Summary: Last five minutes of Tabula Rasa and after. Spike lust. Buffy lust. Viewers take cold showers.
Author's Note: I began this in the week in between Tabula Rosa and Smashed, because heaven and Joss only knew when Spike and Buffy were actually going to do anything about their attraction. Silly me. They brought the house down before I finished this fic. So, really, there's no point in posting this, except for Spike gave me some excellent bibble, and, well, why not?
Author's Note, September 2002: First posted March 2002. With the new rules on NC-17 stories, I took a look at this one and decided I'd rated it too high before.
Rating: R for Spike's language (wash his mouth out with garlic soap) and unconsummated sexuality
Spike wanted to kill someone.
That was hardly new. He wasn't even terribly particular about who he wanted to kill.A random stranger on the street would do nicely. A woman, maybe, soft, perfumed skin and thick, silky hair, struggling in his hold, twisting, attempting to escape, curve of her neck vulnerable under her blonde hair...
He cursed and laughed humorlessly when he realized his victim had turned into Buffy in his imaginings. If he spent one bloody minute without thinking of her, it was because someone was beating the shit out of him and the pain was sufficiently distracting, thank you.
But if he had her under his hands, it wouldn't be his fangs piercing her. That thought made him grit his teeth and groan as his body reacted predictably. The last time he'd had a decent shag was with that lovely debasing sex toy of a animatronic Buffy. Decent, hell, as much as he wanted to believe otherwise, that tin can hadn't been any better than his fist.
It was Buffy he wanted. Above him, beneath him, up against the wall, her face wild with lust for him. Her eyes hot, instead of coldly dismissing him.
Bugger it. He had to stop thinking about her. The little bitch was blowing hot and cold (Spike shut off the mental image that shouldn't hit as fast as it had on the word "blowing"), treating him like shit, then turning up looking for a shoulder to cry on.Ê "That fucking ponce Angel is more of an idiot than I ever thought, if this is how she treated him," he muttered to himself.
Head down, he hunched and lengthened his stride, heading for the Bronze, with its noise and distractions. He didn't want to be Angel for her. Angel was a broody bastard who never seemed to enjoy anything, certainly not Buffy. And he didn't want her to see Angel when she looked at him. He wanted her to want him, exactly him.
At the alley behind the Bronze, he froze for a second, remembering the night that Buffy had come to him to ask for help. His help. She'd wanted to know about Slayers and vampires, and ended up grinding his pride to dust beneath her heel. Humiliation was sour in the back of his throat at the memory.
A sly smile crossed his mouth as he imagined a different ending to that scene. It wasn't hard to replace her scorn with something a bit more... receptive. His imagination had carried him as far as having her in his arms, her shirt torn off and her nails digging into his back as he hungrily licked her breasts before he managed to yank himself back to reality.Ê Reality was that the body that he imagined devouring had lain rotting in her grave. Reality was that the spirit that he longed to have yield to him had flow away to some bleeding heaven, and resented being dragged back to this hellhole.
Personally, he rather liked this hellhole. That was why he'd teamed up with Buffy three years ago to keep good old Angel from ending the world. He snorted with amusement and ducked into the Bronze. Irony was, then, he'd done it to get Drusilla out of Sunnydale, and to have her back for him.
His priority was now Buffy, who was sitting at the bar, her spine a hunched curve of misery. Spike stopped short. He'd expected her to go to Los Angeles with Giles, to wave him off on his flight to London... hmmm, maybe not, considering the fit she'd thrown when Giles had announced his decision to return to England.
He didn't want to approach her. She was going to rip into him if he got close to her. He knew that. But he was completely incapable of not crossing to her side, not responding to the desolation he could almost see in the air around her.
There was a popular vampire myth that emotions seasoned the blood. It was bullshit, but various idiots he had known swore that fear was the best spice for the blood, followed by lust. He wondered by grief tasted like in Buffy's blood.
She barely moved, even though he could tell she had sensed him. He waited, somehow finding the patience that had kept him chained to her for the best part of a year now, a persistence that was foreign to his nature in many ways but was the story of his obsession with her.
She finally turned to face him. Tears streaked her cheeks but her eyes were weirdly expressionless. After a bare moment, she turned her head, sharply dismissing him. Ignoring him.
It hurt. Again. Always. Sucker punch in the gut. A low blow. Venting pent-up pain as fury, he snarled and stalked off. Screw her. He'd get some wings, a beer, hit the weekly bloodmobile outside the hospital and stock up on the real stuff, and Buffy could just fucking go to -
"Spike?"
"What?" he snapped, turning on her. He'd retreated towards the back of the Bronze, but she'd followed him.
She'd wiped the tears from her face, but he could still smell the almost-blood salt smell of them. "I -" she began, and then the anger in his voice reached her, and her face closed off. "Fine," she said, turning on her heel.
He grabbed her arm, swinging her back. Reflexively, she brought up one hand, aiming to drive his nose through his skull. He caught that one, and they stood locked in a circle, bound together but separated.
He let her go with a scowl, pushing her back a step. "Stay away from me."
"Why the hell should I? You never listen when I tell you that." Buffy folded her arms and slitted her eyes and generally looked about as threatening as a five-foot-nothing blonde could. Which, as always, was vastly deceiving.
"You tell me to go away, and then turn up on my doorstep. Go, stay, go, stay. Make up your bloody mind!"
"Does it matter?" she asked bitterly. "I say go, and you stay. I say stay, and they go."
The realization of what she was saying made him sick. Once again, she was refusing to see him, she saw everyone but him. "I'm not the amazing Angel, ducks. I'm not Solider Boy, nor am I your father-figure. I'm the idiot who's in love with you, and I'm not going anywhere. I'm going to follow you and watch you." Yelling at her had bled off some of his anger, and her vulnerability brought out the predator in him. He began a lazy stalk towards her. "I'm the one who watches you when you think I'm not there. I could watch you when you're asleep, and you'd never know."
Buffy refused to back up, which suited him just fine. His body brushed hers, hips grazing, her breasts against him. He smiled in dark satisfaction as she jumped back as through touched by fire, and her heartbeat accelerated sharply.
It was too easy to grab her wrist, swing her movement towards flouncing off into an arc into the wall. She wasn't trying very hard to get away from him, and he leaned in close, caging her body. "That's what you want, isn't it, love? Someone you can abuse and cut at, who won't leave, no matter what? Fine, then. But you've got to pay the price for it." She turned her head to snarl at him, and he caught her mouth before she could say anything.
It was as though someone dropped a dark curtain over his head. No sight, no sound, no senses but touch, taste, scent, filling him with her. Her mouth was blood-warm, human heat, and for a moment he just wanted to drink her through the fragile tissue of her flesh.
And then she snapped. Anger turned to active participation, as her arms came around him and her body shifted from straining away to cradling his. Her response was a narcotic, and he stole every moment of it he could before she pulled away. Because she would. She always had.
"Geese," someone jostled Spike's shoulder. "Get a room!" A few snickers behind them.
Spike pulled his mouth from Buffy's, hands pried carefully off her body and propped above her head. "I could rip their heads off," he said in a growl meant only for her ear (pretty pretty ear, must remember to lick that sometime). "Crack their skulls, drink them dry... the bloody chip couldn't hurt any worse than I -"
With a strangled gasp, Buffy shoved against his chest. Off-balance, Spike half-turned, and could only watch her run away.
"Bloody, buggering, fucking hell," Spike cursed in a low monotone. He wanted to follow her, wanted to follow up on his initial urge to rip to pieces the idiot who had interrupted them. But right now, he had to sit very still and catch his non-existent breath. He was as hard as a bloody (trust a poet to make a bad play on words) spike, and moving at that moment wasn't exactly a good idea.
By the time he gathered himself, she was long out of sight. Weary to his undead bones, Spike headed for the cemetery. She'd go patrolling now, and then head home to check on Dawn. She'd keep faking that she gave a damn, and it wasn't working.
By the time he found her, she was in the middle of a messy fight with a nest of vamps she'd apparently tripped over.Ê None of them were anything more than a nuisance for the Slayer, and even in a group it was routine for her to take them down. Across the wide sweep of grass-covered graves, Spike watched her methodically fight, kick, the slim piece of wood in her hand almost invisible from that distance. Graceful as a dancer, she whirled away from one cloud of dust and used the momentum to backhand another vampire in the face.
Between one moment and another, the ritual fragmented. One of the vampires grabbed her arm and flung her into a headstone. Ê She rebounded and kicked back at him, but missed. Instead of her practiced motions, she was suddenly fighting a losing battle. Another kick to the head sent her tumbling to the ground.Ê She rolled, trying to knock her opponent's feet out from under him, trying to give herself enough distance to get up. Desperately, Spike began running.
As though they had rehearsed it, the vamp jumped over her roll, accelerating it with a kick in the ribs. Buffy gathered herself, and looked up. There were two vampires left, circling her. She smiled, baring her teeth at them. And did nothing.
Spike kicked the closest vampire in the skull with enough force that its head flew from its body. With every ounce of fury in his body, Spike punched the remaining vampire in the face, knocking him back several steps. Snake-quick, Buffy sprang to her feet and staked it.
The only sound around them was distant traffic from the highway. Buffy tried to catch her breath, holding her side and shaking only slightly.
Casually, Spike leaned against a tall gravestone.Ê"If you wanted to get yourself killed," he said, every word sharp-edged with restrained fury, "there are better ways than that."
"I didn't. I wasn't -"
"Like hell you weren't."
Buffy turned and stared at him at the lash in his voice. Ê "Yeah. Like hell. Everyone thinks that because I've been through worse, somehow, this isn't that big a deal. I love my friends," she said desperately. "I love Dawn.Ê I didn't want to die!"
She shook her head sharply. "And then I did die. And I... was at peace.Ê Was it too much to ask to not get yanked back and forth? I just wanted it to stop."
"So suicide by vamp was your choice to solve your little life problem?" Spike asked.
"No!" she denied. "I just... wanted to know why I bothered. I just had this moment where there just wasn't any reason to get up and fight again. I wasn't afraid. I didn't feel anything.ÊAnd that was the worst. I feel like I'm turning into this... thing.ÊWithout emotions. And I hate it. It's like they brought me back without my heart. Or maybe my soul. I don't know."
She was blindly staring at some point ten inches away from his left shoulder, and didn't refocus as he approached her.Ê Gently, he traced the curve of her cheek. Ê She tilted her head into his hand and closed her eyes, sighing. Cupping her face, he leaned forward and laid his lips on hers.
The silent explosion incinerated both of them.Ê Tenderness was burned away in a moment.Ê He felt her thighs part against him, as though they were already naked against each other, as though she was already expecting his thrust.
Then she pushed back, stumbling awkwardly over the rough ground. Ê Before he could say another word, she turned and ran.
Hard as a rock, aching, Spike still found a way to grin as he leaned against a headstone and watch her run in terror.Ê He liked the sense of chasing prey.Ê The anticipation wasn't that different from chasing a kill.
"Run away, little Slayer," he muttered, digging into his coat for a cigarette. "I'll catch you eventually."
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