Title: Bad (1/1)
Summary: Spike. Rejection. Someone has to bleed.
Rating: PG13.
Disclaimer: Joss Whedon.
Date: December 2, 6, 2000.
Headlong rush forward. Stops so fast his body jerks, brain flung, crashes, rattles within the confines of his skull. Falls back a step. Feels her eyes on him, disgusted, mocking and in her gaze, superimposed, his life in denial. Remembers Cecily, Dru, a thousand other slights and impassive looks sliding past him as if he were nothing.
Hands flex against his side. The Slayer turns, heads up the steps to her house. He watches her ass as she walks away from him, and lust sparks and bleeds with anger, made real and tangible, pressing against the inside of his jeans. Swallows back his words, weak and soft and pleading to feel her body - warm and live and vital - against his cold one.
Buffy shuts her door against his gaze. Thoughts snap back into place, expand to include reality. Spike finds himself alone, denied, lost and wanting in the Slayer's back yard.
Sharp edged blade slicing and sawing through his memories: emergency surgery. Savage strength behind each blow, tears out the disease she has infected him with in bloody chunks of thoughts and images. Plastic surgery, painting over the jagged scars left across his consciousness.
Master artist, he shapes himself anew.
He isn't standing in the Slayer's yard, body aching to loose itself in hers. He hasn't watched her. Hasn't dreamed of touching smooth flesh, forbidden. He hasn't been in her room, face buried into her clothing, eagerly drowning in the scent of fabric softener and perfume and _Buffy_. He hasn't taken pictures of her from her house, jerked off to the sight of her smiling face. He has not spent the last months unmanned, a schoolboy shuffling his feet and tripping over his own tongue whenever he sees her.
Fast forward and he's on top of Harmony, between white thighs splayed wide, moving hard and fast as if he wants her to crack and shatter beneath him. Montage behind closed eyelids, quicksilver flicker of memory and imagined images.
He screams against Harmony's neck, an arched offering to his fangs, and falls.
Rewind, a twirling flick as the reel spins back to start.
Cecily, when love was the pounding of his heart and weakness in his knees. You're beneath me, each word grinding his heart to dust beneath her fashionable ladies' boots. Skip ahead, past the man rushing blindly trying to escape his heartbreak, past the tearing of his flesh beneath soft lips and wicked fangs. Stop.
Cecily, when there is no love, when everything is the parallel demand of lust and bloodlust, possession and destruction. Pause. Study her face, twisted and streaked with blood and tears. He studies her face, then, now, admiring the agony he has transferred from his heart to her body. Smiles, full of fang and rage. He's nowhere _beneath_ her now, is he?
Wakes into darkness, Harmony's hair trickling across his face, clinging to lips fallen open in sleep.
Longs to snap open Buffy's ribs, dig his hands into the heated cavern housing her heart. Feel it struggling against his palms before he squeezes. Warning: explodes under pressure. Chip screams in his head, Spike screams into his pillow. Harmony stirs at his side, arms gliding over his shuddering back. Face held next to his ear, she murmurs emptiness.
Fast forward. The Magic Box. He steps into welcoming smiles that go hollow and dismissive when minds process vision. He watches heads bent over books, listens to the soft murmur of voices brushing past him. And Spike hates them all. Despises them. Loathes them.
And he is helpless among them, battered by careless words and an aching lack of fear.
He looks at Buffy, despite himself. Her eyes are shadowed, lower lip longing to quiver, held in place by blunt white teeth. His body stirs and he nearly screams his rage at them. She does not look at him, not with pity nor scorn, banished from her mind utterly. As if his words, his touch, had been cleanly cut away, sterilized, bandaged. While his wound still wept blood, dark liquid seeping out from the patchwork job his memories were subjected to.
Time stutters forward. Heads lift, smiles stay in place as the store's bell tinkles. The scent of incense, candle wax and sex and the witches have arrived. Spike watches Buffy, her lips wide and curved, eyes lightening. And he nearly smiles in turn.
Willow brushes past him, all fluttering skirts and soft flesh. She holds Tara's hand beneath the table, doe eyed gazes meeting, melting together.
He turns back to Buffy, studies Willow in his mind. Sweet. Friendly. She has offered him her hand in the past, and he has batted it aside in impotent fury. She wants to help. And he will let her. He'll take her hand, grind bones to dust within his palm. And she will weep, her pain twisting through the Slayer as his never will.
Spike bows his head, lips opening into a flash and teeth and rage.
Yeah, he thinks, I'm _bad_.
~end~