A/N: My first Buffy fanfic-- it's just a teeny little Buffy/Angel drabble, set during Surprise, and. . . yes. I own nothing and mean no harm. Luffs to Nita, who told me I should write.
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Touching Grace
by drama-princess
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I didn't use to love the rain; it sends the chill right down into your bones. You can feel the darkness settle there in the damp. And when it rains in the cemetery-- well. The stone is hard, and your fingers and feet slip on the headstones. But tonight. . . something's different. I can smell it. You can smell rain coming. Like you.
You.
The beloved, the torturer, the slayer. The survivor. The fragile, the beautiful, the strong. You're all that. I didn't know people could hold all that in their clay bodies, that the hollow spaces wouldn't crack and spill out all the fear.
You look at me, your eyes so . . . shaken. Sometimes I think I can see to the bottom of hell in your eyes. Or heaven. The romantic thing to say would be heaven, I know. But you've seen too much. The survivor, I said. Not the innocent.
Never the innocent now.
Something about you. . . oh, God, I can feel you trembling. I feel you with my hands, like the half-blind creature that I am. I think I can feel everything about you this way. The taste of your mouth, and how you try to fit into the empty spaces in me, about me.
It's pretty obvious what we could do tonight. What I want to do. What I'm scared to do. It's laughable.
But my body is thrumming in ways I didn't even know it could. Everything about you. The way the wet cloth clings to you, and the half-healed cut on your back. The smell of your skin-- not the fine lines of veins that run underneath, but the smell of the rain. The dirt, too, and the buried scent of your makeup. Perfume you put on a thousand lifetimes (or last morning) ago, and the black eyelashes that blot against your face.
Your body heaves again, another quick sob, and then another that catches in your throat.
I love you but I can't stop, I can never stop, I try and try and try to let go of you, to stop loving you, but I can't stop, I can't I can't.
Touching you, I think, must be like touching grace.
