A fic for you with love!
My very, very, belated Christmas present for sockmonkeyhere .
I'm sorry this took me so long, sweetie, and I really hope you enjoy it. Thank you for giving me a reason to write it.
Title: Find me and warm me
Characters/Pairings: Fred/Spike, Illyria
Rating: G
Word count: 683
Summary: Where he thought he’d find an end, he found a beginning.
A/N: Written especially for sockmonkeyhere .
They say that payback is a bitch. Well, irony is an even bigger one. Even when he had been turned, Spike had never stopped living. He loved the flow, the motion, the action. He loved life. And now he spent his days chasing ghosts. Because that’s what she was. He might even be imagining it all. Wouldn’t that be funny? But he became more convinced each day. She was there somewhere. When her eyes became warm for just a second, when she stopped talking in mid sentence as if not knowing what she was saying, when she opened her mouth as if to speak but no sound came out, when she started to reach out to touch him but never made contact. Fred was in there. He knew it. And he would be damned, if he didn’t help her come out.
It had been a long game of cat and mouse. Illyria was trying to hide what could not be hidden. He knew it and she knew it. But sometimes, when she looked at him with nothing, absolutely nothing, it chilled him to the bone. It made him want to just give up. Because her eyes were so empty that there was just no way that his Fred could be hiding behind them. Or was there? The vampire sighed and let his head fall back. He was really tired of running without knowing what exactly he was chasing. So as he stood on top of the open roof, looking at the dark sky and the stars that were too few and too far away, Spike wondered, if he should just wait for the sun to come and wash away the coldness that Illyria left in him.
Illyria’s bones felt so heavy. She was a god, she did not feel exhaustion or sadness, but this heaviness, it was getting more unbearable each day. The weight of pretending. Pretending that she was in control, that she cared, if she was. Because she honestly didn’t. Being in this body, moving like a human, talking like a human. It was just too much. Ever since Wesley had… lost, she didn’t really want to communicate with people, not that there were all that many to communicate with. But the vampire. He wasn’t supposed to act so much like a human. It made the weight even heavier. His eyes. Full of sadness, of pain, of hope, of despair, of… that feeling that Wesley had looked at her, no, at Fred, with in his last hours. His eyes were like light that blinded her and she wanted to hide from it. But she was a god. She never hid from anything.
The sunrise was just around the corner. He could smell it, feel it and he had the feeling he would soon see. It had been a long time since he last watched the sun rise. Funny that, the warmth he could already taste had once reminded him of a certain blonde, now it had the image of a brunette. Some people started their day like that, with the sun’s light, but then again he had never been like everybody else, it made sense that it was an end rather than a start for him.
Illyria watched the vampire. She knew he wasn’t going to move, she knew because a voice inside her screamed it so loud that her head hurt. She felt the need to move but it wasn’t hers and she felt the desire to cry and it wasn’t hers at all. She had always known how weak a human body is but she finally realized how strong a human spirit is. And finally the weight was too much and she admitted it. Illyria was tired.
He heard her scream, he turned around and saw her, he felt her arms around him, he felt her heart beating against his chest, he felt her breath against his neck. But it was when she pulled back and he looked into her eyes that he knew for sure. The sun had finally risen and it didn’t burn, it made him warm.