Chapter Text
As is well known, the return of the beloved
does not correct
the loss of the beloved
- Persephone the Wanderer, Louise Glück
The rumble of hog motorcycles speeding (please, somebody) away, the crackle of distant flames, and the far-off, belated sound of sirens assaults Spike’s ears. The oily scent of burning petrol overlays all the usual Sunnydale smells, and Dawn is missing.
He rushes down Revello Drive, aware the sounds are growing yet more distant, knowing that is a good sign. By the time he’s reached the path up to the Summers house he can recognize none of the Scoobies have been around in hours and hours, and Dawn is missing.
The door is cracked just a hair open and Spike rushes through it, heart in his throat, and Dawn is—
Dawn is here. He can smell her, a fresh scent overlaid with adrenaline-sweat, he can hear the sound of her step, distinct as robinsong to the ear.
For just a second, it all flashes through his mind’s eye, anyway: Dawn’s body splayed out after some hell-creature made sport of her. Blood all around her still-little body. Big blue eyes open forever. The image rushes through him like a seizure. Something in him creaks a little, like a rotten floorboard getting ready to give way under a careless step, and it sparks a kind of desperate rage inside of him. An inferno.
“Dawn!” he shouts.
“I, I’m here!”
Her voice sounds a little strange: thready. Off.
It only makes the flames lick higher.
“Thank god!” he shouts as he sees her at the top of the stair. “Scared me half to death,” he says, and hears himself. Hears two things: that the metaphor doesn’t make sense and that it easily trips off his tongue. He’s Dawn’s big brother now, only family she has, but it strikes him now how easy it is to play the part, like all this time he’s just been waiting for permission to look after a Key in the shape of a girl. “Well, more to death,” he allows, before the rage flickers back to life. “You! I could kill you,” he tells her.
She’s still walking down the stairs. Her gait is strange. He wouldn’t recognize it if he heard it far-off. It’s like she’s afraid each step might give way if she doesn’t hit it with her toe just right. More rotten floorboards, everything coming apart. “Spike,” she says, but he isn’t in any mood for her excuses. She isn’t taking him seriously. She needs to take this seriously; he can’t lose her, too.
“I mean it!” he assures her. “I could rip your head off one-handed,” he says, demonstrating how he would grip her by the throat in some other, more brutal life, “and drink from your brainstem.”
“Look,” Dawn says.
Buffy—it is Buffy—that’s her name—stands at the top of the stair. She’s ashamed of how long it took her to recognize Spike’s voice.
Well. Not recognize, exactly.
It took that long to put Spike’s voice into context.
When she heard him shouting, threatening, it was like the sound flipped through a Rolodex of memories. That voice meant danger!—no, wait, she should mostly be annoyed, tinged with reluctant amusement. No, that wasn’t right anymore, either.
Oh! Buffy thought, as a wave of trust and awe seemed to wash through her, still with an aftertaste of that irritated humor. Spike’s voice nearby meant Dawn was safe. That was a good feeling.
Til the end of the world! He must have meant it.
It had looked very apocalypsy outside.
“Look,” Dawnie’s saying, and it takes Buffy a moment to realize Dawn means at her.
“Yeah, I’ve seen the bloody bot before,” Spike is saying dismissively, “I didn’t think she’d patch up so—” And then his gaze snags on her.
Oh. Buffy is putting it together, now. The bot. That was what she’d seen torn to pieces, outside.
Poor thing.
That’s the last thought Buffy has for awhile that isn’t about Spike.
His eyes have gone—startled. Startled is a good word. It describes the shape of his face. But there’s more. Buffy doesn’t think it’s just because she was—elsewhere—that she can’t read the whole story written there.
She’s sure, dead or living, no one has ever looked at her like Spike is looking at her, now.
“She’s kind of, um,” says Dawn. “She’s been through a lot.”
Spike still seems to be realizing, in bits and pieces, that she’s really standing here. Or maybe he’s realizing over and over and over again.
“There’s,” says Dawn. “There are some things…”
Is it possible Spike’s staring because her buttons aren’t done up properly? Buffy seems to remember that people associate nakedness with sex, here. She doesn’t want to appear to be taunting Spike with sex by being only half-dressed. She frowns down at the buttons on the loose top Dawn found her. She reties the halter behind her neck so it lies properly and buttons the last of the stays at the front. The absence at her back twinges strangely.
She flexes her shoulders as she works, examining that final set of feelings in the Spike-Rolodex. Trust— and awe that she could—and a kind of now-I-can-rest relief because of his strength and devotion. Had before-Heaven Buffy been in love with Spike? She feels that isn’t quite right, but it’s close. The awe part especially, even recalled through the muffling gauze of time and death, bears a certain resemblance.
“Spike,” Dawn says, “are you okay?”
Buffy jerks her head away from her busy fingers to see that Spike’s face has gone through another transformation. She can read something like disbelief—fear?—in his open-book features.
“I,” he says, and stops.
Buffy waits. A twinge, this time not at her shoulders.
Deeper.
She realizes she is worried about Spike.
Like Dawn is.
“What did you do?” he whispers, and Buffy realizes another thing.
Spike’s gaze has been searching.
He is trying to figure out if it’s really Buffy—or if it’s something else.
Buffy isn’t sure how to fix it.
“Me?” Dawn squeaks, in a way that ought to be totally normal, but instead physically hurts Buffy’s literal brain.
She winces.
“…Nothing!” says Dawn.
Buffy believes her.
“Her hands.”
“Right here,” Buffy says softly.
Spike’s gaze flickers up to her face. “Your hands,” he corrects, knowing what she wants right away: for them to acknowledge she’s here, she’s really here. Everything feels unreal enough without her sister and her—without her allies talking over her head.
“I was gonna fix ‘em,” Dawn says, apologetically. “I don’t know how they got like that.”
“I do,” Spike says, and she watches him flicker away a moment, to a long-ago time. “Clawed her way out of her coffin, that’s how.” Then, he seems to remember her adjuration to include her. “Isn’t that right?” he says. Voice still low. Even. He hears how she’s speaking. He probably saw her wince. He’s already making way for her.
It’s so kind.
She wonders if that’s about to change.
“It’s,” Buffy says, glancing up at him. A glancing glance seems to be all she can manage, with him staring at her like that. “It’s what I had to do.”
“I’ve done it myself,” he says.
Well.
Of course he has.
Buffy hurts a lot, everywhere. The absence-weight at her back aches. The lights are so bright, and everything is so loud. Even the halter top feels weird at the back of her neck, a pressure that’s bothersome and strange. She would really prefer to be naked, she realizes all over again, but once again her higher sensibilities inform her that’s unacceptable here, and that Spike—
She shakes her head.
Spike wouldn’t get turned on, she realizes. He’d whip his coat off and cover her with it, like a knight in a painting. It would make him and Dawn worry.
Buffy recognizes the workings of her brain are strange, now. Different from how they used to be: both more analytical and through an outsider’s lens.
More analytical because an outsider’s lens? Nothing quite makes sense anymore, nothing aligns, so she has to puzzle it all out.
Buffy comes back to herself realizing that they’ve all been lost in thought: her, Dawn, and Spike. Spike seems to come to life just as she does, reaching out one arm. “Come,” he says. “We’ll take care of you.”
Spike herds her towards the living room; she sees him reach for her shoulder, then twitch back, like he isn’t allowed to touch.
Buffy looks up at him. He’s still behind her. He’s still herding her forward, so she moves, but she wonders why he thought he couldn’t even press a hand to her shoulder. It’s possible he thought she would shout, or flinch, but she thinks her first impression was right: he’s afraid of taking liberties.
He’s afraid she’s so damaged that she might not protest even though she’d want to, were she in her right mind.
Ought she? Protest?
She isn’t sure.
The ways of people are strange.
The ways of vampires interacting with people are possibly stranger.
He’s asking Dawn to get some things to fix up her hands, and then she’s settling down onto the couch, and he’s perched on the coffeetable across from her. He finds his courage, or else he can’t navigate around the shoals of necessity, because he’s suddenly clasping her hands.
Oh, she thinks, looking down. Spike’s hands are cold, but his grip is firm. The pressure feels foreign, but also nice: grounding.
She thinks she remembers this.
Touch: good for humans. Settling.
Kind.
Spike is being kind.
She looks up to find that his gaze is rising simultaneously.
Spike is staring at her again in that way that no one else ever has. She feels that twinge again, the deep-down one.
“How long was I gone?” she says. She can hear emotion in her voice for the second time. The first: irritation at being left out. The second: a little empathy. It must have been a long time. Spike is looking at her like the very sight of her is reconstructing his whole world, brick by brick.
“…A hundred and forty-seven days, yesterday. A hundred and forty-eight today.” He gives her the bare curve of a smile. “Except today doesn’t count, does it?” He looks down at their clasped hands again, and Buffy gets the distinct impression he feels he’s getting away with something. “How long was it for you?”
She shakes her head. It’s too hard to explain. And then—he’s holding her so lightly, but his thumb brushes up against one of the worse scrapes, and—
When she opens her eyes, Spike has drawn back, and his eyes are wide, staring just behind her. That’s the first thing she notices.
The second is that his stance is defensive, like he’s getting ready to protect her from the appendages that have burst from between her shoulderblades.
That’s when Dawn walks back in with their well-stocked home medical kit.
“Well. Now you’ve seen them,” Dawnie says to Spike.
Spike gawps.
He can’t help it.
They’re enormous. They’re wings.
They’re Buffy’s.
Somehow, he still has hold of her hands.
“You startled me,” Buffy explains. Quiet, still.
The wings shake out a bit. Settle.
Spike finds his gaze darting back up to her face.
It’s still the same.
Buffy’s face.
Buffy’s large, dark eyes. Green and gray and even-keeled. Patient.
Her little nose. Snubbed, just a bit, at the tip.
Sweep of sweet gold hair. Darker lashes that hint at its true color.
She’s waiting for him to say something, he thinks.
“Er,” he says.
Try harder!
“Does it hurt?” he tries.
She shakes her head. “Aches. A little,” she says, shifting her shoulders as if her muscles are a bit knotted instead of—Jesus Christ. “I. Came back like this.”
They’re lovely, is the thing.
Like everything else about her.
They’re not pure white.
They’re this kind of mottled cream-and-white-and-dark-gold, and there’s a bit of iridescence in some of them so that certain parts look a little bluish. He isn’t sure if the plumage is a real blue in places or if that bit’s a trick of the light.
“They’re pretty messed up too,” Dawn says, coming the rest of the way forward and setting the med kit down, like this is an unfortunate but entirely normal thing to happen, and Spike realizes they have not raised her right— or maybe they’ve raised her exactly right, for Hellmouth values of ‘right’. “All ruffled and turned around, huh, Buffy?”
Buffy blinks and then suddenly, one of the huge wings is moving forward, curling around so she can inspect it, but Dawn and Spike are in the way, so it’s more like she’s suddenly mantling them than just getting a closer look.
I’m dreaming, he thinks, not for the first time.
Then, they do look a right mess. Her wings are laced through with gravedirt, feathers turned all the wrong way, some of the primaries snapped. He amends the terrible picture of Buffy awakening in her grave and beating her way out to awakening in her grave with wings flailing against the wood and it’s somehow worse.
“Well, we can fix that, too,” he hears himself say, and it makes no sense how matter-of-fact he sounds. But for now he’s—not Spike. He thinks he’s William. The William who rubbed his mother’s back until she’d finished coughing up blood and responded with, there you are! All clear, Mother. Now, which novel shall we read in the garden to-day?
It slips on easy, that worn and weathered role.
And then there’s a clatter and Scoobies are spilling through the door, all a-chatter, Buffy’s wing snapping back behind her to keep her view of the door clear. Spike makes out, “Buffy! Are you here?” and “you’re—” until they catch sight of Buffy and, one at a time, fall silent.
“Oh my god,” is the first coherent thing that emerges from the Scooby pile. It’s Tara.
Spike moves to stand, escape—it sounds like they knew about this, and of course they did, of course it was Willow, who else would—?!
But Buffy’s damaged hands tighten around his, wordlessly.
She isn’t even looking at him, she’s looking at them, but it doesn’t matter. She could crook her finger and he’d follow her into hell.
So he settles back into his seat as Dawn rounds on the newcomers.
“…Buffy?” Xander breathes.
“Well!” says Anya. “She’s not a zombie! I say we celebrate.”
“You knew she was back?” Dawn demands. “How did you know?”
Spike frees one hand with a bit of difficulty. He shoots Buffy a look that he hopes conveys—god, whatever alchemical reaction is going on inside of him—and jostles the med kit a little, demonstratively, in his free hand.
He sees her breathe out. The ghost of a smile.
He could die all over again.
“H-how?” Willow manages. “W-what? H-how?”
“I t-thought you s-said she was in a hell dimension,” Tara moans.
“I, I thought she was!” Willow exclaims. “She, she fell through a portal to hell!”
“Hey,” says Dawn, dangerously.
Spike looks up to find she’s planted herself in front of the two of them and folded her arms.
“Back off,” she says.
And…
The babbling cuts off.
Buffy gives him another one of those tiny smiles. So tiny as to be microscopic, being honest. But the edge of her lip curls the barest amount and she gets this crinkle at the corner of one eye.
He loves her so much it could possibly explode out of him, just guts spilling everywhere.
He begins dabbing at the cuts with a little disinfectant.
Buffy winces. The wings shudder.
“Sorry, love. Sorry,” he whispers over her hands.
“You did this. What did you do?” Dawn demands, gesturing towards the otherworldliness that is Buffy, and it’s every bit as accusatory as it ought to be.
“A spell,” Willow says. “We, we did a spell.”
“W-we didn’t think it worked—”
“Well, it worked!” Dawn shoots back, and Spike realizes, slowly, that he is proud of her. He moves on to Buffy’s other hand, dabbing at the wounds, there. “You brought her back but you left her in her coffin!”
“Ohgod,” says Willow, clapping a hand to her mouth.
“She had to claw her way out and, and, I can’t believe you were so careless!”
“Dawnie,” Buffy says. Her eyes have squinched closed. Spike thought it was the pain in her hands, but apparently it’s also the noise.
Dawn breathes out, one long, low whoosh of air. She plops next to Buffy, who immediately mantles her wing around Dawn on that side.
Willow’s cheeks are streaked with tears. “Buffy,” she whispers. For the first time, she seems aware of Buffy as a person again, and not a project. Her voice is the right volume, and guilt drips off her. “I, I didn’t know, I really thought—are you all right? Are you… can I do anything to help?”
Buffy looks at her a long moment, then at the rest of the Scoobies: Tara, Xander, Anya. “You couldn’t have known,” she says, eventually. She pauses again. Frowns, as if something has just occurred to her. “I wish you wouldn’t have left me there.” Her frown deepens. “It was hard to get out. And. Confusing.”
Spike looks up from where he’s retrieving gauze to see the kids all looking green. Harris speaks first.
“Oh, god, Buffy. The bikers—there were demons. They chased us away from you. We had no idea you were… awake in there.”
Buffy blinks at him.
“Was there a ‘sorry’ in there at all?” Spike snaps, then winces a split second after Buffy. “Sorry,” he murmurs, tucking the end of the gauze in place on Buffy’s right hand, then turning to face the Scoobies. “You lot took our girl out of heaven and left her in her actual grave, and I’ve yet to hear an honest apology from any of you.”
“Like you’re sorry any part of Buffy is back,” Xander hisses. His gaze flickers down to where Spike is mummifying Buffy’s left hook. “…And letting you touch her,” he adds.
“Xander,” Buffy says, and her voice is quiet, but there’s warning in it. “Spike is helping.”
“Yeah, it’s why Spike is helping that’s—”
“Xander,” Buffy says again, in the same tone. Her eyes are still very large and very dark.
Her second calm admonition seems to do the trick. Xander shuffles in place as if to physically change course. “Are you okay, Buff?” he says, and Spike despises the shot of fellow-feeling that shakes through him.
Harris is so worried.
Buffy is calm and remote, but she’s letting Spike look after her and it is—yes, it is—very much out of character. Is she all right?
“I’m okay,” Buffy says, swiftly. She settles the wings. “Everyone else can… see these, right?”
Xander issues a half-hysterical giggle.
Anya leans forward a little. “They’re very attractive,” she says in her straightforward way, “if you like that sort of thing.”
Buffy ducks her head. “Thank you, Anya,” she murmurs.
“Do they confer special powers?” Anya queries.
Buffy looks up, gazes around the room. “I don’t… know,” she says.
“Oh!” Willow says, excited. “That could be a thing, you know, there are all kinds of possible—”
“Back off, okay?” Dawn snaps from beside Buffy. “Geez, you guys need to learn to take a hint. Spike and I were doing fine helping Buffy. The cavalcade is a little much. Can you guys go away, now?”
Spike bites his lip.
Buffy settles back into the couch, feathers quite literally ruffling with upset.
They make it very hard to pretend she’s as calm as her face looks.
Spike realizes there’s only so long he can fiddle with the bandage around Buffy’s left hand and finally tucks the end of the gauze into place and lets go.
“Thank you, Spike,” Buffy says clearly. She curls her wing around Dawn. “Thanks, Dawnie,” she says, and Spike doesn’t think he’s imagining that warmth in her voice, like the first rays of winter sunlight cresting the horizon line, and Buffy looks at her friends, puzzled. “Thank-you, everyone. For. Bringing me back.” She frowns. “I think.”