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Well. I'm getting some rather...interesting reactions to my new fic.
First, if I didn't make it clear in the fic, I want to reiterate that Spike was wrong, wrong, wrong, for what he tried to do to Buffy in her bathroom. Sexual assault is all kinds of bad, and even if two people have a tendency to say "no" when they mean "yes" (as both of them did--go back and read the transcripts), he should have known her well enough by then to know that that time, she really did mean "no."
Speculating here: Had Spike approached Buffy differently that night, with gentleness instead of force, he might have gotten what he wanted. Maybe. Would have been a nice change of pace, anyway.
All that being said, once she threw him across the room, he came back to himself and was (quite properly) horrified by what he'd tried to do. He was, in fact, so horrified that he went and did something that no other vampire in history had done. He sought out a demon that had the power to restore his soul. That...is huge.
And for Buffy to have not forgiven him after he did that, would, IMO, have made her less of a Champion than she was. If she could forgive Angel, after he lost his soul, for killing Jenny and torturing Giles--when he didn't try to get the soul back for her, and in fact had a grand plan to suck the world into Hell--then forgiving Spike for what he did should not have been too much of a stretch. Especially since even his demon was repentant, as evidenced by the trials it went through so that he would become the kind of man who would never do that to her again.
And you know what? I don't recall her ever apologizing to him for beating the crap out of him behind the Sunnydale police station and leaving him to die--when he was trying to help her. So, as far as I'm concerned, they were both wrong, and both had things to be sorry for.
First, if I didn't make it clear in the fic, I want to reiterate that Spike was wrong, wrong, wrong, for what he tried to do to Buffy in her bathroom. Sexual assault is all kinds of bad, and even if two people have a tendency to say "no" when they mean "yes" (as both of them did--go back and read the transcripts), he should have known her well enough by then to know that that time, she really did mean "no."
Speculating here: Had Spike approached Buffy differently that night, with gentleness instead of force, he might have gotten what he wanted. Maybe. Would have been a nice change of pace, anyway.
All that being said, once she threw him across the room, he came back to himself and was (quite properly) horrified by what he'd tried to do. He was, in fact, so horrified that he went and did something that no other vampire in history had done. He sought out a demon that had the power to restore his soul. That...is huge.
And for Buffy to have not forgiven him after he did that, would, IMO, have made her less of a Champion than she was. If she could forgive Angel, after he lost his soul, for killing Jenny and torturing Giles--when he didn't try to get the soul back for her, and in fact had a grand plan to suck the world into Hell--then forgiving Spike for what he did should not have been too much of a stretch. Especially since even his demon was repentant, as evidenced by the trials it went through so that he would become the kind of man who would never do that to her again.
And you know what? I don't recall her ever apologizing to him for beating the crap out of him behind the Sunnydale police station and leaving him to die--when he was trying to help her. So, as far as I'm concerned, they were both wrong, and both had things to be sorry for.
