Buffy didn't say much about Spike right after he died. We had a little bonfire/memorial service on the beach a couple days after the battle, and Buffy spoke then, and cried a little, but after that she focused totally on figuring out the future. I was expecting to wind up in a boarding school somewhere while Buffy went off to find all the new slayers, so it was a huge surprise when she asked me if I wanted to come with her on a tour of Europe. We went to England first, to Giles' family estate. We spent weeks recovering and planning and dozing off in Giles' big, cavernous wingchairs, and then we bought matching suitcases and sallied forth, just us.
I learned a lot about my sister on that trip – stuff I'd sort of subconsciously known or guessed before, but never really processed. It wasn't me being dazzlingly observant; Buffy, who'd always been Little Miss No-One-Can-Know-What-I-Suffer, all of a sudden needed her friends to understand what being a slayer was like. To protect the new ones. So she forced herself to talk. She wasn't very good at it, sounding mostly maudlin and whiny, or so embarrassed and terse as to be practically unintelligible, but it was good for her and me. And eventually, inevitably, she got around to talking about Spike.
The thing about hotel rooms is it's seriously impolitic to lock your roommate outside. And while you can hide in the bathroom temporarily, you can't sleep there. So she really had no choice but to cry where I could see her. And that turned out to be good, too. I had my own share of crying to do, and on some self-indulgent days I even thought I had more reason than Buffy, since I never told him I forgave him, or loved him or even smiled at him that last year. But Buffy and I managed to forgive each other. Those claustrophobic hotel rooms brought us closer together than we'd been – ever.
One thing we didn't do was waste time on might-have-beens. I didn't ask her what she would have done if Spike had lived, and she didn't let herself wallow in regret. She probably didn't even know what she'd have done – she'd confided to me often enough how confused and complicated the whole relationship had been. So we went to Rome and we settled in, and worked our asses off with the Council and school, and we played hard. We lived, day to day.
Then Sunnydale's anniversary rolled around, and Andrew called us out of the blue to say that Spike was back and Angel was probably still a white hat after all, in spite of what had happened with Wolfram & Hart Tokyo, and they were both in big, big trouble. For about three seconds Buffy looked like she'd been punched in the diaphram, then she rolled her eyes, put on her fight-now-emote-later face and went in. I, go figure, was stuck in Rome writing final exams.
When she returned alone, I was good and didn't bombard her with questions until she'd had a whole thirty-six hours to unwind. I was very calm: "So. You talked to Spike?"
"Yeah, we drove out to the crater, because he hadn't seen it, and spent most of the night there."
"What did you say?" Fractionally less calm.
"He's staying with Angel in LA–" The phone rang exactly then, so it's no fair to say she actually avoided the question. It was Andrew calling for one of his Debriefings, and getting off the phone with Andrew is like trying to kill a Zutuzzu demon with a fly swatter: it just keeps on buzzing. She was still stuck when I had to leave for my summer art seminar, and when I got back Buffy was out.
I stewed for almost a month, and designed elaborate and subtle conversational cookie trails to steer her gently into disclosure. She phoned him a couple times, but the only conversation I walked in on was about the Tokyo thing. No endearments there.
One night in the kitchen, while we were busy experimenting with our brand new juice maker, I caved and just blurted, "Do you love him?"
"Of course," she said, turning around and eyeballing me like I might have kidnapped her normally clever and perceptive sister and stuffed her in a sack in a closet. Oh. Well then. Who knew the best weapon against my terrifying bluntness was terrifying bluntness?
Swiftly, I rallied. "Then why isn't he here?"
"Angel needs him more than we do. Could you hand me the tomatoes?"
How could I argue with that?
I stopped pestering Buffy, but I was still antsy. We'd mourned for Spike together, and now it felt like he was back to belonging to just one of us. Buffy'd gotten to see him; I hadn't. They still had something together, and I didn't. We were all really busy and tense, and as the rogue slayer business started getting hot, they talked more and more frequently.
I ... blew. Buffy and I had a fight about something idiotic – cellphone bills or something – and I just exploded and started yelling about how it was no fair that she talked to Spike all the time and not to me – which was unfair, because she does talk to me, and she and Spike were both really invested in the case – and how she was monopolizing him and I never got to talk to him and ... yeah, it was dumb. Logic Girl lost her logic. Buffy kind of stared at me with her mouth hanging open, and then she said very quietly that I could call Spike whenever I wanted to and he missed me a lot. And then I bawled and Buffy patted me and tucked my hair behind my ear and then we had ice cream. And then I called Spike.
In November, they finally got both slayers that Wolfram & Hart's Japan branch had discovered and corrupted. Buffy had to kill one of them. It was ... sick. The weirdest and hardest thing was watching my sister hold it together while Angel fell apart. Spike went after him. It wasn't until he brought him back, intact, three nights later, that I finally understood that Buffy had been right about Spike's decision to be where he was. But after Spike put Angel to bed, he came out and Buffy stood up and between one blink and the next they fused, and were silent, locked safe in each other's arms, and didn't move for a very long time.
That happened a few years ago.
So this is how they are. They greet each other with kisses. Giles averts his eyes, but these days it's less about Spike and more about British reserve. When they're in the same house they tend to fall asleep, apparently by accident, in each other's laps. They communicate in cute couple shorthand, even when they've been apart for months and months:
"(eyebrow.)"
"(nod.)"
"Good. West at eleven."
When they train together it's fucking scary, because you're positive they're really trying to kill each other, and the whole building sneaks down to watch. Quarterstaffs shouldn't, by rights, be that scary. Buffy and her axe versus Spike and a pair of long knives, fine. The suruchin is scary, even when you know the fire's only one of Willow's glamours. The staffs are just ... wood ... reinforced and capped, in the training circle, with rubber and steel.
I have no idea if they've had sex since Sunnydale.
The sex thing ... I guess now I'd be fine with it if it happened. Once I saw a tuft of white hair sticking out from under the comforter in Buffy's bedroom, but I guess he likes to burrow, because that tuft is all I've seen. Dunno if he was naked. When it's Spike exiting the bedroom in the morning and Buffy's hair still draped on the pillow, he's always dressed.
Or sometimes when Spike's here I'll rattle down the stairs in the morning and find them all tangled up on the couch, apparently chaste, if snug, Buffy snoring into Spike's armpit, books and ledgers tipped onto the floor, TV crackling in the background.
Not having the whole scoop on my sister and her champ still drives part of me nuts. Of course they're the Arthur and Gwen of the Slayer school (or maybe Spike's Lancelot ... Buffy's definitely the resident Pendragon), but regardless: walking legends, churning with power and mystery and scrumptious juicy late-night chick-flick-and-ice-cream-party gossip. Everybody from Almira to Andrew (God knows what rites he passed, but he's on the chick-flick invite list) is sure I've got the dirt and am just being discreet or coy.
But there's another part of me that doesn't want to know. I like that Buffy has something that's hers alone. Theirs alone. What they have together, what they are to each other, is private, and profound, and I don't need to understand it.
It's still in progress. Every once in a while they'll mention England like it's home, and I'm not sure they even notice. Or they'll say domestic-sounding stuff like, "Someday I want a house with a jacuzzi." "Check. And those little towel racks that heat up your towels." "Yeah." Someday they might get one. But with Buffy and Spike, I think that day to day's the point.
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