Right, yeah. Okay. There it went, all his meticulous effort slashed through in an instant. Not that life-altering, he supposed. Buffy spent how many years taking the wind out of his sails? Not that she was, at the moment, not really. If he focused on the melodramatic of it all and on hating the fates or what-have-you, then he didn't have to tune in to what was happening internally. The fact of the matter was that Spike spent so much time toiling over how he would get to Buffy that once he had nothing holding him back, he turned over a different stone.

Hence the avoiding her since arrival. Oh, he'd asked. He'd heard whispered talk. Thought maybe once he'd even smelled her in the halls — her perfume, yeah, but her. Blood, essence, didn't much matter.

( And he had rehearsed, you know? Imagined the impossible, wrote it down once in an actual letter that he burned in a metal trash can because how could anyone be so cowardly as to not say the words to her face? )

So here they were, destinies intertwined, and Buffy was asking him . . . how it was hanging???

"Please. They couldn't pull it together without me," he tried lousily. He knew full well that it sounded like he was choking on gravel. "Wouldn't expect anything less than to be jerked around by destiny."

He pocketed the cigarette with as much grace as a blind man and forced himself to ask, "And you, pet?"