#spaith

Spike is genuinely pleased to have Angelus back in season 2, at least to begin with, so there must have been something more than just resentment between them, and I think that something was kinky sex. Angelus is a sadistic bastard who’s idea of BDSM probably looks like torture to an outsider, but Vampires heal fast, and while I think Spike’s more a pure submissive than he is a masochist, I also don’t think he minded the rough treatment at all, especially not if Angelus took the time to build a clear distinction between play time and any of the bickering from the rest of their lives, and I think that’s something Angelus would care about, because he also needs that distinction. He can’t walk around just being the person who’s attracted to Spike in his daily life, not without fundamentally altering his own self-image. So they have boundaries, they have pretty compatible kinks, they have accelerated healing to keep Angelus from fucking up too badly.

Aftercare is probably non-existant, but the plus of them all living communally is that Darla and Dru are there to pick up the slack. (Darla and Spike have a singular lack of relationship in canon, and which is mostly a feature of Darla not really being a character in any meaningful sense until pretty late into Angel, but I like the idea that once he stops trying to turn her into a mother figure, they actually get on pretty well. They don’t have sex, and Darla ultimately disproves of him on religious grounds, but she can’t resist fussing over him a little bit in her own way, including cleaning him up and getting him a meal after Angelus has got bored and wondered off to massacre a village or whatever it is he does for fun. Her interactions with Dru suggest she quite enjoys taking that matriarchial role with her family, indulgent and fond and the ultimate unquestionable authority.)

Ensoulled Angel and unsoulled Spike have sex exactly once, in that weird liminal space where Angel has his soul back but hasn’t left the Whirlwind yet and is going slowly insane while trying to pretend everything is still normal. It’s pretty tame by their usual standards, because the idea of doing any of the shit Angelus used to do makes him feel sick (he never really figures out that the kinky sex isn’t the actual bad thing Angelus did to Spike, because ensoulled Angel is messed up about a lot of shit but none more than his family). Despite that, it’s the only time that leaves Spike actually fucked up, Angel blowing hot and cold, moving the boundaries every time Spike thinks he's figured out what game they're playing, letting him go deep and then refusing to actually be his Dom. It's bad enough that Dru actually warns Angel off, which ends up being of the catalysts for him figuring out he needs to leave.

This may also be the source of Spike’s issues with men, but I suspect that that has more to do with his mother and noticable lack of a father than it does Angel. (Although Angel disappearing in China probably reinforces every natural suspicion he was already harbouring). Either way, every person Spike cares deeply about is a woman. It’s one of the reasons I don’t like Spike/Xander as a ship, because that requires Spike to care about another man in a way he just... doesn’t, in canon. Even as I'm writing a version of Spike owning his bisexuality and falling for a man, I don't think that's changed much, he's just mentally ammended his definition of acceptable people to 'women and also John' in his head, and even getting him to do that much took 130,000 words of branching timeline character growth. That's one of the reasons I don't think Spike & Angel would ever work as a couple outside the confines of their family, for all that they probably screw around a few times during/post Angel S4. With Dru and Darla there, Spike can follow their lead, (and he probably hates men at least a bit less at that point, which helps). When it's just the two of them, no Dru to follow and no Darla to lay down the law, his mental pigeonhole for Angel is a lot less about family, and a lot more about masculinity.

Drusilla

Oh Spike and Dru, I love them and their relationship so much, and it’s so fucked up.

Lets start with the fact that Spike wants a domme and that’s a role Dru can play - when the stars of her mental constallations happen to align correctly - but it’s very much playing. Spike is not playing, Spike is deadly fucking serious. I’m honestly not sure if Dru knows that or not, not that it matters particularly when it’s not something she can give him either way.

Then there’s the fact that Dru wants, and frequently needs, a daddy. And not just a daddydom. She needs an authority figure to act as a fixed point she can orbit around and rebel against (Dru has a complicated relationship with authority figures), and Spike does an impressively good job considering, but it doesn’t seem to come naturally.

More seriously, there’s the fact that while Dru does genuiely like Spike as well as loving him, a rarity among the vampire relationships we see, she doesn’t ultimately respect him. I think when Angel and Darla were still around, she thought of Spike as something like her fellow Little, or possibly the beloved family pet to her own precious daughter. He was her playmate. When Darla said ‘no, you can’t go and steal dresses from bond street we’re keeping a low profile’, Angel might have egged her on but it was Spike who actually went with her, and it was Spike who tried to keep Darla from scolding. (Are you noticing a running theme here? My Darla is the only actual adult, surrounded by people who never finished mentally growing up). Once their ‘parents’ have left, it’s just Dru and Spike and someone has to stop Dru doing something that will put her in serious danger (I think the family all underestimate her in this respect specifically, but given her penchent for murdering children, which tends to attract attention, it’s not an unfounded concern) so now he’s not her fun playmate anymore, or not as often as he used to be, he’s the one trying to keep them safe and under the radar, the one trying to manage her actual mental health issues (and despite the goth manic pixie dream girl-ness of her, she does have very real, very serious, mental health issues.)

He thinks she’s a goddess and loves her in probably the closest to genuine healthy romantic love we see from a vampire, which isn’t saying much admittedly, but he’s definitely bottling up some resentment for the ways she isn’t what he needs. He wouldn’t fixate on Buffy the way he does if there wasn’t at least a part of him that’s unhappy. Meanwhile Dru loves him but needs him to be at least two people at any given time, and is disappointed when he can’t manage it.

Could they be fixed with marriage counselling? Yes, I think they actually could, marriage counselling and maybe an open relationship, or at least some friends, would do them the world or good. They can’t provide everything one another needs, but no one person ever can, the issue is that they only have each other. If they had other people to lean on for the things they can’t give one another, and if they learned to actually communicate, I think they could be genuinely happy. Dru's lack of respect for Spike, Spike's lack of trust in Dru, they're solvable problems that will never get solved because every joss wheadon character is terrible at actually communicating.

Harmony

Every Spike and Harmony scene is either hilarious or heartbreaking, often both at once. The really stupid thing is that I legitimately think they could have been friends if they didn’t keep trying to date. Spike can be a catty bitch sometimes, and he doesn’t have anyone he can let that side out of himself out around. Also despite being a pretty horrible person when she was alive, Harmony was absolutely also the drunk girl earnestly telling you to dump your shitty boyfriend in the club bathroom, and Spike could use some of that in his life. And Harmony would adore having a mentor, she’s so hungry for validation. They even probably like a lot of the same movies.

As it is though, Spike’s scenes with her are essentially him trying to LARP being a straight man, or what he thinks a straight man is filtered through victorian morality, demoic possession, and Angelus. There’s definitely a whole lot of nasty internalised shit going on in the fact that he responds to Dru telling him he’s not masculine enough by trying to pretend to be straighter, more dominant, and less kinky, than he presents himself in any other relationship.

(And just as much horrible internalised shit in the fact that Harmony behaves the same with him as every other love interest she gets, and it's not at all the way she behaves when she's actually just being herself.)

There's absolutely no universe in which they could have a healthy romantic relationship, or even healthy casual sex (they're both so very very bad at casual), but there definitely is a universe in which they sit in the lobby of Wolfram and Hart drinking pink wine from corporate branded mugs and talking shit about Angel, and I wish that was the universe that had made it to TV.

Faith

Okay, so this is like two hints in S7 and not an official love interest, but it was going to be. Those hints are in there because there was a Spike & Faith spin-off show in the works that never ended up happening, but I care nothing for the petty concerns of canon so I'm going to talk about it anyway!

Could they have had a healthy non-destructive romantic relationship? God no, in absolutely no universe. Faith's definitely-present-if-never-precisely-canon untreated BPD and Spike's 100%-canon insecurity and lack of emotional skills would collide in the worst way. But on the other hand, would every interaction they have be more erotically charged than the best porn ever made? Absolutely also yes.

If Spike was actually capable of having casual sex without falling in love, they would probably have the best sex of any of these possible relationships. They don't need the same things from sex, or kink, but in a casual setting that would probably work in their favour. Faith would absolutely enjoy playing Spike's domme, but it would only be playing, and in a universe where they managed to keep things casual that wouldn't be the issue it is with Dru. And Faith would freak the fuck out if anyone tried to service!top her for serious, but the fact that that's not Spike's preferred role would keep things casual in a way that might let her actually start learning to accept care and give up some control.

It would all go up in flames eventually either way, because of the afore-mentioned ways their different mental health needs would conflict and the fact that I'm not entirely sure mental-health professionals who aren't horror-movie-trope-assylum-orderlies even exist in the Buffy universe, but while it lasted I think they would actually be good for one another.

And, you know, they could bond over both being really really thirsty for Buffy.

Buffy

Oh Spuffy. I never shipped it and yet I understand completely why so many other people did. They're just so compelling together, the way good tragedy always is.

I know this is going to be contraversial with some people, but I don't think Buffy loves Spike. I don't think she even likes him, although that's sort of moot given that she doesn't really know him, and doesn't show any real interest in getting to know him. She needs something he can provide, and that's really as far as their relationship goes, for her.

Which isn't a criticism, exactly. If they were on the same page about that, there would be nothing wrong with her using him that way. (By the end of season 7, they actually mostly are on the same page, which is why I prefer those interactions to anything that came before, no matter how I feel about the season as a whole). The issue is that Buffy not only has no idea where to start with healthy communication, I don't think she even knows that it's a skill she's lacking, and even if she wasn't, it probably wouldn't occur to her to apply it to Spike.

I should also stress, I do think Buffy is very emotionally immature in a lot of ways, but I don't think that's her fault. Living the life she has, it's no wonder she doesn't know how healthy relationships are supposed to work. Hell, the best role model she's got is Joyce, who despite the bait and switch they pulled in season five is a consistently terrible parent for the first three seasons. One of Buffy's two main role-models of emotional maturity is a woman who kicked her sixteen year old daughter out of the house for being, essentially, born different, and then punishes her for having left once she allows her to come back. (Seriously, like half the emotional beats of season 3 are people being angry that Buffy left town, and it's never once address that her own mother literally threw her own and made her homeless minutes after the most traumatic experience of Buffy's life up to that point. I have a lot of strong feelings about Joyce and absolutely none of them are possitive). Her dad sees his daughters once a year, and eventually even that gets to be too much quality time for him. Giles loves her, but it also takes him five seasons to stop thinking of her as a sacrificial lamb, or maybe a scapegoat, and even once he admits to himself he loves her that's still not enough to make him actually say the damn words. It is in no way Buffy's fault that she's fucked the hell up, but that doesn't negate the fact that she's fucked the hell up.

As she is in canon, I don't think Buffy is capable of having a healthy romantic relationship with anyone. She needs time, and space, and a boat-load of therapy to start unpicking all the bullshit she's been taught, by her mom, by her dad, by Giles, by Angel, and for that to happen the world would need to stop nearly ending every other weekend.

The question of whether Spike loves Buffy is thornier. I'm not sure he likes her all that much more than she likes him, although he definitely knows her better. He respects her more than she respects him, and he understands her more. Whether he actually likes her... hard to say. I don't think he's lying when he says he loves her, but I also think he uses her as something like the methodone to Dru's heroine. She's emotionally safer, just by virtue of being more stable, and the fact of her being the Slayer lets him justify to himself why she deserves the plinth he places her on in his mind, but ultimately she's still up on that pedestal that used to belong to Dru.

This isn't an Edward Cullen situation though, or even Angel, I don't think he'd hate her if he ever actually realised she had feet of clay, but I don't know whether his feelings for her would survive it. Maybe, because Spike is nothing if not loyal to the people he loves, but I don't think so.

I also think, despite the element of hero worship, his attraction to her is fairly grounded in reality, and post-series, will fade naturally into the kind of fondness people have for old flames. It will take more time that it would for most people, both because he's immortal and because she's the reason he got his soul back, but it will happen. There will be a point, a hundred years from now, when someone asks him who Buffy was and he'll respond truthfully 'just a girl I used to know', and that's not a bad thing.

And then there's the biggest question of all: could they have worked? Is there a universe out there somewhere where they actually built something that lasted?

I think my answer to that is... maybe. I think it's possible. I also think it's vanishingly unlikely. There's probably one universe where it happens. There probably aren't five.

They don't have much in common, when you get right down to it. They don't share a taste in music, books, movies, friends... The only hobby they have in common is fighting. They could probably be having better sex than they do in canon if they actually talked about anything, but they still wouldn't have many kinks in common. They're very different people, with different needs. There was a moment when those needs alligned, when Buffy needed unconditional support and Spike needed a cause to pledge his heart and soul to. They anchored close to one another while they weathered the storm, traded for the supplies they needed to survive, and then passed on, each going their own way.