."

Spike blinks a couple of times, feeling like the headache is impairing his ability to understand the watcher clearly. "Back to Ol' Blighty?"

"Yes."

"Oh, well, that's just what the Slayer needs, innit?" he scoffs disbelievingly. "Why not one more person abandoning her to this fucking literal hellhole."

"Better that than a fresh apocalypse on our hands because Willow lost control of herself. Again."

Spike bites his tongue, shaking his head but knowing he's right. God, he hates it when that tweed-encased asshole is right.

"Fine," he huffs, digging his thumbs into his eyes and outwards, trying to push the swelling ache towards the back of his head. "Can hold down the fort for you no problem—"

"That is most definitely not what I am insinuating you do, Spike," Giles interrupts. He takes his glasses off to clean them, and Spike's stomach drops, knowing just what's coming. "I think you should stay away for a while. For your own sake as much as hers."

Spike opens his mouth to object, but Giles doesn't give him the room to. "You can't deny you are… profiting quite severely from her vulnerability."

"I did NOTHING! I told you all—"

"If I thought for one second that you had taken advantage of her that way, make no mistake, cigarette ash would not be the only dust decorating your disgusting floor." Giles bulldozes over Spike's protests before regaining his composure. "I believe you have her best interests at heart for once. However, it's complicated enough as it is. Give her space. You could both use it."

It goes unsaid that should Buffy recover and decide that whatever intimacies she shared with Spike were nothing more than a rebound of a depressed mind, all for the better. But his voice softens microscopically as Spike's eyes drop to the gashes over his hands.

"I think we can both agree she's not in a healthy frame of mind, and any…" Giles' mind stutters over the word relationship, but he perseveres, "connection the two of you have built is not on an even footing."

Spike nods, hating himself and hating Giles and hating Willow and hating the whole evil writhing mess of it. But underneath his broiling self-pity, he can just about recognize that the watcher is attempting to be… gentle. For lack of a better word. Not forbidding or banishing. No curses or threats that he'd honestly come to expect at this point.

Between the two of them, that could almost count as a blessing. As close to one as Spike would get anyway…

"And if she… if she needs me back?" he says without looking up from the scabs on his knuckles.

"I'm her watcher. Not her keeper." Giles shrugs against the pillar. "The invitation needs to come from her."

Spike takes a long useless breath in. His eyes are stinging, and he pinches them shut.

"Alright."

"Good man," Giles mumbles as he clears his throat.

Spike snorts, raising an eyebrow that says fucking neither as a slightly sad smirk tugs at Giles' lips in reply.