Love is pain
By: Cricketpoor
Paring: Oz/Spike
Rating: Pg-ish
Feedback: yes please
Archive: Ask first but I find it hard to believe that I'd turn you down... Author's Notes: I wrote this before watching the first half of season four, so it is set in an AU season four where Oz didn't leave as early as he did in canon.
Pain. One word that explained it all. He can see and understand Spike's pain because he feels it, as well. . . He understands how feels to be forced to lock that power - that hunger for violence - in a cage. He feels it himself, three nights out of a month. No matter how annoying the vampire becomes, he never yells, never tells him to sit down and be quiet.
Never talks to him. The others do, but he never says a word to the vampire, doesn't have to. He isn't usually chatty with anyone, but never once with the one person he can truly relate to. Not that he hasn't tried to relate to the others, especially Willow.
He does love her; she's the girl of his dreams, after all. Only lately his dreams have been of a bleach-blonde, British vamp, who paces and smokes and snarks until the Scoobies beg the Slayer to dust him. What he feels for Spike is rooted in the thing both of them know and somewhat fear: pain.
He just can't understand how Buffy and Giles can say that vampires don't have feelings when the pain is so clear on Spike's face and in his eyes. Eyes that show more emotion than Buffy and Giles seem capable of, lately. Yet another thing he and Spike seem to have in common; that lost feeling that comes with being one of the monsters. The shared, familiar pain in his heart constantly makes itself noticed. It's all he can do to control himself, to refrain from taking the vampire into his arms, soothing him with nuzzles and licks, the way he'd soothe any member of the pack.
But he never does. He doesn't look at the vampire, doesn't talk to him. He already knows what they would see in each other's eyes and hear in each other's voices.
Love and pain. Those two things are much the same for them. For the monsters.
The End