Oh, I used to have a normal life, but then things changed – as life tends to do. Buffy started getting in trouble, refusing to tell me what was wrong. Hank and I fought more and more. Dawn became quiet and shy over night, and the school counselors started asking me if everything was all right at home. And then Buffy getting expelled certainly didn’t help things.

Then Hank and I decided to go through with the divorce, and the girls and I moved to Sunnydale. Things were supposed to get better, go back to normal.

My eyes were closed shut those first eighteen months. Buffy opened them at the worst possible moment, and told me about her sacred birthright, her duty and purpose in existing: she was the Slayer.

Strange how I never imagined my baby girl having a divine destiny when the doctors placed her in my arms for the first time twenty years ago. She was my daughter, my first child, precious and sacred in her own right, but at the same time just a normal baby.

Would Rupert have known she was the Slayer even then if he had seen her?

And I never imagined that my other baby, my sweet little Dawn, despite my memories, despite all my fears for her when she didn’t grow those last six weeks and the doctor had to force her to leave the safety of my womb - never, with my certainty of those labor ppains and her broken arm on her sixth birthday and the day Buffy tried to feed her to the neighbor’s dog and everything else, did I imagine that she, too, was unique and precious to the world in the way that she is. Never did I imagine that she wasn’t really mine, that until six months ago she was nothing more than some kind of…energy, swirling around in another dimension for millennia. Never did I realize that something evil, something that *I* cannot fight, but Buffy can and must, might come to try to take her away from me.

I never thought, never imagined a lot of things – that much is certain.

I never thought I’d be sitting here, comforting a heart-broken vampire – I never even imagined that vampires were real, nor did I imagine that Buffy was destined to hunt them.

But I’ve done it before. I welcomed a distraught vampire – a sweet young man, but a vampire nonetheless – into my home, and comforted him as best I could. I never thought I would, never *imagined* I would, but I did.

I just never thought I’d do it a second time.

And I certainly never expected that vampire to be Drusilla, the poor dear.
 

Maybe I should start at the beginning…

She seemed to be taking it a little better. She was going to school and behaving herself – thank God. I didn’t think I could handle another call from the principal’s office. God knows I had enough of them when Buffy was still in school, even after I found out that it was all because she was off trying to save the world.

No one had explained it really to me yet, and my curiosity was driving me crazy, so I went ahead and asked her. “Dawn, honey?”

She looked up from where she sat on the couch. Her long hair swung around her shoulder as she turned her head. Oh, how I envied my girls’s hair! They were so lucky to have such lovely straight hair – they must have gotten it from their father, instead of inheriting my annoying frizz. “Yeah…Mom?” she asked. She was still a little uncomfortable saying the word, but she was trying, and I think I understand. In the normal world, she would have just discovered that she was adopted.

Of course, Sunnydale – and this family – is anything but normal…

I walked over to the couch and sat down beside her. “Buffy and her friends really haven’t explained it to me, and I was wondering…how you…found out?”

“Oh,” she said quietly, and I longed to scoop her into my arms and never let my babygirl go. “Well…”

“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,” I told her in that tone we mothers usually reserve for other things, a tone that resembles the one we have for things like The Sex Talk and The No-Drugs-Or-Alcohol Talk and The She’s-Discovered-Boys-Are-Cute Talk.

“No,” Dawn said. “It’s okay.” She was quiet for a moment, and I almost said something, but then she spoke. “It was Buffy’s birthday, remember? And every time I came in the room, her friends would stop talking. I *know* they were talking about me.”

I nodded. Buffy had told me beforehand that her friends might start acting oddly. She said that some things had happened with the evil woman they’ve been fighting, and she and Rupert had decided it was time to tell them about Dawn. Even if they hadn’t been talking about her at the party, they all had been a little…off that night, and Dawn’s a very bright and perceptive girl. She had to have known that they were keeping *something* from her.

“I…got mad and went up to my room,” she continued. “I decided I would go to the magic shop and get this book that I saw Giles hiding there. I knew it had to be his Watcher’s-Diary-thingie and I’d be able to find out for myself the slaying stuff that was going on that Buffy never tells me about.”

“Honey,” I told her, “you know Buffy is only trying to keep you safe. And how were you going to get into the store? You know that Ru-Mr. Giles had closed it for Buffy’s party.”

“I know. I just hadn’t…thought that far ahead.” She sighed. “I climbed out the window and ran into Spike.”

“Spike? He was here?” I asked.

“He never made it to the door. I…talked him into coming with me.” She paused and looked at me. “Did you know he likes Buffy?”

I blinked and a puzzled look probably showed up on my face. “He *likes* her?” I said cautiously. “You mean-”

“Yup.” She giggled – something that I was relieved to hear. “He brought her a box of chocolates!”

“That was…sweet of him.”

She laughed. “The box was all beat up, like he’d thrown it against the wall a couple of times.”

I laughed myself, but all I could think was, ‘He’s a sweet boy and all, but really! *Another* vampire for Buffy? Oh, dear God.’

And once again, one of them was reportedly in love with my daughter, their one natural enemy. Joy.

I walked up the sidewalk and for some inexplicable reason turned mid-stride to look down towards a clump of bushes. An unnatural fog surrounded them-

Or was it cigarette smoke?

Smiling to myself, but groaning internally – for why would he be hiding there for any length of time unless it *was* because of his attraction or affection or whatever it may be for Buffy? – I stepped towards the conspicuous smoke plume and said, “Spike?”

He stepped out into the open, dropping the cigarette and rubbing it out with his toe. “Hello, Mum,” he said jovially. “You’re home late this evening. Everything all right?”

I smiled. Remember how I said he was a sweet boy? This was example #561 for the jury’s examination. “Everything’s fine. What are you doing here?”

He smiled himself. I like it when he smiles – to be honest, I like it when any of my kids smile. It means that they’re alive and well, and at least *most* everything – if not everything – is right with the world. Plus, he’s all the more pleasant and handsome (from a mother’s perspective, of course) when he smiles. He cuts an impressive figure no matter what he does, but a smile is the key to any girl’s heart – be it a mother, a sister, a girlfriend. We strange, mysterious females like smiles.

I don’t know much about his life before he became a vampire, but I know he wasn’t married, and I think he was pretty lonely. He probably didn’t smile enough – and I mean *really* smile, not those fake, polite muscle exercises that one is forced into to save face or maintain an image. He didn’t smile like he should have, for whatever reasons there were for him not to. With my own maternal perspective, if he had…well, every girl in London would have been after him like a bitch in heat.

And I cannot believe I just thought that. *Baaaad* Joyce. And wait – it would have been Victorian England, so the girls weren’t *supposed* to even *think* like that…

Okay. So it was a bad simile or metaphor or whatever it was. I think my intention with that thought was somewhat clear.

Okay, so he should smile more, got it? Good.

Moving right along…

“I thought I’d take you up on that offer,” he told me. “I was…in the neighborhood and in the mood for some of your hot chocolate–” Suddenly, he sped up and started almost looking embarrassed. “If it’s, um, not a bother, you know…what with the little one an’ all…”

I think he almost stuttered on that last bit, but it was so sweet. I know, especially after our conversation yesterday, that Dawn looks up to him in a sort of ‘you’re kinda cool’ way, and I think he actually likes her in a brotherly-sisterly way. It was sweet of him. Example #562, I believe.

Okay, back to reality…
 

I had invited him over back when Buffy put us in his…care when the Watcher’s Council was in town, after that woman – Glory? Is that her name? I can never seem to remember – had come into the house and threatened the girls. He had seem so…well, he wasn’t the same Spike I’d gotten to know when Drusilla left him. I didn’t expect him to be depressed and grieving like last time, of course, but I hadn’t expected the anger, the frustration, the pent-up agression. I know he’s a vampire, and so some of that is…mandatory, but I still didn’t expect him to be the way he was. We got to talking, first about “Passions”, which I had unfortunately gotten into while confined to bed rest after the operation, but the conversation moved on to saner things, and so I invited him to come have hot chocolate with me again sometime.

His whole face and demeanor brightened. Remember the smile? It was turned on me full-force. “Sure,” he said, “I’d like that, Mum.”

“She’s not your mom,” Dawn called out from her spot on top of one of the sarcophagi. She was supposedly doing her homework, but somehow I think she was really reading one of those books by L. J. Smith she’s been into lately – horror in the rest of the world, but humor here in Sunnydale, Dawn had once said.

“Is, too, Nibblet, if I bloody well want her to be,” Spike told her with a silly sort of grin.

I smiled, a little surprised at the nickname he had given her, but realizing that to a vampire, it might be considered ‘affectionate’. “Children, behave,” I told them in my best Mom Voice.

“Yes, Mom.”

“Yes, Mum.”
 

So now he had come for his hot chocolate. “Oh, of course,” I told him. “Come on in. I think I even have some of those little marshmallows.”

The thousand-watt grin returned.