On why Buffy loved Spike in "Dead Things"
"Why does everyone in this house think I'm still in love with Spike?" - Buffy Summers, s7e14 "First Date"
I went on a spiral about this quote and needed to determine when, exactly, prior to this episode, Buffy had loved Spike. There are arguments to be made for a lot of episodes to be the first where she definitely loved him, but "Dead Things" (s6e13) kept coming up for me.
The episode opens with an oddly tender post-coital scene where, for the first time in their sexual relationship, Spike and Buffy are having a normal(ish) conversation. They're comfortable with each other (despite inexplicably being underneath a rug), joking and smiling. It's the first time since before "Once More With Feeling" where the energy between them is relaxed. Something has changed (almost certainly on Buffy's end) since the last time we saw them.
This deep, possibly new, connection between them is demonstrated again, later, when Buffy feels tempted to go and visit Spike in his crypt and the two stand on either side of his door, sensing one another without seeing each other.
It's reinforced with Buffy's murdersexnightmare dream, where she dreams of Spike in her bed, comforting her, her true desires laid out to the audience. This is what she wants but won't let herself have.
In their confrontation outside the police station about Katrina, the show tells the audience that when Buffy's speaking to Spike in this scene, she is also speaking to herself by calling back to the scene in "Who Are You" in which Faith says these same things to herself (in Buffy's body). This scene is between Buffy and the parts of herself that she's trying to suppress/deny (represented by Spike). With this framework, the exchange where he says "I love you" and she says "No you don't" are an argument within Buffy's head in which she is trying to argue herself into not loving him. This exchange is as much an external representation of Buffy's internal conflict as the part where she beats him, telling him that he's "nothing". He tells her that "you always hurt the one you love" and she repeats his words later, after having hurt him.
Finally, there's the scene where Buffy "comes out" to Tara. Tara asks Buffy whether she loves Spike, but Buffy doesn't answer, only looks conflicted and horrified. Buffy has had no problem saying that she does not love him in the past (see: most of season 5), so why can't she say that now? If she doesn't love him, why is the idea of hurting him, a soulless demon, who she has had no problem hurting in the past, tearing her up inside? Either she doesn't know and it's distressing or she does love him and being confronted with that reality is scary to her. If it's the former, perhaps in the time between this and "First Date", Buffy may have realized exactly what the answer to Tara's question was.
I'm not sure if Buffy loved Spike before this episode, but I feel like this episode provides a lot of evidence that, by this point, her feelings for him had evolved into love. Not pure, uncomplicated love, of course. It's all tangled in her previous notions about soulless vampires, Spike's fucked up morality, and her own self-hatred and depression, but it's love, nonetheless.
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