Chapter Thirty

It isn’t at all what Angel has already started to suspect and set aside to examine later since he believes that it isn’t important. His priorities are to keep Spike from getting the Gem of Amara, keep him from terrorizing Buffy, her friends, and her mother, and rescuing Willow—exactly in that order. He’s known for days, he’s known since San Francisco, that Spike has added despoiling naïve girls to his repertoire. It has more to do with his frame of reference for Willow. Fondness for Willow had crept in sometime between the appearance of her doppelganger and his departure from Sunnydale. When he thought she was dead, when he saw her at the Bronze, he had felt something that he recognized as sorrow chased by the regret that either he or Buffy would have to destroy what was left of her.

When they traded the Box of Gavroc for her, he had known that it was foolish and inevitable. It was as much about what Buffy was as it was about what Willow meant to them. She was a hero, and heros don’t abandon the innocent for a tactical advantage. He recognized that he was able to be pragmatic about his priorities because it wasn’t his call. It was Buffy’s, and her choice would always be to save the innocent and deal with the consequences as they unfolded.

If it were his choice, his priorities would probably change. He would still see all of the options and the need to eliminate any possibility of Spike getting his hands on the Gem of Amara, but he would probably save Willow if push came to shove and his choices narrowed down to one or the other.

Thinking back on it, he’s sure that they’ve been intimate. The curiously neutral phrase makes him frown at himself, but he tracks it patiently back to Spike’s admiring tone of voice when they talked the night that Willow almost got away from him in San Francisco. He can’t hurt her too badly. There is too much risk involved. He can’t drain her and turn her, at least not yet. That leaves other forms of manipulation to control her, and vampires express domination through violence, death, or sex.

Guilt clawed at him. How many nameless women had he seduced and killed? Raped and killed? Drusilla stood in their place, an undead monument to his sins. So did Spike, who was in his vampire adolescence, his novice, his student.



It wasn’t like that at all. If anyone particularly informed Spike’s perspective about Willow, it was Drusilla, not Angel. He had spent a century taking care of Drusilla, providing what she needed, when she needed it, despite her inability to articulate her needs in any way that was consistent or coherent. Where Drusilla’s influence ebbed, Spike’s own rejection of Angel and Darla began. For nearly twenty years he had been the object of their disapproval and derision and he had never stopped refining what they had taught him in the miserable and vivid crucible of his formative years.

Between the two of them they had fucked up everything they had ever touched.

He felt no particular need to change Willow. Controlling her, enough to keep her where he needed her, was an issue, but beyond that, he didn’t need to smash her into tiny bits and pieces, and he was able to appreciate the sheer novelty that she represented. He had hurt her, deliberately, more than once, and she was expecting more of the same while he kissed her. They were laying on their sides, facing each other, a position that she had been orchestrated into assuming on the cusp of her non-participation decision.

Sex was still new to her, but kissing and petting were not. Kissing and petting were familiar terrain that had probably gotten short shrift after she and her honey started screwing.

He had turned on the television while they were taking what she described as a break in her own odd terms. There was just enough sound, for her, to drown out her own sounds. It started with the change in her breathing, shading towards rapid and shallow, with little sighs and startled sounds slipping past her lips. Her lips were kiss swollen and sensitive from kisses that grew forceful and then backed off to a slow exploration of the changing taste and texture of her mouth. The mouthwash she had used was reduced to a faintly spicy complement. He felt her shiver as he used the tip of his tongue to trace her lower lip.

Her eyes were closed, but her eyelashes fluttered. He stroked her soft cheek and smoothed his thumb over her eyebrow and her eyes almost opened while he let her catch her breath and then shut again when he nibbled on her upper lip while his hand moved to the nape of her neck, fingers sliding into her hair, silky from the conditioner that she had used. The strands had a heavy texture that he recognized belatedly as coming from hair color. That had surprised him a little, though he realized that the hints had been there for him to take. The nearly uniform dark auburn color suited her, but it wasn’t natural.

Her natural hair color probably ranged to red and she had taken it darker.

He kissed her jaw and nibbled on her earlobe, hearing the little catch that was developing in her throat, just a sensation away from a moan. He wasn’t bored. He wasn’t in a hurry. The smooth space behind her ear beckoned and he licked it to the downy edge of her hairline, feeling her small breasts make light contact with his chest.

She backed away the tiniest bit and he explored her spine, bringing her back with the pressure of his hand. Her neck was sensitive. He had gone there twice, feeling her alarm and confusion as she tensed, and he had backed off. Savoring the notion of taking one of her nipples into his mouth, he licked and sucked on her neck and she froze and then shuddered, lifting her chin and tilting her head back.

He smiled. Tasting her, biting her was in the forefront of his mind, but he pushed it back, knowing that it would frighten her again. He scooted down in the bed, running his hand over her ass and thigh to the back of her knee, pulling it up over his hip and holding it there as she rolled a little more into him, eyes opening as she felt his cock against her abdomen, leaking copious amounts of cool, clear fluid.

She stared at him, absorbing his expression. A small amount of friction and contact with her body made him close his eyes and lick his lower lip. When he opened his eyes a crooked smile twisted his lips. “Your skin feels like pudding,” he said in a voice that was recognizably husky.

If he knew what she sounded like when she was aroused, she knew the same things about him. His voice was soft, heavy, and slightly deeper. She watched his tongue slide over his lips to be caught briefly as it returned, between his teeth. His arm cradled her thigh as he rocked against her.

Her nose wrinkled. Pudding? She felt like pudding? For some reason this struck her as funny.

He saw the gleam of humor in her eyes. “What’s so funny?”

She shrugged. “Pudding.”

It did sound funny. “Soft and creamy and delicious,” he nibbled on her chin. “I could eat you all up,” there was an answering glint of humor in his eyes as his hand reached the open space between her legs, his fingertips lightly stroking her.

She felt a corresponding shiver of anticipation that made her wince inside. It nibbled with sharp teeth at the languor that the hushed sound of his voice fostered. He had eaten her all up before and he was unforgivably good at it. She wanted to get back to the place in her head that she had found after they had left Sacramento, when it was all about what she had to do and not about the dread of what she was going to do.

With that in mind, she touched him, starting above his hip where her knee rested. She didn’t have an objective. Not like the other night. It had been simple. She wanted to drown out the false impressions of kindness and comfort that he had been doling out. She wanted to obliterate the feeling of having failed and having been failed.

He didn’t seem to notice that she was touching him now. She was used to being mocked for her complexion, likened once by Cordelia to the underbelly of a fish. He was whiter, or paler and against his skin she could see the contrast in the undertones. Pink for her, and blue for him. Girl. Boy. Except not. Human. Vampire. Cool fingers touching her, fingertips insinuating themselves between her legs, between the lips of her cunt. Her attention switched from her own hand to his face to gauge his intentions, and his hand moved away from her, stroking the back of her leg as he leaned in to kiss her, and then paused, millimeters from her lips.

His hips moved, bumping against her almost playfully. “Kiss me?”

She eyed him warily. They had a bargain, an arrangement, an agreement, and kissing him was part of it. She started with his upper lip. The hand attached to the arm that was lying near her head lifted to cup the back of her head, but there was no smooshing together of lips. He didn’t hold her there or press her lips harder against him through the back of her head. He just cupped the back of her head, his thumb moving lazily to stroke her hair. She meant to keep her kisses neat. Small neat kisses that wouldn’t induce heavy breathing or thrusting hips.

She wasn’t sure when he started kissing her back, mimicking her. She caught his lower lip between hers and ran her tongue over it. He made an appreciative sound and did the same to her upper lip. After a while she lost track of who did what first and how it was copied. There were advantages to making out with a vampire. He didn’t accidentally or inadvertently breathe into her mouth. When her breathing became too erratic and she started to feel too closed in, he backed off, stroking her back, and scattering kisses over her face.

The uneven way her skin heated up fascinated him. Against his lips and the tip of his tongue, the crest of her cheek, her lips, and her forehead were warmest. Her small straight nose was cooler. His chin inadvertently grazed the hollow of her cheek and she flinched a little at the slight raspiness of his skin. He started to apologize for it and caught the flash of curiosity in her eyes. He smiled, threading his fingers through the hair under his hand.

“Let me guess. You’re about to blurt out some question about how often I shave. Or how vampires shave without mirrors, or why does hair grow if I’m dead?”
She looked startled and a little guilty.

“Hmm. Everyday. Very carefully, and I haven’t a clue. It’s bloody inconvenient.” He ran his hand along her leg. “How often do you shave your legs?”

She frowned at him. It was an odd question. She didn’t sound like that, did she? “Once a week,” she supplied the answer.

“Sunday?”

She shook her head. “Friday.”

Of course, Friday. That would be a date night for her. He untangled his hand from her hair and used it to prop up his head. Her hair was finger combed and tousled and her face was flushed. His gaze dropped to her breasts, one half obscured where it was between the mattress and his chest, the other pulled by gravity toward the center of her chest, smooth and full across the top, her half erect nipple lushly inviting.

She scooted back a bare inch. “I need to go to the bathroom.”

“Yeah?” his eyebrows lifted.

“I’m all sticky,” she elaborated.

“Is that all?” he rolled them over, easing her down on her back.

“Uh, yeah, but it’s kind of gross,” she complained, looking at him to see if he was offended.

He trailed his fingers through the fluid that was wetting her skin, carrying them down to the curls that modestly veiled her cunt. His fingers cupped her firmly, the heel of his hand rotating over her clitoris.

“What a little beauty you are,” he murmured. “So clean and pretty.” Two fingertips pressed against the opening of her body. “Spread your legs wider,” he coaxed, kissing the corner of her mouth, his tongue flicking lazily over the crease there while his fingers moved with his hand. “You can have a nice bath later.”

She opened her legs the tiniest bit for him and he kissed her again. “More,” he insisted. The tips of his fingers pressed into her. He hung over her, balanced on one arm, looking like he could stay there indefinitely.

When she opened her legs wider his fingers slid into her. His lips brushed hers, just enough to divide her attention and remind her that the wisest course was to concentrate on something else, and baring that to do something that would make him move this along to its inevitable conclusion because what he was doing felt too much like intimacy and they were not intimate. They were just having sex.

He hadn’t taken a human for a lover in decades and those relationships had been fleeting. There had been a girl in New York with shiny brown hair and sticky strawberry lip gloss that he had been taken with for the length of a summer. It had gone badly, even from his point of view, and she was buried under the foundation of a building in Manhattan. That wasn’t going to happen to Willow. Even in the unlikely event that that the Slayer ultimately refused to follow through on the trade, leaving Willow dead was no longer an option that was worth giving even fleeting consideration to.

He kissed the corner of her eye when she squeezed her eyes shut. “You feel so good,” he crooned to her, wanting to smile at her effort to block him out. She was so stubborn. He liked that about her. It reminded him of Dru. Insane as she was, Drusilla didn’t lack for her own set of stubbornly-held ideas about herself. It was the quality that was similar, not the underlying set of principles that they clung to. If Drusilla was a brave, cunning, resourceful Princess, Willow was Cinderella informed by skepticism. In a ball gown and glass slippers she would be aware of the grit under her fingernails and the pinch of unyielding shoes.

His fingers moved in and out of her, luxuriating in the warmth. It still felt a bit off to him, but that was the charm of the mismatch of her. She was clashing colors and strange ways of thinking, goodness uncomfortably wedded to pragmatism, warmth and living flesh, sensuality and a guilty conscience. A part of her would pick at this for the rest of her life, looking for a meaning in it as well as wondering how she could have improved on what she had done.

His thumb moved lazily over her clitoris while she bit her lower lip and struggled to be still and quiet.

It wasn’t like anything that Angel imagined.

On any other day, Spike would have been tempted to make her open her eyes and acknowledge what was happening, but he was satisfied for the moment with kissing her neck when it extended as her head fell back, pressed into the pillow, moving from side to side in an unspoken denial and listening to her breathe faster as he nuzzled the flat, smooth space above and between her breasts.

There were things he wanted to tell her, but they could wait on the possibility that there would be a time in the future that she would understand them, and her breasts were there, under his lips, waiting to be appreciated given the way she was unknowingly rolling her shoulders into the mattress as the tension in her body grew. What she didn’t grasp was that by denying him the sounds that he had come to enjoy, she was internalizing what she was feeling, shutting herself up inside of it where there was no escape.

Behind her tightly closed eyelids, Willow saw flashes of colored light. There was a corner of the bedspread caught under her shoulder, a little oasis of bunched up batting and polyester. The sheet under her was coarse and stiff with the detergent that was used to clean it. Her head still hurt, or if it didn’t, she was sure that punching herself in the head might help. The voice in her head that woke her up from nightmares, sniped at her now to open her eyes.

The lamps at each side of the bed were still on, and the sudden flood of light made her flinch, blinking as her eyes adjusted. In her field of vision there was the beige blandness of the room and Spike. He had left the television on. He had told her that she was the prettiest and most interesting thing in the room before he had turned the television on. She understood what he meant now. The room was meant to be functional, and if the walls had been painted black the contrast would have been more noticeable, but no less stark once it was seen. She watched his shoulders shift slightly.

His eyes were closed. He seemed different to her with his eyes closed, the sheer force of his personality veiled behind eyelids. His tongue curled around her nipple. The sensation was a complement to the slow circular motion of his thumb on her clitoris. Stupid brain telling her to open her eyes. If she looked down—as soon as the thought came, she found herself peeking—in the open space between their bodies she could see his arm, bent at the elbow angling down to his hand between her legs and his cock, bobbing gently as his lips plucked at her nipple, tugging on it.

He gave it a sharp nip with his teeth and kissed away the slight sting before lifting his head, looking at her with heavy lidded eyes. With a lingering stroke of his fingers that curled as he withdrew from her, he found her hand and brought it to his lips, nibbling on her fingertips and his own indiscriminately.

He wasn’t talking. She frowned. He was always talking. His eyelids drifted down again as his tongue rubbed along the inside of her index finger, his fingers spreading hers. The tip of his tongue traced the webbing between her index and middle fingers.

“What are you doing?”

The bewilderment in her voice made him smile. She was full of guile. She had a half dozen carefully constructed aspects that she relied on and when you pried her away from them, there was this, the slight tremor in her voice, the uncertainty, and the curiosity that made her ask a question with an answer that should have been obvious to anyone with the most meager intelligence.

“Licking your fingers,” he murmured.

Her lips pursed at that. “Why?

He grinned. “Because they are attached to your hand,” he teased, turning her hand over to run his tongue over her palm down to her wrist. He pressed a kiss there.

Her expression turned wary but there was a hint of humor that was bubbling up to the surface. Her nose wrinkled. “You aren’t going to go Gomez Addams on me with fake endearments in foreign languages that are really bad names and slobbery kissing, are you?”

One eyebrow lifted quizzically. “Why would I do that?”

To be mean, she thought, but she kept that to herself, wishing that he would be mean without the prompting. Instead he straightened her arm, nuzzling the inside of her elbow before guiding her arm over his shoulder, holding her hand briefly at the nape of his neck. When he was satisfied that she would keep it there he let go of it and started playing with her hair, smoothing his thumb over her cheekbone.

Their eyes met, hers worried and apprehensive. “This is confusing,” she pointed out, her hand moving on his neck, as if she was going to let it fall.

He felt her fingers pinching little bits of the hair at the nape of his neck, tugging on them as she rubbed the short hair between her fingers.

“Massively,” he agreed, shifting on one knee until he was between her legs and then resting, his abdomen pressing against the cradle of her open legs. His elbows balanced his weight off of her, freeing his hands to stroke her face and neck. His attention shifted to her neglected breast.

He kissed the underside of it. Her heartbeat was slow and steady, matching the way she was breathing. Her fingers slid deeper into his hair, and he sighed against her skin, enjoying the scratch of her fingernails against his scalp. His fingers traced the outside edge of her ear and she turned her face, seeking his hand, kissing the base of his thumb. It was confusing. There were moments when she irritated the hell out of him, and other moments when he knew that he should be irritated with her and wasn’t. He applied his lips and tongue to her nipple, sucking it into a hard, rosy peak until her fingers tightened in his hair while she sucked on the base of his thumb, like she was trying to gag herself with his hand.

He moved against her, rocking his abdomen against her, feeling her squirm and shift under him, trying to get more contact with him, not less. She tried to wrap one leg around him and her foot landed on his ass, her toes curling into the shape under her foot.

Testing his theory about what she was doing with his hand, he crawled back up her body, freeing his hand with a twist of his wrist and covering her mouth with it as the head of his cock butted up against her. Her eyes opened and with a minor adjustment of the angle of his hips he was in her, feeling her awkwardly lurch into his body, surging against him, a strangled sound trapped under his hand.

“Wrap your legs around me,” he urged, feeling her shifting under him in a frustrated kind of way when he was inside her and unmoving.

She grabbed his arm to pull his hand away from her mouth and took a deep breath, and then another as she bent her knees, tucking them in against his sides as her ankles crossed at the base of his spine. She rocked her hips under him, her face a mask of intense concentration. He kissed the corner of her mouth, letting her catch her breath.

“I’m a bad person,” she whispered.

“No.” His fingers stroked her hair back from her forehead.

She shifted under him again, trying to get him to move. “I’m terrible.”

“I’m terrible,” he corrected. “You’re just human.”

“They would hate me, if they knew that I was like this.”

“Sssh,” he soothed. “They aren’t going to know,” he promised. “I know what you are like, and I don’t hate you.” His shoulders flexed as he withdrew from her, slowly, his eyes holding hers.

Her teeth were worrying her lower lip and he gently dislodged it, kissing it as he sank back into her, shivering a little at the sensation, willing to get lost inside how she felt to him.

He held her face in his hands and kissed her eyelids shut, catching a tear that slid out of the corner of her eye, slowly working them both to a climax, feeling her slim arms around him after she came to a shuddering, quaking orgasm, holding him, petting his shoulders and hair, while he sought his own fulfillment.

He could have kept going, or started over, but she looked exhausted, so after he got up to get a beer and a cigarette, after she came back from purging herself of their mingled bodily fluids in the bathroom, he watched her curl up on her side, facing away from him and he pulled the bedspread up over her bare shoulder. He thought she had fallen asleep when she spoke.

“I don’t think I hate you anymore either,” her voice cracked a little.

There were ways he could have answered that that would have reminded her that she did hate him. He ran his tongue over his lower lip, tasting nicotine and beer and her, looking down at his body ruefully.

“You wouldn’t do that to me, would you?”

For a second she had lost him, and then he remembered warning her about how long he could feed on her and keep her alive. He wouldn’t do that to anyone. It was an enormous amount of work with a slim return, but really, the idea of doing that to her was almost obscene no matter how effective it was as a threat.

He picked at the label on the beer bottle with his thumbnail, aware that she was wondering if he would answer her.

“What do you really want to know, Willow?”

She turned back toward him, looking at him over her shoulder. “If they can’t find it, are you going to kill me?”

He took at deep breath. Fuck. “Probably,” his eyes narrowed. “Eventually, I would.”

She stared at him. “Eventually?” Her tone picked at the word.

He tangled his hand in her hair, pulling her toward him, a slow smile curving his lips. “Eventually,” he repeated as she swatted at the hand tugging on her hair while she obeyed his unspoken demand to move closer to him. He let go of her hair and wrapped his arm around her waist to pull her against his side. Her hand landed on his chest to keep from sprawling across him.

As soon as his arm left her waist she started to pull away from him, reaching for the bedspread to cover up. He shook his head and brought her back, settling her against his chest and tugging the bedspread up over her. He kissed her forehead. “Don’t worry about it. I’m not planning on killing you anytime soon,” he admitted. “You’ll probably have time to work your way through your reading list.”

“Are you serious?”

She sounded so dumbfounded that he was moved to chuckle. “You don’t think that I’m going to give you back without getting the Gem of Amara, do you? If they don’t find it this week or next month or even next year, I’ll still have you. Time is something I have in abundance.”

His arm curled around her as he brought the beer bottle to his lips. She watched his throat work as he swallowed. “But I don’t,” she said, feeling oddly detached.

“You don’t,” his tone was warm, even tender. “I wouldn’t mind seeing you put on a few more years,” he watched her eyes widen as the idea of years impacted. He had a very contradictory appreciation of time. No matter how long he lived, a year sounded like a long time, but he had lost track of more years than he could count. A few days ago the decade Georgia demanded sounded reasonable, but right now he was sure he wouldn’t have lasted ten months before he came for her.

‘Years,’ her lips formed the word, but no sound escaped.

He leaned back against the headboard, slanting a look at her. “Do you think someday we’ll laugh about this?”

He looked amused, but there was something in the way he was looking at her that made Willow realize that he was serious.

“Why?” she croaked.

“I don’t know,” he shrugged. He caught her hand that was creeping up to her throat and brought it to his lips. “The rational part of my mind is telling me to send back a couple of fingers to get their attention fixed on finding the Gem of Amara.” He sucked on the tip of one of her fingers. “But, your fingers are attached to your hand, and I like your hands, and your toes, and all the bits in between.”

“So, it’s the irrational part of your mind,” from her tone he thought she was suggesting that irrationality was a big factor in his mental processes, “that’s telling you to keep me?”

“In one piece,” he corrected. “That’s the part of my thinking that is keeping you in one piece until the Slayer finds the Gem of Amara and I trade you for it.”

“And you leave? And I never see you again?”

He tilted his head back, looking at the ceiling. “The leaving part was more or less implied,” he conceded. “What else was there? No taunting your mates? No telling anyone—which is a two-way street, pet,” he warned her. “And I’m to leave your friends and family alone?” he frowned. “Hmm. Never seeing you again was not part of the deal. Possibly an oversight on your part,” he mused, seeing the way her eyes were narrowing in outrage at the implied insult to her negotiating skills.

“Leave ‘us’ alone,” she insisted. “I said us. I’m part of us,” she insisted.

Actually, he no longer remembered exactly what he agreed to, which was convenient for him. She was probably right. She wasn’t stupid or selfless enough not to have meant to include herself in his potential victims list.

He let her stew for a few more seconds, belatedly recalling her threat to curse him with a soul. Which argued against teasing her too much as well as ever letting her go.

“I’m yanking your chain, Red,” he told her, rolling his eyes. “Spike?” he adopted a breathy falsetto. “Are you going to kill me?” He snorted. “Yes, Willow. I’m going to kill you. How does five o’clock on Thursday work for you?”

He mumbled something that sounded like, ‘daft cow’ under his breath.

She still looked deeply suspicious. “Why Thursday?”

Caught swallowing the dregs from his beer, Spike had to cough to keep from choking. “Weekend, pet. If I’m going to have a coming-out party for my own baby vampire, it has to be the weekend.”

Her mouth formed an ‘O’ of surprise. That kind of ‘kill her’, not like it was an idea that he was tormenting her with, but like it was a foregone conclusion.

“But, I don’t want to be a vampire,” he mocked. “Your morbid fascination with the subject really makes me wonder about you. Let’s recap. Eventually. Not Thursday. Not next week. Not next month. Years, okay? Your toe could go septic and you’d drop first. You could trip over something and break your bloody neck, which is so likely that if there’s any thought that you should be gnawing on it is to pay closer attention to your surroundings.”

She scowled, possibly annoyed by having her finer feelings mocked. Interestingly, she didn’t run out her threat to curse him again. She was catching on to how the game was played. He set the empty beer bottle on the bedside table and switched the lamp on his side of the bed off. Holding the bedspread to cover her, she got up on her knees to move across the bed to turn the other light off.

Picking up the remote control, he started looking for something to watch while she was sleeping. He settled on a re-run of Law & Order while she rearranged her pillow to give herself something to hug while she slept, presumably to avoid a repeat of waking up hugging him. It didn’t bother him precisely. He didn’t really like being touched while he was sleeping. Still, he felt a mild twinge of regret that he had ever teased her cuddling up to him.

There wasn’t a lot of comfort in knowing that you were valuable only as a trading piece and living only as long as it suited someone else. He waited until her breathing evened out, when he was sure that she was asleep before he made himself comfortable, moving her and the pillow she had her arm wrapped around to the center of the bed and spooning in behind her.




Giles had come to his own conclusion, independent of Angel, that it was highly likely that Willow would have seen or done things over the last two weeks that would have long term consequences for her. Possibly for Oz as well, who he felt a degree of sympathy for. It was an intangible that he had not permitted himself to dwell on while other tasks occupied his attention. If she survived, his obligations as a Watcher were nonexistent. Thankfully. He was in a position to make Buffy his penultimate concern, without any obligation to his former colleagues who would gleefully descend on Sunnydale with a team of Watchers to pick apart every detail Willow could provide about Spike and his associates as nothing more than an anthropological exercise.

Giles was no longer under any obligation to provide such an opportunity, and he was surprisingly incurious about what Willow might have learned. He didn't want to know. If Oz’s imagination ran to maltreatment and abuse, Giles imagination was more richly informed by the day he spent being tortured by Angelus with Spike offering his helpful, and ultimately far more successful advice. Angelus injured him. Spike pointed the weapon that was Drusilla at him and violated his mind. Angelus might have prided himself on his ability to break his victims, but Spike wasn’t interested in breaking anything and that made him in some ways more perceptive.

His obligations to her as a significant adult involved in her life made him wonder how he allowed it to happen that she was ever involved in anything that would have made Willow the likely victim of a soulless demon. Spilt milk, but it gnawed at him at odd moments when he wondered if Willow would become part of the roll call of dead children that he would never entirely forgive himself for.

He still thought of her as a child, more so than Xander who was in all reality, far more childish, more so than Buffy who deserved to be thought of as a child for more of her adolescence than she was permitted. Xander was correct in the point that he made. She was far more mature and well adjusted than she was given credit for being.