Does it feel like a trial

He comes back at dawn.

It's still smoking. Here and there embers are still glowing. Otherwise nothing's left. It's a black stain on a green field. He's afraid, a little, that he might see someone here, but there's no one. The sky is barely light, half-obscured by smoke where he's standing, and he's alone.

He hasn't slept. He hasn't gone to Spike. He hasn't gone to anyone. The relative emptiness of the city has been striking him as worrying and eerie; now he's grateful for it. He doesn't want to be disturbed. He's not sure what would happen if he were. He still feels dangerous, on the edge of something. He is himself, but he's not. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

If you want that boy, you make yourself worthy.

Okay. That sounds so good in theory.

His boots scuff through the ashes. He's tracing lines, the spacing of walls. Here a living room, here a bedroom, another bedroom, little girls' beds, Tom's big sleigh bed that had been more than enough for the three of them. Eostre, Eostre's Tree, what she had left him when she moved on. Part of herself. Family. Home. Burned.

And he wouldn't even try to claim that he hadn't known what he was doing.

So here's what might be: The good part of him died on a beach. And what's left is what this is: ruins and ashes. The shapes of what used to be there and what can't ever be again.

I want to get to know you.

No, you fucking don't.

He stops in the center of what had been the trunk and stands and looks up at the rising smoke. He doesn't even know why he's come back here. To torture himself, maybe. To be sure of something, probably. What is and isn't possible.