Work Text:
Buffy watched him squeeze his eyes shut for a moment, then look up at her with an awful mix of dread and hope in his gaze. “It’s two thousand and one, Buffy. And you’ve been dead for sixty-three days.”
She felt herself sway back and forth, loose in her body, her arms prickling and shivering. Sixty-three – “Was that all I got?” tumbled out of her mouth, and she couldn’t stop her voice from breaking. “Was that…” It hadn’t even been warm, it’d been more than warm, it’d been herself completed. It’d been gentle, it’d been peaceful, and it’d lasted endlessly for just a moment and for all that she’d done, just sixty-three days. It wasn’t anything to where she’d been, except now it was something. It’d been sixty-three days of herself completed.
She looked down at Giles, picking up fragments of the teacup. She looked at her hands, and at the drops of tea still on her left palm. She couldn’t hear anything, just the tides of blood pumping through her body. Putting a number to it – it hadn’t been long at all.
“Here,” Spike said, handing her a cloth. She nodded, taking it, gripping it tight, pulling on her scraped-up knuckles and ignoring the pain. Clenching her hand around it to keep from shaking. He didn’t look so different. His hair had changed and everything else was the same. He could have said anything about how long she’d been away and she might have believed him for a moment, for long enough that the truth would be easy after the lie. But Giles had asked her, not Spike. He’d asked her so quietly, and she’d forgotten how to lie and said she didn’t know. And then she’d understood she wasn’t there anymore. And she dropped the teacup. And he’d told her. He’d told her how long it’d been. All she’d gotten was sixty-three days.
“Why?” she whispered. “I wasn’t…I wasn’t gone. I was…”
“They didn’t know,” Spike told her. “They didn’t think to ask.”
“If they had,” Giles began, fragments of china in his hands. Buffy looked at the handle lying on the rug, still intact. All that tea wasted, darkening the flowers in his carpet. It’d hit the table and broke when she’d dropped it. He’d have to vacuum. Get rid of the tiny shards that’d cut without you feeling them until they were inside your skin. He said, “If they had thought to find out before trying to – to bring you back into the world, they’d never have been so cruel. I’m sorry, Buffy. I should have stopped them, but they knew…”
The thin sounds of the fragments against each other caught in her ears as he stood and kept speaking. She wanted to tell him not to step back on the rug, to be careful where he stepped, but her voice was gone again. Small and swallowed deep down. Buffy tried to force it, tried to close her eyes and go around it, but there was nothing. She opened her eyes and Spike was there, and Spike was there. She blinked, and felt the tears at the edges of her eyes, and Spike was there, solid and cool and everything unlike where she’d been for sixty-three days she’d been gone she’d been dead for sixty-three days only sixty-three days that’s barely two months that’s less than summer vacation that’s not even a semester that’s just a season I missed the Fourth I missed the fireworks and she was crying and wailing and his hands were on her back and his arms were around her face pressed into his shirt as he gathered her close and didn’t even whisper and didn’t even murmur and didn’t make a sound and just held her as she cried and cried and couldn’t stop and couldn’t make herself stop and she kept crying. I missed the Fourth and Dawn’s not here and I don’t know what time it is what’s sixty-three days from what day did I die I don’t remember it was so long ago just two months not long I should remember when I died when did I die why am I crying why can’t I stop crying why can’t I stop why can’t I stop.
“Buffy!” Giles cried. “Buffy, what’s going – are you, are –”
“It’s all right, Giles,” Spike called out, his chest moving as he drew in air to talk and then falling still again. “Go ahead and cry, Buffy,” he said quietly. “Let the tears out.”
She heard footsteps and she thought, he should put on shoes, and she thought, I should tell him to put on shoes, and she started bawling, her thoughts so clear, I should stop crying to tell Giles to get the vacuum cleaner, and she kept on crying.
Spike’s hands were solid on her body. His arms were strong around her, and he wasn’t even making the motions of breathing. He was just holding her as she sobbed, He’s not doing anything but holding me, and she hiccupped, All he’s doing is holding me, and she pulled back to look into his eyes. She blinked tears away and he looked down at her with eyes open, and soft, and she thought, He came back right away, and she tried to catch her breaths but they were coming too fast, all of them falling all at once.
“She’s all right, Rupes,” Spike said. He didn’t look away from her. His hand was on the back of her head, gentle against her hair, just there as she kept gasping and gulping in air, as she shuddered and slowed and finally, finally stopped crying. And he kept on holding her exactly as he’d been doing. Not even pulling her close or stroking her hair. Just holding her. “You’re all right, Buffy. Had to let it out. Had to let all the tears out. Sometimes you gotta let them come.”
She nodded, mute.
“Some water. And biscuits.”
No. That wasn’t – she didn’t – she croaked, then swallowed, and whispered, “Tea.”
“Make that tea ’stead of water,” Spike called out.
“Tea it is,” Giles called back.
Buffy felt herself jerk in Spike’s arms. A full-body jolt like she’d – “Is the…the…” She couldn’t put the words and ideas together to ask, instead raising her hand and reaching out towards his head, gesturing at the air around his ear.
“Long gone,” Spike said quietly. And smiled, faintly, the way he’d smiled when he’d seen her standing at the threshold of his crypt after he’d realized it was her. Not the bot. Her, Buffy, herself. “Dawn asked. Willow didn’t say no. Popped it right out, hey presto, in my head one moment then in my hand another.”
“Have you…” She gestured around her mouth. “Or are – do I have to? If you have…”
He shook his head. He’d let his hair grow out a bit. It was still mostly white, except it’d gotten all curly and twisty, and there was a little bit of brown roots peeking out. “Butcher shops only.”
“Oh,” she said. “Oh. Okay. So I don’t have to…” She made a fist, hitting him gently in the chest twice.
“Prefer it if you didn’t, myself.”
“Here you are, Buffy,” Giles said, putting the tray down on the table. It carried little sweet biscuits that looked close to gingerbread and another cup of tea. Another teacup. China again. Not some plastic thing. Something else that could break if she dropped it.
“You trust me,” she whispered, something fragile and powerful beating its wings inside her chest.
“Of course I trust you,” Giles said, almost laughing. Like the idea that he wouldn’t was so silly to be laughed at.
Spike leaned over and picked up the cup, his chipped black nails holding it gently as he brought it to her. She slid her hand beneath his, and with her hand around the teacup and his hand around hers, she tipped it forward, drinking slowly. Bitter and sweet and rich from the milk, it went down easy, and she stopped after two mouthfuls, putting it back on the tray and picked up a biscuit from the little plate. The biscuit was shaped like a kid’s drawing of the sun, round with little points in all directions, and it snapped in her mouth, sweet and spiced, one of Giles’s favorites, and she had to hold back tears again for knowing he’d given her one of his favorites.
She drank, and ate, the most she’d put in her stomach in the hours since she’d arisen with the early morning late-summer sunrise light. She wiped her mouth with the cloth she still had clenched in her hand, and let it fall next to the empty teacup, flexing her fingers to work out the stiffness. Full, and hollow, like in that old song, For her heart is full and hollow echoed in her mind, the guitar tuning gently as the woman sang. She couldn’t remember.
“What’s that song,” she started, then shivered, and remembered, Like a cactus tree, and she did remember, after all.
Buffy looked at Giles, watching her patiently, and at Spike, looking at her lovingly. She shifted on the couch, putting her hands in her lap.
“Where’s Dawn?”
“San Diego,” Spike answered without hesitation, before Giles could even open his mouth. “Sent her down there right after you – a few days after Glory. She’s with your Papa right now. Papa, Stepmum, normal and all ordinary like. Far away from the Hellmouth. Safe as houses.”
“They thought, everyone did, even I thought, this is no place to keep her,” Giles said. “This is no place for her to live. And while the robot served the illusion of your presence to protect Sunnydale, we knew it couldn’t adequately care for her, and I offered to, but she wanted to go. And I thought,” he pulled his glasses off, letting them dangle from his hand, “I thought, better to not fight her, there. Let her go, if she can.”
Buffy nodded. “Has anyone – I mean, do you think – do you think they’ve told her?”
“I shouldn’t think so,” he said.
She nodded. “Okay.” Full and hollow, wet and clean. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly, then another, and one last one, before she said, “I should tell her. Me. Not anybody else. If she doesn’t know,” If they haven’t told her, if they haven’t taken that away from me too, “I should be the one to tell her.”
“Of course! Of course you should, I’ll go –”
“Let me,” Spike said, stepping to his feet gracefully. “We always talk, I’ll make the call.” He held a hand out for Buffy, who didn’t need it, but took it just the same. Cool, and gentle, she suddenly was glad for his hand, to help her steady herself on her feet. She was as she’d been before the tower, no broken bones and no bruises, no cuts or scrapes, still as strong as any Slayer could hope to be, and yet, unsteady on her feet in a place that was wearing through her, weighing her down, brutal and stronger than she was. But Spike was right there, his hand steady around hers, and held her until she pulled away.
Giles dialed the number, and handed Spike the phone.
“Hey there, Jeanine,” Spike said. “I was – oh, she is? Good.” He worked his jaw as he waited. The conversation stuttered and spurted, and he kept twisting around, shifting his weight, as he and Dawn talked. “Hey, Pigeon. No reason from me, no. Just wanted to call. No, nothing’s wrong, got nothing to worry about for us up here. Anyway, though, there’s – yeah, there is. Not from me. You sitting down? Listen, a vampire asking if you’re sitting down’s like a German scientist saying hold onto your hat, the vamp’s not kidding, the vampire means it. You sitting down? Because there’s someone here that wants to talk to you.”
He handed the phone to her. She put it to her ear, trying to listen.
“Hello?” And there was her sister, her voice strong and angry and real, and Buffy couldn’t not go on with her life, not with her sister out there in the world. Not without seeing her again.
“Hi, Dawnie,” she said. “Hey. Dawn?” She’d known Dawn had been safe when she’d been dead, but she was alive again and she didn’t know anymore, and she had to know. She had to know. “I’m here,” Buffy said. “Dawnie, I’m here.”
“Buffy?”
“Yes. Yes. Dawn, it’s me.” If she hadn’t felt like crying again, her sister’s voice did it, her sister’s voice asking her name. Quiet, soft, uncertain and hopeful, Dawn was out there, my sister is out there¸ and she’d –
“Put Spike back on.”
“What?”
“Put Spike back on,” Dawn ground out. “Now.”
“But –”
“Now.” No room for arguing, no way to negotiate, Buffy knew that harsh voice well enough to know that was all she’d get, if she didn’t hand the phone over it’d be done, she’d hang up and as long as Dawn was on the phone she could pretend she was almost here, had that idea she could talk to her again as soon as she and Spike were done. She didn’t have a choice. She handed the phone to Spike, mute.
“Dawn, what’s –” He winced, and Buffy and Giles both grimaced at the amount of noise coming out of the headset. Buffy knew they didn’t need to hear the words to understand what Dawn was saying. Spike pulled a face, set his jaw, rolled his shoulders out, shook his head. “Dawnie – Dawn. Dawn!” he managed. “I don’t know much more than you do. Who you really wanna talk to is Giles. He’s right here. C’mon, Watcher, fill her in.”
Giles took the phone, listened, nodded, and went full-on Librarian Answer Mode voice. “This morning. Maybe sixteen hours, possibly eighteen. I – it was her decision. We didn’t yet – Egyptian. From what Anya said, it was quite – well, certainly. Willow found the ritual and – not from me. Good Lord, no. She managed to get her hands on an urn of Osiris, and – the internet, from what Tara told me. I, I thought – well, yes. Yes, I know. Too well. Believe me, I do.” Buffy wanted to step away and not listen, except she wanted to stay in the kitchen even more. Because in some weird way, Dawn was in the kitchen with her and Giles and Spike as long as she was on the phone and that same clear-headed giddy feeling of her crying jag was coming back. She pressed her hands over her mouth, Spike looking a second away from leaping into action, and Giles kept answering Dawn’s questions. “No. Please, you can’t expect me to answer that. No. You know the answer as well as I do, you know what I’ll say. You don’t need – Dawn, you don’t need – Dawn?” He pulled his glasses off, and Buffy could barely make out his, “Yes. I would have.” He put them back on and kept listening. Then he smiled, his voice suddenly soft and warm like a sunset. “Yes, I did. As soon as I saw her.”
He handed the phone back to Buffy. “Your sister would like a word with you.”
Buffy couldn’t stop herself. She might’ve been dead less than a day ago, and she was still herself. “Giles says you’d like a word. How’s ‘persnickety’?”
“That’s a good one,” Dawn said. Her voice was strong, and steady, and Buffy could hear how much work she was putting into keeping it that way. “So – you’re here.”
“Back in the world.”
“Did it hurt?”
“No.” That wasn’t a lie. The digging from her grave had been hard until her friend’s hands were there on her arms to help her out of the ground, and the less said about the early morning sunshine blinding her the better, and she wasn’t telling Dawn anything about where she’d been, but the actual coming back to life part hadn’t hurt at all. “No, it didn’t hurt.”
“Okay,” Dawn said, more quietly this time. “Good. Okay. Are you…what are you going to do now? Are you – are you staying in Sunnydale?”
“I’m coming to see you.” She stiffened when she heard what she’d said, and breathed out a tiny laugh when she realized she couldn’t possibly do anything else. My first laugh after death, she thought, and let out another little one. “I don’t know when I’ll be there, but I’m coming. I’ll be there as soon as I can.” She smiled. “Soon. I promise. You’re with – Dad’s San Diego condo, right?”
“Yeah.” Dawn’s voice was littler than it’d been just a moment earlier. “That’s…it’s where I am now.”
“So I – Dawn?”
“Give me a call before you leave,” she said, and hung up before Buffy could say anything. She didn’t move, kept staring at the water heater as the dial tone rang in her ear, and finally handed the phone back to Giles, trying not to let her hands shake.
“I’m going to see Dawn,” she told him, and turned to Spike. “I’m going to go see her.”
“We’ll take my car,” he said.
“You’ll what?” Giles snapped his head around.
“Not like we can all ride your midlife crisis-mobile down there, can we? I’ll get the DeSoto, she’s only parked twenty minutes away, we’ll be off –”
“No.” They both turned to look at her. “No. Giles, you’re staying here. Make sure they don’t – make sure nobody comes after me. I want to go see Dawn, and I want to go just…just me and Spike. Nobody else. I don’t want anyone pulling me back here. I’ll come back if I want to, but this – I want to go. We’ll take his car. It’s a good car. I’ll get some clothes from home and Spike can pick me up there. Giles, you call Dawn when we leave. It’s a four-hour drive and I want to get on the road as soon as possible.”
“Buffy,” Giles said, and that was all before he swept her into the most un-English, uber-Californian hug he’d ever given her. She wrapped her arms around him and didn’t squeeze him like he was squeezing her, just pressed her arms to his sides gently like Spike had done with her on the couch. “I’ll see to it you’re not followed,” he promised. “Let me know when you get there.”
“Will do,” she promised. “And thank you. For…” Her thoughts stumbled over each other like out of practice dancers. For being there for her, for taking her away from her old house to his safe apartment, for bathing her when she couldn’t do it herself, for inviting Spike in, for the phone call, for talking to her and understanding what she needed, for so many things, for being Giles. “Thank you for the tea.”
His smile could have lit the entire Las Vegas strip. She’d thanked him in his native British. “Of course, Buffy,” he said softly.
He drove her to Revello Drive with the convertible’s top down, letting the wind run through her hair, and stared down everyone who so much as attempted to speak to her. Buffy didn’t acknowledge them with more than fleeting eye contact. If they wanted to say they were sorry, she didn’t mind. Let them want what they want. But they knew there wasn’t anything they could say and wanted to say it anyway, and she didn’t have time for that. That afternoon she’d barely had time to notice that Willow and Tara had taken over her mother’s room, and Dawn’s room was gone, and hers was a robot’s time capsule. A time capsule for a robot that was now sitting on her bed, like it was waiting for her. God, she was never going to get used to that.
“Hello,” the robot said.
Buffy ignored her, grabbing a suitcase.
“I see that you’re sad,” she said.
Buffy kept packing. Mr. Gordo went first. Her jewelry box, that too, the special one. Underwear, build the outfit from the inside out, pack what she needed for a week, more than that and she could –
“What can I do to help you feel better right now?”
“Nothing,” Buffy shot out, then tried not to feel bad for being rude to a robot.
“I see you’re packing. That means you’re going away. If you’re going away then they’ll need me here,” she said. “It’s good that they need me here. I like serving a purpose to my friends.”
“They’re not your friends,” Buffy muttered.
“I beg your pardon?”
“They aren’t your friends,” she said again, head bent low over her t-shirts.
“Could you please repeat that?”
“They’re not your friends!” Buffy shouted. “They’re using you! You’re a tool to them! You don’t mean anything to them past what you can do for them, they don’t even like you! You’re nothing to them, they don’t care about who you are or what you want as long as you’re doing what they need you to do, all they want is for you to sing and dance for them, they don’t care about you! What do you even want? What do you even want here?”
The robot blinked at her. She was still sitting carefully on the bed, ramrod straight, in scuffed boots and old jeans and a shirt Buffy hadn’t ever liked much, her hair pulled back in a sensible patrol-style ponytail. She folded her hands in her lap, a small, careful gesture, and Buffy swallowed down a surprise lump in her throat.
“I want to be useful to my friends,” she told Buffy.
“Good luck with that,” Buffy said quietly, and went back to packing. The robot didn’t say anything more to her, but when she glanced back from the doorway, suitcase in hand, she raised a hand and gave a little wave. The most precise, deliberate wave Buffy had ever seen in her life. It put Queen Elizabeth and Princess Diana to shame. And somehow, even with the blank look on the robot’s face, the wave of her hand seemed just as real as any of the looks Willow and Xander and Tara and Anya gave her as she walked out the front door and down the steps to Spike’s DeSoto.
She put the suitcase in the back, climbed into the passenger seat, slammed the door, and they were off.
“You can crack a window if you want,” Spike said. He’d painted and papered them up since that one so-not-a-date, with a little strip of clean glass for the driver to peek out of and see the road from. Everything else was sun-proofed the old-fashioned way with near-total physical blockage.
“Thanks,” she said, and did just that. Actually rolling down the window, too. Not pressing a button, but turning a crank to let the air in. No power windows for Spike. With the window open and cool night air on her face, she felt something inside her unclench as the houses and streets of Sunnydale slid by. She felt it loosen a bit more when they passed the Now Leaving Sunnydale sign at the edge of town right before the highway turnoff and kept on driving. Maybe it was something about the movement of such a behemoth of a car. Maybe it was knowing she was leaving everything behind. Maybe it was that Spike hadn’t said anything since he said she could open a window.
“How come you stayed?” she asked. He didn’t look away from the road. “How come you didn’t leave for England or San Diego or LA or wherever? Why’d you stay in Sunnydale?”
“Well.” He switched to driving right-handed to roll down his window. Buffy watched him get out a half-full carton of cigarettes, pull one out and stick it in his mouth and stuff the carton back away, grab his lighter and light it up, and start smoking while he put the lighter away, all one-handed while keeping his eyes on the road. No motions wasted in the whole elaborate process. He took a long drag and held the breath and blew the smoke out the window. “Wanted to follow Dawn. Made a promise to you I’d look out for her an’ protect her to the end of the world. End of the world came and went, but I wasn’t about to turn my back on that promise.” He gestured with the cigarette like he was in an old black-and-white movie. Between his skin and hair and nails and coat, he might as well have stepped out of one. He took another pull of the cigarette before going on. “Only Dawn said – she kept saying, no, don’t want me coming. Kept saying, all the good I’d do, she was living safe with your papa and stepmum out in San Diego, far away from everything. An’ the way she argued, I thought – I can’t break that promise, but if this is what she’s saying, if this is what she wants, maybe letting her live ordinary’s the safest thing.”
“Ordinary.”
“Yeah. She’s – she’s everything you ever wanted to be. Normal. Ordinary. She’s no Key anymore, I can say that much. Glory’s spell didn’t work, so all the trans-dimensional mojo those monks stuck inside her when they made her, that all went poof,” he waved the cigarette around, smoke drifting out the window, as good an illustration of what’d apparently happened to Dawn as anything, “and it left all of Dawn herself behind. She figured, her being nothing but a little girl anymore, she could step away from all this, leave Sunnydale, and live out in the world. Me comin’ along would do more harm’n good, if that was what she wanted.”
“But you keep in touch,” Buffy said. Not a question.
“Phone calls, mostly. Wrote her a couple times. Jeanine thinks I used to be a janitor at your mum’s gallery, so that’s how I know you two.”
Buffy nodded. “Good lie.”
“Dawn thought it up.”
“Of course she did.”
They were way out of Sunnydale and starting to get deep into a long California nighttime drive. Buffy hooked an elbow out the window, and stared out at the thick buffer of trees behind the low guardrails through the little ditch, the concrete fence flashing past as they drove along, and tiny bits of light from the houses far beyond the road that still managed to shine through everything in between them. She and Spike kept driving on, over the little twists and bends and rises of the road, out past the last bits of town and to bunched-up, pillow-soft hills and the twisting, dancing trees rising from the tall summer grasses. Live oaks that branched out as much as they went up, strange nighttime shapes clustering together in the little valleys that she knew she’d only see as trees if it was daytime. And then they were out of the hills and at the ocean. The most direct route to Dawn was the 1 to the 101 to the 5, heading south with the coast. They’d hit LA soon, and then that big stretch between LA and San Diego that was a whole lot of nothing, and then – Dawn. Not quite Dawn with the dawn, but close. Close enough to almost be funny.
She rolled her head around to look at Spike when she asked, “Did I have a funeral?”
He didn’t even twitch an eyebrow. “Not what I’d call one. We buried you and said a few words, put up a headstone a few days later. Not a big thing. Didn’t think it was what you’d deserved, but they all said, they didn’t want the world thinkin’ you’d died. Keep it secret and keep it safe, keep all the nasty things from chargin’ the Hellmouth without a Slayer on it, nobody but us needs to know.”
“So my dad doesn’t know I died.” Spike nodded. “Who knew I was gone?”
He set his jaw, tossed the filter out the window onto the road, and began the elaborate cigarette routine again. Buffy waited, letting him smoke as the movement of the car drifted and flew its way into her tired bones, until he tapped some ash away and said, “Angel. His crew. They knew. Willow, she made a trip to tell them firsthand.”
“Oh.” Buffy looked back out the window at the flat nighttime ocean. In her head, she knew it was important they’d told him what’d happened. He still sometimes fought by her side, they were her friends down in LA, they deserved to know. And in her heart, she didn’t know if she would’ve made that choice. If it mattered who knew.
“You wanna tell –”
“No,” she said. “Not yet. Not until after we see Dawn.”
“Right.”
“Have you gone to visit her?”
“Just calls and letters.”
“She’ll be happy to see you,” Buffy said.
“Expect so. Been missing her myself.”
Buffy nodded and went back to watching the road, breathing in the salt and smog and cigarette smoke all mixing together in the air as it blew across her face. There weren’t any electric wires humming out here, and not much in the way of streetlights, either. She couldn’t see any stars or the moon, but there was light on the ocean coming from somewhere. Enough light to see how dark it was.
She’d never been to the beach with Dawn. Never really been. She had memories of it, the summer after Dad married Jeanine, the summer after graduation when she and Dawn had taken six weeks to live with Dad and their new stepmother when Dawn collected two shells every day, just two, because she didn’t want to take too many all at once and be an undue stress on the ecosystem, her own words, and those shells were on the picture that was in her suitcase in the back, something real out of something that’d never happened, except she remembered it happening. She didn’t remember dying, not either time. But it’d happened. She didn’t remember it, and that didn’t mean it wasn’t real.
I’ll make a new memory of it, she thought. Go to the beach with her and make a real, honest memory of it. The two of us. We’ll make it real together.
She looked at Spike, still staring out at the road ahead. I could hold him, she thought, and almost startled in surprise, and let the though slide through her head again to make sure it’d happened. I couldn’t – no. No, I really could. I could hold him like I can’t hold anyone else. Like how I couldn’t really hug Giles. Like how I can’t – but I could with Spike. I could really hold him.
“So how’ve you been?” she asked before she could stop herself. “How are you doing?”
Spike glanced over, cigarette in his mouth and a smile on his face, and he tapped some ash out the window before he answered. “Better with you here, thanks ever so for asking.”