Title: Nothing
Author: sangga
Rating: F – for swearing. Use your imagination.
Disclaimer: Sadly, I don't own them. All thanks to Joss.
Email: sangga55@hotmail.com
Archive: If you please, and please email.
Summary: "And the wild regrets, and the bloody sweats,/None knew so well as I;/For he who lives more lives than one/More deaths than one must die." Oscar Wilde
Note: Short is good. I like short. This is the first fic I've written for Buffy since my bereavement at the end of the final season.
Spoilers: Season seven – finale.
NOTHING: Spike
I've spent the last two hundred years, nearly, perfecting how to be cool. And apart from a couple of hundred situations where being cool has worked to my advantage, it's turned out to be a spectacularly inefficient use of my time.
Do you know how many books I've read? Thousands. Hundreds of thousands, maybe. And do you know how many more I could have read, if I hadn't spent so many hours personifying my bloody rebel yell? I shudder to think. Millions, probably. I dunno. A lot.
I could've written a couple of thousand poems. Penned a few hundred works of literature. Painted dozens of pictures (they would have been crap, but at least I would have done them). I could've learnt scores of languages, human and demon. I could've seen more countries (by night), explored more museums, examined more branches of philosophy or fields of knowledge, listened to more music, slept with more lovers, danced more, sung more, tasted more, delighted more, studied more, changed more…
Been more.
I feel like I've wasted two centuries.
And here I sit on the edge of a camp bed, smoking and staring, and she's lying there asleep, all golden tendrils and hard muscle, on the night before the fight of her and everyone else's life, and I feel like she's crammed more into twenty-one short years than I have into my entire bloody existence.
It's fucking depressing, is what it is.
I just wish I'd done something that could've made me more useful. For her. I dunno – become a better fighter, or learnt more about the First, or something. Fuck. I look at her now, and all I can think about is missed opportunities. On any number of levels.
I mean, Christ, this in itself is a missed opportunity. I should be writing it all down – all this crap, the Reader's Digest condensed version of my life. It might be useful to somebody, some future Watcher or Slayer, or even some stupid vamp a hundred years from now - read it and weep, and treat every moment as precious, you sorry bastard, because Here Endeth the Lesson.
But I don't write it down. I stick with tradition and keep smoking.
Because no matter how cool I've tried to be, I've never been such a wanker as to think that the record of my life would have any real significance.
Because none of it may matter anyway, after tomorrow.
Because every moment is precious – not every moment meticulously performed and recorded, but every moment lived.
This is it. I'm in it now. Smoking, sitting, staring. Smoking, because I like to smoke. Sitting, because you can be bloody sure there'll be no sitting around tomorrow. Staring, because…I don't need a reason. Just look at her. Golden tendrils, hard muscle. We all like to gaze on the divine. This could be my last chance.
Ah, bloody hell…
It doesn't matter now. It's all bygones. Could've, would've, should've – doesn't matter. Let it go. I'm just here. I'm in the moment. It's all I can do. If it's the sum total of my usefulness, then, given the preciousness of time, at least she can say of me, "It was better than nothing".