"Better for who, exactly? The people you're leaving behind? Oh, yeah, I see that goin' real well. In case you hadn't noticed, Slayer, we're in the middle of the bleedin' apocalypse. Your friends aren't going to think you got sucked right on back through that seal if you up and vanish on them." Spike raked a hand through his bleached hair and squinted up at the sky. "Nope. Way I see it? They'll search for you. Panic. Run 'round through all of Lawrence completely and entirely terrified 'cause the idea of you being dead, possessed, or worse'll be all they can think about for days on end. Fear's all they'll know. They won't be able to eat, they won't be able to sleep - and Dawn." Spike shot Buffy a pointed look. "She'll cry." He shrugged, as if that were matter of fact. "A lot. The idea of her big sister being under Lucifer's thumb won't sit well with her. In fact, it'll downright break her little heart." So, maybe he was poking Buffy in all the wrong places by way of convincing her to stay. But he wasn't wrong, was he? The Dream Team from Sunnydale would panic. They'd scour the city, they'd worry at each other, and Dawn would inevitably be a weepy, moody mess. The last thing that anyone in the world wanted was for that kid to have even more issues than she already did. Everyone and their mother knew she already had enough of them as it were.
"Right, yeah. I should probably do that, eh?" Spike looked off at the rising sun with an air of distaste. If he didn't shove off soon, he'd be nothing more than a pile of dust scattering to the wind. Spike may well have been a free spirit, but he didn't want to be that free. "Thing is, I'm not gonna. Not until you agree to come back with me. I get that the world is crap and that you're not all too pleased with it, but you can't run away from what's going on here in Lawrence, Buffy. You can't run away from the apocalypse, you can't run away from your friends, and you sure as fuck can't run away from me."
Buffy wasn't going to like his take on things, Spike figured. Didn't change that she needed to hear it. The world was going to crap, Buffy wasn't the Buffy that everyone here knew, and everything was complicated and annoying. Still, that didn't mean that Buffy could just up and run away from it all. It'd follow her. Maybe not literally, but emotionally it always would. She'd always have that weight. That knowledge that there was a dark corner of her life tucked away here in Lawrence - something that she was so afraid to deal with that she had decided to just up and run away like some kind of weak-kneed coward. Of course, Buffy was no coward. No matter how she may have felt and no matter what she may have believed about everything that was going on now, Spike knew that she wasn't.