It had come so easily at first. She'd hated him with a blind passion that nearly choked her it was so palpable. She might not have had a lot of power to do, but she certainly had power to feel. Xander said seeing was her gift, but he was wrong. Where Buffy had learned over the years to deaden her emotions, hers were sometimes shattering in their ferocity.
She wondered, on occasion, when she reflected on such things, if she was tapping into her Key energy somehow. Probably not. Probably just hormones. Or whatever.
Thoughts like that, though...they threw her. In the beginning, after he'd first left, and she'd learned why, they reinforced her rage because it was like her own subconscious defying her -- sounding like him; reminding her what she'd lost...what he'd taken away.
Because, as much as she pretended that hers was a righteous indignation on behalf of her sister...it wasn't. That was there, too, but...there was too much else to call her motivations pure.
The Scoobies all tended to forget what things had really been like, so that the complexity of her feelings afterwards never even seemed to occur to any of them. The summer of Buffy's death, she'd been held together by the finest of threads. And they all tried to be there for her, with their pitying looks at the orphan girl, and their platitudes about how time would make it better. But, they all had someone they could share their real grief with: Willow and Tara, Xander and Anya...Giles and Glen Fiddich. And so, she and Spike had had each other. That summer had turned their friendship into something much deeper, though indefinable. He had never treated her like a fragile, stupid little child, so she never had to maintain a front with him. She could lay herself bare and know that he'd judge her feelings as an equal. And, he offered his own broken heart back to her, unashamedly, in return. They'd become one another's refuge when the sea of grief and self-blame threatened to drag them under, and they'd clung together in the sometimes shattering emptiness of their shared loss.
Her trust in him had become a foundation on which she'd begun to rebuild her life. He was the brother she'd never had, the father she missed, the cool boyfriend she hoped to have one day.
And, it wasn't that she didn't know that he'd done terrible things...she begged him for stories of his exploits, after all. She'd thought it was a sign of her mature open-mindedness that she could separate the Spike she knew from the monster he was in his yarns. He was only following his nature, after all. And it was in the past, so who cared!?
That house of cards had come crashing down on her that awful night of Tara's death and Willow's wrath. On top of everything else, she'd lost Spike, too. She'd felt so stupid to have trusted him, like -- like what she'd been: a gullible little girl who didn't know enough about the world to guess that a monster was always a monster.
So, a lot of her anger at him was really anger at herself. And hurt that he could do such a terrible thing when he knew ~ he KNEW ~ how much she relied on him to be there for her ~ to help her through the hard stuff, with his sarcastic and uncensored language, and his naked emotions. It wasn't just Buffy he'd hurt, it was her, too. Not that hurting Buffy wasn't enough, but....
But then, he'd come back, and she hadn't hesitated to let him know where he stood with her. Like the spoiled brat she knew deep down she was, she let him think it was for entirely altruistic reasons. But seeing him again brought back everything she'd felt six months earlier, doubled...tripled. Her rock had abandoned her, betrayed her trust in him, hurt her sister, and disappeared, grinding a chunk of her heart under his boot as he went.
She sensed right away that he was different, though didn't understand how or why. Didn't CARE how or why, because nothing that he did mattered to her anymore. She had Cut. Him. Out! But then she'd learned about the soul and he'd moved into the house and was...so much like she remembered, but more so...and not. Quieter sometimes, but still capable of that eye-twinkle she'd loved so much.
Not that she was going to be won over as easily as all that! He was going to have to work for it. She could forgive his leaving, if she looked at it objectively, in light of what he'd gone off to do. But, he was still responsible for what had come before, and for going without a word! So, yeah, she'd played hard to get. And it had backfired completely.
He'd evidently agreed that the didn't deserve her forgiveness, wouldn't ask for it, wouldn't seek her out, accepted her hatred of him as his just desserts. She could tell that he didn't think he deserved Buffy's forgiveness either. Difference was, even if she never admitted any of it aloud, Buffy'd had the guts to give it to him anyway. She'd been willing to give him the chance without really punishing him first. So they'd had the time to patch things up. Way beyond, it seemed. By the end.... |
