Delirium - 1 of 3
A pinch-hit I did this week for The Post-Apocalyptic Multifandom Ficathon
Title: Delirium
Author: inveigler
Recipient: kaizoku
Fandom: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Rating: 15 maybe (language, violence, implied sex stuff)
Pairing: Spike/Xander
Spoilers: Some events from Season 8
Request: Request 3 - fandom: Buffy/Angel
Details: Post-vampire apocalypse Spike/Xander fic plz? I know it's been done before but I LOVE IT SO.
Summary: Spike and Xander on the road together in the wake of vampires overrunning and seizing control of the country, if not the world.
Thanks as ever to intl_princess for the beta, this time with bonus lightspeed and corporate firewall circumvention.
The pain never ended.
“Where are we heading?” he asked, voice coming thick and groggy. His eye swam from the stab in his skull and what little light filtered through the blacked-out windows.
“You care?” Spike barely made it a question, swerving to avoid some hazard in the road. For all that was visible, it could’ve been a shadow. Then again, it might’ve been livestock, a sound like a receding bell coming over the ever present growl of the engine.
“Not really,” he sighed and slumped even lower in the seat, pulling the blanket up around himself. He shivered at the cold from without while squirming in the sweaty soak from within. The car stank. Old food, unwashed bodies, stale alcohol, cigarette ash, blood and sex. Also, something like sour milk.
“North,” Spike grunted, one eye on the impression of a road, the other on lighting a cigarette. The smoke drifts eerie tendrils, slithering around Xander’s feverish face.
“Why?”
“Because I always fancied trying my hand as a sodding lumberjack. Because I fucking feel like it, that’s why,” Spike dismissed him. Everything in Xander hurt. He was inwardly amazed he even had enough blood left to form bruises. What of him hadn’t been ravaged by Spike’s fangs had been plenty ravaged in other ways.
“Fine.” He tried to shift so that the knuckle bruise to one kidney and the bite to the opposing shoulder wouldn’t press white points of light into his mind at the same time.
“We’re low on gas. There’s a station comin’ up, you good for it?” Another non-question as the brakes complained and the world swerved to the right. He knew there must’ve been a reason for Spike to leave him enough to be awake.
“Do I have a choice?” It would’ve been a complaint a month ago, now his voice just sounded hollow and tired and weak. He closed his eye and tried to avoid the gnawing knowing that he was, in fact, hollow and tired and weak.
~
The light was like a hammerblow, even as wan and grey as it was. Xander lurched out of the car, dragging a rifle they’d looted from a store with him and reeled sideways into a fuel pump.
“How many fucking times?!” Spike snapped at him as he lunged out a blanket-swathed hand to yank the car door closed. His opaque skin crackled and smouldered, adding new smoke to mingle in with the Marlboro.
It was like a fever dream, everything washed out and overexposed. His life was lived in snatches now, falling out of stolen cars at random and, preferably, deserted gas stations across the country. Doing it in daylight limited the possible damage to a wary survivor putting a bullet in Xander. Trying it by night usually meant wading into one side or other of the civil war. There was no north/south divide, unless you were speaking of celestial planes - in those terms, my how the South had risen again.
Nothing happened the way it was supposed to. Buffy wasn’t meant to die. Vampires weren’t supposed to get organised. They weren’t supposed to infiltrate, to strategise, to think about the big picture. The young and the reckless and the feral made for the perfect distraction, probably something like the new underclass by now, the rung above food. It was all very ‘Project Mayhem’ or more, ‘I Am Legend’ - the book, not the vague mess of a film.
He smiled weakly at the analogy. The unbearable weight of the rifle over the ache of his shoulder. The worn-out wreck of a car. All he needed was a dog.
“Can we hurry this up?!”
Of course Spike already had one.
The gas fumes made the icy air waiver, his boots crunching on a layer of frost. He let out a long, foggy breath and looked around at the desolate outskirts of what was once a town. What might still be a town a few hours from now for all he knew. A light dusting of snow was filtering down, flecks of ash winging their way in between.
“Something’s burning,” he winced as he slid back into the passenger seat.
“No shit,” Spike scowled at him, holding up the blistering back of a hand. “Close the fucking door already!”
~
“It wasn’t meant to be like this,” Xander complained, sunk in a lawn chair at a rickety cardtable in the basement of who-knew-where. A lone bulb painted things in orbits of yellow and black.
“Great. Another night of listening to your bloody whining,” Spike muttered and rubbed the heel of a hand into a tired eye, pouring them each enormous measures of scotch.
“As opposed to what? Drinking ourselves into an angry stupor until we try to kill each other, or fuck each other, or both?” Xander countered, shoving the glass back across the table, it’s contents slopping onto the surface.
“How was it ‘meant’ to be then, eh? She saves the world for the umpteenth time, comes to her senses and you ride off into the sunset for your happily ever after? Sorry to tell you this, but there were a few other dance partners lined up on that card of hers ahead of you - even a girl or two of late, from what I hear,” he broke off from his mockery with an almost wistful expression. “Sorry I wasn’t around for that.”
“Screw you Spike.”
“No, you’re right, that part usually happens later.”
“Funny,” he muttered, one wasted arm clutching at the other. The house still had hot water, a shower seeming a mercy until it highlighted how little damage could be washed away. How much dried blood ran red again in the water. It still felt like there were knives in his temples. His tongue tasted like acid.
“No, it’s not funny. It’s fucking pathetic,”
“You said it,” Xander replied with all the bitterness he had the energy for.
“No, I mean you pal. One eye and you’re more desperate to see straight than ever. You never wondered why it always took the girls in your life to take you in hand? Those nights you came sniffing around the basement shitfaced drunk when you were scared none of your builder buddies’d wanna play Brokeback. That’s without even mentioning the months you spent as Drac’s little bitch boy,” Spike goaded him, searching for a truth that would provoke the reaction he wanted. Anger that would become something else.
“Why bother keeping me around then?” He asked, too tired to rise to the bait.
“You’re a happy meal with legs mate. ‘sides, you have your uses,” Spike shrugged in response.
“Why’d you even take me out of there in the first place?” Flickers of memories. Plans gone horribly awry. Blood. Bodies. Bodies rent apart like Renee. Bodies like Buffy’s.
“We’ve been through this a thousand times. I came looking for her and all I could find was what was left of you, the psychotic bookworm and a crater the size of Ohio that I think used to be Red. Still, maybe she’ll pop up again a few hundred years from now to herald your salvation.” The prickling kept up, coming from the last person Xander had expected to drag him from that mangle by the hair. There was nothing left of his squad, his legion. He was sure there were still others, but killing Buffy was killing the shepherd. Third time was a charm.
“I don’t need saving, and I don’t need you.” He’d needed to be held. What he got was a fractured jaw.
“Really? Not what I recall you saying the last time you sucked me off. Though, in point of fact, you did have to go and start crying. Quite the little killjoy pansy aren’t you?” Xander lunged at him, more out of habit than an actual reaction, table and glasses careening aside.
“That’s more like it,” Spike breathed as he bound up an arm and slammed his head against the wall.
“I hate you,” Xander spat back, little conviction in the bile. He never asked him to stop.
“That’s what makes this so entertaining.” Needlepoints raised droplets of blood from an old neck wound as belts and denim gave way to icy hands of steel.
“Why not just kill me?” He said it with something like longing as another ache ran through his whole form. The sex wasn’t even a kindness, let alone in the realms of affection. It was more a form of piteous self-destruction than anything else.
“You’re the last game in town,” And then Spike was inside him - mind, body, blood and all.
Delirium - 2 of 3