Shade: On the Problems of Returning to Your Own Kind

Wish I died
Instead of lived
A zombie hides my face
Self forgotten with its memories
Diaries left with cryptic entries

She wrenched her arm away from is grasp and winced a bit at how much it hurt to break his grip. "Why do you always have to do this, Spike? It's over; don't you understand over? It's finished between us, it never should have started."

Shoving the door closed again, he leaned with his back against it, looking arrogant despite the rents in his flesh, despite the dried blood and the bruises. That was Spike for you; he could really take a beating and wear it well. She remembered how he looked after she had beaten him, remembered that he still smiled even after she had pummeled him into the ground, remembered that he forgave her even before she had finished pounding in him. That was what had scared her worst of all, that he forgave her. What kind of sick, twisted affection did he feel for her that he took so much pleasure from the pain she inflicted? What was wrong with him that he thought that love was supposed to be like this? That it was supposed to hurt this badly? That anything that they did together was okay, that loving people meant you made them bleed? In the end, that was why she ran. Because it was so easy to hurt him, because he liked it so much that she was scared, truly scared, that she would start to like it, too. Would start to think that this was supposed to be how she should treat the men she was sleeping with.

Oh, hell, what is wrong with me, she thought, and it was so painful, so awful, that she just wanted to sit down on the floor, close her eyes and pretend that none of this was happening. Not one little bit of it. She wanted to picture herself back in the grave, peaceful and dead, without a care in the world.

"You didn't do it for me. You did it for yourself and it screwed you over and I'm glad," she spit out and could feel the old familiar venom of their love to hate each other relationship rising up in her again, a warped and disturbed need to hurt him for loving her.

"Hurts all the time," he said, in an almost conversational manner, like it was the easiest thing in the world to talk about, but she could hear the anger and regret lacing through his words. "Starting to get why my poof of a sire turned into such a broody git. It's not even the things that I did so much as how happy it made me. How much I loved it. And I hate that I still want to go back to my old ways. I never wanted to be this. I loved being a vampire. And not just any vampire, I loved being Spike, William the Bloody, the big bad, the vamp who killed two Slayers. But now this; I get this double whammy, the chip and a soul and its like I can't even feel myself anymore. Like I can't reach myself. Feel all lost."

She looked away from the raw confession. She couldn't stand this. She had loved Angel, Angel, and Spike could never be him, not even with a soul, not even with that devil-may-glare glint in his eye looking old and faded now. This didn't change anything. He was a killer and the person he had made her into through his love, through his tender care that left bruises on her body and a sick feeling under her skin was not the kind of person she could bring herself to look at in the morning. And yet all his words sounded so much like how she had felt just months ago, crawling out of the her dark box, her hands bleeding, her clothes dirty and cold on her back from the funeral slit, to see Sunnydale on fire, to see it look like hell on Earth, and realize that she was back, that she had left perfection and come back to this, to pain, mortality, all the things she thought she had left behind her like so much old skin. There was no feeling in her then either, nothing true, just an leprous despair that ate at everything in her until she was desperate to feel anything again, for any brief flash of the person she used to be. Spike felt it too, now, she could tell. He had lost the pleasure of his old ways, lost anything that brought him happiness, was now doubly trapped by nature and nurture, forced by powers stronger than himself into some new shape that he didn't fit at all. She had kissed him that first time, and all the times after that, because she was desperate to feel anything at all, dying for any brief spark of humanity to remind of her of what she had been. She couldn't imagine what Spike was looking for now. A spark of the demonic? Something he could kill, rend and tear without any regret in the morning, without any feeling at all? Something he could lose all this new pain in, all the sharp edges of living in a world where nothing was right anymore?

"I can't help you," she said wearily. "What could I do, Spike? I could barely help myself when I came back, what can I possibly do for you? I don't... what am I supposed to do? Comfort you, try to take the awful of burden of humanity off your shoulders? You're a monster. You'll always be a monster, with or without a soul."

He grabbed her arms them, again, grabbed her and dragged her against him, and it was like the last time and the first time and she wanted to fight and she wanted to struggle because she never wanted to want him again. She never wanted to need him again. She didn't want to go back to the way things were ever again.

But his eyes were intent on her, fixed, burning with an emotion she couldn't even identify. "Can't you just once look at me and see that I've bloody well changed? It's not even this hell damned soul the demon set me up with. It's you! It's always been you and if you think you aren't excited about that, how the hell do you think it makes me feel?"

"You're nothing to me," she whispered back, wanting to yell, wanting to scream, wanting to destroy him so badly it was like an itching in her bones, and craving in her muscles. But like all the other times between them, like every fight that started out violent and turned, well, different, if no less violent, she feel a deeper need crawl through her and the shuddered at its touch.

She tried not to think that it was her fault that she wound up kissing him again, just for the thrill of his mouth, bruised and bloody, cold against her own. It wasn't that she missed this, it wasn't that she missed him. She just wanted him to shut up. At least that was what she told herself for as long as she could think straight and then Spike's hands went to all the places he knew she liked and she wasn't thinking at all anymore.

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...