Spike scaled the wall of the Summers house, his fingertips confidently finding the gaps and ridges that led the way up. Doing this always made him feel like a superhero in some cheesy comic book, especially the way he suspected his duster hung down the back of his legs like a cape. He actually had a lot in common with Batman, except for the whole undead thing. Of course, he fancied himself just a little bit cooler than Batman, what with the Robin fiasco and all.

He wondered what Buffy’s neighbours thought of his unabashed climb to her window. He supposed they had learned long ago not to look too closely at the goings-on at 1630 Revello Drive, if they knew what was good for them. Or maybe some had embraced the situation, and used the view from their furtively parted blinds for the night’s entertainment, like TiVo. He swung up over the eavestroughing using only one hand, just in case there were any fans watching.

Spike hunkered down beside the window and listened. Christ, he could hear the sobs from out here, even though the window was closed. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all. He picked at the paint on the window ledge as he considered his options. He could go back to the bar. Go home and watch Conan. Go find some other trouble to get into. Ahh, why go looking for new trouble, when the old trouble was conveniently right at hand? He gave a sharp rap against the pane of glass. And waited.

And waited. He would have knocked again, but the crying had abruptly stopped, so she’d obviously heard him. He wouldn’t be surprised if she didn’t want to see him. Conan it was, then. He’d just stood up to leave when the window opened. He crouched back down on the balls of his feet. "Hello Willow," he said.

Willow looked like she'd been a recent victim of killer bees. Her eyes were almost swollen shut from the crying, her pale skin blotchy, her nose red and runny. A vision of loveliness. "What do you want, Spike?" She sounded profoundly weary.

He smirked. "I just came to see the freak show."

She closed the window with a click. Fuck! Some Jehovah's Witness he'd make. He started tapping on the window, one tap after the other. He counted them for something to do. She opened the window again on number three hundred and twelve. She didn’t say anything, just looked at him like he was a spider she’d found hanging out there.

He shrugged. "I dropped by to say goodbye is all."

She pressed her lips into a hard, thin line. He watched her as she worked out the pros and cons of this. Even distraught and beaten down, she was still sharp. A step ahead. He'd always liked that about her. She finally moved away from the window. "You can come in for a minute, if you want."

He nodded and pulled himself through the window, silent and graceful. He'd done this a time or two before, though not lately. Buffy's room hadn't changed. Same hint of musky perfume, same proliferation of shoes and belts and cheap jewellery. Only the girl was wrong.

The room was dark, and Willow made no effort to turn on a light. She sat on the edge of the bed in her too-long Snoopy pyjama top and half-heartedly straightened the rumpled bedcovers. There were wadded-up tissues everywhere - the bed, the table beside it, the garbage can, the floor. Spike remained standing. He crossed his arms, unsure of what else to do with them. "So," he finally said, "Tara's dead."

Willow started to cry again. Nothing dramatic, just a soft and steady stream of misery. She felt around blindly for the box of tissues, couldn't find it, and settled for one of the used ones beside her. She blew her nose loudly. For Willow, the time of niceties was long over.

"And Warren's dead too," he continued. She nodded. "And you're being sent to England tomorrow as rehab for trying to end the world. Does that about cover it?"

She kept nodding, the tears rolling into the corners of her mouth. She shrugged helplessly - she couldn't speak. Her trembling hand hunted for another recyclable tissue. Spike hesitated, then retrieved the tissue box from where it was hiding under the foot of the bed. He held it out to her and she took it from him and hugged it gently against her chest like it was a baby.

Spike sat on the bed beside her. Didn't attempt to put an arm around her or any other gesture of comfort. He was only familiar with making women cry, not getting them to stop. And Buffy, well, she was what you could call stoic. If she had shed tears, it hadn't been in front of him.

"You will get through this," he said confidently. He always had been a good liar.

She made a noise of despair. "I don't want to get through this. I don't deserve to get through this."

"You don't have to deserve it. You just have to survive it."

She turned on him, her eyes dark and wet as ink. "I don't know if I can. The way they look at me...the things I did..."

"You know as well as I do that every one of us has done terrible things. Some of us more than others, mind. They love you. They'll forgive you."

She started to sob in earnest now, shoulders heaving and teeth bared. "They shouldn't! They shouldn't!"

If he were human, he would have sighed. "Maybe not. But they will. And you'll get your chance to make amends."

Willow twisted on the bed as if he were torturing her. "Make amends? Are you crazy? I can't fix this! You don't know!"

He said thoughtfully, "What don't I know, Willow? Tell me."

She opened her mouth to answer, then slapped him instead, a good one across the side of his face. He was almost surprised. She started to pummel him, her fists hammering against his chest. "Shut up, you stupid fucking vampire!"

He let her go at it for a while before he grabbed her wrists. She fought him, such as it was, then suddenly collapsed against him, clawing at the lapels of his duster. Keening. Now he put his arms around her, held her tightly and said into her hair, "Of course I know. Of course I do."

"No, no," she moaned.

"He killed her. And you killed him. And if you had the chance to do it over..."

She pressed her face into his neck, her tears hot against his skin. "I'd kill him again. I'd like it more the second time."

He kissed the top of her head. "I know you would. But you won't feel that way forever, love."

She pushed away from him, her voice high and desperate. "But that's all I have! If I don't hate him, I won't have anything left. I can't live without her, Spike! I don't want to!"

Willow searched Spike's eyes, looking at him as if really seeing him for the very first time. She gripped his arms, yanked at them. "Kill me," she begged. "Please. I don't want to be here anymore. For God's sake, Spike, please." Her face was crumpled with grief.

Spike considered this. It wasn't anything soulful that held him back, of course. No moral voice whispering at the back of his mind, no fear of law or God. It was all logistics, and consequences. Would the chip hobble him even if she had asked for it? Would Buffy hunt him down even if he left town? It wouldn't be the first time he'd done something unforgivable, certainly. But it might be the last.

He decided it was doable. If he wanted to. He could almost taste her blood, thick and intoxicating, against the back of his tongue - as a favour yet. He just about said yes. Then it was if as if Spike was looking at Willow for the first time, too. What would the world be like without this girl in it? How much smaller and greyer would it be without her magic and her mind and her messy hair the colour of the dying embers of a fire? Loss upon loss.

He didn't kill her. He left her hurting and bewildered, went to the bathroom and held a washcloth under the tap until the water ran as cold as it was going to. He came back to the bed, gently pushed Willow backwards into the pillows and settled the washcloth over her eyes as he sat back down next to her. "You have to stick around so you can remember her, don't you?" he said softly.

Willow said nothing. The cool solace against her face, the relinquishing of her fate to someone who neither loved nor judged her, seemed to be enough for the moment. Her body slowly unclenched.

He smoothed her hair away from her face. "What a Big Bad you must have been," he said. "I only wish I could have seen you."

She caught his hand in hers and held it against her cheek. This time he was fully surprised, verging on shocked. He didn't move, just sat there dumbly looking at her cradling his hand against her face. Just came to see the freak show. "Where were you?" she asked.

"I was drinking. I'm getting quite good at it, with all the practice."

Her fingers squeezed. "You didn't miss much. Although as it turns out, all the best Big Bads are brunette these days."

"Oh, that cuts, Willow. To the bone."

She smiled tiredly, her cheeks nudging the washcloth upwards. Spike noticed that the Snoopies on her shirt were all playing baseball.

Willow finally said, "Spike?"

"Mm-hm?"

"It's okay that you didn't want to. I know I'm not the kind of girl vamps like to sink their teeth in."

Spike fondly stroked her temple with his thumb. "Don't be ridiculous. I'd bite you in a heartbeat." How long had it been since the first time they'd said those words to each other on a different bed?

A couple more minutes of comfortable silence, then: "Spike?"

"Yes Willow?"

She paused so long he started to wonder if she was going to ask him on a date. She finally said, "I know I've always been quick to judge you. Quick to decide what you are. But I want you to know...I admire you for trying to be good. It's a lot harder than it looks."

He swallowed. Then he swallowed again. "I'm not that good, pet."

"You'll get there," she said.

The heat from her skin was suddenly intolerable. He pulled his hand out from under hers. Her hand fell back, empty, on the pillow. She crossed both arms over her chest and hugged herself. "I...I'm sorry. I didn't mean to..." Her voice cracked.

Spike studied the sunshine yellow washcloth that hid her face, except for her chapped lips and quivering chin. For a brief moment, the merest fraction of time, he wondered if he'd possibly given his love to the wrong girl. The thought skipped off of him like a smooth, flat stone. He pulled off his duster and dropped it on the floor at his feet. Then he leaned over and whispered in her ear, "Willow, I'm going to make you feel better now."

"Oh, Spike," she said sadly, "nothing can make me feel better."

She couldn't see his smile. He reached under her pyjama top and tore open the seam of her panties at her hip. When she froze, as he knew she would, it was just long enough for him to reach over and rip out the seam at her other hip. When she flinched, as he also knew she would, he yanked the ruined panties out from under her and tossed them into the garbage can beside the bed.

"What are you doing?" she gasped. She tried to pull the washcloth off her eyes, but his hand was on her wrist before she'd hardly begun to move. After all the various and sundry tussling with Buffy, Willow might as well have been moving at 16 frames per second.

"Leave it on," he told her. It wasn't a request.

Willow lay very still, breathing hard. She knew how strong he was. She didn't struggle. "Spike," she said reasonably, "you don't want to do this."

"To do what?"

"To...to rape me," she whispered.

He snorted. "I'm not going to rape you, you silly bint. I'm going to give you some grief counselling."

"Like how?" she asked him, a bit sharply given the circumstances, he thought.

"With my mouth," he said seriously. "With my tongue."

This information did not improve her breathing rate. She curled her legs up into her chest in a panic. "I'm all distressed and heartbroken-y here! This isn't the time for you to make the moves on me!"

"No moves," he said. "I won't even take my boots off. You're half-dead and numb from the heart down. I'm just going to bring you back to life for a little while." He nodded to himself. "It's a bit ironic when you think of it."

"The chip," she blurted. "The chip will save me!"

Spike paused as if her saying this just might make it so. He shrugged. "Maybe. Maybe not. The very last thing I want to do is to hurt you. Let's see which kicks in first, why don't we - the chip or your hips."

Willow made a last-ditch attempt to scramble off the bed. Spike tried not to enjoy it too much as he straddled her and pinned her wrists against the mattress. This was not about him, after all. He could feel the blood racing under her skin everywhere their bodies touched. He shifted slightly away from her. Somebody should have told his cock this wasn't about him.

Willow stopped struggling. She lay, rigid and trembling, under him. "I'm gay," she said, her voice smaller now. Uncertain.

"Yeah, but my tongue doesn't care," Spike said, and licked her lesbian neck. Her skin was salty and hot. She moaned, and Spike had to work very hard indeed not to enjoy that.

When she opened her mouth with the next objection, he talked over her impatiently. "Willow, let me make this clear. You don't have a choice. It's completely out of your control. This is going to happen, and it's going to happen right now. Understood?"

Willow's body began to shake so violently that her teeth chattered. Again, this was not unexpected. The human body was remarkably predictable under duress, he'd learned a very long time ago. The smell of her fear and underlying arousal was unbearable. It was a relief to kiss her.

She tried her best to fight. Squirmed delightfully against his crotch, clawed her nails into his knuckles. When she bit his bottom lip deep enough to draw blood, it hurt him enough that he jerked his head away from her. Below the washcloth, her mouth was an "o" of shock at her own ballsiness. "You fucking bitch," he said, and kissed her again, his blood on her lips. This time she kissed him back hard and eager, her legs opening under him like butterfly wings, the washcloth slipping badly. He pressed his thumbs into the insides of her wrists until they bruised, and the chip should have been shrieking in his head, but Willow had started to make small, needy sounds of encouragement, and that must have done the trick. He kissed her until she was thoroughly desperate. It didn't take long.

Spike was feeling a little desperate himself. He reluctantly abandoned her mouth, as he felt he was starting to lose sight of his objective. He carefully adjusted the washcloth back over Willow's eyes, then moved between her legs. He was going to make sure that death and retribution were the last bloody things on Willow's mind for the time being.

He ran his cool hands down her feverish thighs and opened her up. She wriggled away from his touch. "Wait! I...I haven't had a shower for two days."

Spike laughed, maybe for the first time ever in her presence without sarcasm or bitterness. She was thoughtful even in her own violation - what a puzzle she was! "Vampires are like dogs, pet. We delight in every taste we come across."

And what could Willow say to that? She dug the heels of her palms into the washcloth as Spike positioned her legs as he saw fit, nice and wide. He let his eyes linger on her most intimate places now so utterly exposed. She'd shaved herself sometime in the last week, when she was still happy and in love, ready to please the person who was going to enjoy it. Quite the plot twist that it turned out to be him.

He wanted to tease her, make her beg and shudder until she was incapable of any thought but the torment between her legs. However, time was short and he had no choice but to make do with verbal foreplay, and precious little of that.

Willow stiffened as he traced a line with his fingertip over her thighs, her belly, her hip bones. Everywhere but. "How does it make you feel knowing that I can do whatever I want to you, and you can't stop me?" he asked her as he went.

"Frightened," she said, voice tremulous.

He let his finger move closer, closer to her centre, but not close enough. "And what else?"

"Excited," she breathed.

"And just how excited do you think I can make you?" He started to pinch her thighs, harder and harder, fuck the chip.

She tried not to arch her hips. "Very. Very."

Indeed. Christ, he could do this forever. But he didn't have forever. He moved his head until his mouth was as close to her hard, swollen clit as possible without touching it. "I'm going to suck it now, Willow. Are you ready?"

"Yes," Willow said, straining. "Yes, please."

Spike's mouth made contact. Willow flinched away from him. Then thrust against him, very hard. Then away from him again. And thus a pattern was established. Spike didn't hold her down at all, and she started fucking Spike's mouth like it was what she was born to do. Spike, undaunted, matched her thrust for thrust. Her pussy was just like velvet - impossibly soft when his mouth moved down her, and rough when he moved up, against the grain.

Willow hung on for dear life to the washcloth. She tried to dig her feet into the blankets, looking for leverage, but she needn't have bothered. Spike was so brutal with her that her shoulders were soon pinned against the headboard, her hand fluttering helplessly against the sheets, tissues scattering. She was relatively silent as he worked her over, because she kept holding her breath. Spike tried his best to get her to cry out. It was a very enjoyable game for both of them.

Willow had just settled her heels into Spike's shoulders when his mouth pulled wetly away from her, his head snapping up. "You any good in high pressure situations?" he asked her.

Willow gulped air. "What? I don't know! What are you saying?"

That's about when the bedroom door opened.

"Don't come in!" screamed Willow.

The door hastily closed again. "Honey, we're back," said Buffy from the other side of the door.

Willow tore the washcloth off her face. She gaped at Spike kneeled before her in the darkness, hands on her thighs. Spike, who was very good indeed in high pressure situations, slowly grinned, his tongue curling against his teeth. Then he lowered his head and resumed what he'd been doing. "Oh my God," said Willow sincerely. Then more loudly: "I...I just need to be alone right now, okay? I need some space." Her voice rose an entire octave while saying this. Spike snickered between her legs, which only made her wiggle more.

"She sounds worse," Buffy said.

There was a gentle knock on the door. "We got you something to help you sleep," said Xander. "And some Rolos."

Spike shoved two fingers into her and twisted them. Willow frantically tried to escape either his hand or his tongue. Now he thought it best to hold her down. "No, that's all right!" said Willow in the most strangled tone one could imagine. "Just leave me alone for a while!"

There was some muffled debate in the hall as Spike's fingers pistoned into her, just below his chin. Willow, apparently passing the point of no return, pressed her palms upside-down against the headboard, spread her legs, and took exactly what Spike gave her. Buffy finally said from the hallway, "We'll be downstairs if you need us, okay?"

"Oh! Oh!" said Willow.

"You'll feel better in the morning honey, I promise. And Will? I'm pretty sure Spike is around here somewhere. Just call me if he tries to bother you."

Willow came so hard it was a wonder Spike's fingers weren't trapped inside her. He fully enjoyed her harsh sobs as she jerked against him. He didn't stop until she lay puddled and panting, sprawled across the mattress.

"I can't believe they bought that," she eventually croaked.

Spike stretched out beside her. "Which one seems more likely to you? That you were having a nervous breakdown in here, or that I was going down on you? Even I bought it."

Willow turned to him, her face flushed and earnest. "Spike..."

"They're going to be back to make sure you haven't hung yourself with the sleeve of your Snoopy pyjamas - I'd better get out of here. The last thing you need is the Slayer giving you her disappointed look again."

She touched his shoulder. "That's the last thing you need, too."

He shrugged. "I'm only glad I got to find out you're so handy with a razor."

Willow punched his arm. "Shut up!" She yawned as she fished the tissue box over with her toes. "Here, have a Kleenex. For the...for your fingers."

Willow watched as Spike brought his fingers to his mouth and sucked them clean. Then he accepted the tissue from her and dried them. Willow's knees shifted open. "Don't do that," she begged, "or I might not be able to let you go yet."

Spike could have kissed her. Pushed her onto her back. He could have forgotten everything for a little while, too. But he didn't. He rolled off the bed, tugged the blankets over her and tucked them around her shoulders. "You need to get some sleep. You have a long flight tomorrow, and you'll need your strength to put up with Rupert's sanctimonious bullshit."

Willow's eyes slowly blinked shut as he spoke. "He's not so bad. I'm glad I didn't kill him."

"God help the world that's saved by the librarians." He scooped his duster off the floor and slipped it on.

"I'll tell him you said hi." Her words were lazily languid now, her heartbeat unhurried. She snuggled into the pillow.

"You do that." He leaned down and kissed her forehead. "Good luck Willow. If you ever decide to go evil again, give me a call."

"Mmm. World Domination. Maybe you could be my sidekick."

He debated whether he should bundle her in the blankets and spirit her away. It didn't seem that much more outlandish than endlessly waiting around for Buffy to change her mind and come crawling back to him. He went so far as to reach out and caress the lump under the pink comforter that was likely Willow's leg. In the end, he settled for grabbing the tissue box and putting it on the bedside table, where she'd be able to find it easily if she needed it during the night.

Spike opened the window. A warm gust of June wind teased the curtains apart. He could have done with a cigarette, but he didn't want to lose the taste of Willow in his mouth. Now that wasn't something he said every day. He was half way out to the roof when Willow said dreamily, "Spike?"

He leaned backwards until he could see her again. "Yes Willow?"

"Thank you. And Spike?"

"Yes Willow?"

"Be good."

He smiled. "You too."

She was asleep before he shut the window behind him.