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Spike wasn’t exactly sure why he was doing what he was doing. Even as he dug up the Slayer’s grave, he recognized how bizarre it was. How macabre. But she’d been gone for ten years, now… nothing but bones. And Spike kept telling himself he just wanted to see her again. But he knew that wasn’t true. He knew he was going to take one.
To always have a piece of her with him, just like she’d always carried a piece of him- willingly or not. She’d had his love. She still did, whenever he thought of her, more often than he’d care to admit after all this time.
And so what if she’d never loved him back? It didn’t matter. He’d loved her just the same. And even now, as he dug in the dark, unearthing the ten year old grave, he told himself he just wanted to see her again, that it was nothing more than coincidence that just enough time had passed for him to be sure she was nothing more than disarticulated bones.
Finally, finally, he felt his shovel hit the hard wood of her casket, her final resting place. But, as he unearthed it, he realized something was wrong. The lid of her casket was broken. Not by him. The splintered wood was dirtied, faded with time. And the wood was broken outwards, it appeared, not inward like it would be if he’d cracked it with the shovel. It was hard to tell with all the soil bearing down on it, weighing it down, falling into the casket. But it looked like it had been broken from the inside…
Like a vampire’s.
Spike fell to his knees in the grave, using his hands to frantically wipe away the dirt so that he could pry what remained of the wooden lid off of her. And what he saw disturbed him more than anything he’d ever seen in all of his life and his death. It was harder to see even than her broken body the day she’d thrown herself off that ledge for her bloody sister, which until now, had been the worst thing he’d ever had to witness.
Buffy’s skeleton wasn’t laying as he expected, as she’d been posed. The bones weren’t laying back on the floor of the coffin, arms meeting with clasped hands at her chest. Her arms were strewn, as much as they could be in the cramped space. Her legs curled up beside her body in the fetal position- one last, desperate, possibly even subconscious, desire for comfort.
The dirt that should have been surrounding her casket was spilled inside it, partially covering her form. She’d clearly tried to clear it away from herself. He could picture it- frantic, manic movements, desperately fighting against the sudden onslaught of the crushing weight of six feet of damp earth…
He’d done it himself once before.
But the difference was, he was a vampire. He had the strength required to claw himself out of his grave. Of course, Buffy had a Slayer’s strength. Just as strong as a vampire, if not even more so. But vampires had one advantage in the arena of digging themselves out of their graves that a Slayer did not. They were dead.
The Slayer was alive. She needed air to breathe.
Spike continued to clear the dirt off her bones, likely in shock at what he was unearthing. And when he pushed aside a broken bit of the casket lid, his eyes sunk slowly shut, wishing he could unsee the scratches she’d frantically clawed into the wood of her own coffin, probably panicked, terrified, desperate for air.
Alone.
He hadn’t cried over her since the night he saw her die. But he cried now. She didn’t deserve that. Not her. Not Buffy.
Once his tears were shed, he pulled himself up out of the grave, slinking away before the sun could rise and add him to the collection of dirt covering her bones.
But he would make them pay. He would kill them all, slowly, painfully. He’d make them suffer, make them afraid, just like she had been. He’d let their lives end like hers. Scared, alone, gasping for air.
Her so-called friends. Who else could be stupid enough to try to resurrect her inside her own grave?
They’d pay.
Spike’s jaw was set with hard determination, his fist clenched around the delicate finger bone in his pocket. He couldn’t go back and fix what happened, stop her from waking up six feet under. But he could do this. Starting at dusk tomorrow, he would do this. For her.