Awards for The Writing on the Wall

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Author: Holly (holly.hangingavarice@gmail.com)
Rating: NC-17 (For language, violent imagery, disturbing content, and sexual situations)
Timeline: Post-The Gift, AU.
Summary: There was no body to bury. There was no funeral. There was nothing but the three rules and the knowledge that a thousand years of torment was nothing compared to a world without her in it. Spike embarks on a journey through the Gates of Hell to rescue the one he loves, but in order to save her, he must risk losing himself.

Disclaimer: The characters herein are the property of Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy. They are being used out of respect and affection, and not for the sake of profit. No copyright infringement is intended.

Her face was so bright. It was all he saw. Though his vision had faded well over a century before, Buffy’s face served as a beacon to warm him through the dark. She was the one thing he remembered. The one thing he carried with him. Every time his mind began to slip, every time his body shuddered against the unforgiving silence, he summoned Buffy forward. And while the memory who spoke with him, who had kept him company these lonely years, didn’t always come, her face was never denied him.

His light. The end of the tunnel—the end of his tunnel, and it was in sight. It was so close.

So close.

Just a hundred years.

A hundred years of remembering what he wasn’t supposed to forget.

Buffy, Buffy, Buffy. Keep your thoughts with Buffy. Buffy’s what matters. Buffy’s all that matters. Buffy. Buffy, Buffy…Buffy.

“You sure do know how to hang on, I’ll give you that.”

The phantoms were back—he’d known they would be. It was the last century—the last day—and Spike hadn’t budged. Not once. Not in the face of overwhelming odds, not when his body was a decrepit mockery of the man he’d once been, not when starvation pulled at his sanity and pain threatened to render his skinless bones to dust once and for all. Through everything, Spike hadn’t blinked.

He’d endured what no man could endure, and they knew. They had to know he wasn’t going anywhere.

Not until he made good on his word. Not until he got to Buffy.

It took several minutes to drag the face matching the voice out of his exhausted mind. There were times when Spike wondered if his memories of the spooks were real. Perhaps they were tormentors fashioned by Hell, given a fabricated past he’d come to believe because of relentless repetition. Spike didn’t remember much of anything of his real life anymore. Had he even known Angelus before entering Hell? At this point, his memories might as well be fiction Larry and the supreme Gits That Be had created to further his torment.

Spike toyed with the idea often, and even though it sounded possible, even convincing, he always discarded it in the end. He didn’t figure the few memories he had of Angelus would smart so badly if they’d never actually happened. If Angelus hadn’t truly tasted Buffy’s purity first. If a thousand bloody things.

There were some things that couldn’t be faked.

“How do you think this is gonna end, hmmm?” the prat continued. “They let you go and you, what, walk out of here like nothing happened? You think you can do that? Pretend like you weren’t a useless weight for three centuries?” A pause. “‘Course, you had good practice at doing that before, didn’t you? Guess that’s why Dru kept begging me to fuck you outta her. And she did, you know. She’d run to me and straddle my face, begging for a good—”

A soft sigh rolled through his mind as Spike turned his attention inward. This was another reason he concluded Angelus was an actual memory and not an implanted one; the bastard’s tactic remained the same, always the same. It was familiar enough to fan Spike’s ire, and it never evolved into something sophisticated. No, Angelus blabbered incessantly and didn’t seem to realize when his audience had drifted off to a better place. Most of his talk was about Buffy, but on occasion, like now, he’d try to scratch Spike’s nerves by mentioning the woman from before. The woman Spike only recognized now as the one who’d made him—the one he might have loved, even if he didn’t remember it.

Angelus couldn’t torment him. Not now. Time hadn’t defeated Spike; he certainly wasn’t going to let anything else.

Only one more day—he was so close, even if the end remained decades away. He was so close. Ghosts couldn’t annoy him. Not if he didn’t allow it.

And he wouldn’t.

They could talk. He would wait.

Wait for the end to come.

Years had passed since he’d heard her voice, seen her face, or watched her move across his prison. He didn’t know what had happened, how he could have lost something so essential to himself by doing nothing at all. He spent hours reciting her name—her name, not his own, if only to live up to the promise he forged before even entering the mouth of Hell. Even if he forgot who Spike was, he would never forget Buffy.

And in doing so, she helped him remember himself.

Buffy, Buffy, Buffy. Think about Buffy. About Buffy. Buffy, Buffy, Buffy. God, why doesn’t she come?

He tried so hard to see her, tried to remember why it had once been so easy. In the beginning, all he had to do to step inside himself was close his eyes. He’d close his eyes and she would be there. She would always be there. He didn’t see her now. He hadn’t seen her in so long. So long. And her absence rendered his world a dark, hollow place. He was thoroughly gutted without her beside him.

Even if she’s not real. She’s not real at all, is she? All in my head. Buffy’s not here. She’s waiting.

The real Buffy had been waiting far longer than he could even dream.

A hundred years for a day.

Spike gasped, pain tightening his chest, his heart twisting. Every move he made introduced him to a new level of hell. It was agony, but needed. He needed to feel something—anything. Even if his body had withered to nothing, even if he was left with only a vacant shell for a body, even if… Pain kept him alive when he shouldn’t be. Pain kept him feeling something.

Starvation. Would he ever eat again? He couldn’t remember how blood tasted.

Buffy, Buffy…why aren’t you there?

The dark offered no answer.

It never did.

“What do you think happens?”

It was another voice he knew—a voice he knew he knew. While it had remained dormant so long, his mind had come full circle in what he did and didn’t remember. Over the past few years, especially since Larry’s last visit, the phantoms had come to him almost daily. His mind was weary, but he knew who they were now. He knew who all of them were—he was able to identify them without struggle or undue concern; when it came to his blood-family, Spike reckoned he’d never again be able to forget them. It was only their faces that remained hazy; he recalled Darla had light hair, but couldn’t piece together her eyes and nose in a manner that struck him as accurate. He often confused women’s voices with Buffy’s face.

Buffy was the only face he remembered clearly.

You again, he replied in the only way he could.

“That’s right,” Darla agreed softly, her voice moving forward. “Me again.”

Bugger off.

“Not exactly the ideal way to show respect for your elders, now is it?” she demanded, giving a long-suffering sigh. He pictured her folding her arms, because that was what Buffy so often did. “What do you think will happen if you somehow manage to get through these last few years, hmmm? Look at you. Do you really think you can manage the length of the tunnel to even get where you’re going? And what happens if you do actually get there? You’ve become nothing. Nothing.”

Spike didn’t answer. He had no answer. It wasn’t the first time it had been suggested, and he knew it wouldn’t be the last. All he knew was he had to get through the trial. What followed might kill him, but he had to get there to give it a chance. He couldn’t afford to worry about crossing that bridge when he was still on this one.

“What a sad case for the Slayer’s champion,” Darla mused thoughtfully. “But then again, that’s you all over, isn’t it, William? It always has been. So I suppose we shouldn’t be too surprised.”

Again, he didn’t answer. There was no need.

Darla had given him what he wanted.

She’d spoken his name.

I’m Spike. William. I’m William, and I didn’t forget. I didn’t bloody forget. I’m William. William the Bloody. Spike. I’m Spike.

The silence didn’t answer him.

Buffy? Buffy…I know who I am, Buffy. I remembered my name.

God, why wouldn’t she come?

Strange how two hundred years couldn’t change the habit of something that had been second-nature for half that time. Whenever he awoke from a deeper sleep—the sort that lasted a good generation or so—he always tried to open his eyes. Always. No matter that he’d closed them ages before in order to escape the visual reality of his personal hell, he always tried to pry them open.

Just as he always came around when his dreams forewarned he’d been silent too long. He hadn’t had a reminder in years.

He would forget if he didn’t tell himself who he was.

Darla’s mistake, and his allowing himself to broadcast his relief at her mistake, had warded off the phantoms long ago. He hadn’t heard a voice in years now. Not one of them, not Larry, and not Buffy. Buffy remained far from him—blocked away, shoved into some discreet room in his mind. He couldn’t reach her, no matter how long he focused on her face. No matter how hard he thought about her voice. He couldn’t call her forward—the ghost of the girl he loved; his memory and his faithful companion. He needed her so badly, and she wouldn’t come.

Buffy, Buffy…I’m Spike. I’m Spike, I remember that. I’m Spike. Gotta remember that.

And Buffy.

No matter how often he repeated her name, she stayed away.

He had no idea how much longer he had, but it would feel thrice that without her. It already had.

She hadn’t come to him.

Her absence made his bones ache.

Spike wasn’t going to forget his name. It occurred to him one day while encased in silence, left alone by ghosts and ignored by the Buffy who had once lived in his head. Over two hundred years, likely bordering on three, and he hadn’t forgotten. His mind, if anything, was quicker now than it had been a century earlier. He didn’t know why or how that worked; the last day had been bloody hard on him, but his resolve strengthened with each hour. At one point, he’d been in true danger of losing his name—losing himself—but he hadn’t. He’d had Buffy to speak with—Buffy to get him through the cold.

The ghosts could ignore him, and he’d remember. They could haunt him, and he’d remember. Perhaps his mind was becoming quicker again with age—it had failed him most profusely during the second day; perhaps he was maturing again. Growing up and finding himself in his prison. He didn’t know.

And while he still lacked memories, he knew the only thing he really needed in order to survive.

He knew his name and he knew Buffy’s. He knew Buffy waited at the end of the tunnel. The phantoms were insignificant; they were just voices, just personalities. There were some he recognized and more he didn’t, and none of them mattered.

It was for this reason, he suspected, that the phantoms’ silence came to an end. They realized there was nothing they could do, or not do, in order to make him forget. And they were getting desperate.

Therefore when they spoke again, they didn’t shut up.

“Ugh. If possible, you look even grosser than before.”

Had he been able, Spike would have rolled his eyes. He didn’t remember who owned this voice, but he assumed it was someone he’d known before, even if he couldn’t fathom wherefore or why.

“Like, way gross. Your little…slayer or whatever’s gonna flip her lid when she sees you, and not in the good way. Bleh.” She sighed, her voice migrating to the left. “You used to be something, Spikey. Remember that? We had, like, loads of fun. There was the time you tried to kill me, remember? And all the sex. We had tons of sex, and it was good. Do you even remember sex? If you do, you really can’t tell me you like this more. This. It’s all…dark and creepy, and you’re all kinds of nasty.”

A ghost of a smile drifted across Spike’s lipless mouth. They were getting desperate. He felt it. There was no other explanation. They had dropped the attack on his memory and were instead appealing to his vanity. Letting him know how terrible he looked, how time had worn away at his body, how even freedom wouldn’t mean anything. How his wretched legs wouldn’t support him and his useless body would fall away within the first step to Buffy.

He wouldn’t worry about that now. He wouldn’t give Larry or his cronies the satisfaction.

Not when he was so close.

Spike hadn’t seen anything in or outside his mind for at least fifty years, save Buffy’s face. Buffy’s face, which never spoke to him anymore. Buffy’s face, which kept him satisfied while the rest of him starved. Buffy’s face, which warmed away the chill surrounding him.

Buffy’s face.

So it stunned him out of his proverbial skin when he heard her voice. He had drifted within himself to avoid the blabbering ghosts, and when he did, she was there.

For the first time in years, she was there.

And perhaps, given how he’d longed to see her, his first response wasn’t the best.

“Where the bloody hell have you been?”

Buffy blinked in surprise, her brow furrowing. “Me? Where the hell have you been?”

“Right here! What? You think I popped off on holiday?” Spike shook his head hard, relief weighing his worn, broken body so strongly it would have knocked him down in any other terrain. “You left me. How could you leave me?”

“Well, I’m a part of you, buddy, so you can’t blame me,” she replied, her hands coming up. “I’ve been here. You just haven’t looked hard enough.”

He stared at her for a long, incredulous second before cracking. He hadn’t heard a sincere laugh in ages, and though his was born of frustration and disbelief, it was different from the mocking rhetoric lurking outside these protective walls. He’d be grateful to laugh were he not so aggravated.

“I haven’t looked hard enough, she says,” Spike murmured. “You have any idea what the last few years have been like? An’ you weren’t there! You left me—”

“I have so not left you,” she snapped, brilliant eyes flashing with ire. “I can’t leave you, you jackass. I’m a part of you. A part of you. How can I leave you when I am you?”

Spike’s arms flailed upwards. “How should I know?”

“Then don’t blame me! You think it’s been fun trying to get your attention this long just to be ignored?”

“I would never ignore you.”

“And yet—”

“Stop. Jus’ stop.”

Her eyes widened in protest. “Stop? You storm in here without so much as a hello or a smile and start reading me the Riot Act, and you’re telling me to stop?” She shook her head, exhaling deeply. “I’ve been here, Spike. I’ve been waiting. You might not see me, but I’m always here. I can’t not be. I’m in you.”

A hefty pause settled between them, her wisdom feathering over him and filling him with appropriate shame. He couldn’t argue with her. There was no repudiating the truth, especially when he wasn’t truly angry. He really wasn’t. Not with Buffy—the real Buffy. He hadn’t been able to reach his imaginary Buffy because of his own shortcomings, not hers, and scolding her was a way to punish himself. It made sense, after all; Buffy was a manifestation he’d created to keep himself company, and when she wasn’t there he was irritated with himself. He’d been irritated for so long because it had once been easy, and he’d allowed it to become difficult.

“I know that,” Spike confessed softly, sighing. “I’ve just missed you, pet. I’ve missed you so much. I din’t think…these last few years…”

Tension rolled off her shoulders. Buffy glanced down and licked her lips. “I know,” she said. “I saw it. I tried to talk to you, I really did. But you never heard me.”

“I miss you.”

“I know.”

“No, you. The real you.” He shook his head and turned away, the stirring of long-dead tears prickling his eyes. It wasn’t real, of course. He couldn’t cry in the real world. His body was a dry, dead leaf in the real world. But here he could cry. Here, in his mind, he could taste his tears and remember what it was like to live. “The Buffy…I haven’t seen her in nearly three centuries. Heard her voice. Seen her face. I’ve been waitin’ here, an’ she’s…”

“Don’t think about that,” Buffy advised gently. “We still have to get through whatever’s left.”

“I can’t help but think about it,” he replied. “They…the wankers who visit, they keep reminding me how I look on the outside. How much I’ve wasted away an’ all. How can I get there if I’m so bloody—”

“You decided not to worry about that until you had to.”

He frowned. “How’d you know?”

Buffy arched a brow. “Again. Me equals you. You might not have been too chatty with me, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been listening. Plus, it’s kinda hard to hide things from, well, yourself.”

The corners of his mouth tugged upward. “Gonna have to get used to that,” he said. “When I see you again an’ you can’t read my mind.”

She smiled grimly. “No,” she replied kindly. “No, you won’t. Even if I have to remind you, you know I’m not real. If you didn’t I wouldn’t be reminding you at all. And it kills you, knowing this doesn’t exist. Knowing whatever we’ve said here…it isn’t real. None of it. I might never look at you out there the way I do in here.” Buffy spread her arms. “And hey, you’ve been really good at portraying me realistically. I’ve never said ‘I love you’ or any other thing you know isn’t true. You told me once I’m the girl, in here, that you want in reality. But the girl in reality is unpredictable. She might never—”

“I know that.”

“She might not even wanna listen.”

He shrugged. “An’ if she doesn’t, yeah, it’ll hurt…but I’ll manage. I’ll survive…I will. That doesn’ worry me. Just getting there does.”

“It doesn’t worry you?” Buffy arched a brow. “Spike, this is me you’re talking to…and about.”

He smiled softly. “You know me too well.”

“So you are worried.”

“You’re me, pet. You suss it out.” Spike sighed and shook his head. “What I want most of all is to have her, but I know that’s not gonna happen. But she…the way it was at the end, she looked at me differently. An’ even if she doesn’t love me, jus’ to be near her, welcome, is enough. It’ll hurt, yeah, but I didn’t get into this to win her heart. She’s all that matters. Getting her out is all that matters. This has never been about me. Might not remember a lick, but I do know myself well enough to know my plans always fall apart. Bloody always…an’ that’s because they were for me. This is for her, an’ it’s the one thing I’m not gonna let fall apart. I care what happens after, yeah, but not enough to let it worry me. This is for her. It always has been.”

She looked at him just the way he remembered: with warmth and understanding, kindness and caring. The way it had been in the end.

Perhaps they were closer to the end than even he knew.

“What, exactly, have you done that’s ever been worthwhile?”

Spike stirred but didn’t respond. He’d felt his heart sink the second cold air brushed against his black, rotted bones, stirring him from his subconscious and into his bleak reality. Into the place where ghosts of his former life mocked what they couldn’t see and pushed harder by the day to get him to cave. It was an act of desperation if he ever saw one. Every possible piece of artillery was aimed and ready to strike; he just had to make sure they continued to miss.

“I mean it, William,” the phantom continued, her voice twisted with a sense of patrician entitlement he’d learned long ago to despise. This was another woman he didn’t remember, but knew must have been important at one point or another in his life above. She was snobbish and judgmental, and her voice grated into him with ruthless efficiency—a bad tick that wouldn’t go away. Whoever she was, he must have hated her to the core.

Again, she sighed and went on, “What have you done? You aspired to be so much once. A poet, though Lord knows how that turned out. A professor, a man of honor. Do you remember that, William? Do you remember when you thought you would conquer the world with academics and flowery words of beauty? You were once controlled by action and thought…now look at you.” Disgust seized her tone and twisted; it was something to which he was accustomed. The visits from the others often reflected the same. “You’re nothing. You’ve become absolutely nothing. Not a whisper. Not a peep. You just hang there while the world passes above you. In three hundred years, other men have conquered empires. Entire eras have come and gone, civilizations rising and falling again. And what do you do? You hang and wait. You rot. You decay. And you think it will matter, don’t you? You really think this matters.”

She wanted an answer he wouldn’t give. It was time to stop playing their game, time to stop speaking to them at all.

He would ignore them, now. Ignore them until the end.

It couldn’t be too much longer.

One day he awoke, and everything changed.

Everything.

“Look at me.”

He wasn’t asleep. He couldn’t look anywhere. His eyes didn’t work anymore.

The demand came again. “Look at me.”

A crushing sigh rushed though the vampire’s frail body, his head trying to lift for the first time in over a hundred years. He’d forgotten how quickly fresh pain could shoot through his limbs, tackling the hurts of yesteryear and stirring them to consciousness with a swiftness that would put the Romans to shame. Hunger had been present always, giving way to starvation, but over the last few years, he hadn’t felt it as vividly as he once had. His senses were dulled, his nerves and cells all but dead, and it was impossible for the dead to feel anything physical.

He felt it now. Hunger arose from the ashes, an irritated sleeping beast. It seized his every remaining fiber and demanded something for being disturbed. Spike remembered thinking, long ago, that hunger never died; he hadn’t been wrong entirely, but he likewise hadn’t appreciated the quiet after hunger retreated to hibernate. It was always there—had always been there—it just hadn’t made as much noise as it did now.

“Look at me,” the voice said again.

Spike hadn’t the strength to open his eyes. He didn’t even know if he had eyes anymore.

“Look at me.”

And suddenly, without knowing how or why, it became easy. His eyes fought open against the vibrant agony running through his long-latent body, and he saw for the first time in years. It took a few minutes to adjust—for the blurs to manifest and take shape, for the sensitivity of disuse to fall away. It should have taken forever but it did not; everything was clear in a proverbial blink. Everything.

Hope and relief were dangerous things. Spike had learned long ago not to showcase them.

“I want you to see something,” Larry said. Then, without awaiting anything, he brought his hands together and pulled apart a space of staticy fuzz. It was bright and offensive, yet triggered a memory Spike couldn’t ignore. Television. It was a television without a box, tubes, or anything save the images telegraphed. A small formless screen set between the demon’s palms.

There were people. Larry was showing him people. People he recognized from a distant dream. People he might know in a different life. People who were sitting around a table, and talking about him.

“It’s been three days,” one of them was saying. A male with dark hair, youngish from the looks of it. “I say we saddle up and head on in.”

A redhead seated at the head of the table heaved an exasperated sigh. “Xander—”

“No, I’m tired of talking about this. Three days is like, what, a bajillion years in this place?” He turned to the older man sitting opposite him, anxiousness wiring his body. “You remember what you said when Angel came back from Hell, right? It was probably thousands of years for him. If time moves so much faster, why isn’t he back yet?”

The man looked half dead, though mostly from worry. “We can’t know what’s happening, Xander. We haven’t given him enough time.”

“All I’m saying is, if we keep waiting for Spike, we might never get Buffy back.”

“We don’t have a lot of options,” another voice said. Another girl, blonde, who was seated next to the redhead. “Getting Buffy back was more important to Spike than anything. If he failed—”

“How do we know that?” the one called Xander demanded. “I know…I mean, I know he…had feelings. Some of them, yes, might have been of the love variety. He was definitely the most mellow, chipped vamp we ever knew. But for all we know, he got there, saw what a bitch it was going to be, and, I dunno, went back to Plan A of torturing Dru to love him again.”

The redhead looked deeply troubled. “I don’t think so.”

“How do we know?”

“We have to have faith,” the older man said. “Spike is…he wasn’t my first choice, but he was our only one. And, like Tara said, he cares about Buffy. We know he cares about Buffy…”

“Enough to withstand Hell?” Xander asked. “It’s been three days. How long is that where she is, Giles? He should have been back by now.”

Silence settled over the table, accented with uncomfortable glances and uncertain fidgeting. It took a few seconds for anyone to find a voice.

“We’ll give them one more day,” the older man said. “One more day, and then we’ll look at our options.”

“Giles!” the redhead protested.

“We can’t put him on a time-table,” the blonde agreed.

“We also can’t afford to play fast and loose with Buffy’s life,” Xander retorted. “We have to do everything. Let’s face it; we don’t know what Spike’s doing. The only thing we know is he’s taking forever, and Buffy’s the one suffering for it.”

The screen disappeared without warning, leaving Spike’s tender eyes drifting through wide spots of color and disfigured formations until darkness settled in once more, and he was able to tell Larry apart from the shadows behind him.

“They’ve given up on you,” the demon said. “Just three days, and they’ve decided you’re yesterday’s news. They don’t care what you’ve done or sacrificed. They don’t care anything about you getting where they can’t. You really want to keep fighting for this? For one of them? They don’t have the stones to fight for you…why on earth should you keep going?”

Spike just stared at him.

“You can’t tell me you aren’t bothered,” Larry egged.

Can’t be bothered when I’m not surprised.

That wasn’t entirely true, but it changed nothing. Nothing. Larry could show him whatever he liked and Spike would remain unmoved. He’d made it. Nothing could distract him from the knowledge that he’d made it. Larry only visited at the end of the century, and it had been three days. Three days—three hundred years. It was over, now. This endless torment was over.

Relief would have washed him away if it had form.

It was over.

Larry sighed, arms falling to his sides. “Well,” he said, “you did it. Three days. I really wasn’t expecting it. You—you were a surprise no one saw coming. I mean, yeah, you gave me warning enough, but I…I didn’t listen. And here we are. You made it through. Way to go.”

Not a word was sincere. Spike didn’t care.

That’s nice. Let me go.

“You still have to get there, you know. Out of here. Out of the tunnel. We ain’t gonna carry you.”

Fine. Let me go.

“And even then, getting in’s nothing compared to getting out.”

Let me go.

Larry sighed again. “All right. Let’s get this over with. What’s your name?”

There was no hesitation. His jaw had been locked shut for centuries, but found the strength to fall open. Likewise, his raw, dry throat scratched like plank wood, and his hoarse voice, which had not tasted the air in centuries, managed to utter a single word.

“Sccchhhiiiiiiike.”

“And why are you here?”

“Uffeeee…”

The guardian stepped back, waving a hand. “You’ll never make it out alive,” he quipped.

Then nothing mattered. Nothing at all. The binds that had kept him prisoner for three hundred years loosened until they were no more, and then his broken body was falling hard and fast to the ground.

It had been three hundred years. Three hundred long, cold, lost years. Three hundred years during which his arms hadn’t moved and his legs hadn’t walked. Generations ago, he had closed his eyes without thinking of when he might see again, and his mouth had remained shut even longer. There had been times he didn’t think tomorrow would ever come—that his life, his whole existence, would be summarized in his tragically anticlimactic end. If not for the constant thought of a girl he would not have survived.

He wouldn’t have made it this far.

Spike moaned, bleary eyes blinking open without struggle. He saw. For the first time in three centuries, he saw the dark, jagged cave walls of the hell he’d entered so long ago. It was all familiar. All known. It was his domain now, the only one he remembered. The path he’d embarked on and refused to surrender.

The path that would get him home, would get him to Buffy

Pain. He remembered pain.

There was pain in the flow of energy through his veins, his cells communicating, sharing, trying to energize his dead body with nothing but dust coating his stomach. His limbs had been numb for ages, and now he felt. He felt everything; every twist of agony, every inward jab, every sharp jerk. There had been many times during his incarceration when he’d wished to feel anything, even if it was pain. Pain, at the very least, made him feel alive.

Made him feel something other than what he was.

And now he could move. He could see, he could smell and he could breathe.

His stiff joints didn’t want to budge. Every flex of muscle had his body screaming.

Spike gasped, a harsh, raucous gasp that cracked against his chest. Warmth. The cold he’d felt so long had been chased away with the soft embrace of flesh. He had flesh. Soft, peach flesh stretched from fingers to toes. He’d forgotten how wonderful skin felt over bone. The cool air he’d felt against his lungs and stomach had vanished. And God, it was wonderful. So fucking wonderful. He’d never felt anything like this—nothing in the world could hope to compare. He had form. He’d been without it for centuries, but when he opened his eyes, he had form. He wasn’t a twisted piece of rot anymore. He’d been made whole.

“What…bugger…”

It didn’t make sense. None of this made sense. He remembered very clearly being told what would happen to him after the trials were over—remembered worrying about the day he’d walk free and his ability to get from his prison to the mouth of Buffy’s hell. But he was whole once more—a man once more. The clothes of which he’d been deprived had likewise returned. His body was mapped with skin, his head was again covered with hair, and he was clothed.

He’d been restored…except for the ache in his stomach. The bottomless hole chewing through his insides was going to render him completely useless if he didn’t get food. Food… God, he hadn’t thought of food with any sort of hope or genuine craving in so long. It had been off-limits; even thinking of blood during his incarceration was enough to spark a surge of desperation deep enough to forgo the mission. But now he could think of blood. Dream of blood. Crave it.

Another day without sustenance would surely kill him. He had the body of a vampire that had been held without food for three days, but the mentality of one who knew the truth. Who knew he’d been without it for centuries. And he needed blood. He needed blood so badly.

Buffy.

Spike swallowed hard and lifted himself onto shaking arms. “Buffy,” he gasped, turning his newborn eyes to the pathway ahead. He had to keep focus on what was important. What had brought him here.

The tunnel had been his white bloody whale, but he wouldn’t let it destroy him.

“It’s a long way down,” a voice cautioned. A voice Spike knew as surely as his own.

The stupid git wouldn’t leave him alone for anything.

“Sod…off…”

“Well, well,” Larry continued, “look who learned to use his words.”

Spike’s jaw tightened and the rest of him hardened with resolve. “If you’re not gonna help,” he gritted through his teeth, fighting back a wince at how the words scratched his throat, “then leave me the hell alone.”

The guardian snickered. “The hell alone,” he cracked. “I get it.”

A long, harsh breath shook the vampire’s crippled insides. “Leave,” he rasped, dragging himself a few inches forward with a gust of borrowed energy. “Jus’…leave.”

Larry shook his head and placed a claw over his chest. “Dude,” he drawled, “that really hurts. After all we’ve been through.”

“Wanker.”

“You really think you’re gonna get there like this?” the guardian asked pointedly. “Look at you, man. You can barely hold your head up. How do you expect to rescue your ladylove from Hell when you can barely rescue yourself?”

Spike tried to glance up but decided it wasn’t worth the effort; he would have laughed had he the strength. Three hundred years he’d waited for freedom—a little distance wouldn’t kill him. He’d existed without flesh or blood, without anything but the hope of the woman waiting for him. Compared to what he’d been asked to survive, the rest was a bloody cakewalk.

“I’ll…worry about…it when I…get there.”

“Yeah,” Larry agreed. “That’s been your motto all along, hasn’t it? No one was prepared for you. You warned us…warned me, sure, but I could’ve sworn you were just crying wolf. And though I am way impressed, I gotta say, overall, not too happy.”

Spike’s fingers grasped the ridges in the ground, leveraging his weight the best he could as his worn body edged forward another few inches. His weak eyes couldn’t see much beyond a few feet in front of him, and he wouldn’t wager the scene would change anytime soon. Nothing but shadows and stone. Rock scratched against his belly, digging into skin and introducing him to pain he’d all but forgotten.

It had been ages since he’d had flesh to cut.

“It’s gonna be a long night,” Larry predicted.

Most likely; Spike didn’t care.

Time didn’t matter anymore. Not when he was so close.

He remembered.

Spike’s eyes fought open, frail lungs inhaling a deep breath of dusty air. He’d fallen asleep. He didn’t remember resting his head against the ground or allowing his eyes to rest. But he was awake now—awake and alone.

And he remembered.

There were faces he hadn’t seen in centuries. People whose names he’d lost on the wayside of time. He remembered them, now. The windows in his mind were aligning, shining light on shadow-cast corners. Giles, Willow, Xander, Tara, Anya, and Dawn. Dawn. He remembered Dawn. He remembered all of them. He remembered.

Spike gasped, his hand straining forward to anchor himself on something solid. They weren’t going to wait. They’d trusted him, treated him like one of them, patted him on the back, embraced him…and they weren’t going to wait. Barely seventy-two hours had passed for them—had elapsed since Giles and Willow sent him off. They had treated him like one of their own. He remembered it so clearly.

And Larry had shown him what became of that trust. They talked about storming the gates of Hell like it was a bloody game.

It hurt but he wasn’t surprised. He couldn’t be surprised. No matter what had occurred the last few days he was with them, they wouldn’t see him for what he was or what he offered. Willow and Tara had accepted him—he remembered that clearly. Remembered Anya’s startling defense of him at the dinner table an hour before he’d set off on his journey. He’d been so grateful, so astounded, but even if he hoped otherwise, a very real part of him had known it wouldn’t last. Tragedy often brought out the best in people, but it was a fleeting sensation. A quick glance at the way things ought to be rather than the way things were.

Three hundred years. He’d survived because he could. He was the only one who could.

He was so close. So fucking close. The end of the tunnel…it couldn’t be more than a few yards away. While he saw nothing but darkness, logic told him it only seemed endless because he hadn’t the strength to make the journey quick. How he managed to move at all on a stomach that had all but eaten itself to survive was beyond him, but he wouldn’t question it. He still had strength when he should not. He had the ability to move when he ought to be dust. His body had healed itself with power beyond his comprehension. He would make it. He would.

This wasn’t a trial. This was the passage he’d earned.

And he would make it.

Her fingers were in his hair, dancing over his scalp and sending small tingles down his spine. He loved it when she did this. When she came to him and favored his battered body with kindness and warmth—when she touched him like she cared. And he supposed she did care. She had in life. There, toward the end, she’d looked at him with compassion, and he’d carried her gaze with him when constructing her likeness in the seclusion of his mind.

The place where she’d kept him company these long, lonely years.

“You’re almost there,” she whispered, rubbing his crown tenderly. “You’re almost there, Spike.”

It took a long minute for the vampire to look up. “You’re here,” he murmured hoarsely.

Buffy smiled softly and nodded, cupping his cheek. “I came to say goodbye.”

“Goodbye?”

“You’re almost there,” she said. “You’ve done so well, Spike. So incredibly well. You’ll make it soon.”

“My arms aren’ working.”

“I know.”

“An’ I can’t feel my legs.”

She nodded. “I know.”

A ripple of nostalgia rushed through him, and he offered a watery smile in spite of himself. “‘Cause you’re me. This is it, innit? You’re tellin’ me goodbye because…”

Buffy shrugged. “I’m not needed anymore.”

“Rot.”

“Me. This me. You have what you need down there.” She nodded to the endless tunnel. There was no sadness in her eyes, no resentment or regret. And he understood as he’d always understood, but in ways he couldn’t appreciate until now.

During his imprisonment, despite her countless reminders, it had always helped to believe a part of her existed outside himself. It was improbable—impossible—but it had kept him from forgoing all hope, from giving up entirely. Buffy had saved him in his darkest hours without knowing it—she’d saved him with her memory, and the promise that was ahead. And while the conversations he’d had with her likeness remained precious to him, it was more for what they represented than what had been said.

He was close now. Close to the end, and his mind was reconnecting the dots separated so long ago. He didn’t know how or why, and he wasn’t going to question it. Spike understood this—he understood his need for the figment, just as he recognized he was not parting with Buffy by parting with the vision smiling into his eyes.

He couldn’t part with her, because she was a part of him. And she’d kept him alive.

“Take care of me,” Buffy said softly.

“I will,” Spike replied. “I will.”

“I don’t know what’s been going on…but it won’t be pretty. I won’t be pretty.”

“Bollocks. You’re always pretty.”

She rolled her vibrant eyes and shook her head. “Spike—”

“Gorgeous, point of fact. Oughta know, love…you were my light in the dark.” He smiled, muscles surging with renewed strength. “I can’t thank you enough for that. For stayin’ with me even…even through the rough parts.”

“You mean all of it?” she replied dryly.

“That’s right.”

Buffy pursed her lips and nodded, running her hand through his hair again. “She’ll need you whether she admits it or not,” she said. “Well, I really can’t imagine her denying she needs you, but you never know. She’s a bit stubborn…and I don’t know if any amount of time in Hell could change that.”

He grinned. “God, I hope not.”

“You sure you’re ready for this?”

Spike laughed harshly. “If I’m not, love, I bloody well don’ deserve to be here. I know it’s gonna be messy, but I love her. Through everything, everything, I love her more than I knew people could love.”

“And after everything you’ve been through…”

“I know. I’m pretty amazing.” He snickered and shook his head again. “Seems that was your line, once.”

“What’s mine is yours is mine is yours.” Buffy turned her eyes downward and exhaled softly, tucking a lock of hair behind her ear. “You really still love me? Love her?”

“Of course.”

“After everything?”

“I would’ve waited until the end of the world for her.”

Spike looked at her a minute longer before allowing her to fade—the girl who’d been with him without ever being there. He’d said the same thing to himself so often. Whispered words of determination and dedication, all the while worrying his strength wouldn’t be enough. But the words weren’t empty, and they never had been. Once upon a time, even knowing his own capacity for love, Spike worried he wouldn’t have enough to offer. There was a fine distinction between words and action, and he had always been a man of words—a man of conviction. He’d known he would die for Buffy…he just didn’t know if he could live.

And he had. He’d lived.

It was just a little bit further.

A soft, yellow light spread across the cave floor. It was so faint, so distant, but it was the first light he’d seen in centuries and therefore nearly blinded him. Spike squeezed his eyes shut and opened them again. The light didn’t fade. The light was there, beckoning him, calling to him, whispering this was the end.

The end.

The light. The light at the end of the tunnel.

“God…” Spike gasped, summoning all his strength to lift himself onto his shaking arms. Tremors broke across his body, a hard, painful gasp slashing at his dead lungs. He wanted to collapse but he couldn’t. Not when he saw it.

Not when it was within reach.

“Buffy…”

And he moved. He moved fast. Ignoring his body’s pleas, ignoring his trembling muscles and numb legs, he moved fast. Moved despite limitations. Moved, moved, moved…

The light grew brighter, forms took shape. The nightmares he’d feared—the ones that had haunted her now for a thousand years. He couldn’t see them, couldn’t predict what lay ahead, but he kept moving. She was so close. She was there—there, and he was so close.

Her world, her hell, was just a few feet away.

Light chased shadow. The rock walls around him disappeared. And before he realized it, before it registered, the ground beneath his hands led to nothing and he was falling. Falling hard. Falling fast.

Falling out of the tunnels and into a new world—into a world where Buffy lived.

He fell forever.

There was a part of him that had forgotten color. He’d been relegated to darkness and shadow for so long that color itself seemed an abstract concept. He saw it when he retreated inward but never when he turned to reality. When his eyes had sealed shut he’d been left with but the memory of something brighter than the Hell he’d entered. Now he was falling in a sea of color. Yellows, oranges, and reds, swirling around him, cushioning and engulfing him completely until the ground was in sight.

Spike didn’t remember the ground being so red.

Then the scent hit him. A scent so rich, so delectable, so achingly wonderful he wanted to cry. It was fresh, delicious, and overwhelming. Every nerve in his body sparked to life, his fangs descending and sending shock-waves of pain through his weakened gums. Blood. Blood. He saw it now; saw it clearly. A river of blood. A long, winding river of blood.

His body smacked the surface so hard it would have knocked the remaining life out of him had it not birthed a surge of new energy. Spike’s mouth fell open, nearly weeping when blood poured in. Blood. He knew he should fight, knew he needed to examine where it came from, but Christ, he was so tired of fighting. His weakened stomach couldn’t survive another day without food. He barely had the strength to open his eyes; fighting his instincts wasn’t an option. Not now. Not anymore.

So he drank. Spike drank. Blood filled his mouth and trickled down his long-neglected throat, pouring into his stomach with such fiery rapidity he had to pace himself before his body locked up in alarm.

He’d lost himself in a sea of blood, and he couldn’t stop drinking.

Gasping, his eyes turned to the skyline. A hazy curtain of yellow, accented with rolling, pregnant storm clouds and a few rumbles of thunder. He kept himself afloat, eager tongue lapping at the waves of blood that crashed against his mouth, mind lost to worry. This wasn’t an offering of food; nothing like the red-rimmed glasses Larry had tried to give him over the past three centuries. Blood was already here—already lining the perimeters of a newborn world, and Spike had simply tumbled into it.

His long-useless limbs fought at first—muscles infused with energy so potent he thought he might explode. Spike shook his head, forcing his arms to stroke their way to the shoreline. Images in the distance were still fuzzy and his red-drenched eyes weren’t helping any, no matter how good it felt.

Bathed in blood. Every vampire’s fantasy was suddenly his reality.

The river’s flow threatened to tug him in again; Spike struggled his way to dry land, drenched head-to-toe, caked with red and uncaring. Streams of crimson rolled down his arms, dripped off his lips, seeped from his hair, and the feeling was so great he could barely keep himself from diving back in. As it was, his stomach had not yet filled to capacity, thus he’d barely made it three feet onto solid ground before turning back swiftly for more.

Spike collapsed at the shoreline, diving face-first into the waves of red that splashed against his knees. God, it tasted so good. So good. He could feast forever and never tire. Flavor exploded in his mouth. He’d forgotten this—forgotten how rich it was, how warm it was, how it fired his cells and left his nerves alive. He’d forgotten what it was like to have his stomach ache—to feel too full after a good meal. Therefore, when his abdomen began to cramp, he didn’t know how to interpret it. The only pain he knew as a constant anymore was hunger, so he kept feeding it. Kept eating. He could eat forever.

“God,” he groaned, pressing a blood-drenched hand to his belly even as his mouth kept devouring. “Oh God…”

It became too much too soon. Spike’s eyes went wide as a dull alarm in the back of his mind began blaring, his feet sloshing through the red mud at the riverbank in a hurried trek away from temptation. It took a second longer for the sensation to register, and by the time it did, he’d vomited all over himself.

“Christ,” he murmured, wincing and fingering his t-shirt. “That’s perfect.”

With his eyes clearing at long last, Spike turned to view the distance he’d fallen. It was minimal at best, but might as well have been forever. The opening to the cavern stood at the other end of the blood river’s bank, a rocky mountain that stretched for miles in the opposite direction, a small opening in its middle. It didn’t encompass the entire river, rather stood as an odd pseudo-natural development where Spike had tumbled into the dimension. Perhaps it was there only because he’d made it through the trials—he didn’t know. All he knew was, when the time came, that was the way out.

It would be a hard mountain to miss.

Spike sighed, pivoting to view the sickly yellow sky. His stomach rumbled again, but not enough to turn his attention back to the river. The river, he gathered, wasn’t going anywhere.

The river was a part of Buffy’s Hell.

Buffy’s Hell…

Spike turned his eyes upward again, gaze directed at the horizon, to the faint yellow sky with its ominous clouds, and the still-blurry shapes in the distance. It was unlike anything he’d imagined—so far removed from the renderings of the endless nightmare Willow had suggested so long ago. A place where Buffy’s fears lived and tortured her, without mercy or pity. No, the shapes weren’t monsters…

They were buildings.

Frowning, Spike turned to glance wistfully at the river. There would be blood here. Buffy’s Hell…human blood. Her savior complex notwithstanding, blood was what tied her to the earth. Blood of the people for whom she fought, and the lost blood of those she couldn’t save. Perhaps he was oversimplifying it—perhaps it wasn’t that complicated. But he understood the blood. A river around her prison would keep her locked inside herself.

Perhaps it was the blood that helped piece his mind together. Blood working its way through his body and repairing three centuries’ worth of damage He remembered suddenly waking after the trial by holy water, refreshed and renewed, made whole again despite what he’d suffered. His skin hadn’t melted and his muscles hadn’t fried. The third trial, despite how it had rendered him, had left him physically unchanged. The only thing that had been denied was blood, and he had that now.

He had blood and intelligibility. The shapes in the distance were buildings, and a river of Buffy’s people—those for whom she’d jumped—flowed behind him.

It was unlike anything he’d ever dreamt. And Buffy was there. Somewhere in the landscape ahead was where she lived.

Where she’d lived for a thousand years.

“Buffy,” Spike murmured, stumbling over his feet. “Buffy!”

The scene didn’t change, didn’t waver, the closer he grew. The more steps he put between himself and the river, the more twisted the new reality became, the more hardened and bewildering. He remembered sitting in the Summers’ living room or at the dining room table, talking with the others—the others whose faces he suddenly recognized with outstanding precision. As though truly nothing more than three days had passed since he’d dodged a goodbye hug from Willow and told Giles his prized duster belonged to Dawn should Spike not make it home. Things that the distance of time should have made lost forever came tumbling back.

Things like what to expect in Buffy’s Hell. Her worst fears—the sort of things she would imagine Hell to be. The sort of world she would create.

A city—a broken skyline encircled by a river of blood. The sky was yellow, sickly, and there were buildings; buildings without sound or life…an entire city with no life. The closer he drew, the more certain Spike became. He remembered this scene; he’d walked the abandoned streets of Paris after the Germans pelted the city with bombs. It hadn’t looked like this, but it had damn sure felt the same. Smoke and soot pillaring upward…he and Dru had camped out in an empty hospital, snacking on the dead and dying and waiting for a clear chance to leave before Armageddon came crashing down.

There was no soot or smoke in this place. No dying to feast upon. No people of any kind.

There was no life whatsoever.

It felt wrong to taint the air with sound, but the silence was offensive. And after three hundred years, he couldn’t keep quiet.

“Buffy!”

Spike stilled and listened. The call rolled down the empty streets, but didn’t elicit a response. There was nothing. Nothing at all.

A world full of hollow places.

And still, he couldn’t stop trying. He wouldn’t.

She was here somewhere—she bloody well had to be. And he would find her.

He never saw them. He heard them…heard faint, wordless whispers. They trailed him wherever he went, followed him around every turn. Whispers without form—he knew there was no voice behind them. No shadows to answer, no people to claim words that were never spoken. Just as the buildings lining the streets bore no distinction. They were nondescript structures with doors and windows, but nothing to separate one from the other. Voices without owners, buildings without reason. A vast space without civilization.

Buffy’s worst fears…

God, he was such an idiot. They’d all been idiots. The lot of them—sitting around the table and chatting up fears like they were a dime a dozen, like Buffy could be nailed to one certainty versus another. Her greatest fear would be the one to solidify Hell, and he, more than anyone, should have seen it. The greatest fear. A fear they shared, though not to the same extremes.

Buffy had been alone for a thousand years. She’d lived here, in this abandoned city without street signs or identifiable buildings, in a place where whispers followed her steps without providing a face. There were no phantoms, no ghosts, no torture to her body. This was torture on a different level.

Larry wouldn’t send his goons to visit. Silence was the greater foe.

Silence. Abandonment. How long had Buffy waited for rescue, knowing her friends were trying their damndest to find her? She had to know they were looking. She had to know they wouldn’t give up. It was what they did—Buffy and her chums, like the do-gooders they were. They didn’t give up, and they hadn’t given up. They had labored to find a way into her Hell, and they’d sent the one person who could survive the trials to retrieve her.

They just hadn’t realized how long her days were. How waiting even seconds could cost her everything.

Spike braced his mouth with his hands and shouted her name. His cries fell to the whispers and died down an alleyway. There was no response.

She was here. She was somewhere in this place—in the place she had lived.

“Good God,” Spike murmured, shaking his head. His eyes dropped to his blood-soaked t-shirt. He couldn’t approach Buffy like this. The first sight she had of another person—vampire or not—couldn’t be a snapshot out of a Wes Craven flick. With a sigh, he aimed his feet to the left, knowing it was a bloody long shot but figured there was no harm in seeing if there was a facility in which to clean up.

“No showers in Hell,” he mused quietly, pushing his way through the door of a building he picked at random. The inside didn’t reveal any surprises. The floor was scattered with an assortment of boxes and trash, a few pieces of furniture, but nothing he wouldn’t have expected. It gave the feel that, at any time, someone else could come wandering across the threshold to resume picking up a mess, or packing belongings into crates.

It provided the allusion that perhaps one wasn’t alone.

“Don’t suppose there’s anyone in here?” Spike asked, crooking his head around a corner. Silence answered him. The odds of finding Buffy so quickly were against him, especially in a place like this.

He sighed and tugged his t-shirt over his head, moving toward a staircase plotted in the back next to a rust-stained kitchen. A bloody kitchen. And yet, the place didn’t look like a home. It didn’t look like anything—a warehouse, perhaps, if he had to apply a label. But there was a kitchen, which provided the hope that there might be a shower.

These things would make the world seem a bit more normal while simultaneously enforcing a devastating sense of isolation. In the early days, it would be enough, undoubtedly, to drive anyone mad.

A shiver raced down his spine. He paused at the head of the stairs, nostrils flaring for any lingering scent, and while a woman’s fragrance was present, it was faint enough to suggest years had passed since Buffy had stepped inside this place.

“All right, Spike,” he murmured, turning his hands to his belt buckle. “Let’s make this quick.”

He found a bedroom three doors down, complete with a bed, a dresser, and a doorway leading to a bathroom. The comforter was twisted and nondescript articles of clothing littered the floor, along with a few stuffed animals with missing eyes or white cotton seeping from a rip in the seam.

It was haunting in how normal it was—how normal it could be.

How he was still very much a traveler in a strange land.

The bathroom was in much the same state. A few scattered staples but nothing more. Spike kicked off his shoes, stripping away the last shred of fabric. Red caked his hands and face, soaked his hair, and…

He paused and frowned, his head shooting up, meeting the eyes of his mirror’s reflection.

His mirror’s reflection.

“Bloody hell,” Spike murmured. “That’s not natural.”

No, it wasn’t. His memory might be a little fuzzy when it came to fine details, but he was bloody certain he hadn’t seen himself in anything but photographs and video since running into Dru so long ago. But here he was, standing in Hell, in a loo in Hell, and he had a reflection.

He looked…different. And the same. The last time Spike had seen himself, he’d stuffed a twenty in Dawn’s hand and instructed her to take a few candid shots of his head so he could see where his bleach was fading. Now he was…well, he didn’t know. The few times over the last three hundred years that he’d had the strength to hazard a glance at his body, he’d seen a twist of black, rotting muscles around bone so fragile it would likely break under a hard stare. He wasn’t that man anymore, but the fatigue and stress of the last trial had left an impression in his skin. He was thinner than he ever remembered being—never before had he been able to trace his ribs with his fingers, and it wasn’t a look he liked. Likewise, his hair had lost its color, dipped with red, flaked with chips of platinum, but his chestnut locks were back. He’d buried his hair under bleach for so long; he’d forgotten what he looked like without it.

It wasn’t bad…it wasn’t anything, really, aside from different.

And he wasn’t sure if different would benefit him.

Spike sighed and shook his head, turning to the shower. There would be plenty of time to worry over cosmetics later. Right now, he had to focus on scrubbing his skin clean so he didn’t scare Buffy out of hers.

Though there was no bloody chance the water would run. Hell didn’t strike him as a place that featured indoor plumbing.

But somehow, it did. And Spike wouldn’t question it.

Buffy’s Hell was a different breed. She’d made it as normal as she could while maintaining its landscape to that of a nightmare.

A place where no one else lived, but the world existed.

Spike had forgotten what cleanliness felt like, much like he’d forgotten how a different set of clothes could make a world of difference. The piles of clothing scattered across the bedroom floor provided a nice selection; after exchanging his blood-saturated jeans and tee for a different pair of jeans and a green long-sleeved cotton shirt, he again took to the ghostly streets under the angry yellow sky, darkening with what he could only assume was dusk. There was no sun, therefore no fear of death by its light, though the rules governing Hell were at odds with those with which he was so accustomed. He could see himself in mirrors here. Perhaps the sun wouldn’t kill him. Perhaps nothing would.

Whispers nipped at his heels. Whispers followed him wherever he went.

He couldn’t let them get to him. He had to focus on what was important.

He had to focus on Buffy.

“Buffy!”

The cry reverberated emptily along the outer walls of a dozen vacant buildings, over the barren street and drowned out the whispers that trailed him if only for a few seconds. And nothing. Nothing at all.

Would Buffy be able to distinguish his voice from the whispers? Did she even remember what words sounded like?

He wasn’t sure if he wanted to know.

“Buffy!” he screamed again, again receiving no answer.

Whispers at every turn. Whispers…whispers…

Then a different scent hit the air. A manifestation of grime and sweat, and other things he didn’t wish to consider. Whatever it was, it was alive, and it was near.

Incredibly near.

Spike drew in a deep breath and took off. “Buffy!” he yelled. “Buffy, it’s Spike. It’s Spike. I’m here to…I’m jus’ here. Buffy?”

This time there was a response; a deep, guttural response. Not human. Alive, but not human. Not Buffy.

Not Buffy, but something.

Something.

“Hey!” Spike screamed, turning another corner. There was no way he’d get an answer but he couldn’t help himself. It was the first living entity he’d smelled or heard in eons and it, whatever it was, was slipping away. “Hey!”

And then there were a thousand things; the constant whispers, growls rumbling from whatever creature lingered ahead, and now footsteps from behind.

Footsteps or hoof steps…he couldn’t tell the difference. Spike whirled around; if he didn’t know better, he would have sworn his heart thumped against his chest. And yet there was nothing there. Footsteps with no one behind them. He heard them clearly, heard rustling through the debris and against the pavement, but no face to match.

He couldn’t just be hearing things.

Only of course he could.

“Buffy?”

Nothing. And then the growl reemerged, and he was running again. Running after a creature he couldn’t see while dodging footsteps from feet with no owner.

He screamed without realizing it, her name leaping from his lips. A prayer. A mantra. Something he remembered when he didn’t remember anything at all. He was so close—he was so close, but he couldn’t find her. He raced through the empty streets of a city that had no civilians, following the sound and scents of a creature that might not exist, and Buffy was nowhere to be found.

This was her Hell and he couldn’t find her.

“Buffy! It’s Spike. Spike, remember me? Come out here so you can kick my ass for somethin’…I don’t know, jus’…it’s Spike!”

Nothing.

“Buffy!”

Nothing. Footsteps, growls, and whispers. And he realized something he couldn’t have known before.

He was being hunted.

Spike whirled around again, trying to pick up a scent. The heavy, lingering odor of whatever he was chasing tickled his nostrils, but nothing else. And then footsteps…more footsteps—quick and methodical, shadows dancing behind shadows before he could catch a glance. Someone was watching him.

Someone. Something.

He didn’t know.

“Hello?” Spike ventured. “Buffy?”

Something rustled behind him. He pivoted swiftly on his heels, but the scene hadn’t changed.

Nothing had changed.

And then the air ripped apart—a high whistle of something being hurled at superhuman speed. It pierced his shoulder before he could turn again, throwing him hard to the ground. Pain split his insides apart but he barely felt a thing. He couldn’t think about pain when he knew who was behind him. The only person who could launch a weapon like that and hit its target.

It happened. When he turned over and looked up, his eyes clashed with hers.

And the world fell away.

She was beautiful. She was so beautiful. An angel in hell.

He’d forgotten so many things—things he swore he would never forget. Things he had thought impossible to forget. The way her hazel eyes, at times, burned green. The way her hair curled at the ends where it hung over her shoulders. The way she could peel away layers with a simple stare. She was beautiful—so beautiful. Her beauty struck him hard, numbed the pain in his shoulder and stirred him to tears.

There was nothing to do but stare for long, endless seconds. Captured in a moment three hundred years in the making. He’d promised himself this—he’d promised he’d make it here, make it far enough to experience the awesome power of this. It took forever to jerk his mind from a place of awe and wonder back to reality. She was real. The girl he’d fought to see again, suffered to touch again, the girl he’d seen only in his mind…she was real.

She was real.

A sob strangled his throat. Spike stumbled to his feet, his heart twisting when her eyes went wide with fear—when she jerked backward to regain the step between them. Her chest crashed with heavy breaths, her eyes like saucers, large and full of wonder. He tasted her fear and confusion, felt how hard her heart pounded and how quickly her blood raced. She was afraid. Buffy, the girl with a spine made of steel, was afraid.

And she didn’t know him.

Before he could even think of stopping himself, he’d reached for her, her name a desperate cry on his lips. “Buffy!”

A harsh gasp gripped her lungs. She shook her head hard, feet trailing backward.

“No,” he protested, hand closing around the spear in his shoulder and jerking it free with a hiss. “No. Buffy. It’s me. It’s Spike. Spike. Remember Spike?”

She gave no indication she understood. There was nothing in her of the girl who had jumped. This girl was hollow where Buffy was full of life, skittish where Buffy was steadfast, and timid where Buffy was lionhearted. An eternity alone could unmake the bravest of warriors…undo the strongest of men. And there was no one stronger than Buffy. No one stronger, and no one more human.

She’d been alone so long.

“God,” Spike gasped, taking slow, methodical steps forward, his hands up. “Buffy…it’s me. Fuck, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry…I should’ve been here sooner. I should’ve been here. I should’ve…”

Buffy shook her head again, her eyes welling with tears.

“Don’t run,” he pleaded softly. “Please don’t run.”

Asking made little difference. Without a sound, she whirled around and took off, hard and fast, in the other direction.

And Spike was hot on her heels.

He’d known there would be consequences, even if he hadn’t wanted to consider them. This stark reality was one, where he raced across the empty streets and through the winding alleyways, desperate to keep up with the colorful flash ahead of him. Seeing her again was the best and worst of all worlds. He’d known this was a possibility, feared its reality and hoped she would have the strength to fight the monstrosity of her own hell. But how could she, after waiting a thousand years for rescue that hadn’t come? How could he or anyone expect her to remember them when, in her world, she’d been alone and waiting longer than he or anyone could imagine?

She hadn’t had phantoms or captured memories with whom to speak. Chances were she hadn’t even known she was in any form of Hell. She might have pieced it together over time, but there was no way she would have understood it. After sacrificing everything—after martyring herself so her sister could live—the world had repaid her by sealing her in a world where she could not die, in a world of despair and isolation. In a world where she was utterly alone.

He should have seen this. He should have predicted she wouldn’t recognize him at all.

“Buffy!” Spike screamed, commanding his legs to pump faster. “‘m not gonna hurt you! Stop!”

If anything, the blur ahead became more distant, twisting around the corner and vanishing from sight.

Fuck.

Spike heaved a sigh, racing harder, faster, pushing beyond his body’s capabilities, his eyes focused and his heart trying desperately to ignore how quickly it could break. She hadn’t known him. A part of him had known she wouldn’t—he remembered all too well how his mind had begun to slip in the cave, and he’d known where he was and why he was there. He’d known this was a path he’d chosen deliberately, precisely for this cause. He’d hung in solitude for three centuries, allowing his body to waste away, to fade to nothing, all to see her face again. He’d done that, and he’d all but lost himself in the process.

Buffy hadn’t been given a manual before she jumped. She hadn’t known what waited at the other end of Glory’s tower. She couldn’t have imagined how giving her blood would damn her for eternity. There was no reason for her to remember him, especially after waiting so long for a savior.

How was she to tell him apart from the whispers that tickled the air? How was she to tell him apart from the growls of the beast he’d been tracking before she’d launched a spear through his shoulder? How was she to tell him apart from anything?

She couldn’t—and that was why she ran. Of the nothing in this world, he was an unknown element, and the most primitive instincts instructed fear of the unknown.

“Buffy!” Spike shouted again, nearly falling over as he sharply turned the corner around which she’d disappeared. “Buffy!”

The blur of motion returned. Running, hard and fast, its movements erratic. She was doing her best to lose him; he could feel her panic. Feel her fear. He felt everything, even at the distance that separated them. He felt it because he’d experienced it once upon a time—he’d felt pure panic. In the first minutes after awaking in his coffin, there had been nothing but terror—nothing but cold, dark, gripping fear.

Buffy had been living for centuries in a large coffin, and life, even in the form of a vampire, was terrifying.

“Buffy!”

She darted down an alleyway, and he was just yards behind her. She couldn’t run forever.

Slayer or not, eternal or not, she couldn’t run forever.

Not like a vampire.

To think he’d spent years trying to get her to fear him. The very embodiment of be careful what you wish for—right here in all its demonstrative glory.

Buffy feared him, and he couldn’t stand it.

The alley she’d led him down proved to be a dead-end, and even if his spirits leapt at having caught up with her, the state in which he found her in tore his heart to shreds. She was clawing at the brick wall at the end of the line, body jumping as fingers latched, searching desperately for a crook to leverage her weight, feet scuffling along the sides before gravity pulled her down again. She was so far from the woman he remembered, and it was devastating. He knew Buffy, the real Buffy, was somewhere buried in the shell of a girl who had been left behind.

This was his fault. He could have been here sooner—perhaps not soon enough to matter, but a hundred years was still a hundred years. If he’d gone immediately after learning how to storm the gates of Hell… If he’d taken off without waiting for Willow and Giles and the whole merry lot of them. If he’d gone…

If a thousand different things.

Though even as he broke, somewhere within himself, Spike knew better. There had been no other option. If he’d acted rashly, everything might have been lost. Without waiting he wouldn’t have heard the story of Brychantus. He wouldn’t have had the Rule of Three, and likely would have failed long ago.

But perhaps, perhaps, he wouldn’t have failed. Perhaps. And perhaps he would have been here to keep Buffy from losing herself.

Spike swallowed hard, his eyes misting again. He had to keep a level head. If he lost it, he would only frighten her more, and that was something he couldn’t afford to do.

“Buffy,” he said hoarsely, hands coming up again. She froze the second he spoke, every inch of her small body wrought with tension. “Buffy…it’s all right. It’s all right.”

Hard, shattering gasps rocked through her chest. She turned around swiftly, eyes clashing again with his before exploring the area behind him. She was contemplating another run, he knew, but he wouldn’t let her get far. He wouldn’t let her run again.

Not when he’d come so far to find her.

“It’s Spike,” he said again, patting his own chest to establish familiarity with the name. “Spike. I’m a…friend.” The word sounded wrong on his lips, but he had no other way of describing himself. “I’m your friend. I’ve come to take you home.”

Whether or not she heard a word was up in the air. Her eyes were still examining possible escape routes.

“Giles sent me,” Spike continued, hoping a name closer to her heart might stir some of the woman he knew to the surface. It didn’t. She favored him with a quick glance, but only to ensure he hadn’t come any closer. “Giles an’ Willow. You remember Willow, love?”

Still no response. Her attention had turned to her other surroundings. It was something else—watching her evaluate her options on such a rudimentary level, knowing her survival instincts were impeccable, deadly for anyone who dared intervene. He had to play this carefully, lest he find himself dust the second he reached his target.

There would be a bit of tragic irony. And neither of them would ever be free.

“How about Dawn?” Spike ventured, risking a step forward. Buffy’s eyes went wide and she pressed herself against the wall with a cry. He flinched but didn’t relent. “Or Xander? Joyce? Your mum, love, you remember her?”

No answer. Her heart thundered a mile a minute. She whimpered again when he took another step forward.

Spike swallowed again. He really didn’t want to play this card, but as sick as it made him, he knew if any of Buffy was left in her, there was one more name to mention—one more name which would guarantee a reaction.

Didn’t mean he had to like it.

“What,” he ventured slowly, hating himself, “about Angel?”

A long pause. Buffy just looked at him—and for a minute, he thought he might have seen a flicker of recognition; a flicker which quickly proved to be nothing but another gasp. There was nothing. He might as well have mentioned Bert and Ernie.

His heart fell.

“You don’t know me.” It was an obvious statement, but speaking was important now. For both of them. “Buffy…”

She shook her head again, shivering hard and sliding against the wall until she was secured in a corner where the building met brick. Her eyes fastened on him, large and round, and wholly terrified.

God.

“You don’t know me,” Spike said again, releasing a deep breath. “’m Spike. William, if you like that better…God knows I don’t, but we can…it doesn’t matter. We were…I won’ lie to you, pet, I wasn’t your favorite person…but I love you. I love you more than I can even…an’ I’m here because you kept me alive. Because the world needs you, an’ I… God, I should’ve been here sooner. I should’ve been here before this happened. Before…” He broke off, shaking his head. “Let’s start from the beginning, yeah? You jumped. There was a tower, an’ you jumped. You jumped to save the world an’ you thought you were gonna die, but you didn’t. You ended up here. This isn’t home. This is Hell. You ended up in Hell. An’…” The words strangled his throat, but he had to keep talking—if not for her, then certainly for himself. “I don’t know why you’re here, but I’m with you now. You understand? I’m not going anywhere without you. Took me centuries to see you…to be here…an’ I’m not leaving. Not without you, sweetheart.”

While the fear hadn’t abandoned her eyes, there was a certain calm that couldn’t be denied. Tension rolled off her shoulders, and while she retained a healthy amount, she became relaxed enough to encourage him to keep talking.

“The Tower,” Spike continued, taking another step forward. “You stopped the end of the world, love. ‘Course, no small feat for you, is it? Bloody family event, the way things are up in ole Sunnyhell. An’ I was there. I saw it. I should’ve stopped it—I could’ve stopped it. If I’d been quicker, a bit more clever…I could’ve gotten there in time. Could’ve stopped the Doc from makin’ those cuts…from forcing you to a decision that…” He broke off again, tears assaulting his eyes. Strange how fresh that was…even after everything he’d been through. Even after the trials, after Larry’s taunts, after an entourage of ethereal visitors, determined to break him—determined to steal his name from his memory—the thought of Buffy leaping to what she thought was her death left him feeling cold and devastated. Left him with the horrid memory of what it was like walking a world that lacked her warmth.

“It’s all right,” he said softly, reining in his reactions. It wouldn’t bode well if he started sobbing in front of a girl who didn’t remember him. “It’s all right.”

She bit her lip uncertainly. It was better than nothing.

Spike exhaled deeply and took another step forward, flinching when she flinched. “You don’t remember me,” he said softly. “Might be just as well. I was never your favorite bloke. You were made to kill me, an’ I din’t make that easy…’course, I don’t know many who would, right?” Nervous laughter bubbled off his lips, then he frowned and shook his head. It shouldn’t be this difficult. “But it got us here…strangely, what happened even then. It got me here.”

There was no reaction. He sighed again and stepped forward, ignoring an inward pang when she flinched again and pressed herself further against the wall.

If he could just get close enough to touch her…

“Did I ever tell you what Dru told me all those years ago?” Spike continued, taking another step forward. “How I…how I realized I love you? It was after that truce. We had a truce, love, you remember? We teamed up, you an’ I, we saved the world.” A pause; he rolled his eyes at himself. “Right, of course, you saved the world. I got what I wanted an’ skipped out. But she knew, Dru did. She knew what I din’t. She knew I…” He broke off and cleared his throat. “When we got to Brazil, she wasn’t the same. She kept whisperin’ that I was covered in you. How you were all around me. I didn’t wanna listen, but she was right. God, she was so right. I came back to prove her wrong, see. I wanted to show her she was off her nutter—more than usual—an’ offer you as proof.”

Another step and another. Her scent tickled his nostrils…and despite the dirt on her face and the grime on her hands, despite the filth in her hair and the sweat on her skin, she smelled divine. She was here—¬here—he’d found her. She was alive. She was with him, after three hundred years of waiting, after three grueling trials, after a week’s despair of walking and living in a world without her, she was here. She smelled wonderful simply by existing—by being with him. She might be sweaty and dirty, she might be years away from her last shower, but Christ, it didn’t matter. He’d made it to her.

He’d made it.

“An’ I’m too late,” he whispered to himself, feet carrying him forward without permission from his brain. It seemed wrong not to hold her now. “It’ll be all right, Buffy. No matter what, you hear me? I know…God, I can’t imagine what it’s been like here. But things are gonna change. Your memories…I’m not going anywhere. Not without you, love. You’re my reason for everything. I know you don’t like the idea—never bloody did—but it’s what’s gonna get us outta here. I’ll do whatever it takes.”

His feet kept moving forward, determined mind not registering her widened eyes or the protective ball into which she’d curled herself. It wasn’t until she whimpered and threw her arms over her head that he realized what he was doing and came to a quick halt. “Sorry, sorry,” he said, his hands coming up, heart twisting. “I’m sorry, love. I din’t mean to…I jus’…Buffy?”

She was shivering so hard he could barely stand it.

“Buffy…”

He wanted to wait, wanted to give her time, but the need to touch her was overpowering. Spike drew in another deep breath and edged forward one step. “I’m jus’ gonna touch you,” he told her. “Jus’…I’ve waited three hundred years to touch you.”

He couldn’t wait for permission. The words themselves wore his body with fatigue, and when she was so close, when she needed someone even if she didn’t realize it, he couldn’t keep himself from her. With renewed vigor, Spike drew in a sharp breath and quickly covered the space between them. Buffy whimpered but didn’t attempt to flee again, just sat and waited.

Just waited. Passive. Buffy was never passive.

God.

Spike knelt before her, tired eyes soaking her in. “I won’t hurt you,” he said softly, reaching for her. “I’d never hurt you, sweetheart.”

His fingers wove through her raven-colored hair, wincing when she gasped hard and ducked deeper into her arms. The first contact was enough to cripple any man. After so many years alone, yearning for this, yearning for her, he couldn’t help himself. He didn’t want to help himself. Not anymore.

Not when she was trembling so hard because she’d forgotten what it felt like to be touched.

To be loved.

An electric shock speared through his body the second his skin touched hers. It was warmth unlike anything he’d ever felt—fiery heat ripped through his veins, but he didn’t fry. Didn’t dust. In that second he kissed the sun and came back whole—a man touching the heavens in the face of Hell. For the first time, even briefly, he was at peace.

The shaking stopped and she looked at him, and the fear in her eyes wavered before fading entirely. Fading in favor of something he’d never before seen…not here. Not with Buffy. As though it took that moment—it took touching her, being touched, for the shaken girl to understand she wasn’t alone. That he wasn’t a monster constructed from her Hell…rather someone, something, that wouldn’t hurt.

She looked at him with awe and wonder.

“Buffy,” he whispered hoarsely.

And then Buffy gasped and burst into tears, barreling into his arms, wrapping herself around him. Her face pressed against his chest, her hands everywhere, her body broken and trembling. She clung to him and sobbed, and he held her. The world couldn’t pry her away.

Buffy was in his arms. She didn’t know him, she didn’t know herself, yet in that moment she was his. Entirely his.

In that moment they belonged to each other.

A thousand things went through his mind, but Spike retained none of them. He was only aware of the trembling girl in his arms; the way she shivered and clung to him, how her body wouldn't stop convulsing, even after her tears had dried and her sobs had subsided. His mind was blank—aware, thoroughly captivated, but blank. He was caught by the moment, and in so, made completely hers.

“It's all right,” he whispered, even though he knew it wasn't. “I'm here. Spike's got you. I’ve got you, Buffy.”

She jerked violently—enough to startle him, though he did not know at what. Reaction to her name, perhaps, though he'd said it several times now. At that moment, anything seemed possible.

“I'm sorry,” Spike said again, feeling every syllable. “I should've been here.”

Easy words to say. Easy sentiment to murmur. Yes, he should have been with her sooner. He should have jumped off the bloody tower and into her abyss, if only to catch her before she crashed. She might have hated him, resented being captured for all eternity with him at her side, but at least she wouldn't have been alone. Not after everything—not after all they'd been through together. At least, had he been at her side when she jumped, he would have saved her from solitude.

Buffy shook her head and pulled back, but only slightly. Her eyes danced across his face, questioning, before her hands began to wander…and every molecule in his body fell still. It had been so long since he'd been touched—so long. Not a hug or a handshake in three hundred fucking years, and now he was holding the woman he loved. Raw, angry emotion rolled through his chest and threatened to burst through his lips in relieved, thankful sobs of combined adulation and regret. He'd needed her to touch him, needed to feel her skin against his, and here she was. Centuries he'd waited, and Buffy's hands were on him. She explored with cautious curiosity, fingertips running along his chest, skimming his neck and inspiring trails of gooseflesh to follow in their wake.

“Oh God,” he murmured, eyes falling shut.

She didn't stop. Her fingers explored his cheeks, rubbed along his lips, briefly brushed over his brows before rolling over his nose and tugging his ears. Then she tunneled her way through his hair, massaging his scalp with such tenderness he nearly came apart. Her hands migrated southward, sliding down his arms and following them to the place where they were linked behind her. She explored his clasped fingers before her curiosity led her touch back up his arms until detouring to explore his abdomen. His stomach released an untimely growl the second she placed her hand against it, and when she jumped in surprise, he couldn't keep from smiling at her. His eyes fell open lazily just as her attention darted back to his face.

“Bit peckish is all,” Spike explained. “Ate a bit when I fell in, but tossed it up jus' as quick. Din't stay around for seconds—finding you was more important.”

Her brow furrowed, her eyes falling again to his stomach. Then, with childlike curiosity, she placed her hand on his belly again and waited for it to growl; when it did not, she looked up, gaze almost accusatory. A laugh tumbled through his throat before he could help himself.

“Doesn't do it on command, love.”

Buffy quirked her head, expression changing and her eyes falling again to his lips.

“Suppose you got nosh around here, don't you?” Spike mused, watching as her mouth fell open, mimicking the shape of the words he spoke. She didn't make a sound, just played shadow, and just as quickly the enchanting spell of her childlike innocence came crashing down.

She didn't remember a thing. Not a blessed thing.

“You forgot, didn't you?” he murmured. He'd known it the second he saw her, of course. He'd seen it, recognized it without knowing, and hoped against hope he was wrong. But he wasn't wrong—now, sitting here with Buffy in his lap, watching him the way she was, there was no hiding what he already knew.

“You forgot your name.”

Buffy met his eyes again, somber, as though she understood the significance of what he said. But she didn't. She couldn't.

She'd forgotten everything. In losing her name, she'd lost herself.

“Buffy,” he said. There was little chance it would work, but hell, a man had to try. “Buffy. Buffy Summers. Buffy Anne Summers. Buffy, Buffy, Buffy. Your name is Buffy.”

She frowned quizzically, her eyes falling again to his lips. He utilized the opportunity to say her name slower, knowing it was a long-shot but wondering still if it would come back to her if he could get her to say it. “Bu-ff-ee,” Spike sounded out. “Bu-ff-ee. Can you say that, sweetheart? Can you talk for me?”

Her eyes lingered on his mouth, her own resuming its game of mimicking the shapes it made.

But she didn't speak.

“Bu-ff-ee.” No response. Spike's hands seized her shoulders. “Buffy, Buffy, Buffy.”

There was nothing. Her eyes met his after a few minutes, almost apologetic. As though she could tell what he was trying to accomplish…and perhaps she could. There was a sad wisdom in her eyes, despite her candid behavior. The face of a woman who had tried everything in her power to remember…once upon a time.

A time far from now.

A long sigh rolled off Spike's shoulders. He glanced down, rubbing her arms. He had to speak—he had to keep his mind moving, keep words flowing, if only to counter the deathly silence that encompassed them. She'd lived in silence too long, and she wouldn't get it from him. “Don't think it works that way anyway, pet,” he said. “Though I'm hardly an expert. Spend a few days hanging around an' I make like bloody Dante. Guess he didn't have it too bad. They did steal one of his lines for their welcome mat.”

Her frown deepened.

“Nothing you have to worry yourself with,” Spike assured her. “When we see it again, we'll be on our way out.”

Buffy licked her lips and shuffled self-consciously. The movements were subtle at first but became increasingly agitated, as though she were becoming aware that she should try to make sounds to accompany his, and her frustration was about to manifest. He sighed and placed a finger across her lips—the last thing she needed was undue pressure, especially when he was growing more and more convinced the repetition of her name wasn't going to magically open the inner doors that forgetting it had closed. “It's all right,” he said softly. “It'll come when it comes.”

She shook his finger away, her mouth falling open, hoarse sounds scratching her throat. “Ahhhh…”

“Buffy—”

“Bu…” She inhaled, frowned, and concentrated. “Bo…boo…Boofay.”

The world might as well have stopped then…strange when all his heart wanted to do was pound. Spike was caught on a cusp—body ready to explode and freeze at the same time. Somehow, he managed to pull his nerves to a halt, his grip on her clamping, imploring eyes searching her face. “What did you say?” he demanded. “Buffy?”

Her face fell into a frown again, her nose twitching.

“Buffy…”

Again it came. “Boofay.”

An iron hand closed around his throat, his eyes watering. “That's it,” he encouraged. “Your name. That's your name.”

The frown refused to fade. She waited for a second as though expecting something. He couldn't blame her; he was expecting something, too.

Expecting anything. Anything.

An anything that didn't come.

“Come on,” he murmured, eyes turning heavenward. “She said her name, didn't she?”

There was no response. Of course there was no response. Nothing ever came that easily. Spike exhaled deeply, gaze finding hers again, heart breaking at the flecks of disappointment clouding her pretty green eyes. “Sweetheart, don't,” he urged, sighing heavily. “You…there's no need for that. You jus'…it's more than the name. More than the bloody name.”

More than the name. He'd known that—he had to have known that. The name was nothing more than an identity stamp. It held power for what it represented, not what it was. Not the letters it used or the sound it made. Names were a verbal symbol of life, and that was what she had forgotten. Her name, yes, but more importantly everything it carried with it. Past, future, friends, family…her very identity.

Imprinted in Buffy's name was everything she was. It was devastating in its simplicity.

Forget oneself and lose the world. Lose everything. And even if she regained words, they would mean nothing unless she could regain the essence of herself she had lost when she forgot.

When she lost the foundation of who she was.

That was the only bloody thing that made a lick of sense to him. The days in the cave had nearly ripped away his sense of self. Years would pass without word from the phantoms carved from his past, with nothing but silence eating away at his tired mind. He'd try to call for her—for Buffy—but she wouldn't always come; during the last day, the last hundred years, she'd only come once. And hanging with nothing but time at his side, it was easy to lose oneself. God, he'd felt himself slipping away. Felt faces he'd once known melt into a sea of indifference, felt things he'd known about himself fade until he didn't know if he was remembering something or making up a memory. There toward the end—before the phantoms renewed their visits—the only thing keeping him from losing his name was the promise of what lay ahead. The promise of this. Of Buffy.

She'd pulled him out of the cave. If she hadn't been with him, he would have lost all semblance of who he was. He would have lost himself.

But he'd known to fight for it. He'd been told his name was important. He'd been warned of what might happen, cryptic words or not. He'd been warned.

Buffy never had a chance. Not a fucking chance.

It wasn't fair. Christ, how it wasn't fair.

And yet, here they were. Buffy had forgotten her name, and everything attached to it.

Spike turned his attention back to Buffy, his eyes softening, his lips finding her brow before he could help himself. “'m sorry, sweet,” he whispered. “It'll be all right. We'll find a way, yeah? We'll get you back where you belong.”

From the way she looked at him he almost believed she understood. His heart jerked and his hands tightened around her arms. God, he hoped he could make good on his words—though he'd fight the rest of his days to give them strength, no matter the cost.

All the fight he had left in him was hers for the taking.

He knew exactly where to go—where to look. The deep crimson mud of the river bank was scattered with fresh, heavy footprints. His footprints. He'd stumbled to freedom here—here, he'd gorged himself on blood until his stomach rebelled. Here he'd stood and observed the cave from which he'd fallen, the one that had held him prisoner for centuries, the one that would lead them home. It had been here. A visual aberration within a nightmarish landscape—a mountain without hills or valleys, a mountain that simply was. It had stood here. Here, where Spike's footprints led away from the blood river, where the mud was disturbed against the bank where he'd collapsed and drank. It had been here. He knew it. He'd made sure of it before turning to the abandoned streets in search of Buffy.

In search of the trembling girl at his side.

She hadn't wanted to come here. The second it became apparent he was leaving the perimeters of the city, she'd tensed and shaken her head, but had followed him anyway, her grip on his hand like steel.

There were some actions that spoke volumes. The briefest look, the gentlest touch—the way one tensed, however slight or dramatic. Spike knew how to read people; he'd excelled at it once upon a time, and though his skills were a little rusty, his eye for Buffy hadn't suffered a lick for their time apart. And even if it unnerved him, the sense of being so needed by someone who could barely stand to touch him in the world he knew, he wasn't going to deny her…or himself. He needed this, her, as much as she did. She'd been without hope or reason for so long, and while he might not have eradicated her nightmares, he'd at least provided her with companionship, and Buffy wasn't going to let him out of her sight.

Which was just fine by him.

Only now he was standing at the place where there should be an exit. A way out.

There was nothing. Nothing. A vast, empty desert that stretched until the horizon clashed with the darkening yellow sky. A desert that stretched forever.

“No,” Spike snarled. “This isn't…it was fucking here. It was here.” His head whipped to Buffy's, eyes blazing. “It was here. Where I fell. I saw it. I bloody well saw it. It was here.”

Buffy's eyes were as wide as saucers, saturated in confused trepidation. She watched him like he was a bomb ready to ignite.

“It was here,” he insisted. “Here…goddammit.”

She shook her head, though only in reflex. There was nothing else to do.

“I made sure…I…” Spike tore his eyes away, turning his face to the sky. “You twisted, gutless sod! Come down here an' face me! Face me, you worthless bastard! Your plan is to bloody well torture us from a distance, as long as you don't get your claws dirty? You can't keep us here forever. You hear me? You can't keep us here forever!”

Wind rippled across the red river. The whispers from the city behind them grew in volume. The creature's growl rumbled through the still air. And Larry didn't respond.

There was nothing. Nothing.

They were stranded.

Spike stared hard at the blood, shivers sprouting across his skin. Buffy was beside him. Buffy was watching him, and he didn't know what to tell her. If there was anything to tell her. The exit on which he'd been banking, the path he'd traveled…everything. It was gone. And for the first time, the first true time, he knew what he could not have understood before. Not even in the long, endless years he'd spent in the cavern. Not in the holy water that had scalded his flesh nor the twisted phantoms that had tried to tear his mind apart. He understood now—there was no end. No end. Getting to Buffy hadn't been his destination; his destination had been getting her home. Getting her back to the place where she truly belonged.

There was no escape from Hell. There was only surviving it.

He'd earned his place here, sure as she'd earned hers. She'd jumped, and he'd followed her.

He'd followed.

A tentative hand touched his shoulder. Spike whirled to face her before he could allow his fears to surface. Before his mind could seize logic and reason; he knew the price didn't matter. It didn't matter where he was so long as he was with her. The battle had been worth it. Getting to Buffy was worth the whole bloody world.

Even if they were trapped here forever.

Even if he couldn't keep the promise he'd made to the others before he left, and in his head to Buffy a thousand times.

Hell with Buffy he could survive; life on earth without her was a different story. He'd already traveled far enough without her at his side.

A long, dark shudder seized his body. No matter what, from this point forward, they were together.

Together.

“It'll be all right,” he whispered, though he didn't know to whom he spoke. “It'll be all right.”

Buffy pressed herself into his side and wrapped her arms around his middle; every inch of his body relaxed.

This was worth anything.

“It'll be all right.”

And he meant it.

There were certain things time couldn’t eradicate, no matter how it tried. The instincts of a slayer were one of them. The second the growl touched the air, she hit the ground running, quickly scavenging something pointy out of a pile of debris and motioning for him to follow. And follow he had—it was the first sign of anything beyond utter devastation to hit his eyes, and once she found her target, it wasn’t difficult to see why.

“Figure they had to keep you fed somehow, din’t they?” Spike muttered, flashing Buffy a glance before turning his eyes back to the large warthog he’d wrestled to the ground. By the time he and Buffy had returned to the city’s empty streets, he’d consigned himself to the thought that the sounds he heard had no source—a theory proved wrong when Buffy’s eyes went wide the second the rumble shook the ground.

The growl from the creature he’d followed earlier. It was real. It, aside from Buffy, was the only real thing this place had to offer.

“Yeah,” he muttered, jabbing a piece of broken glass into the pig’s side. His fangs itched to play but he figured that to be a step down the road—once Buffy was accustomed to seeing him, accustomed to touching him and being touched. Introducing his bumpies this early, when she had no context in which to place him, might well send her running again, and that he could not allow. “Makes sense. Caught a live slayer who needs food, an’ this is what they give you.” Spike sighed and shook his head, kicking the dying creature once for good measure. “Bloody Pumbaa.”

Buffy frowned.

“Don’ worry about that, pet,” he assured her, hoisting the pig into his arms. “Got yourself some nosh. Gimme an’ open fire an’ it’ll roast proper, though don’t fret if I poke it from a distance. It’d be right…me getting here jus’ to be done in by a bloody spark. Where we goin’?”

She turned promptly as though she understood, and though his hopes spiked, there was little chance her mind had broken down the mechanics of language and reason within the last hour. As it was, the now-dark sky was indicator enough. Night was when she retreated, at least in this world. In the world above, night was when she thrived.

In the world above…

A world he might never see again.

Spike sucked in his cheeks, eyes catching Buffy’s when she glanced over her shoulder to ensure he was still following. The way they sparkled…the way she smiled…she was happy. Well, perhaps not happy, but she wasn’t miserable. She wasn’t the shattered girl who, just a little while ago, had clawed at the dead-end wall of an alley to escape what she thought was another nightmare. This was a girl inspired.

A girl for whom he’d live or die. A girl he’d braved Hell to find.

If she was with him, it wasn’t Hell. It was paradise.

“We about there, dove?” Spike asked, bouncing the warthog in his arms. “Not back to full strength yet. Bloody embarrassing to be done in by Babe.”

Buffy just grinned at him again and his heart melted.

Chump.

Spike glanced down and smiled to himself. It was fleeting, but for the first time in a long while, he felt normal. Felt like he could be anywhere—in Sunnyhell, trailing helplessly after the Slayer and hoping she’d drop some crumbs along the way. Felt something like himself sneak its way home. And though the sensation wasn’t permanent, it was kind enough to follow him until Buffy signaled they had arrived.

The building wasn’t much to look at, nor distinguishable at all from any of the others they’d passed. It appeared very much to be an old warehouse, worn by time and neglect. Her scent was heavy here. Thick. For a brief second, it reminded him of standing below her window, smoking fags and hoping to catch a glimpse of bare breast through the glass. Scent triggered memory, and those featuring her, no matter how painful, were the ones he treasured the most.

“Home sweet home, I take it,” Spike said, following her blindly through the entry way. “I don’t know, pet, I think you could have—”

His voice cut the second his eyes hit the walls. What little was left of day had just dipped below the horizon, therefore there wasn’t much light—not much but enough; though his eyesight had weakened from centuries of hunger, his vision operated far beyond what any human could reach. And he saw everything. Everything.

He saw everything—every aspect of the space belonging to her. Every inch of clutter, every scattered warthog bone, every strain of use against broken furniture. He saw everything. The bed she’d compiled from discarded clothing and stuffing from cushions, the place where she undoubtedly roasted her food before eating, the bucket she kept for water…but he didn’t look. He couldn’t.

He couldn’t tear his eyes away from the walls.

“Oh God,” he whispered, staring.

The pig hit the ground. Buffy turned and frowned at him, confused, but he couldn’t look at her.

Couldn’t tear his eyes away.

“Oh God.”

They were horrible. They were everywhere. And they were hers.

“Oh my God.”

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