you're too young & eager to love

No idea where this came from. Oh well.


-

He doesn’t like Paris. She can smell the discontent on him, rank through the bouquet of daily blood. He doesn’t like to be swallowed, not her boy (except as occasion and old knees allow): he hasn’t yet learned to love the deed unseen, the hand discreetly gloved. Darla is practical, and a hundred years of American murder have drained all urgency from her dry throat, but watching him she sometimes forgets that she will have to curb his melodrama. “Just one city,” he says. “It hasn’t had a good fire for centuries, it’s due doom.” He paces their velvet suite like a songbird caged, and serenades her with the last words of long-necked courtesans.

When she could still remember sunlight, and her name, the Master told her to go out and kill everyone she’d ever loved. She almost staked him where he sat; she was so eager to obey him in those days. Then she realized he was laboring under a misconception.

Now, Darla remembers the shadow of human bone on the Master’s sunken cheek, and the first flush of strength.

Angelus believes that the purpose of monsters is to drag darkness out of its allotted hour into the sphere of light. He likes to talk, his mouth open and blunt against her thigh. He seems determined to counter the innocence of his living with an intellectual death; Darla doesn’t have the heart to tell him that a monster’s only purpose is to persist— to deny God his endless dust. She hooks her leg over his back, instead, sliding her foot between shoulder and spine: a white vale where no white wing will one day sprout.

Outside, Paris blooms with the dusk. Paris already burns.

I don't know if this will make much sense. It's pretty abstract.

The last thing I was expecting to write when I sat down was Buffy, so I'm still unsure of where this came from.

7th season setting. Woo!

-



Dawn wears an expression she’d last seen on her mother’s face. “You really aren’t going to go?” It’s a woman’s firm question coming from an adolescent’s mouth.

Buffy rubs her shoulder. There’s a bruise so large under the cotton of her sweater that another woman, a regular woman, would be unable to move it. She’s tired, but she’s been tired for years now so gathering enough perseverance in order to fulfill yet another obligation is as normal as fighting Xander for a bowl of cereal in the mornings.

She’s far too used to these circumstances, the ones that damage her.

Dawn was never called to be a Slayer. She’s not even a Potential. She’s just longhaired and high school fresh, but she has the type of stare that all the Summers women inherit. Withering with disappointment, fixated pointedly, topped off by folding her arms over her chest.

“I’m really not going.”

“He would go, if it were you.”

Buffy takes her jacket with her and closes the door too loudly. Fair is fair.


-


Seven years has allowed her a long time to accumulate wounds. Her skin heals but her insides don’t. She’s been battered and bruised and broken. Buffy has all of it fester, keeps the injuries as reminders, hidden in some small corner of her body, some unspoken of place that is truly private. The new girls, the ones she’s supposed to be training, they sit around in her living room and take up space on her furniture, all the while staring at her like they know. Like they’re aware of her dirtiness and how, now, she isn’t sure she’d like to be clean anymore.

It doesn’t make her less of a savior, she thinks.

Besides, she reminds them each time she drives a stake into a vampire’s heart, she never asked for this, she’s just good at it.


-


Angel is staying in his old home. A smell of the gutter around the place, thick walls and too much dust. Curtains that once were thick and red but have turned threadbare. It’s small. He must feel confined, she thinks, after being used to a mansion in Los Angeles.

He holds out his fingers when he opens the door, and Buffy gives him her jacket. She isn’t sure if they were supposed to shake hands, because she isn’t used to formalities between them. Angel smiles; hers falters a little.

He looks the same. She doesn’t. Her hair is longer, blonde as butter, and she looks more of a woman at twenty-one than she ever did in high school. She looks too old though – the deep ageless core inside of her is showing itself in her eyes. “Too many wounds.” Buffy tells him and his questioning glance, even though it angers her that he still thinks he can search so openly. “No more giraffe-print pants though.”

That gets a laugh.


-


If she’s really honest with herself, Buffy knows she isn’t that girl anymore. Can’t even really remember being that girl. Maybe it’s because of dying twice, or still feeling guilty for murdering her first love (she’s getting a little tired of choosing the safety of the world, since we’re being honest), or Spike, or all of the above and then some. Being vulnerable is her own fault, she knows that too.

“What’s wrong?”

This is supposed to be about a battle. An apocalypse. A Big-Bad and some convenient relic that she’s giving him. It is, and then it isn’t. It’s her and him and their relentless tug of war. She shoves her hands into her pockets and shakes her head.

Angel has his home; Buffy has her family. It’s Fate’s version of fairness, and it’s good.



-


“How’s the great poof?” Spike is smoking outside when Buffy comes up the back porch.

She sits without responding, her shoulders hunched, fingers near her temple. Spike has the good sense not to say anything else, but she can feel him simmering behind her, all leather and sharp white angles. Slowly, she stretches and pulls her knees in close to her chest, watching the shadows in her yard. The animal shapes she can’t make out.

“I don’t think we ever found each other again.”

Spike flicks his cigarette to the ground. “Yeah, pet. I know what you mean.”


-


That night, she dreams she’s in a sewer, crying, with too much blood on her hands.

There are a lot of fangs and shattered bones. Angelus has a hole in his stomach and absent eyes.


-

Again, too lazy for a cut.

The second piece is not mine. It's posted more as a rec for me, because it's short and yet explains a lot about Buffy and Spike's relationship in so few words.

In response to a dangling carrot – Spike and Drusilla! With appearances from Angelus and Darla.

Notes: This stems from how, despite the fact that it’s always Spike taking care of Drusilla and catering to her, she seems to noticeably brighten whenever Angelus is about. She responds to him more, and in a different manner. I also think these four, in their travels and decades together, probably spent the whole time: fighting, fucking, and killing. Angelus pretty much gets whatever he wants, you know?

Also, Darla was a prostitute who was dying from syphilis before she was turned into a vampire. I thought I needed to point this detail out, because the whore reference seems unnecessarily harsh otherwise.


-



Angelus has eyes that are hard and flat and full of demon. Drusilla croons beneath them, delighting inside her pale skin whenever he looks at her, to stroke her heavy hair and murmur into her ear. Not that he is good at being quiet, inherently distrusting silence, but Spike hears the monster roaring inside of his chest. Hears the words he slips like bloodied honey into the woman’s ear, making her thrill, making her come alive again.

It’s difficult with them sometimes. Darla and her cunning eyes, staring at him as though he’s just a lost lamb, something Drusilla brought home to eventually die within the walls. There’s no dying for him now, and his grandsire scoffs, calls him young and foolish. Angelus and his possessive need to control everything, to have everything. Spike feels like rebelling, smoking a cigarette down to the filter, hunger gnawing at his stomach and up into his throat.

Angelus slips his large hand behind dark curls, cuts his eyes in a suggestive manner that lacks all subtlety. “Now that she’s all ready for you, William.” He taunts, working at the black pearl buttons of Drusilla’s gown, letting her pirouette beneath his fingers when his hand lifts.

“Spike.” He corrects from his stretched out position on the chaise, a little uselessly.

Darla laughs behind her fangs. She’s in the shadows somewhere, close to Angelus’ arm, just like a whore waiting for her turn. This house in Prague is full of darkness so dead it reminds him of a grave (like the one he had to crawl out of. Drusilla was a traditionalist, except it was Angelus waiting for him once he broke through the dirt, smoking a cigar and smirking – always picking up his daughter’s messes). There’s skeletons beneath the floorboards, heavy curtains that hide the light, a damp smell of rotting that causes Drusilla to cry of vermin and faded china doll lace.

After a few centuries, he still isn’t sure what to expect. Sometimes, Angelus will leave and Darla will stay, idly stroking her thighs as she watches. Or Angelus will take until everyone’s bones feel like they should be breaking, skin red and bruises already vanishing, the scrape of fingers and the push of flesh. Everything is so cold between them.

Still, Spike is a struggler, a fighter, and Drusilla should be his. His Princess, his terror to burden under. So he rises like he always does, playing a game with no ending. Drusilla speaks of tasting oceans and railroad tracks. She has nails that hurt and he groans beneath them, satisfied in his coreless center.

He knows he used to feel pity, but now that’s a rapid, fading memory. Drusilla, she complains about the bruises fading too quick, says they look so pretty on her wrists.


--


Love Revisited
By: Amerella

Once, he pressed his cheek to Buffy's breast. Something was beating inside of there as if it were angry-winged.

"What are you doing?" she whispered.

"I like you to be so alive," he said, without thought. Belatedly, sickly, he realized that he meant it.

"Don't be stupid," she told him, though they both knew that he was just that.

"What a pretty little slice of sunshine," he continued, tracing her ribcage, though he was more mocking than reverent by then. He couldn't categorize what he felt for her and her vitality. The raw force of it staggered him. "Sharp as a morning sky, you are."

She found something within herself then and rolled out from under him.

They fought over who got to be on top, over everything. That night they fought about nothing in particular: Sharp as a morning sky, he said, and she struck out at him. She was that.

Being with her, he recalled the confusion that fathers wrought. Those cold, still hands. He wanted that for her less and less. For the first time he felt the weight of his own immortality.

And oh, how he loathed her, the stupid bitch. She'd put him at odds with himself. She'd died twice and she wouldn't stay in the ground. Well, that was all right, though. He knew how to remedy such a situation, you better believe it, mate.

It never quite happened that way, of course. There was only- something. He came to lose something.

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.

-



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.