Warming Up To New Things
Set in an AU late season three or early season four where Spike and Drusilla briefly reunite in Sunnydale, when Spike suddenly- or not so suddenly- realizes that he's left a bit cold by his lady love, and he's starting to warm up to someone else.
He doesn't know when he started to warm up to her. Underneath all of his mocking and sniping for her being loyal to the big broody idiot turned evil, he admired that loyalty. Certainly his own lady love had never been loyal and always rather capricious.
Maybe it was when she could have killed him time and time again, helpless as he was in that bloody chair, and then weaker than he wanted to admit, but she didn't. She would bend those rules and work with something as dark as she was light to save what she loved. He had always been a bit of a rule breaker himself, or at least that's what he like others to believe. And as for saving what he loved, he could certainly attest to a kinship with that. He'd tried to save his mother, and hadn't he tried to save Dru, endlessly scraping her back together, binding up her shattered little mind, time after time.
Maybe it was when he was drunk and angry and holding the witch and the whelp hostage. She came riding in like the cavalry she was always destined to be, and he thought that he would have liked a friend like that. Only demons don't have friends. They have commodities and trade-offs and payoffs, and he was never really going to get the good end of things, but maybe a little tiny spark in him admired that about her. She was the goods for the pathetic little wicca. It was nice to see some second string character in life being treated like an equal. God knows Angelus had never treated him like that, and even when put to it , neither had Dru.
And now, in some bizarre twist of fate, she was the one tied up and waiting for the cavalry to come and he was the one with the power and the ability to distract Dru. He suddenly had a mad desire not to snap that pretty little neck, but to save it instead.
"You know, Dru, those pretty little knives you brought back with you from your last time galavantin'?" He glossed over the fact that her absence had been another one of her trysts, another with a lover that wasn't him. "Why don't we have a bit of a play before we see to that Slayer?"
Dru stopped what she was doing, stopped approaching the small blonde shoved onto the floor, which is what he wanted. Only a moment with and opportunity, and she should be free, especially if he just happened to slip something he was carrying into her hands as he passed.
His raven-haired temptress looked at him quizzically, her lilting voice pointing out, "But you don't like my pretty toys, nor my pretty games. You don't like the strings of rubies on your own skin. Makes you feel like you're going to bits. Makes you feel like you're out of control, and we all know how much you love control, Sweet William." She purred the words, eyes dreamy, hips hinting.
He noticed she did not say how much control he had, because she was holding it all. But as he smiled at her, sauntering up with a curling smirk and sex in his swagger, he had all the control he wanted. He took her by the arm and turned her away, leading her to the little room they called their own, silently dropping the knife from his duster down to the Slayer's reach. He didn't even blink an eye but smiled in his head when she caught it perfectly without a sound, even though her hands were bound.
"Why, you know, Luv, I've been thinking about those pretty toys and all those ruby reds. And I think I'm warming up to new things," he purred for Drusilla, but his eyes weren't for her. He met startled green eyes, confused, then suddenly understanding, and he had to look away before Drusilla noticed. Something quick and hot flooded his chest where a heart used to beat. A sweet flash and a twist of pain followed. What had he done? Something he couldn't undo.
Now she'd be free and he'd still be trapped. But yet, he knew he wouldn't change it, wouldn't change a footstep down this reckless path he'd plunged down. He was warming up to new things all right, just all the wrong ones.