AUTHOR: shoneaugen
EMAIL: shoneaugen@hotmail.com
DISTRIBUTION: Want it, ask. ^^
DISCLAIMER: Buffy and Spike aren't mine; they're Joss's. I just bring them out to play.
FEEDBACK: Please! I'll give you cookies if you do..
SUMMARY: Why does a man do what he mustn't? For her. To be hers.
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She can watch, stunned, when he drapes himself over the cross. She can shed a single tear for him, for the smoke billowing away from the icon scorching its mark into his flesh, for the sudden clarity that spells out every single one of his actions since she came back. She can even drop her facade of scorn for him, now that he's not looking. She's a hero, right? She can do anything, can come back from the dead and try to live a real life with false hopes in a crumbling world.
But she can't find a single word to say to try and make things right.
She can't think of any way to make Spike whole again.
And she can't think of one, just one reason to justify how she could have blinded herself to the way she had broken him.
and she shall look on him with forgiveness and everybody will forgive and love... and he will be loved. so everything's okay, right?
No. Nothing is okay. Nothing will be okay. That's good enough reason for her to cry, then - salted waters, salty as the blood she knows he still craves. That craving that still burns the bridge between humanity and monstrosity for her as well as him, and she cries because she knows that she still can't love him even for all of his love for her, because he is not a man even if he isn't a monster, and she's already been crushed by another like him. They can never be what she wants, he can never be what she wants, and she is shamed for that.
to be hers. . . to be a kind of man.
But even that kind of man isn't enough for her. So she will pry him off the cross, take him back to his crypt to Clem, and she will go home and try to forget, hope that in the morning he'll be the old Spike again, hardened enough that she won't see the lines where she pushed too far into him. Hope to rest.
can we rest now?