buffy and spike

During the Sixth Season, Spike and Buffy become violent lovers after Buffy's resurrection.

Unable to confide in her friends the fact that she had been in Heaven, and that they pulled her out from there, Buffy is increasingly drawn to Spike, who understands why she doesn't want to tell them the truth.

Their physical relationship starts after a demon's spell makes them express their emotions in song - the episode "Once More, With Feeling" sees all of the major characters forced to sing and dance, and to express their feelings against their will.

Buffy sings many songs full of desire for understanding herself; the last solo song is "I want the fire back", and that desire is consummated two episodes later. Buffy most often initiates both the violence and the sex between them, and threatens to kill Spike if he ever tells anyone about their relationship. Both are unsatisfied with the relationship; Buffy is ashamed of her dark desires, while Spike obsessively craves the love, trust, and affection that she is unwilling to give.

In the episode "As You Were", Buffy admits that she is using Spike and finally ends their romantic (on his side) and sexual (on her side) relationship. Believing he still has a chance with Buffy after seeing her reactions of jealousy and hurt when he has a drunken sexual fling with Anya, Spike corners her in a bathroom at the Summers home and makes aggressive sexual advances. When she refuses him, he grows desperate and unsuccessfully tries to force her into making love. He realizes in moments by her cries that she perceives it as rape, at which point he runs out of the house, so appalled by himself that he leaves his beloved leather duster behind. Horrified by his own actions, Spike heads to a remote area of Africa, where he seeks out a legendary demon shaman and undergoes the Demon Trials, a series of grueling physical challenges. Proving his worthiness by surviving the trials, Spike earns his soul back.

A New Relationship with Buffy; Spike Seeks to Prove That He Has Changed

In Season 7, the great battle to be fought is against what is called "the First Evil" or "The First."

A re-ensouled Spike must cope with the guilt of his past actions - experiences that make him almost crazy, experiences both like and unlike what Angel had to cope with when he was re-ensouled by gypsies. Spike wants most of all to win back Buffy's trust. When Buffy asks him why he had fought for his soul, Spike explains that it was all in an effort to find "the spark" for Buffy.

Under the influence of the First Evil's hypnotic trigger, Spike unknowingly starts killing again. After he discovers what he has done, he begs Buffy to stake him, but she refuses and takes him into her house, telling him she has seen him change. Buffy guards and cares for Spike throughout his recovery, telling Spike that she believes in him, a statement which later sustains him throughout his imprisonment and torture at the hands of the First.

Potential Slayers - teenaged girls who might have been "chosen" to be Slayers - begin to arrive at Buffy's and Dawn's house because a battle to save the world is about to begin. Spike helps Buffy to train them in fighting and to encourage them to become a small army.

When Spike's chip begins to malfunction, causing him intense pain and threatening to kill him, Buffy trusts him enough to order the Initiative operatives to remove it from his head.

When Nikki Wood's son Robin tries to kill Spike, he unwittingly frees Spike from his hypnotic trigger: the song "Early One Morning" that Spike's mother sang when he was human. The song evokes Spike's traumatic memories of his mother's abusive behavior toward him after she turned; after Spike is able to address these issues, he realizes that his mother had always loved him, knowledge which frees him from the First's control.

Later in the season, Spike and Buffy achieve an emotional closeness; they spend two nights together, one of which Spike describes as the best night of his life, just holding her while she rests. It is unclear whether they resume their sexual intimacy the second night; creator Joss Whedon says on the DVD commentary for "Chosen" that he intentionally left it to the viewers to decide how they felt the relationship progressed, though Whedon had earlier stated on the commentary that he personally felt having them resume a sexual relationship would send the wrong message.

Spike tells Buffy in the episode "Touched," "Now, you listen to me. I've been alive a bit longer than you. And dead a lot longer than that. I've seen things you couldn't imagine--done things I'd prefer you didn't. I don't exactly have a reputation for being a thinker. I follow my blood. Which doesn't exactly rush in the direction of my brain. I've made a lot of mistakes. A lot of wrong bloody calls. A hundred plus years and there's only one thing I've ever been sure of. You."