He was...
...Perfect.
Everything about him, from his cold demeanor to his rare smiles was absolutely unimaginably perfect.
He had no excess of emotion to mar his beauty. Everything from his haunted past to his uncertain future only added to the chain of events that had shaped him into the glorious statue of humanity that he was. I had known him for so long, and yet I knew him hardly at all, but every time I saw him, every time I thought of him, it sent a chill down my spine.
He killed with grace, spoke with poetry, and lived dangerously.
Even his name fit him so precisely that I could not imagine him being called anything else.
Vicious.
Perfect.
I wanted him to love me, to truly love me, but he demonstrated his perfection by denying me that as well. There was some part of him that cared, I had seen it in his pale eyes, but in the end, he knew nothing of love or of joy or sorrow. He was a man beyond emotions, an angel that could not stoop so love as to care for a mortal, even if he wanted to.
Perhaps that is why I could not find it in me to love him.
He was perfect, but he was also dead.
No one can be expected to love a dead man, even one as beautiful and dangerous as he was. I admired and adored him, and perhaps that is why he humored me, why he let himself believe that what he felt was love. I never believed for a moment that he trusted me, but he let me get close to him, and that was all I could ask. That was all he had to give.
I regret that I could not be enough for him.
I failed him, and for that he could never forgive me. I did not expect him to.
I loved Vicious for his perfection.
But I loved Spike because he was alive.
I think Vicious hated me for that. He had hated me because we could never truly be in love, though we had tried once. He hated Spike, because I had found in him what I could not in Vicious. It was my fault, in the end, because I could not be what either of them really needed or wanted. We were all damaged emotionally, and it ripped our tainted little family to shreds.
Even I was lost.
I hid it easily, but in the end, I was human too.
The only one who wasn't was Vicious.
He was beautiful. He was a being carved from marble, something too perfect for Earth or Mars. He was fierce and beautiful, but sometimes I saw him smile. Once that would have been enough. Once I would have been happy with the strange, empty relationship we'd had.
I wanted to love him.
But I didn't have it in me.
He was an angel, and I forced him from heaven. I turned him into a devil.
I had been the catalyst that had turned him into a hateful, ravenous beast. I should have hated him for that.
But I couldn't.
In the end, he was still Vicious.
He was...
...Perfect.