Maybe
Title: Maybe
Dedicated To: <3 J <3
Fandom: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Author: Apache Firecat
Characters: Spike/Buffy
Rating: Soft R/M
Summary: Buffy awakens in the arms of a Demon yet again.
Word Count: 2370
Written For: GenPrompt Bingo: Round 22: Perfect and Nekid-Spike Paired Up challenge: Spike/Buffy
Warnings: None
Disclaimer: All characters within belong to their rightful owners, not the author, and are used without permission.
She stirs slowly in the dusty, abandoned house. She doesn’t remember which house they chose last night, which street this is, when they got here last night, or even what day of the week it is. She knows she needs to be getting to school, not for her own education - that's yet another lost dream - but for work, to keep a roof over Dawn’s head and food in both their bellies. Right now, however, she just wants to lay here.
She can hear a bird singing somewhere, which is surprising. She rarely sees a loose animal in Sunnydale anymore. They’re too easy prey for the Vampires and other Demons, and most who didn’t have homes left long before the humans started giving up and running away, abandoning their homes and sometimes even their families in their desperation to save their own selves. She’s tried to run away from destiny on multiple occasions, but it’s never worked.
It never will work, she’s finally come to accept. This is her destiny: to work hard in the day time for her sister, a sister who is not even truly her flesh and blood but might as well be for all the importance she is to her, and to slave away at night to protect humans who will never appreciate her or the sacrifices she’s made. She’s sacrificed much more than her own education. She’s sacrificed her life multiple times, and not just her body. She has no future, no hope, no reason to believe anything in her life will ever get any better.
She is a warrior. She is a slave. As hard as she has tried not to be, she is a slave. She is a slave to being the Chosen One. She is a slave to giving everything she has - body, heart, and her very soul - to keeping others alive. She is a slave to the darkness that impales her. In her own, she has become just as much of a slave to the night as the Vampires and the other creatures she’s destined to spend her entire existence killing.
Oh, she talks a good talk. She’s managed to keep her friends, and none of them have any idea just how bad she’s hurting, how bad she’s barely living. They’re all wrapped in their own little problems too much to realize how much their hero is hurting, how dark she’s become, how much of a killer she has become. Yet she still fights for them. She still fights for Dawn. She still fights for a humanity that was ripped from her long ago, long before she was pulled out of the one peace she’d finally come to know in her grave that, despite what they think, was not too soon.
There’s another peace she knows as arms come around her, another reprieve from the darkness that plagues every other aspect of her life. Buffy looks down at those leather-clad arms wrapping around her waist. Then, suddenly, she realizes there is sunlight filtering into the living room of this house that belongs to whom she does not know. There’s sunlight,… and that means it could kill the person laying underneath her, the man with whom she escaped last night.
She gasps his name and starts to roll to her feet, but his arms hold her tight. She could break him easily. She could dust him right here, right now, even if the sun didn’t kill him. But she needs him. As much as it pains her to admit it, she needs the Vampire laying beneath her. She needs the Demon who pounded her senseless last night, and who she gave to with equally reckless and wild abandonment of all that she would have once called common sense.
Common sense would dictate that she has nothing to do with this Demon, this man who has never been a good man or even really a man the entire time she’s known him, this Vampire who, even as a mortal, had been a meager whipping boy, from all he’s confessed to her in their late night talks. The anger’s beginning to rise again already. She’s not even up, hasn’t gotten to her feet once, and barely has her eyes open, but quiet and deadly fury is once again flushing through her entire system.
Her teeth set. She pops her eyes open and takes survey of the room. Nobody’s been in this house for quite some time, but at least it looks like they took most of their belongings with them. Maybe they were one of the lucky ones. Maybe they had actually had somewhere to go when they’d fled the Hellmouth. She shouldn’t care. They’re just one family after millions of people who don’t care for her beyond what she can do for them, after all, more nameless faces in a never-ending sea of people for whom she’s destined to give her life. Even though her body still breathes, her actual life has been over for a long time now, and it’s never going to be returned to her. Any hope for an actual future she professes to have to her friends, to her “family”, is nothing more than an extravagant lie.
But she can forget that, when she’s in his arms, she admits silently, biting her bottom lip and looking down at the pale, strong hands that hold her tightly. In his sleep, Spike is jarring her rib cage with his black nails, but she doesn’t care. Pain is the only other emotion she can feel these days other than anger. She’s angry at everybody including herself, for allowing herself to become trapped like this, for allowing her Slayerage to trap her in a life she does not want, for allowing herself to love others greater than herself, for surrendering the future and happiness she’d once fought so hard to keep without much more than a whimper and a very brief bang, and yes, for loving a Vampire again too.
Anger flashes across her entire being at that betraying thought. She tosses Spike’s hands off of her and jumps to her feet, only silencing the growl of self-disgust that swells within her throat because she doesn’t want to wake the Vampire. He gave her what she needed last night. She escaped her life, her existence, for one more night in his arms in this place where her friends, and no one else of importance, will ever find her. That’s all he is to her - the only escape she can find.
If her eyes glance quickly across the room and make sure that the sunlight can’t reach him, she doesn’t admit it to herself. If he looks handsome and sweet, laying there asleep, she most certainly doesn’t admit that either! If some would consider waking up in the arms of a hunk like Spike, she also doesn’t admit that. After all, she far too well knows the Demon that lurks beneath him. Angel had been called such because he had worn the face of an Angel. Spike is just as bad, if not worse. She knows better than to succumb to him; yet she keeps doing so every night!
It doesn’t matter, she thinks fiercely, that he has his soul! It doesn’t matter that he supposedly fought to reclaim that soul whereas Angel was cursed with his. He is still evil, still wicked, still a foul, horrible being, still a Vampire she’s supposed to slay.
Buffy moves in a flash, snatching her clothes back on. She notices a single chair in the room and rapidly snaps off a leg. Holding the wood tightly in her hand, she looks back at Spike’s sleeping body... and curses with language that would make Faith proud. She can’t do it. For all her strength in saving others, she cannot save herself! She cannot kill this man. This Demon, she reminds herself viciously.
His eyes have opened, she realizes suddenly, as she catches him watching her from underneath his long, black lashes. Their gazes connect, and to both her surprise and further disgust, he waves a hand at his bare chest. (They had evidently left his shirt in the doorway, where she had undoubtedly stripped the dark, tight fabric off of his lean, pale torso.) “Do it.”
She glares at him, trying to make him feel with her burning gaze how much she hates him. Yet, even in this moment, she knows she doesn't truly hate him. If she did, she could walk away from him. She can’t. No matter how wise a choice of action it would be to save herself, or even the world, she cannot simply walk away from this man. He does something to her, something deeper and beyond anything Angel had ever done. Angel had been puppy love. Spike... Spike is something far more, far greater, something she dares not name, not now or ever, especially if she ever truly wants to be able to be her own woman, her own person, to break free of all the chains that bind her and still somehow find a way to live her own life, to finally be free.
Spike is a curse - these feelings are a cage --, and she will not be bound, not to him or to anyone more than she already is. She doesn’t love him. She can’t love him. He’s not worthy of her love. He’s tried to kill her. He’s tried to kill her friends, her family... Memories of watching him with her own mother when he’d thought she’d not been looking flash through her mind. The fact that he’s the one who kept Dawn alive while she’d been dead also enters her mind. Memories of when he helped her save the world, in honor of another woman, long before he’d had any thoughts of restoring his soul fly behind her troubled eyes. She gasps again. He thinks it’s because he’s daring her, but he could not be more wrong.
“Do it,” Spike says again, leaning back with ease and continuing to hold her gaze. He gestures once more to his chest, to the place on his body where, had he been mortal, his heart truly would have beaten, at the place that had felt so dead and hollow within him for so long but that she somehow makes feel alive every time she deigns to touch his skin or look at him in a certain way. He’s never had any luck at love or at picking women who were good for him, but he knows he’s the monster. He was the freak who had never deserved love in his mortal life, and he is still the monster now. She is the one who deserves better, who deserves to be free -- “What’re you waiting for? Do it if it’ll make you feel better, pet.”
Against her better judgment, Buffy releases the makeshift stake. The wood clatters to the floor, echoing in the otherwise empty house. Their eyes are still locked. She’s having trouble breaking the gaze, breaking his hold on her. She forces the memories of their good times down, forces her heartbeat not to pound so loudly and swiftly that she knows he can hear it and must undoubtedly deriving some sense of pleasure from her weakness, forces herself, at last, to rip her eyes from his. She looks to the dusty floor instead and notes there’s dots of blood on it. Blood that she instinctively knows is one or both of theirs.
“Get out of the sun,” she growls, and flees. She does not love Spike. She does not care for him. She cannot! He isn’t good! No matter how many times he’s helped her save the world, no matter how many times he’s been there for her when no one else has, no matter how many times he’s held her and let her cry on him or even beat him to a bloody pulp, he is not a good man! He is just another Vampire, another Demon she’s meant to kill.
She runs through the streets as the birds’ songs rise. She runs with her heart pounding. She runs, leaving another still-living Vampire behind her, a small grin beginning to pull up the curves of his black and bruised mouth. She runs, but she cannot out run herself. She cannot out run the memories that plague her, the memories of every time he’s been there for her when no one else has, the memories of when he was so gentle with her sister and mother, the memories of when he’s fought beside her or let her come so close to killing him, the memories of how sometimes, in those late, late hours of the night or the wee hours of the morning, he has actually made her feel something besides anger, hate, and emptiness...
The memories of his kisses that stir her like no other ever has, the memories of the feel of his arms around her, of the feel that maybe, just maybe, somebody else could keep her safe at least for a little while... The memories of when she has lain there in his embrace and thought, despite herself and her better knowledge, that if things had only been different, if he had not been a Demon, if she had not been the Slayer, maybe in another world, another life, he could have been the perfect man for her. He could have been the fairy tale love.
But fairy tales don’t exist. Only monsters do. But when Buffy screams that morning, her cry echoing off the alley ways of the Hellmouth, it has nothing to do with monsters.
Left alone yet again, Spike leans back in the shadows of the house that will serve as his crypt for the day and smiles. Maybe he is wearing her down after all. Maybe, just maybe, he might get a miracle yet. She’ll never love him - he's not worthy of love --, but maybe, if he keeps pursuing, if he keeps being there for her when no other fool will be, maybe, just maybe, she’ll learn not to hate him any more. Grinning, he sings softly to himself an old song. Maybe he’s wearing her down after all.
The End
Dedicated To: <3 J <3
Fandom: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Author: Apache Firecat
Characters: Spike/Buffy
Rating: Soft R/M
Summary: Buffy awakens in the arms of a Demon yet again.
Word Count: 2370
Written For: GenPrompt Bingo: Round 22: Perfect and Nekid-Spike Paired Up challenge: Spike/Buffy
Warnings: None
Disclaimer: All characters within belong to their rightful owners, not the author, and are used without permission.
She stirs slowly in the dusty, abandoned house. She doesn’t remember which house they chose last night, which street this is, when they got here last night, or even what day of the week it is. She knows she needs to be getting to school, not for her own education - that's yet another lost dream - but for work, to keep a roof over Dawn’s head and food in both their bellies. Right now, however, she just wants to lay here.
She can hear a bird singing somewhere, which is surprising. She rarely sees a loose animal in Sunnydale anymore. They’re too easy prey for the Vampires and other Demons, and most who didn’t have homes left long before the humans started giving up and running away, abandoning their homes and sometimes even their families in their desperation to save their own selves. She’s tried to run away from destiny on multiple occasions, but it’s never worked.
It never will work, she’s finally come to accept. This is her destiny: to work hard in the day time for her sister, a sister who is not even truly her flesh and blood but might as well be for all the importance she is to her, and to slave away at night to protect humans who will never appreciate her or the sacrifices she’s made. She’s sacrificed much more than her own education. She’s sacrificed her life multiple times, and not just her body. She has no future, no hope, no reason to believe anything in her life will ever get any better.
She is a warrior. She is a slave. As hard as she has tried not to be, she is a slave. She is a slave to being the Chosen One. She is a slave to giving everything she has - body, heart, and her very soul - to keeping others alive. She is a slave to the darkness that impales her. In her own, she has become just as much of a slave to the night as the Vampires and the other creatures she’s destined to spend her entire existence killing.
Oh, she talks a good talk. She’s managed to keep her friends, and none of them have any idea just how bad she’s hurting, how bad she’s barely living. They’re all wrapped in their own little problems too much to realize how much their hero is hurting, how dark she’s become, how much of a killer she has become. Yet she still fights for them. She still fights for Dawn. She still fights for a humanity that was ripped from her long ago, long before she was pulled out of the one peace she’d finally come to know in her grave that, despite what they think, was not too soon.
There’s another peace she knows as arms come around her, another reprieve from the darkness that plagues every other aspect of her life. Buffy looks down at those leather-clad arms wrapping around her waist. Then, suddenly, she realizes there is sunlight filtering into the living room of this house that belongs to whom she does not know. There’s sunlight,… and that means it could kill the person laying underneath her, the man with whom she escaped last night.
She gasps his name and starts to roll to her feet, but his arms hold her tight. She could break him easily. She could dust him right here, right now, even if the sun didn’t kill him. But she needs him. As much as it pains her to admit it, she needs the Vampire laying beneath her. She needs the Demon who pounded her senseless last night, and who she gave to with equally reckless and wild abandonment of all that she would have once called common sense.
Common sense would dictate that she has nothing to do with this Demon, this man who has never been a good man or even really a man the entire time she’s known him, this Vampire who, even as a mortal, had been a meager whipping boy, from all he’s confessed to her in their late night talks. The anger’s beginning to rise again already. She’s not even up, hasn’t gotten to her feet once, and barely has her eyes open, but quiet and deadly fury is once again flushing through her entire system.
Her teeth set. She pops her eyes open and takes survey of the room. Nobody’s been in this house for quite some time, but at least it looks like they took most of their belongings with them. Maybe they were one of the lucky ones. Maybe they had actually had somewhere to go when they’d fled the Hellmouth. She shouldn’t care. They’re just one family after millions of people who don’t care for her beyond what she can do for them, after all, more nameless faces in a never-ending sea of people for whom she’s destined to give her life. Even though her body still breathes, her actual life has been over for a long time now, and it’s never going to be returned to her. Any hope for an actual future she professes to have to her friends, to her “family”, is nothing more than an extravagant lie.
But she can forget that, when she’s in his arms, she admits silently, biting her bottom lip and looking down at the pale, strong hands that hold her tightly. In his sleep, Spike is jarring her rib cage with his black nails, but she doesn’t care. Pain is the only other emotion she can feel these days other than anger. She’s angry at everybody including herself, for allowing herself to become trapped like this, for allowing her Slayerage to trap her in a life she does not want, for allowing herself to love others greater than herself, for surrendering the future and happiness she’d once fought so hard to keep without much more than a whimper and a very brief bang, and yes, for loving a Vampire again too.
Anger flashes across her entire being at that betraying thought. She tosses Spike’s hands off of her and jumps to her feet, only silencing the growl of self-disgust that swells within her throat because she doesn’t want to wake the Vampire. He gave her what she needed last night. She escaped her life, her existence, for one more night in his arms in this place where her friends, and no one else of importance, will ever find her. That’s all he is to her - the only escape she can find.
If her eyes glance quickly across the room and make sure that the sunlight can’t reach him, she doesn’t admit it to herself. If he looks handsome and sweet, laying there asleep, she most certainly doesn’t admit that either! If some would consider waking up in the arms of a hunk like Spike, she also doesn’t admit that. After all, she far too well knows the Demon that lurks beneath him. Angel had been called such because he had worn the face of an Angel. Spike is just as bad, if not worse. She knows better than to succumb to him; yet she keeps doing so every night!
It doesn’t matter, she thinks fiercely, that he has his soul! It doesn’t matter that he supposedly fought to reclaim that soul whereas Angel was cursed with his. He is still evil, still wicked, still a foul, horrible being, still a Vampire she’s supposed to slay.
Buffy moves in a flash, snatching her clothes back on. She notices a single chair in the room and rapidly snaps off a leg. Holding the wood tightly in her hand, she looks back at Spike’s sleeping body... and curses with language that would make Faith proud. She can’t do it. For all her strength in saving others, she cannot save herself! She cannot kill this man. This Demon, she reminds herself viciously.
His eyes have opened, she realizes suddenly, as she catches him watching her from underneath his long, black lashes. Their gazes connect, and to both her surprise and further disgust, he waves a hand at his bare chest. (They had evidently left his shirt in the doorway, where she had undoubtedly stripped the dark, tight fabric off of his lean, pale torso.) “Do it.”
She glares at him, trying to make him feel with her burning gaze how much she hates him. Yet, even in this moment, she knows she doesn't truly hate him. If she did, she could walk away from him. She can’t. No matter how wise a choice of action it would be to save herself, or even the world, she cannot simply walk away from this man. He does something to her, something deeper and beyond anything Angel had ever done. Angel had been puppy love. Spike... Spike is something far more, far greater, something she dares not name, not now or ever, especially if she ever truly wants to be able to be her own woman, her own person, to break free of all the chains that bind her and still somehow find a way to live her own life, to finally be free.
Spike is a curse - these feelings are a cage --, and she will not be bound, not to him or to anyone more than she already is. She doesn’t love him. She can’t love him. He’s not worthy of her love. He’s tried to kill her. He’s tried to kill her friends, her family... Memories of watching him with her own mother when he’d thought she’d not been looking flash through her mind. The fact that he’s the one who kept Dawn alive while she’d been dead also enters her mind. Memories of when he helped her save the world, in honor of another woman, long before he’d had any thoughts of restoring his soul fly behind her troubled eyes. She gasps again. He thinks it’s because he’s daring her, but he could not be more wrong.
“Do it,” Spike says again, leaning back with ease and continuing to hold her gaze. He gestures once more to his chest, to the place on his body where, had he been mortal, his heart truly would have beaten, at the place that had felt so dead and hollow within him for so long but that she somehow makes feel alive every time she deigns to touch his skin or look at him in a certain way. He’s never had any luck at love or at picking women who were good for him, but he knows he’s the monster. He was the freak who had never deserved love in his mortal life, and he is still the monster now. She is the one who deserves better, who deserves to be free -- “What’re you waiting for? Do it if it’ll make you feel better, pet.”
Against her better judgment, Buffy releases the makeshift stake. The wood clatters to the floor, echoing in the otherwise empty house. Their eyes are still locked. She’s having trouble breaking the gaze, breaking his hold on her. She forces the memories of their good times down, forces her heartbeat not to pound so loudly and swiftly that she knows he can hear it and must undoubtedly deriving some sense of pleasure from her weakness, forces herself, at last, to rip her eyes from his. She looks to the dusty floor instead and notes there’s dots of blood on it. Blood that she instinctively knows is one or both of theirs.
“Get out of the sun,” she growls, and flees. She does not love Spike. She does not care for him. She cannot! He isn’t good! No matter how many times he’s helped her save the world, no matter how many times he’s been there for her when no one else has, no matter how many times he’s held her and let her cry on him or even beat him to a bloody pulp, he is not a good man! He is just another Vampire, another Demon she’s meant to kill.
She runs through the streets as the birds’ songs rise. She runs with her heart pounding. She runs, leaving another still-living Vampire behind her, a small grin beginning to pull up the curves of his black and bruised mouth. She runs, but she cannot out run herself. She cannot out run the memories that plague her, the memories of every time he’s been there for her when no one else has, the memories of when he was so gentle with her sister and mother, the memories of when he’s fought beside her or let her come so close to killing him, the memories of how sometimes, in those late, late hours of the night or the wee hours of the morning, he has actually made her feel something besides anger, hate, and emptiness...
The memories of his kisses that stir her like no other ever has, the memories of the feel of his arms around her, of the feel that maybe, just maybe, somebody else could keep her safe at least for a little while... The memories of when she has lain there in his embrace and thought, despite herself and her better knowledge, that if things had only been different, if he had not been a Demon, if she had not been the Slayer, maybe in another world, another life, he could have been the perfect man for her. He could have been the fairy tale love.
But fairy tales don’t exist. Only monsters do. But when Buffy screams that morning, her cry echoing off the alley ways of the Hellmouth, it has nothing to do with monsters.
Left alone yet again, Spike leans back in the shadows of the house that will serve as his crypt for the day and smiles. Maybe he is wearing her down after all. Maybe, just maybe, he might get a miracle yet. She’ll never love him - he's not worthy of love --, but maybe, if he keeps pursuing, if he keeps being there for her when no other fool will be, maybe, just maybe, she’ll learn not to hate him any more. Grinning, he sings softly to himself an old song. Maybe he’s wearing her down after all.
The End