Title: "Cordelia's Shadow"
Author: Pirate Turner
Rating: R due to adult content
Summary: Spike lives in Cordelia's shadow.
Warnings: Slash, Het, Unrequited Love, Suicide Thoughts
Disclaimer: Spike, Angel, Cordelia Chase, Drusilla, and Buffy Summers are © & TM their respective owners, not the author, and are used without permission. Everything else is © & TM the author. The author makes absolutely no profit off of this work of fan fiction, and no copyright infringement is intended.

When he closes his eyes, I know it's not me he sees. When he sprinkles my face with tender kisses, I know, in his mind's eye, it's her lovely, feminine face that his lips are caressing with love far greater than anything he'll ever feel for me. When he kisses my chest and takes my small nipples in his fangs, I know he's imagining his hot mouth being filled with far fuller breasts, and when he grabs me by the throat, I know his illusions have been shattered and he's seeing me and hating himself.

I know my sire better than any one else including himself, and I know he'll never love me. He covers himself and maintains our relationship, such as it is, with lies, but I know better than to believe any of them. I hear the truth every night in his whimpers of her name as I hold him tight and do my best to calm his trembles. Sometimes he even screams her name in the midst of our passion, but I carry on as though I've heard nothing for I've felt the consequences of reacting too many times before.

He thinks my love for him runs as thinly as his infatuation for me and what I can do to his magnificent body, but he'll never know just how deep my love for him runs. He'll never know, because I'll never tell him. I've learned my lesson and know that, as love's bitch, you only get hurt. Though I die a little with each reminder that he'll never return the all-encompassing love I feel for him, I'll never be the bloody git stupid enough to tell him the power he wields over me.

I'll take whatever he gives me and come crawling for more. I'll do whatever he wants just to please him, and if he ever tells me that he never wants to set eyes on me again and really means it, I'll walk out of the shadows and into the sun for any kind of life without him in it isn't worth living. Even throughout all those years with Drusilla and Buffy, both women I only pretended to care for because it angered him and made him glare in my direction, it was the opportunities to fight with me that fueled my existence.

I'll do whatever he wants except believe him. I'll take his lies and lock them away inside of me with a smile. I'll let him make the union of our bodies into whatever he chooses -- his personal paradise or my private Hell. Only he possesses the power to shake my whole being and turn my life into a trap. It's not a power I gave him. It's one he took for himself when I fell in love with him upon first setting eyes on him in that dark alley centuries ago, and so I'll stay, trapped in Cordelia's shadow until he finally turns the key and throws me away for as long as he never loves me, death is my only escape from the pain he tortures me with, and as I know he'll never love me, I can only hope one night he'll kill me. Even then, whatever fragment of my black soul that remains will linger on in the torture chamber of her shadow for I will still love only him.

The End