Spuffyficathon
Spuffy ficathon entry, finally, in which I indulge my obsession with second person and fudge canon and timelines quite a bit.
Title: Champagne Supernova in the Sky
Author: Doyle
Pairing: Buffy/Spike
Rating: mild R
Notes: Spuffy ficathon entry. For voleuse. The request was season 2, sex and commiseration with no character death. This is AU after Surprise. (voleuse, it’s probably a good bit nastier than you were hoping for… oops? I found it very hard to work in this time period :hangs head:)
If there are gods on high looking down, or Dru’s bloody talkative stars or anything else watching over you, they’re doing a bang-up job. Drusilla’s on her feet again, stronger and more beautiful than she’s ever been, and from all accounts Angelus (whatever he’s calling himself this century) has skipped town, and you’re finally out of that fucking chair, and you’re about three minutes away from bagging your third slayer.
Things are officially looking up.
One of those things being the slayer; sat by herself on a tombstone, looking up at you with surprised eyes. Silly bint hasn’t even gone for her stake.
She can’t still be moping over Angelus. You heard he disappeared the night of Drusilla’s birthday. Took the last bit of her present, too, but you’re feeling generous about it. Wasn’t as if you were tremendously keen on ending the world anyway.
The slayer says, “You’re walking.”
Bright girl, this. “Walking. Running. Hunting. We doing this thing or what?”
That’s what you’re looking for, that spark of hatred in her eyes, but just as soon as it flares it gutters and dies. “I don’t know,” she says, “are we?”
You can already tell this will not be a glorious kill for the annals of history. She’s handing you herself on a plate, trussed up with an apple in her mouth, and what’s the point in that?
“Forget it,” you say, disgusted, already turning to stalk away. “Call it a freebie.”
**
And of course, this being the way things work, as she pulls herself together you start to fall apart.
The minions who struck out on their own when you were in the chair come grovelling back. You kill them and make new ones. Young, eager, and admirably stupid, and a couple of them are ordered to follow the Slayer at all times.
You amass quite a collection of videotapes.
“I mean, this wanker,” you say, gesturing at the frozen image on the TV, “this child she’s shagging around with, who is he? He’s no-one.” When you turn round Dru’s wandered off somewhere. Doesn’t matter. You rewind the section, watch it again. Her hand comes up to cup the boy’s cheek, pull him in for a chaste peck of a kiss.
Someone from her school. Bland and human, apple-pie American boy, type who’d soil himself if he came face to face with real darkness. You see the pictures of her trying to be just like her little pals - sometimes you see it yourself, watch from the balcony of their dance club. Makes you want to rip her throat out to see her pretend that she’s candyfloss and sunshine.
Takes some effort on your part to get her by herself. You send your minions after her lot, orders to kill whoever they like, maim whoever they can, just get them out of the way. Give the two of you some quiet time.
You even let her get in the first good blow. She doesn’t go for her stake right off - what are they teaching them in slayer school these days? - catching you with an almighty backhander instead, whipping your head around. You spin, fists tight to your chest, right foot swinging out and up to club her in the face.
When she doesn’t reach for a weapon then, you know you were right about this one. She loves the fight, the challenge, as much as you do. Deep down in her blood, just like it is in yours.
It feels like seconds later when her team shows up, the Watcher and the wannabes, and if you could kill them all without taking your eyes off her you would. Instead, you hook it back to the factory. You’ve warmed her up, and she’ll keep a while.
Later, when Drusilla complains about you leaving her alone till almost sunrise, you realize you fought her for hours.
**
“I’m doing this for you!” In some way you believe that, though you can’t say how she could be any better or worse off with the slayer dead.
“Lies,” Drusilla hisses. “Words inside your head that jeer like little fieldmice.” Turning on the look that melts you: “Spike, why do we have to stay?”
You can’t leave. You have to - It’s just - It’s complicated, all right? “Just a while longer, pet,” you promise.
“But I’m not there,” she says, miserable. “I was, and now it’s just her.”
“It’s not even anything to do with Buffy!” You don’t need Dru’s talent, loopiness, whatever you might care to call it, to see those words crystallize in the air, turning it to ice. “The slayer,” you hastily correct yourself, “it’s not even anything to do with the slayer.”
The next night you come back to find her half-naked between two of your stupider hench-vamps, and the night after that you come back and she’s not there at all.
**
There’s not enough alcohol in the world. This strikes you as a serious problem.
You stay in the partitioned-off back room at the factory, wallowing in your misery and broken bottles. You hear the commotion outside but don’t get up to investigate. The last two inches in your bottle of Old Kentucky are more entertaining.
Buffy swims before your eyes as she hauls you upright by the lapels of your coat. Either it’s alcoholic haze or you’ve been crying.
“This is pathetic,” she sighs. “What happened, did your crazy girlfriend run away with another vampire? Hotter, better car, less of a Billy Idol fixation?”
“Your fault,” you mumble. Heartless bitch, strutting into your home in her leather pants and righteous indignation. “Quite the talent you’ve got there, pet. Thought it was just your own honeys you drove off.”
Twin slayer faces glare at you, two wavering mouths set into hard lines. There’s only one fist lashes out, though. The booze’s anaesthesia means you hear the crunch of your nose breaking more than feel it.
“We finish this,” she says, her voice getting further away as she steps over you and out. “Tomorrow. One way or another.”
**
She could have killed you in the factory. Didn’t, and that has to mean something. Oh, you don’t love the chit, nowhere near - Drusilla gets these notions. Comes of having her mind all scrambled. Fancy her a bit, you’ll admit to that, she’s a tasty little thing and you went without a long time, in the months after Prague. But you’re drawn to her, she’s drawn to you, and tonight you’ll sink your teeth deep into her neck and see if she tastes as sweet as that girl a hundred years ago.
God, your body lights up at just the thought.
You’re out as soon as the sky’s dark, waiting for her. She never said when or where so you make for the nearest boneyard, the same place where you didn’t kill her weeks ago. By the time she shows up you know every stone and inscription in the place and you’re nearly vibrating with the anticipation of the fight.
So she, of course, sits down cross-legged in the grass, stake clutched in her lap, and looks up at you, worried.
Tease.
“What?”
“Why do I like fighting you?”
You hunker down beside her, fanning out the coat to sit on. Take a long drink from your hipflask, the one you killed that country singer for down in Austin, and offer it to her. She looks hard at you, judgemental and edgy (and you remember that underneath ten thousand years of destiny, she’s just a kid not old enough to drink or vote) and takes it.
The bourbon makes her cough and splutter. You find yourself patting her back, amused, while she calms down.
“Why d’you like fighting me? Same reason I like fighting you. It’s in you. Calls to you. S’what you were born to do.” You settle back on your hands, feeling like you’re explaining the birds and bees to a child. “Known a couple of slayers in my time.”
“You mean you killed them.” She grips that stake so hard it looks set to splinter. Angry, you wonder? Or jealous? Wait your turn, honey, you think. I’ll get to you soon enough
“I did. But then, I expect the watcher’s told you all about that.”
“Not really.”
You feel quite offended. “One in China. Bit younger than you. Nikki, in New York. She was older. Had some style.” You absently stroke your fingers over the leather coat. You’ve been wearing it so long that it’s just yours, not hers, but it’s still your crowning moment.
“Why slayers?”
Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? “There’s the fight. That’s part of it. Killin’ the one thing that’s supposed to be able to kill me.”
“Just part of it?” She’s looking you right in the eyes, now, not hardly blinking, like you’ve picked up one of Dru’s thrall-tricks.
Your hand’s resting on the ground right behind her. You reach up, pull a strand of her hair through your fingers. Gold like you imagine the sunshine here in California must be, and about as natural as the colour of your own. It fascinates you, both the fact of it and the way she’s sitting there and staring and letting you touch her.
“Slayers,” you say, barely aware of what’s coming out of your mouth, “they don’t live all that long. Oldest ever was, what, twenty-six? Greek bird.”
There’s a faraway look in her eyes when you quote the age and you know she’s thinking that she has nine years, then, at most, and you think you’re not walking away from this fight, love. You’re sitting in a graveyard chatting it up with a creature of the night, these are not the actions of a woman who wants to make it to the quarter century. You could tell her about how you killed her predecessors, about slayers and deathwishes, but she can figure that out when you get to the practical demonstration.
And yet there’s still the knowledge that it could go the other way. This one’s different, got an axe-wielding mum and a whole flock of bratty friends. Maybe that’ll be enough to keep her. You like the uncertainty. Makes it more fun.
“So you don’t live long,” you continue. “But while you live…” You sigh, thinking that there has to be some way to word this that doesn’t involve fucking ‘effulgent’.
You were in Africa once, a few years after China. Dru shook you awake in the middle of the day, dragged you outside. You thought she’d finally gone daft enough to want to take afternoon walks, but the sun was eclipsed, a dark circle ringed with brilliant white light, bright as diamonds.
“Just like your little slayer-girl,” she singsonged. “Lucy in the sky.”
It was one of the few times you felt she really got you.
“You shine,” you finish simply.
Buffy breaks away from your gaze. “So basically you hunt down girls like me because you’re a big, bleached undead magpie,” she says flatly. “Yay.”
You could rip her head off just for that because you’ve always hated people making fun of you, that enrages you quicker than anything else, but you’re more interested in why you can hear her heart going a mile a minute, and especially why she smells turned on.
“Boyfriend not doing it for you?” you ask softly. “Too fragile? Bet you can’t give him a cuddle without a trip to intensive care. Not like Angelus, is he? Heartbeat too loud, skin too warm…”
She’s on her feet in a trice. “Shut up.”
You stand slowly, grin spreading across your face. “Nothing to be ashamed of pet. Heard it’s fairly common.” Her shoulders are trembling when you put your hands on them, anger and fear and arousal coming off her in waves. You skim your thumb over the vein in her neck. The pulse beneath fascinates you. So does the scar, a small patch of pale, raised skin at least a year old. Someone’s been here before you. “You try to hide it. Try to be the good girl for your mum, your friends.” You inch closer to her until the scar’s right beneath your mouth. When you run your tongue along your teeth, you can taste her. “This is where you live,” you whisper into her skin. “In the dark. Just like me.”
She shoves you back, hard. You’d fall on your ass if you hadn’t been expecting it.
A second later she all but leaps on you, arms around your neck and legs locked around your waist and mouth crashing against yours, and you’re so surprised that you fall backwards onto the wet ground.
**
Gentleness wasn’t part of the deal. From her awkwardness, the way she blushes and isn’t sure where to put herself and has to be guided, you realize she’s never done this before.
Too bad for her, you think. If she wanted her first time to be candles and rose petals, well, she shouldn’t have gone jumping on vampires who just wanted an innocent fight to the death. She gasps ragged little pants into your shoulder as you curl your fingers in the grass, pushing deeper into her. Every movement sends agonized thrills through your back at the spots where her nails are sunk in.
You’ve always liked to talk during sex. She arches back, tightening almost painfully around you, just as you finish describing how Nikki looked, broken on the floor of a subway car. The sensation and the memory sends you over the edge with her, leaves you lying senseless on her till she struggles beneath you, and then you take your weight onto your hands.
Both of you are still for one beat, two. You’re thinking that what you’ve just done may actually have been better than killing the slayers.
She touches your eyebrow, the scar you always search for in the rare photographs of yourself.
You’re still inside her; her legs are still wrapped around your hips. Your coat, Nikki’s coat, hangs around you both like a shroud.
“I hate you,” she whispers.
She’s flushed and covered in a sheen of sweat. Her hair and her face are streaked with dirt and grass. You can smell blood off her, dizzying and sweet. She looks so fragile, so young, but you can see them all in her eyes, the ones you killed and the thousands you never did, as strong and as dark as anything inside yourself.
And you want to drink from her, rip open that scar that someone else left there (not Angelus, you’d know, there are enough of his invisible marks still on you that you’d feel him) but you just stare: you hate her, you love her, and either way she’s an eclipsed sun, dark and dazzling, and when you can’t look away from her you realize that, finally, you’ve lost.
END
Title: Champagne Supernova in the Sky
Author: Doyle
Pairing: Buffy/Spike
Rating: mild R
Notes: Spuffy ficathon entry. For voleuse. The request was season 2, sex and commiseration with no character death. This is AU after Surprise. (voleuse, it’s probably a good bit nastier than you were hoping for… oops? I found it very hard to work in this time period :hangs head:)
If there are gods on high looking down, or Dru’s bloody talkative stars or anything else watching over you, they’re doing a bang-up job. Drusilla’s on her feet again, stronger and more beautiful than she’s ever been, and from all accounts Angelus (whatever he’s calling himself this century) has skipped town, and you’re finally out of that fucking chair, and you’re about three minutes away from bagging your third slayer.
Things are officially looking up.
One of those things being the slayer; sat by herself on a tombstone, looking up at you with surprised eyes. Silly bint hasn’t even gone for her stake.
She can’t still be moping over Angelus. You heard he disappeared the night of Drusilla’s birthday. Took the last bit of her present, too, but you’re feeling generous about it. Wasn’t as if you were tremendously keen on ending the world anyway.
The slayer says, “You’re walking.”
Bright girl, this. “Walking. Running. Hunting. We doing this thing or what?”
That’s what you’re looking for, that spark of hatred in her eyes, but just as soon as it flares it gutters and dies. “I don’t know,” she says, “are we?”
You can already tell this will not be a glorious kill for the annals of history. She’s handing you herself on a plate, trussed up with an apple in her mouth, and what’s the point in that?
“Forget it,” you say, disgusted, already turning to stalk away. “Call it a freebie.”
**
And of course, this being the way things work, as she pulls herself together you start to fall apart.
The minions who struck out on their own when you were in the chair come grovelling back. You kill them and make new ones. Young, eager, and admirably stupid, and a couple of them are ordered to follow the Slayer at all times.
You amass quite a collection of videotapes.
“I mean, this wanker,” you say, gesturing at the frozen image on the TV, “this child she’s shagging around with, who is he? He’s no-one.” When you turn round Dru’s wandered off somewhere. Doesn’t matter. You rewind the section, watch it again. Her hand comes up to cup the boy’s cheek, pull him in for a chaste peck of a kiss.
Someone from her school. Bland and human, apple-pie American boy, type who’d soil himself if he came face to face with real darkness. You see the pictures of her trying to be just like her little pals - sometimes you see it yourself, watch from the balcony of their dance club. Makes you want to rip her throat out to see her pretend that she’s candyfloss and sunshine.
Takes some effort on your part to get her by herself. You send your minions after her lot, orders to kill whoever they like, maim whoever they can, just get them out of the way. Give the two of you some quiet time.
You even let her get in the first good blow. She doesn’t go for her stake right off - what are they teaching them in slayer school these days? - catching you with an almighty backhander instead, whipping your head around. You spin, fists tight to your chest, right foot swinging out and up to club her in the face.
When she doesn’t reach for a weapon then, you know you were right about this one. She loves the fight, the challenge, as much as you do. Deep down in her blood, just like it is in yours.
It feels like seconds later when her team shows up, the Watcher and the wannabes, and if you could kill them all without taking your eyes off her you would. Instead, you hook it back to the factory. You’ve warmed her up, and she’ll keep a while.
Later, when Drusilla complains about you leaving her alone till almost sunrise, you realize you fought her for hours.
**
“I’m doing this for you!” In some way you believe that, though you can’t say how she could be any better or worse off with the slayer dead.
“Lies,” Drusilla hisses. “Words inside your head that jeer like little fieldmice.” Turning on the look that melts you: “Spike, why do we have to stay?”
You can’t leave. You have to - It’s just - It’s complicated, all right? “Just a while longer, pet,” you promise.
“But I’m not there,” she says, miserable. “I was, and now it’s just her.”
“It’s not even anything to do with Buffy!” You don’t need Dru’s talent, loopiness, whatever you might care to call it, to see those words crystallize in the air, turning it to ice. “The slayer,” you hastily correct yourself, “it’s not even anything to do with the slayer.”
The next night you come back to find her half-naked between two of your stupider hench-vamps, and the night after that you come back and she’s not there at all.
**
There’s not enough alcohol in the world. This strikes you as a serious problem.
You stay in the partitioned-off back room at the factory, wallowing in your misery and broken bottles. You hear the commotion outside but don’t get up to investigate. The last two inches in your bottle of Old Kentucky are more entertaining.
Buffy swims before your eyes as she hauls you upright by the lapels of your coat. Either it’s alcoholic haze or you’ve been crying.
“This is pathetic,” she sighs. “What happened, did your crazy girlfriend run away with another vampire? Hotter, better car, less of a Billy Idol fixation?”
“Your fault,” you mumble. Heartless bitch, strutting into your home in her leather pants and righteous indignation. “Quite the talent you’ve got there, pet. Thought it was just your own honeys you drove off.”
Twin slayer faces glare at you, two wavering mouths set into hard lines. There’s only one fist lashes out, though. The booze’s anaesthesia means you hear the crunch of your nose breaking more than feel it.
“We finish this,” she says, her voice getting further away as she steps over you and out. “Tomorrow. One way or another.”
**
She could have killed you in the factory. Didn’t, and that has to mean something. Oh, you don’t love the chit, nowhere near - Drusilla gets these notions. Comes of having her mind all scrambled. Fancy her a bit, you’ll admit to that, she’s a tasty little thing and you went without a long time, in the months after Prague. But you’re drawn to her, she’s drawn to you, and tonight you’ll sink your teeth deep into her neck and see if she tastes as sweet as that girl a hundred years ago.
God, your body lights up at just the thought.
You’re out as soon as the sky’s dark, waiting for her. She never said when or where so you make for the nearest boneyard, the same place where you didn’t kill her weeks ago. By the time she shows up you know every stone and inscription in the place and you’re nearly vibrating with the anticipation of the fight.
So she, of course, sits down cross-legged in the grass, stake clutched in her lap, and looks up at you, worried.
Tease.
“What?”
“Why do I like fighting you?”
You hunker down beside her, fanning out the coat to sit on. Take a long drink from your hipflask, the one you killed that country singer for down in Austin, and offer it to her. She looks hard at you, judgemental and edgy (and you remember that underneath ten thousand years of destiny, she’s just a kid not old enough to drink or vote) and takes it.
The bourbon makes her cough and splutter. You find yourself patting her back, amused, while she calms down.
“Why d’you like fighting me? Same reason I like fighting you. It’s in you. Calls to you. S’what you were born to do.” You settle back on your hands, feeling like you’re explaining the birds and bees to a child. “Known a couple of slayers in my time.”
“You mean you killed them.” She grips that stake so hard it looks set to splinter. Angry, you wonder? Or jealous? Wait your turn, honey, you think. I’ll get to you soon enough
“I did. But then, I expect the watcher’s told you all about that.”
“Not really.”
You feel quite offended. “One in China. Bit younger than you. Nikki, in New York. She was older. Had some style.” You absently stroke your fingers over the leather coat. You’ve been wearing it so long that it’s just yours, not hers, but it’s still your crowning moment.
“Why slayers?”
Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? “There’s the fight. That’s part of it. Killin’ the one thing that’s supposed to be able to kill me.”
“Just part of it?” She’s looking you right in the eyes, now, not hardly blinking, like you’ve picked up one of Dru’s thrall-tricks.
Your hand’s resting on the ground right behind her. You reach up, pull a strand of her hair through your fingers. Gold like you imagine the sunshine here in California must be, and about as natural as the colour of your own. It fascinates you, both the fact of it and the way she’s sitting there and staring and letting you touch her.
“Slayers,” you say, barely aware of what’s coming out of your mouth, “they don’t live all that long. Oldest ever was, what, twenty-six? Greek bird.”
There’s a faraway look in her eyes when you quote the age and you know she’s thinking that she has nine years, then, at most, and you think you’re not walking away from this fight, love. You’re sitting in a graveyard chatting it up with a creature of the night, these are not the actions of a woman who wants to make it to the quarter century. You could tell her about how you killed her predecessors, about slayers and deathwishes, but she can figure that out when you get to the practical demonstration.
And yet there’s still the knowledge that it could go the other way. This one’s different, got an axe-wielding mum and a whole flock of bratty friends. Maybe that’ll be enough to keep her. You like the uncertainty. Makes it more fun.
“So you don’t live long,” you continue. “But while you live…” You sigh, thinking that there has to be some way to word this that doesn’t involve fucking ‘effulgent’.
You were in Africa once, a few years after China. Dru shook you awake in the middle of the day, dragged you outside. You thought she’d finally gone daft enough to want to take afternoon walks, but the sun was eclipsed, a dark circle ringed with brilliant white light, bright as diamonds.
“Just like your little slayer-girl,” she singsonged. “Lucy in the sky.”
It was one of the few times you felt she really got you.
“You shine,” you finish simply.
Buffy breaks away from your gaze. “So basically you hunt down girls like me because you’re a big, bleached undead magpie,” she says flatly. “Yay.”
You could rip her head off just for that because you’ve always hated people making fun of you, that enrages you quicker than anything else, but you’re more interested in why you can hear her heart going a mile a minute, and especially why she smells turned on.
“Boyfriend not doing it for you?” you ask softly. “Too fragile? Bet you can’t give him a cuddle without a trip to intensive care. Not like Angelus, is he? Heartbeat too loud, skin too warm…”
She’s on her feet in a trice. “Shut up.”
You stand slowly, grin spreading across your face. “Nothing to be ashamed of pet. Heard it’s fairly common.” Her shoulders are trembling when you put your hands on them, anger and fear and arousal coming off her in waves. You skim your thumb over the vein in her neck. The pulse beneath fascinates you. So does the scar, a small patch of pale, raised skin at least a year old. Someone’s been here before you. “You try to hide it. Try to be the good girl for your mum, your friends.” You inch closer to her until the scar’s right beneath your mouth. When you run your tongue along your teeth, you can taste her. “This is where you live,” you whisper into her skin. “In the dark. Just like me.”
She shoves you back, hard. You’d fall on your ass if you hadn’t been expecting it.
A second later she all but leaps on you, arms around your neck and legs locked around your waist and mouth crashing against yours, and you’re so surprised that you fall backwards onto the wet ground.
**
Gentleness wasn’t part of the deal. From her awkwardness, the way she blushes and isn’t sure where to put herself and has to be guided, you realize she’s never done this before.
Too bad for her, you think. If she wanted her first time to be candles and rose petals, well, she shouldn’t have gone jumping on vampires who just wanted an innocent fight to the death. She gasps ragged little pants into your shoulder as you curl your fingers in the grass, pushing deeper into her. Every movement sends agonized thrills through your back at the spots where her nails are sunk in.
You’ve always liked to talk during sex. She arches back, tightening almost painfully around you, just as you finish describing how Nikki looked, broken on the floor of a subway car. The sensation and the memory sends you over the edge with her, leaves you lying senseless on her till she struggles beneath you, and then you take your weight onto your hands.
Both of you are still for one beat, two. You’re thinking that what you’ve just done may actually have been better than killing the slayers.
She touches your eyebrow, the scar you always search for in the rare photographs of yourself.
You’re still inside her; her legs are still wrapped around your hips. Your coat, Nikki’s coat, hangs around you both like a shroud.
“I hate you,” she whispers.
She’s flushed and covered in a sheen of sweat. Her hair and her face are streaked with dirt and grass. You can smell blood off her, dizzying and sweet. She looks so fragile, so young, but you can see them all in her eyes, the ones you killed and the thousands you never did, as strong and as dark as anything inside yourself.
And you want to drink from her, rip open that scar that someone else left there (not Angelus, you’d know, there are enough of his invisible marks still on you that you’d feel him) but you just stare: you hate her, you love her, and either way she’s an eclipsed sun, dark and dazzling, and when you can’t look away from her you realize that, finally, you’ve lost.
END