Tara padded down the hall.  Her bare feet made no sound on the  carpet, and every so often she halted, listening for any slight movement behind the closed doors.  The house was eerily silent.  She had always been an early riser, and the habit stood her in good stead now--in all likelihood, her opponent was still snuggled obliviously beneath her covers--

WHAM!  Dawn’s door flew open.  Dawn shot out into the hallway, blue cotton nightgown whipping round her thin calves, and skidded through the bathroom door in front of Tara.  “Yeah!” she whooped, bare feet beating out a victory dance on the tiles.  “I win, you lose, I rule, you suck!”

“Dawn, I’ve got an early class today!”

Dawn pulled the shower door open, looking at Tara over her shoulder and batting dark lashes over those great big innocent blue eyes.  “But I got here first.  Dibs.  It’s the law.  Besides, you guys have Mom’s bathroom.  Eww...”  She made a face at the bottom of the tub.  “Buffy!  You left gross Slayer scum all over the bathtub!”

“Scrub it out,” came Buffy’s muffled and unsympathetic reply.

Dawn stamped a foot.  “It’s your scum!”

“So?”  A moment later a tousle-haired Buffy emerged from her own room, muffled in a robe and yawning.  “You keep claiming I’m not the Mom of you.  I concede.  Not the Mom, therefore, not in charge of housework.  If my scum offends you, give me the shower first.”

“And let you leave me twice as much scum?  Besides, I’m faster.  You take about ten years to wash your hair.”

“Never bring your sister back from the dead if you aren’t willing to embrace her hair care rituals.  Move!”

“You move!”

Scuffling ensued.  Tara sighed and turned back to the master bedroom to see if Willow was through with the bathroom there.  She wasn’t at all sorry they’d decided to move into Buffy’s house.  Renting Joyce Summers’ old room was cheaper than the dorm and gave Buffy a much-needed source of income, and it was quieter and more private than the dorm too.  Usually.  Behind her the sound of Dawn shrieking “Ahhh!  No fair!” and Buffy caroling “I rule, you suck!” rang through the hall.  There were times when she could work up nostalgia for student housing.

Still... it was good to see Buffy engaged with the rest of the world this morning.  Her flashes of connection were getting more frequent, and lasting longer.   Maybe things would work out.  Maybe they’d all been cosmically lucky, and there really would be no more serious consequences from Willow’s spell.  Maybe... the bedroom was buzzing.  Tara stopped just outside the doorway with her hand on the knob, puzzled.  The vibration wasn’t entirely physical, and it made her fingertips tingle.  She tightened her grip on the knob and turned it, apprehension in the set of her shoulders.

Opening the door revealed the low, penetrating hum to be of very worldly origin.  Willow sat cross-legged in the middle of the floor, among the piles of schoolbooks and laundry and boxes they hadn’t finished unpacking yet, wrapped up in a green silk robe.  Her hair fanned across her shoulders like a fall of glowing embers in the morning light, and a huge old book bound in flaking brown calfskin lay open upon her lap, the pages bright with illuminated text in red and blue and gold.  Her elfin face was set in concentration as she traced the words of a spell with one finger.  The hum intensified as she did so.

“Willow?”

Her lover looked up, startled.  The intricate patterns of power in the air shivered and dissolved, falling apart into nothing, and Willow’s face fell with them.  A wounded little  “Oh!” escaped her lips.   Willow closed the book and essayed a bright, painful smile.  “Done with the shower.”

Tara knelt and glanced briefly at the cover of the grimoire. Thaumaturgie Made Plaine.  An old standard, full of cures for warts and spells for making chickens lay and love spells that didn’t work.  Easy, simple magics which shouldn’t be any strain on Willow’s recovering faculties.  Nothing scary about this one, but Willow had promised her she’d wait before jumping back into magic.  “Hon, I thought--weren’t you going to wait on the spellcasting till I could monitor you?  You could hurt yourself!  Which spell were you doing?”

She didn’t mean for her tone to be wary, or suspicious, or accusing.  Maybe it wasn’t any of those things; maybe it was only that the lingering tension between them had never quite dispelled since Willow had performed the Raising, or maybe it was part and parcel of her disappointment over the failed spell.  Willow’s brows slanted and her lips compressed to a thin angry line.  “What, you didn’t listen at the door long enough to tell?”  She scrambled to her feet and skinned out of her robe, pulling clothes from the closet at random.

Tara winced.  “I didn’t mean--I was j-just wondering.  I know you weren’t really--”  Most of the spells in that particular book required material components to cast; in speaking the words without them, Willow could only have been doing a dry run, a mental exercise.  Not technically a violation of their agreement.  And she’d messed it up at the first minor distraction, which made Tara all the more concerned that they stick to that agreement, but she could tell Willow wasn’t in a mood to be reminded of that.  Tara tugged on a strand of honey-colored hair, trying to come up with the right words.  “It’s just--are you sure you’re ready?”

Willow grabbed a pair of jeans and began tugging them on. “Why doesn’t--anyone--believe me?  I’m fine!  I’ve been fine for weeks!  I’ve cast difficult spells before, and recovered just fine, and--and--” All of a sudden her face crumpled and a panicked sob escaped her.  “It shouldn’t be this hard!”

It only took a moment to rise to her feet and close the distance between them.  Tara took the smaller woman in her arms and held her fiercely close while Willow clung to her and tried to still her jerky breathing.  “Something’s wrong,” she moaned into Tara’s shoulder.  “I can still do the spells, but it’s so hard!  Even the easy ones!  It used to be like... like breathing, I just did it, it just happened, and now I have to make it happen and I don’t get it, nothing’s changed, I still--”

“Shh, shh, it’s all right,” Tara crooned, stroking her hair.  “You shut down a dimensional gate practically all by yourself, on sheer willpower.  Or Will power.”  Willow managed a quavery smile.  “It’s only been a month.  The aether out by the factory is still all shaken up.  Is it any wonder you are, too?  Give yourself time to heal.”

She felt Willow take a deep shuddering breath and let it out.  A moment later she pushed away slightly; in the morning light Tara could see the charcoal smudges of weariness around her eyes, lying just below the transparent porcelain of her skin.  Beautiful had never seemed a sufficient word to describe Willow.  Willow had something beyond beauty, some fey quality that caught at your heart from half-way across the room and drew you closer, desperate just to be near this creature whose every breath and movement scattered magic with careless generosity in her wake.  For the first few months she’d known her, Tara had been terribly afraid that she’d wake up one morning and discover that Willow had only been a dream.

And she wasn’t, of course--she was a living, breathing woman, stubborn and loving and heedless and brilliant, fearless with the courage of one who has never truly known defeat and terrifying for the same reason.  “Maybe... maybe it’s...better this way.  That you slow down a little.  You’ve been pushing yourself so hard all summer, and between slaying and school...”

Willow’s eyes clouded.  “The things we fight don’t slow down.”

“You can’t save the world all by yourself.”  Tara put a finger beneath Willow’s chin and lifted her head.  “That’s Buffy’s job.  And even she’s got help.”

A sigh.  “Oh, all right, if you’re going to use rational argument on me...”  Willow cuddled into her shoulder.  “I’ll try to be less spazzy.  Promise.  But I still think--”

“Later,” Tara said firmly.  “Breakfast now.”
 

Dawn and Buffy were already in the kitchen when they came downstairs.  It was a bright, sunny November morning.  Willow winced.  Pale clear light streamed in through the windows, and outside the sky was blue and the birds were probably singing, but thankfully Willow couldn't hear them.  It was difficult to believe that this was a town situated over a Hellmouth.  Except, of course, for the fact that at this minute she felt like hell.  She only hoped that Tara wouldn’t notice.  Her eyes were gritty with the aftermath of her magical exercises, and there was a slow, sullen pounding in the back of her head.  She would have gone over and pulled down the blinds to keep the stabby sunlight out, or at least asked Dawn to do it, except for the fact that then they'd have asked what was wrong, and she really didn't want to talk about it.

Dawn, seated across the kitchen table from her sister and looking far too bright and chipper to be allowed, was scarfing down Coco Puffs and reading the back of the cereal box.  Buffy was stirring her own cereal, which was slowly disintegrating into chocolate gruel, in languid circles.  She held up her spoon and let brown, gluey milk dribble back into the bowl, watching the drops fall with utter fascination.  Looked like the connection with the world had some static in it.

“Are you going to eat that?”

Buffy started and blinked.  “Oh.”  She looked down at her cereal.  “I think it’s left the realm of chocolate goodness and entered the realm of performance art.”

“Waste not, want not,” Dawn said from the safety of her cardboard defensive emplacement.

Buffy gave her a look, picked up the cereal bowl, went to the kitchen door, opened it and emptied the bowl into the flowerbed.  “Not waste.  Mulch.”  She came back and poured herself a new bowlful.

Was that old Buffy humor or new Buffy weirdness?  Willow decided to assume the former and mustered a laugh.  “Succinct, yet mildly disturbing.”  She eyed the Coco Puffs and decided against them.  She didn’t think she could face a sugar high right now.  She opened the refrigerator and pawed through the contents--leftover macaroni and hotdog casserole, yuck, Buffy’s stash of yogurt fruit cups, yuck, milk jug half-full of pig’s blood for Spike, double yuck... bread.  Boring squishy Wonder Bread.  With which one could make toast.  Bland, dry, boring toast.  Yes.  Bland was of the good.

Dawn and Buffy kept up a mild sisterly snipefest as she waited for the toast to pop, which would have been annoying except that it was such a relief to see Buffy reacting to things again.  Dawn kept peering at her round the cereal box as if she couldn't quite believe she was having a normal argument with her bossy older sister.

“You seem to be in a good mood this morning, Buffy,” Tara observed, coming in with the morning paper.  Willow felt a surge of justification, balm after the last month, and even her magic-induced headache seemed to ease off.  When even Tara had to admit the Raising had worked, had been, in the end, a good thing...

Buffy made a dismissive half-shrugging gesture.  “Spike and I had a fight last night, and--”

“That’s too bad--oh, cool!  Look, here’s the advertisement Anya put in for the Magic Box!”  Dawn pulled the paper over to admire Anya’s entrepreneurial genius as Tara gathered up her books.  Tara kissed the top of Willow’s head.  “Byzantine history calls.  See you later, sweetie.”

“Bye.”  Willow sat down, maintaining a surreptitious watch on Buffy’s expression--well, maybe, if surreptitious meant ‘eyes glued anxiously to face while trying desperately to appear otherwise’.  Improving?  Not improving?  Buffy gave her a flinchy, worried look and Willow forced herself to be cool.  “Fight?  I thought the two of you were getting on like gangbusters.”  She took a nervous bite of toast and swallowed it a little too quickly, coughing as the crumbs scratched her throat. “Though gangbusters, it does sound pretty fighty, doesn’t it?”

“You didn’t hit him again, did you?”  Dawn asked accusingly.  “It's totally not fair when he can’t hit back.”

“No, I did not hit him,” Buffy said, taking a stab at her innocent coffee cup with a spoon, as if practicing staking moves.  “We were in the middle of Willy’s, and I’m not about to have a public fistfight with Fang-face.  We just had... words.”

Willow scraped margarine over her toast.  Nothing like gossip to alleviate pain.  “And these words filled your heart with chipperness?  So, dish.”

Buffy considered.  “Not as such.  It was just...”  She made a vague swirly gesture with both hands.  “...a non-revelation.  Before the fight started I was happy and trying to figure out why I was happy, so I could, I don’t know, use the scientific method to duplicate the process or something.  And couldn’t.  I went to bed all worried about it last night, and when I woke up there was the answer.  An answer.  A thought, at least.  It doesn’t matter why.  It just matters that I was--until Mr. Ooh-what-a-big-pair-of-fangs-I’ve-got had to go all contrary, anyway--because that means I can.  And that means I will be.  Sometimes.  Which is all anyone gets, right?  No one’s happy all the time.”

“That’s... that’s really great, Buffy.  But...”

“The fight?  It’s complicated.”  She looked significantly at Willow. “I’llway elltay ouyay atway unchlay, enwhay Awnday’s otnay aroundway otay efendday ethay annoyingway ampirevay.”

Dawn rolled her eyes, the teenage personification of sarcasm.  “Golly gee, I just don’t know how you guys manage to hide your secrets so well.  I am baffled, I tell you, baffled.  Hey, if you were at Willy’s, were the guys in back still playing for kittens?  ‘Cause I really wanted one and Spike said I’d have to--"

Buffy's eyes narrowed.  "How do you know about Willy's back room?"

A flicker of alarm crossed her sister's face and disappeared in record time.  Dawn shrugged, elaborately casual.  "Spike must have mentioned it." She began shoveling spoonfuls of soggy chocolate into her mouth.  "Gaw geh t' schoo."

"Did Spike take you to Willy's?  You, underage human-type girl?  Willy's, gross disgusting demon bar?"  Buffy leaned forward over the table with a fair approximation of the look her mother used to use when grilling her about her own unsavory teenaged wandering.  "If he took you to Willy's he is SO dust.  Spike, stake.  Stake, Spike."

Unfortunately Dawn was far more resistant to The Look than Buffy had ever been.  Or maybe Buffy just wasn't doing it right--it was hard to wrap oneself in the cloak of quasi-parental authority with a spoonful of Coco Puffs in your hand.  “Um, Buffy...”  Willow pointed.  Buffy looked down, confused.  Her hair was dragging in the cereal.  She jerked upright and swiped at the ends of her hair with a napkin.

Whatever the reason, Dawn's big innocent blue eyes simply got bigger, bluer, and more innocent, and she rolled them piously ceilingward as she grabbed her book bag and slung it over one shoulder.  "Geez, Buffy, chill.  You know I hung out with Spike a lot over the summer, while he was playing ‘My bodyguard the vampire’ all the time.  We might have stopped at Willy’s once or twice when he had to buy blood.  Which would you rather, he take me inside with him or leave me in the parking lot by myself?  Besides," she added, "who's calling who underage?"

"Excuse me, I'm almost twenty-one and legal in lots of states," Buffy retorted.  "Just not this one.  You are barely fifteen and... not.  And stop changing the subject!"

Dawn didn't crack.  She tucked her hair casually behind her ear and smiled a cool, superior smile.  "I thought the subject was underage bar-hopping?  Which one of us has been doing within the last twenty-four hours?  That one not being me?"  A horn sounded outside.  "That's Lisa's mom.  Can I go now, or are you going to play Spanish Inquisition some more?"

Buffy gave up and buried her nose in her coffee.  "Oh, go to school."  Dawn grabbed her book bag and bounced out the front door, Buffy frowned into her coffee cup and stirred in another packet of Sweet-N-Low.  “I bet she’s lying through her pearly white teeth.  If I really want to know the details, I’ll have to grill Spike.  He’s more crackable... of course, that would mean deliberately seeking out Spike.  My interview's at ten.  When do you want to meet for lunch?"

"Sociology lets out at eleven-thirty.  Noon?"

  "It is the traditional lunch hour, true.  Can I see the paper a sec?  Anya'll get all sniffly if I can't say I've seen her ad."

  Willow handed her the community section.  "Page six.  Right next to that article about the guy that freaked out in the Espresso Pump."

  "Freaked out in..."  Buffy frowned and folded the paper in half, perusing the article more carefully.  "This says it’s just another of the rash of mysterious mental collapses over the last year... the last year?  As in not stopping since Glory went away?  This can't be good.  Wills, we so need to talk--a bunch of non-Spikey non-fighty stuff came up last night that we’re going to need you in on.”

“Really?”  Willow knew she sounded cranky but was too headachey to make the attempt to overcome it.  “Cause last night, it sounded like not so much.”

“Last night it was freakout, one, temporary.  Willy’s not exactly a well-beloved member of the community; anyone could have gotten torqued off and done a freakout spell on him.”  She tapped the newspaper article with a forefinger.  “Now according to this it’s freakouts, plague of, continuing long past the point they should have stopped.  So Will, I hope you’re right about being ready to make with the magic again.  We’re going need you.”
 

Buffy slid into the booth and set her purse down on the vinyl seat beside her with a sigh.  The interview had gone... well, it had gone.  She’d never interviewed well, and it didn’t help that she hadn’t wanted a job as office help at Sunnydale Affordable Mortgage and Loan in the first place.  This was impossible.  She not only had to find a job that would support her and Dawn, but one which had flexible enough hours to allow for vampire slaying and occasional world saveage.  Getting herself up in office drag, plastering a fake smile over her face and talking with the interviewer about actualizing her goals and being a team player was... surreal. 'Previous experience.  One three-month stint as a waitress, six apocalypses averted.  Last night I beat up three demons, killed two vampires and almost kissed a third... What was that noise?  Oh, nothing, just the superego pounding the id with a mallet again...

The situation wasn't panic-worthy yet; they had the tail end of Mom's life insurance and the money from the sale of the gallery, and the child support checks for Dawn still arrived regularly from their father's bank.  As a last resort, she could tuck her tail between her legs and appeal to said father, not that she had any intention of doing so save as an absolute last resort.  They weren’t going to starve in the streets, but she hated, hated, hated having to agonize over whether or not she’d been right to run out this morning and blow some of The Budget on a re-stock of decent makeup.  She’d rationalized it as a purchase that would help her on Employment Quest, but she was well aware that it was a rationalization.

“Hey,” said Willow breathlessly, sliding into the seat across from her.  “Sorry I’m late.  Professor Sorenson had this three-page hand-out, and there was this unfortunate collating incident.  “So what’s up that you didn’t want Dawn to hear?”

Buffy looked carefully around the café.  The lone waitress was attending to another table and everyone around them seemed to be absorbed with their own lunchtime travails.  She leaned forward and placed both palms flat on the table.  “Rule Number One, no freaking.”

Willow looked a little uneasy, but nodded.  “Agreed.  Designated freak-free zone starts here.”

“Rule Number Two... I can’t think of a Rule Number Two, but it sounded silly to have a Rule Number One all by itself.”  Babbling.  You’re babbling.  Stop it.  Willow will get you for trademark infringement .  She took a deep breath.  “OK, Will, I know you’re with Tara now and all, but you still... um... notice guys, right?”

“I’m an equal opportunity noticer,” Willow said, cautious. “Though any conclusions drawn from the noticing are purely academic.”

Buffy rubbed the base of her right thumb, trying to ignore the sense-memory of that cool agile tongue flicking over her skin, soft and wet but not too wet...  “So... if I said I’d started to notice that Spike’s, um, nice-looking in certain lights, would you consider me completely insane?”

“Uh...”  Willow rubbed her nose, perplexed, but was saved from immediate response by the arrival of the waitress.  “Tuna salad sandwich on rye, and can I get it with the little froofy things on the toothpicks?  Those things are so cool...  What do you want, Buff?  I still get parental subsidies, I’m buying.”

“Caesar salad, dressing on the side.”  Buffy watched the departing waitress suspiciously, then turned back to her friend.  “So, would you?”

Willow stared at her for a long moment, and to Buffy’s everlasting gratitude did not ask if she were under another spell. “I’d consider you insane if you didn’t think Spike was nice-looking in certain lights.  You just now noticed this?”

“Yes.  I mean, no.  I mean... in the abstract.  Spike’s... nice-looking.”  In the lean, panthery, drop-dead-gorgeous sense of ‘nice’.  “It’s just that the looks of Spike are pretty much irrelevant given the soulless-killerness of Spike, and until... well... right this minute... the back of my mind looked like the end of that Indiana Jones movie, with rows and rows of neatly crated wrong lusty Spike thoughts stretching off to infinity, and now for some reason they’re starting to break out of the crates.  And worse?”  She leaned forward, her eyes gone wide and tragic.  “I think... I think I’m starting to... like him.”

“I can see where that would be unsettling,” Willow said, poker-faced.

Buffy sat back and folded her arms across her chest, pouting.  “This isn’t funny, Will!  I was having fun last night!  The kind of fun I have with you guys.  Spike’s not allowed in the Buffy Fun Club.  Or he shouldn’t be.”

A busboy appeared and deposited ice water and napkins.  Willow picked up her glass, slurped up an ice cube and began crunching it noisily.  “Why not?  We didn’t exactly spend the summer ignoring him.  It wasn’t unknown for Spike to engage in extracurricular Bronzing with us, and he and Xander had that whole dueling CDs thing going for awhile--” She dissolved into little snorts of laughter. “You should have--he--with the Patsy Cline, and the expression on Spike’s face--”

“A laugh riot, but you had to be there?”

Willow wiped her eyes, looking guilty.  OK, maybe a little heavy on the irony there, Buff.  “Um, yeah.  And Giles--Giles is all mad at us now because of the whole...”  Her eyes slid away from Buffy’s and glued themselves to a spot on the tabletop, and she began twisting her paper napkin into a corkscrew.  “..return from the dead thing, but there were, you know, definite signs of restrained British bonding before that.”

“Oh.”  Buffy propped her chin on her fist and frowned.  “Did you know Spike likes poetry?”

This proved sufficient to distract Willow from the mutilation of her napkin.  Her brows quirked.  “He never told me so in so many words, but he was helping me catch up with my Western Lit when I was out of school for that week--" Right after you brought me back from the dead, but let’s not go there, “--and no one knows that much about archy and mehitabel if they don’t like poetry.  Plus he helped Dawn with her English while she was in summer school.  You knew that.  Didn’t you?”

“Oh.  Again.”  Buffy felt vaguely disconcerted.  She’d been getting rather fond of the idea that she’d discovered something about Spike that no one else knew.  “I haven’t been noticing things very well lately.  The things I should notice, anyway.”

“Look, Buff, have you ever considered that maybe these noticings are connected somehow?  Spike’s gotten... um...”

“Much less homicidal?”

“That’s a good way of putting it.  I don’t know if he’ll ever be all the way good, but he’s... not bad.  You saw how mad Giles and Tara were at both of us after we... you know... but neither one of us got shown the door and asked never to darken his doorstep again.  Maybe it’s just because Giles still needs us to finish up that big interview paper thingy I’m helping him with, but the point is we both get to stick around and get yelled at.  Spike’s one of us now.”  She stopped and looked at Buffy curiously.  “That was what you wanted, wasn’t it?”

“Yes... yes, it was.  I just... I never thought about it involving... me.”  Buffy frowned and stirred her slowly melting ice cubes while Willow squirmed slightly.  The food arrived.  Buffy speared a lettuce leaf and let her fork hover over the dressing for a second, then sighed and popped the greenery into her mouth bare.  Those nachos last night had probably contained a million calories, all migrating straight to her hips at this moment.  All Spike’s fault; probably some weird vampire ability to divine that cheese was her culinary downfall.

Willow interrupted her musings.  “Maybe your crates are breaking open because you’re starting to like him.  Because you can start to like him, because he’s turning into someone likeable.  And you’re not insane, because the rest of us are liking him too.”  She grinned.  “Some more than others, of course.”

“I guess that makes sense.”  Buffy wrinkled her nose.  “I’m new improved Clue-Free Buffy with thirty percent less insight.  I’ll deal.  Now we get to the exciting post-fun argument.”  Willow clasped her hands in front of her and looked expectant.  “While we were at Willy’s, we got drinks--seltzer, seltzer!--and I was going to charge them to the Council as a slaying expense.  Giles said if he couldn’t get me a salary then we could at least do a little creative accounting with his.  And Spike ordered human blood, of course, and I didn’t even think to call him on it until he tried to get take-out later.  Then I said I wasn’t going to pay for it, and told him to take it back, and he got mad, and I got mad, but my moral high ground was severely eroded from not having objected right away, and then we got distracted by demons, and... other things... and--DAMMIT, he ended up taking the stuff home after all!”  Buffy smacked the table and the silverware jumped.

“Welll...”  Willow appeared torn.  “The human blood thing is of the bad, technically, but it’s not like he gets it very often, and...honestly?  We’ve kind of looked the other way when he does.  It doesn’t seem to, um, affect him for the worse, if you know what I mean--not like he chugs a bag and gets all nostalgic for killing people.”

“Maybe,” Buffy grumbled, “but it’s still wrong.”

“I don’t see the problem,” Willow said.  “Angel drank bagged people blood all the time.  He had a whole fridge full.  Of course he had a lot more money than Spike does...”

Buffy fixed Willow with an evil glare.  What was up with this using of reason and logic?  “Angel never rubbed my nose in it.”  Uncomfortable silence.  “All right, I admit it, I’m wigging unduly over something that never wigged me before, and do you know why?  I hope so, because I don’t.”

“I don’t think it’s that difficult, Buffy.  You’ve got an incredibly hot guy who’s head over heels for you and he just happens to be a vampire.  Think back to the last time this happened.”

“Whoa.”  Buffy held up both hands.  “So not going there.”

“Exactly!  Last time you fell for a vampire the world almost ended.  And with the chip, potential Spike-related heartbreak abounds if it ever goes blooey. So naturally you’re going to try to avoid it happening again, and hence, the wig.”

“But it’s not!  I am nowhere near falling for Spike.  I merely find him somewhat attractive in a purely academic, non-touchy sense, and if I can go back to avoiding thinking about it, everything will be exactly the way it used to be.”

“Except that you used to hate him and now you like him.”

“And that makes everything complicated and annoying.”  Buffy stabbed vindictively at her salad.  “This is the badness that comes of liking vampires.  It never happened with Angel.”  Uncomfortable silence.  “Not that I didn’t like Angel.  I loved Angel.” The even more uncomfortable memory of a night three years gone, standing at Angel’s side in the Magic Box, while Spike’s contemptuous North London voice drawled You’ll never be friends ... “OK, ‘like’ could never fit into the same room with me and Angel, given that all the space was taken up by buckets of romantic angst, and--that’s it, Will!”  She thumped the table again and Willow grabbed her water glass.  “I shouldn’t run from this whole friend thing, I should embrace it, because friendship equals death to romantic weirdness!”

“When did romance make an entrance?” Willow asked.  Buffy paid no attention.

“Spike.  Friend.  Yes.  The perfect solution.  It’ll be just like me and Xander.  Slaying partners.  Talking buddies.  No more noticing of--”  Electric blue eyes that crinkle when he smiles and knife-edge cheekbones  and expressive, deadly hands and the intriguing twitch of muscles beneath that ubiquitous black t-shirt and we don’t go any lower than that because Spike absolutely, positively does not exist below the belt buckle and the memory of his reaction to you squirming around on his lap under the influence of that engagement spell which by the way was ALSO all Willow’s fault never, EVER kept you up at night-- “--stuff.  The thing is, just because I can notice doesn’t mean I should be.  Spike’s... he doesn’t care about people, Will.  About me, about Dawn, about the rest of you, yeah.  But about Willy, or some random guy on the street?  No.  He can’t.  No soul.  And what’s it say about me if I... accept someone like that as--as...”

“A friend?” Willow said quietly.

Buffy moaned and dropped her forehead to the table, narrowly avoiding her side bowl of dressing.  She sat back up straight and said with great determination, “Freakouts.  We’re going to talk about freakouts now.  We need to know how many of them there’ve been since last spring.  Can you find that out for me?”

Willow nodded, looking pleased.  “I can do a search of the newspaper’s archives tonight, and maybe hack into the hospital admissions records and the police’s missing persons files--well, no, that’s so huge it would be pointless.  When do you need it?”

She looked so eager that Buffy was tempted to say “Fifteen minutes” and see what happened.  A guilty pang went through her.  She’d been avoiding Willow, she knew that, and now that she was starting to get a grip on the world again, she was beginning to feel bad about it.  “The sooner the better.  Let me know when you’ve got the info and we’ll rally the troops.”  A thought struck her.  “Do you know what happened to the rest of Glory’s crazies?”

Willow shook her head.  “No.  We were distracted.  They just wandered off, I guess. We could check at the hospital, or...”

“Of course,” said Buffy, resigned.  “My favorite place in all the world.  Hospital it is.  You said you were ready to fire up the spells again.  You’re sure about that?”

There was the barest hesitation before Willow nodded again.  “I am.  What do you need?”

“For a start, the spell you cured Tara with.  I have a feeling we’re going to need it.”
 

Evening.  Thursday.  On Thursday he checked the others.  Always the first thing.

Tanner scrambled over the piles of refuse, shards and pieces of other people’s lives, other people’s minds.  Avoid the caretaker’s trailer, touch the rusted “No Private Dumping” sign, follow the barbed wire fence back along its snarled length to the cluster of sheet-metal and cardboard hovels hidden from view by the mounds of trash. Some of the others were out already, gathered around a fire in an old oil drum.  Still more were hidden away inside their lairs.  He could feel them, all of them connected inside by the fingers crawling from mind to mind, hunting and never finding.  Dana, Ronnie, Jim.  The Rabbit Guy.  Blondie.  Their eyes followed him as he passed by, wary, scared, madder than his own.  He counted them off one by one.  Fourteen.  The list had been longer once, then shorter, and now it was longer again.  That was good.  Meant he was doing his job.

“I’m hungry, Tanner,” Blondie whined at him.  He didn’t answer her.  Food wasn’t his problem.   She’d chewed off the Press-On nails again and her fingertips looked raw and bloody.  Stupid.  You could be crazy in Sunnydale and live, but not stupid.  Walk around smelling of fresh blood and the list would be one name shorter, if not tonight then soon.  He didn’t care...

“Ah, shit,” he muttered.  If the list got shorter he was a bad person.  “Ronnie, do we have band-aids?”

Ronnie, small and grey and balding, ceased his rocking back and forth on the upturned paint can and shook his head.

“All right.  I’ll get some.  Can you take her over to...” Where?   “The One Small Step headquarters?  We haven’t hit them for a month.  Get her hands cleaned up.”

Ronnie nodded and looked at the ground.  Went back to rocking.  Tanner sighed.  He could feel it slipping away, what he’d taken, fizz fizz fizz in little green sparks leaking out of eyes and ears and dribbling from his mouth with every word spoken.  Time again.  The Rabbit Guy started screaming.  Oh, yeah.  Way past time.

Tanner headed back towards the exit from the dump, following the winding path beaten by the sanitation trucks.  “Get people together, Ronnie.  We’re hunting tonight.”

Part 3

Part 5