Fic: (Un)happy Days
Title: (Un)happy Days
Rating: PG-13
Prompt: Although the number of unhappy days is endless, yet life is better than death.
Setting: Vignettes in S6, S7, and AtS S5
Summary: They make each other’s unhappy days a little less endless, a little more worthwhile. 992 words.
“Do you still wish…”
Normally Buffy tried to ignore him while finding her clothes, but after a beat his uncustomary hesitation made her look over her shoulder at him.
As he searched her face, looking for she knew not what, his eyes were guileless in a way she’d forgotten they could be. “Are you ever happy you’re alive?”
No was on the tip of her tongue, but there it stayed.
She stank of cigarettes and sex, her back was scraped raw from missing both the bed and the carpets, and all she had to bring home for dinner were Doublemeat burgers.
But she also had a sister to bring them home to, and tomorrow she would get to see Tara for coffee during her lunch break, and soon she would be a bridesmaid in her friends’ wedding, and she had…
For better or for worse, she had this vampire, who loved- claimed to love- her, even though she hardly loved herself. And he looked so uncharacteristically hopeful and nervous now, like it would genuinely devastate him if she said no. And usually he was a jackass, but sometimes he was gentle, and either way he always made her feel alive. Whether she wanted to be or not.
Especially when she didn’t want to be.
No, was what she should say, if only just to spite him; it wouldn’t do to say yes and have him think he played any part in making her happy.
“Sometimes.”
* * *
Some days, he just didn’t see the point in living another one.
The nightmares and memories were overwhelming, 99% of the house’s inhabitants looked at him like he was either a slug or a bomb, and the First could turn him into its own personal evil, mindless thug on a whim. Hearing things like It wasn’t time for him yet made a bloke think the world would really just be better off without him.
Especially if it also meant no longer watching her date other men and pretending he was all right with it.
But he couldn’t do that to her, waste all her effort into keeping him alive; he couldn’t disregard her belief in him like it was worthless, like it wasn’t the most precious thing in the world.
“’Cause I’m not ready for you to not be here.”
Even if he couldn’t always see the point, he’d stay in this world as long as she wanted him in it.
* * *
Love sucked.
Sure, it was great while you had it, but when you lost it? Love made you betray yourself. Made you think life wasn’t worth living, even if everything else in your life rocked.
Like, today, for instance, staring at the gravestone she’d bought as soon as Giles hunted down his birth date, the one that said:
Spike
William Pratt
1852-2003
Champion • Friend • Partner.
It was melodramatic and weak and utterly stupid, but knowing she would never see him again sometimes made her want another gravestone of her own.
Before, she thought she remembered the pain of Angel’s death, of losing love; she thought she was steeled against any further despair.
Wrong.
Sometimes...sometimes it just seemed like far too much pain to put up with.
Fortunately, the Romeo-and-Juliet delirium never stayed long. She loved her new, Hellmouth-free life, even though a piece of it was permanently missing, and she loved her friends, and she would never give up any of it for heartbreak.
And he wouldn’t want her to. He’d died so she could live.
She would make the most of it.
* * *
With a last, great roar, the dragon fell. Limp, burned, and wearing more blood on the outside than on the inside now, Spike fell with it. He had just enough presence of mind to roll away so the scaly corpse didn’t crush him.
He didn’t get up, though. His cheek was plastered to the wet, sticky concrete, and it could stay that way, for all he cared. He was done; through; it was the end of William the Bloody Chews-Off-More-Than-He-Can-Handle; William the Bloody Stupid.
He’d lost his sword; well, not lost it, he knew where it was; stuck in the dragon’s head where he’d plunged it, and maybe he’d be able to yank it out but probably he’d just fall over from dizziness if he tried to stand. His fists and fangs felt intact, but his left arm had a gash that made it hard to swing, and his right thigh was slashed so deeply he’d have been long dead if he were human. He could barely stand, let alone fight.
Any way he looked at it, there wasn’t much he could do anymore and it wasn’t worth trying; the hordes of hell weren’t slowing, so if he did try to fight, he’d only be prolonging the inevitable. The dragon had been his last stand. Wasn’t a bad last stand, at least. He’d saved Angel, miserable bastard. Course, he would have preferred to save Gunn, but that ship had sailed long before the dragon.
So now he’d rest; wait in the street’s gore for some ugly bugger to chop his head off.
“Spike!”
Scratch that; head-chopping must have already happened if he could hear that voice.
Funny, he wasn’t supposed to end up in Heaven.
Although if he was in some undeserved afterlife, why did she sound terrified…?
Driven by pure instinct, he managed to raise his head and there- his chest seized up- there she was. Not glowing and ethereal, though. Grimy and bloody, more like. And swinging her scythe at a demon and- yes, looking terrified, too. At him.
“Spike! Get up!”
He frowned, uncomprehending, unable to decide if he appreciated his dying brain’s hallucinatory taunts. He loved seeing Buffy but not seeing her so scared.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw another young woman in the fray. Then a third.
…Slayers?
Wait. Was this…was she really-
Buffy.
She was here.
Shaking, he staggered to his feet.
Fin