Shade: Empty Ache Alone

I wish I had a reason
My flaws are open season
For this I gave up trying
One good turn deserves my dying

"I was just leaving."

"Newsflash, pet; you left half an hour ago. What you're doing now, that's called coming back."

"I didn't mean to come here."

"I think you did. Maybe not your head, but you're body knew what it was doing. Miss me much?" Cocky bastard. Even looking closer to death than she had ever seen him, even with ghosts in his eyes, he still managed to sound so damn sure of himself that she wanted to throw something at him. Like a sharp, pointy stake. Bet he wouldn't be expecting that. But she had never been any good at killing him, no matter how she excelled at hurting him.

"Like I would miss gangrene. I'm going."

She turned her back to him but her body felt like it mired in quicksand, some kind of morass of thought and memory that sucked her down, sucked her, until she felt like she couldn't even breath. Spike was nothing to her, a way to pass the time, a way to feel better, to comfort herself in the dark. He was never real to her, she never wanted him to be. He had been there to take the emptiness away, that was all. Nothing else. What else could he be something to use? She could never love him; she could never feel anything for him but disgust. Her mind rejected the very thought of the two of them together, she couldn't believe the things that she had done when she was with him, and what's more, she couldn't believe that she had liked any of them. That she had done them to him too, and had been filled with a strange sense of perverse joy that she could reduce a creature like him to a dog panting at her feet. And yet, standing here, pretending to leave, she was instead listening to his screamed-raw voice, rusty with old pain, raspy with old desire. She remembered what it had been like to be with him and forget everything else. Sometimes, she had just needed to forget. She had needed something to take her beyond herself, something to make her real life, complete with all the nightmares of adulthood she had never really thought about because deep in her heart she had never imagined that she would live this long, vanish into a haze. Forgetfulness was like a drug, Spike was absinthe to her, bitter poison, sweetened with sugar, addictive delusions; who needed visions when all he made her see was stars?

Shit. She was doing it again. Over. It was over. She was stupid to have let it begun, stupid to have not stopped him in his tracks months ago, years ago. Beyond stupid to have let it go as far as it had. She should have killed him the very first time she ever saw him. But no, instead she let him into her life, more and more with each passing day. It's said that familiarity breeds contempt, but that wasn't quite the right word to describe what she felt for Spike. The more she knew him, the farther inside him the monster faded, so that now sometimes she would look at him and almost be confused, that was how convincing his little skin mask of humanity was. Because she had forgotten hating him, forgotten wanting to kill him, and instead wound up just wanting him. Even when it meant that she couldn't look at herself in the mirror anymore, so ashamed was she at the things she let him do, at the things she did to him. Even that hadn't stopped the need for him that crawled up her bones, moved like blood through her veins, a constant torment. If he didn't mean anything to her, why did it hurt so much when she saw the other woman he was with? Why had that nameless, faceless skank at the wedding hurt, why had Anya hurt?

"You're still standing there, Buffy. C'mon, come in. The sun's hot, you'll burn."

He was trying for casual, for some old hint of the ways things used to be, only his memory was lousy because nice was one thing they had never really managed to pull off. Nice was simple, nice was easy, and nothing between them could have ever been described with either of those two words. No, there wasn't a single memory of Spike she had that wasn't tinged blood red with the memory of some pain or another, the muscle memory of fists on flesh, the bitter taste of copper in the blood, sharp and metallic. She wished she didn't know what blood tasted like. She really wished she didn't know what his blood tasted like.

You'll burn. How's that for irony? There were so many, many ways she could burn and none of them sounded appealing. She was starting to prefer the cold- it was safer by far. She had burned when he had touched her, had turned to ash when he left, lost and alone without an enemy to define her. How had it come to this, that she only felt whole when she knew who she was fighting? Fighting Willow hadn't been the same, it hurt too much, and it scared her down to her bones, because part of it hadn't hurt at all, part of it had been fun, because Willow was strong, so strong. She was worth the fight, worthy of it. And Buffy blamed Spike for that, too, like she blamed him for everything else, because if he hadn't left, she wouldn't have needed an enemy so badly, wouldn't have been so lost that she could turn on Willow so easily.

"I hate you," she muttered, turning back to look into the darkness of the crypt, where pale Spike looked like nothing so much as a ghost of himself, so white in the darkness, the bruises on him black like decay. What had happened to him? She knew from memory exactly how hard it was to leave marks that lasted on him.

"Yeah, I can tell. C'mon it. It's no fun fighting where I can't hit you. Don't fancy turning into a charcoal briquette."

"Oh, c'mon Spikey, it's barbeque season after all." But her feet were walking her back into the crypt no matter what her mind wanted and she knew that once again she was losing to him. He may have been the one always crawling away from their fights with his tail between his legs, but when it came to staying away, neither of them won. When did she start craving him so much, that she would act against her own best interest?

He looked at her long and hard as she walked through the door, his old look, the one that didn't leave room for anything else in his gaze. She had to admire his single-mindedness. Once he gave his attention to something, he gave all of it. It sent a chill down her spine, the way he looked at her. It was almost impossible to look away from the compulsion in his eyes, and what was worse, she knew it wasn't the vampire in him that she responded to, but the man.

He swung the door shut behind him, trapping them both in the midnight dark of his crypt, eternal night, death's best's friend.

Wordless, deadly grace still despite the severity of his injuries, he dropped into a nearby chair, his eyes still on her, his attention still focused on the lines of her face, the strength in her body that always felt like weakness when she was with him.

She stalked over to another chair, could feel the anger inside her shimmer on her skin as she thought about the fact that she had come back again when all she thought she wanted was to be rid of him once and for all.

Silence wrapped around them like spider webs as they sat and stared at each, memories between them. Pain and pleasure and a thousand other shades of feeling hummed in the air between them, made it thick and heavy, almost impossible to breath. One of them had to end the quiet, or she would wind up doing something stupid. Would wind up hurting him again she that she could kiss it better, or worse, depending what he begged for when he was in her arms. What he demanded. What she had given him so easily before.

"What did it?" she finally asked, anything to break the voiceless tension that was strung between them so tightly. "You've been bitching about the chip for years but it seems like you knew just who to ask to try to get it out, so why now?" It wasn't that she cared. It wasn't that she had any interest in the choices that he made. It was only that she hated the silence.

He looked away for the first time since she had come back, something like shame moving in his face, rippling under the surface of his skin. "Cause of what I did to you," he mumbled. "Cause of that last day."

She couldn't keep back a bark of disbelieving laughter. "Yeah, right, I'm supposed to believe that you felt so bad about trying to rape me that you decided it would be great to go back to being able to kill people again? There's a logical chain of events. Not."

"Actually, pet you hit the nail on the head, pet," he responded bitterly. "I felt like shit, and feeling like shit was driving me nuts. Loving you was driving me nuts. I'm a vampire, I'm evil; I'm darkness incarnate. I'm not supposed to regret anything. I'm not supposed to feel ashamed of myself. I hate what you've made me, I hate it with every cell in my dead body, and I knew if I could just get that damn chip ripped out I could back to what I was. I could back to being the big bad, not this sniffling nancyboy that you've made me into!" His voice rose with every word, until he was shouting, not seeming to care that it made his voice sound worse and worse, was no doubt ripping the hell out of his throat.

"I didn't make you into anything! Like I wanted my own personal stalker! Like I ever wanted you at all!"

Well, that made him look back at her. She could see disgust written plainly on his face. "You are such a bloody liar, kind of crap is that, 'I never wanted you, Spike! Go away, Spike!'" he mimicked in a high-pitched voice. "You couldn't stay away from me and you know it. You couldn't stay away from me when we were just talking and you really couldn't stay away when you were fucking me. Bitch. Dru might have been nuts, and Harm was a simpleton, but neither of them was liar. Stop feeling so high and mighty. You liked everything we did together. You liked it when it felt good and you liked it more when it hurt."

"I didn't make you into anything," she repeated stubbornly. "I never asked for you to love me. And I sure as hell didn't tell you to run off right before everything went to hell and get your stupid soul back."

"That one's not strictly true either and you know it as well as I do. You always said you could never love me because I was a thing, a monster."

"Yeah, well, Spike, I never wanted to love you and I really didn't want you to go and screw everything up. Besides, you said it yourself, you didn't do this to get your soul back so I could love you. You did this to get the chip out so you could go back to being a heartless killer. Not my fault that fate stabbed you in the back."

"And yet, here you are. Just like always. Why'd you come back? Could have just left me. Sort of suits that little streak of cruelty that you work so hard to keep anybody from seeing, if you just left me here to rot."

"Yeah, well, see if I'll stay!" she snapped back, and shot to her feet, every intention of walking right out that damn door and leaving him here. So what if he looked like he'd been through a thousand different tortures, so what if she owed him for being the only thing that kept her sane after she realized she wasn't going back to heaven any time soon. He was still Spike, still king of the jerks, and he didn't deserve one minute of her time, or any drop of her concern.

Just as she was wrenching the heavy stone door open, he was on her, one hand wrapped like steel around her arm, holding her in place. "I don't think so, pet," he growled softly. "You came back and I'm not really feeling inclined to let you go."

You don't need to bother
I don't need to need to be
I'll keep slipping farther
Once I hold on
I won't let go till it bleeds

To Be Continued...