So, baby, if you'll please come home again you know I 'll
Kiss you for my supper,
You know I'll kiss you for my dinner, yeah!
But, ah, if you don't come back you know I'll have to
Starve to death –
Jimi Hendrix
The rain fell against the window, splashing causing her to toss her pack of cigarettes aside and push herself up from the bed she was staying in and press herself against the window. Her hands had risen to touch the glass and trace the pattern of where the rain had fallen. She watched her fingers and wondered when they had gotten so old, so thin. She could remember her hands when she was younger, so delicate, so soft, now they felt so coarse so run down.
She wasn't meant to live this long. Sometimes but only sometimes she wished she had died, with him. Maybe he was in heaven she thought. Maybe he'd come back like she did and they would have something else in common.
The days and nights in London always seemed longer then the ones in Rome. In Rome she would go out in the morning to the market buy some fruit, walk around, smoke some cigarettes and soon enough Dawn would be out of school and they would argue about when she should do her homework. Eventually she would win and Dawn would go into her room and study for at least a little while. Andrew would come home from whatever he was doing, sometimes it was a trip to the country or some watchers meeting that he set up for potential watchers. The days in Rome blended together until night came and she would go out sometimes with other Slayers and others by herself, mostly by herself. The nights were when she liked to be alone because in all the time he'd been gone she had become the moon and the darkness was her home. She'd bag herself some Vamps around town then go dancing, meet a few guys but never bring them home no matter how convincing they tried to be.
Love was something she could never fully get a grasp on. It would come and then go almost like breathing. You breathe in and then out. No one is paying enough attention to notice that the breathing has ceased and there is no sound coming from your mouth. Love is like that. One minute you can feel it, taste it, and practically live in it. Feel it's every heartbeat and then it is gone as fast as it came. She only remembered love in pieces. Moments in time that seemed suspended as if they were floating above reality and against it but still there in your memory. She could see love, remember it, smoke a cigarette and taste it but she could never really feel it. At least not anymore. Not that he was gone.
It was the passion that had always held them together. The obsession for him. The anger for her at herself.
Sometimes she wasn't sure if he felt love at first and if they both grew into loving each other at the same time. Maybe she had a hard time believing any part of his obsession was love because for her, her obsessions could be love but only for a brief moment and then the obsession faded and the love embedded her like a deep wound. Like the scar on her neck from a lover who seemed so long ago but yet she still felt some passion for, some love for. Some cookie dough analogy but yet could not bring herself to mourn the loss of their relationship any longer even though she knew sometimes it was partly her fault for never believing Angel could truly be a man without her. That he could only be a man because of her.
This was always her delusion. Her own self centeredness. Her own desire to keep people locked and chained against her because she was afraid of them leaving. She would make them feel that they could be nothing without her. It didn't last long. The self righteousness. It lost its luster when her mother died, when she died. Maybe even truly before that but somehow Spike always brought it out in her.
The constant need to be better then him at times was what could've killed her a third time. It wasn't his fault she knew that now. She knew that even before but yet could not bring herself to tell him. To tell anyone because no one would understand. If everyone believed he was a bad man then he was a bad man for her. It was an addiction at first. It wasn't like her smoking cigarettes to find comfort because she couldn't use a cigarette. The cigarette used her. The companies used people to make money from a stick that would eventually kill the living with lung cancer or put holes in their throats and voice boxes to keep them speaking. She used him and it was the only thing she knew how to do. Everything else made no sense but even in her darkest moments away from heaven she knew why she used him and he knew it to, worst of all he let her. He never stopped her because he needed her too much even if the relationship was never what he truly wanted. She liked to believe that before he died, really died there relationship had gotten somewhere to that point of where he had wished it to be.
She would stare at the rain in London watch it wash over the streets and splash against the sidewalks. Against the doorways of all the flats on Giles block and wonder always wonder what she would be doing if he were still there. Still by her side. Still in a physical form of where she could touch him, walk by him and then smile.
Giles and her had some sort of understanding now that they must bring all the slayers together, train them, teach them and yet there relationship had never been the same after he tried to kill him. He never believed Spike could be a man worth loving. A man worth saving but she believed. She still believed.
The only real father figure she had after her own father seemed to give up his responsibilities had failed her had lied to her. She tried to understand it when she would sit outside his flat on a step that always felt like it would fall beneath her and pull out a cigarette from her pack, light it and chain smoke until she heard him calling her. She had realized that she licked her lips after a cigarette just to reinforce the taste upon her lips, to remember that he was there once. Her lover was there. Giles knew she was smoking maybe he was even the only one. He never said anything, never even asked her why because he knew why. She would walk back into his flat, smelling like smoke and would start talking while still licking her lips because the habit remained like a disease.
She knew she would have to give it up eventually the time would come. Not this year she kept telling herself. Not the first year away from him. Not the first year he is gone. I need this, she would say to herself every time she would pick up a cigarette inhale then exhale and blow circles into the night's cool air.
It seemed to always be raining in London. At least whenever she was there dark clouds seemed to hover. They would break open like eggshells cracking then they would erupt in a never ending shower taking its claim on the land like a hunter would do with its prey. She often asked the slayers and Giles if it rained a lot. The responses varied. Yes. No. Sometimes. But it was nothing clear, nothing that seemed to validate her thinking it rained more when she was there as if some sign from heaven or even hell.
This used to be his home and she would wander the streets like a drunken solider looking for some sign of him. A want-to-be Billy Idol. A man with bleached blond hair. Someone who was dressed in black. She would roam the streets at night before catching an early flight back to Rome and walk down the streets that seemed unchanged from time. It was then she would smoke and no one would notice her, with a cigarette in hand and her fingertips becoming yellow. Her knuckles almost always bled from a punching bag or a nasty fight with a Vampire or Demon. Most of the time they just bled and the scabs were unpleasant to look at yet she couldn't stop herself from beating a bag too hard or a Vamp who was going to die either way. She began to think people saw her hands before they saw her. They were hard to ignore. They were her scars from the pain and sadness she could not admit to truly feeling.
She couldn't seem to get past it, past him, past the fact that he was gone. It was the constant thought inside her head. She didn't fool herself into believing they would have ever had a life together. It didn't mean she never thought about it. She thought about it, sometimes she thought about it when he had walked into the kitchen, grabbed a box of cereal and then handed it to her knowing that she wanted it too, knowing that there was something they were sharing. It was at those moments when they sometimes could get a grasp on what it meant to be around each other, near each other constantly that they became aware of each other's habits. She'd grab the milk from the refrigerator pour it in her bowl and when he was watching a potential walk in she would pour it in his bowl as well, not because she wanted to but because it was simply a reaction. A habit. A ritual. She would wonder when they had become that couple. That old married couple that knew each other so well sometimes speaking wasn't ever enough.
There was never a moment she could pinpoint and say, it was then.
There were newspapers all over Giles guest room, dates that she couldn't recall plastered on the front cover. The room had somehow become her own while in London. She didn't like the hotels anymore after all the places they had stayed in the states looking for Slayers, trying to track them down she couldn't stand to see another white wall and lay on sheets she'd never felt before. She would have much rather preferred a tomb. A tomb where she could rip her clothes off in and walk around naked, never worrying about how cold it was or drafty but simply in love with the ground she was walking on and the man in front of her. She had often wished she could go back to the tomb he had made his home all those years but it was gone, dead and buried like everything else in Sunnydale.
Her heart was still there. Inside her old house or rather the dirt that was left over. The cellar where she'd spent her last night, with him. She could never express what happened there last night together. To her it was a secret she kept close to her heart something she would never give up not to anyone. Willow asked her once if they had made love and her response was brief but there wasn't a yes or a no just a slight grunt and sigh and a face of longing that only she could truly possess.
It was then she took up smoking when she couldn't explain to anyone what had happened and why it had happened because only he could understand.