you're too young & eager to love

I'm too lazy to put this behind a cut.

Buffy-Spike (more Spike centric, actually) piece. I miss this fandom, so much. I feel very comfortable writing in it, almost as comfortable as I feel writing Anne Rice.

Circa season 6.

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Even now she comes to him.

She still prefers the dead to the living.


Buffy sits in the cold crypt, and she is a child with her small hands on her lap. They are white and the bruises still scatter across her knuckles. She doesn’t look at him, pale and hungering in the shadows, and they don’t speak too much. Spike still blames himself, still thinks he could have protected Dawn or reached the tower top. Buffy can’t step outside of herself long enough to help him, to tell him that, in his way, he’s already saved them both plenty.

He kisses her hands, those empty white lilies.

“I don’t want to dance anymore.” Sometimes, he thinks she’s just talking to make noise.

“That’s all we’ve ever done, pet.”

She looks radiant, his girl. Perched on the top of his tomb like a somber queen, shoulders iron-straight and even the lost look in her eyes can’t change how he views her. Nor the chipped polish on her nails, the still tint of her skin. Her blood is thick, churning like molasses through her veins.

Years ago, beneath her vanilla perfume, Buffy used to smell like fear. Human. He can’t smell anything of her now.

He used to know another queen, once. Darker and paler. A woman of whispers and hot velvet, who spoke of the stars as though they were attainable. His Drusilla, who brought him into this night world with a piercing and a drowning and a chorus of screams. He was a poet-knight-devil in those days. A rabbit before wolves – the three of them, his bloody family, shaping him into a cruel puppet.

Funny, that. The way time changes everything.

Behind the deadness in Buffy’s eyes, there’s perfect despair. Spike knows that, a curdling feeling deep in his gut, and he wishes he could lull her away from it all. The Slayer though, she’s still too strong, too stubborn, too disgusted by him and his ways. But she lets him in because she wants to feel; lets him remove her pretty summer dress, slides the fashionable sandals from her feet.

Spike used to dream of a blood-soaked abattoir where he ripped her heart out every night. Now he can’t get the idea of her out of his head, and sure there’s blood involved, but it’s mostly because he never quite learned how to love without pain. Buffy doesn’t know how sharp Dru’s nails were, how Angelus really was a hundred years past, but it kills him that she’s past caring. No light in her anymore, and he hasn’t the soul to rekindle it.

But he tries.

And Buffy? Death is her art. She’s built for death, built to make it and fated to suffer it. It makes her look old, sometimes, older than Spike. Now that she’s back, she doesn’t try to deny that so much anymore. She'd had Angel's fangs buried in the soft skin of her throat, too, only she was still trying to pretend to be above it. Above the thrill, above darkness.

Not so much here, with Spike, as she arches beneath him, suddenly renewed. Can’t show her true self to her friends, to the witch who tore her from peace. But she keeps her eyes closed to him too, her face buried in the crook of his cold neck, and Spike knows he isn’t enough. Isn’t what she wants, just what she needs for the moment.