Author: Zyrya; zyryafic@arcadiae.net
Rating: NC-17; adult themes, adult language, sex scenes, character death.
Summary: An escapist reworking of Crush (Season 5).
Disclaimer: Buffy the Vampire Slayer belongs to Joss Whedon and assorted companies. Some dialogue and scenes in Part I are taken from Crush, written by David Fury and directed by Daniel Attias.
Notes: This is a first person, present tense, Buffy POV narrative, so the writing style is intentionally rambling. Expect tormented grammar, run-on sentences galore and a criminal abuse of punctuation. I've invented a lower level bedroom in Spike's crypt that wasn't there until Season 6, sent Harmony packing, and cast the most dreadful aspersions on Riley's sexual prowess.
Friday night.
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My sister is a mystical Key and all our shared history is an illusion implanted by a bunch of monks. My mother is recovering from a brain tumour. My boyfriend has run off to South America because I threatened his masculinity to the point that he was getting suck-jobs from vamp whores. My best friend is stronger with the witchy abilities every day and freaking us out with random spell casting. My other best friend is in love with an ex-demon who drives us all crazy. My surrogate father, who apparently swore actual sacred oaths to protect me, is still occasionally in league with the same Council of Watchers that tries to kill me on a semi-regular basis, and now has a guilt complex that he didn't train me in Japanese like I'm some cheesy girl power samurai. There's a dangerous new vampire in town who slaughtered everyone on a train and is still on the loose. Oh, and best of all? We're up against Glory, a hell god who can kick my ass without even smudging her lipstick. I'm the Slayer, all called and Chosen and destined to save the world, and what am I doing tonight? I'm on a mission to tell a vampire that I don't have feelings for him. Because my mom and my best friend told me to.
I kick a lot of things on the way to Spike's crypt. I wish there were something to slay, but over-efficient patrolling this week means a peaceful cemetery tonight. If Spike tries to say he loves me again, I'm gonna dust him ... tell Giles that Spike's chip stopped working and I had to put him down like a rabid dog. To save the world. Because it's my job. Die, tree stump! Die, headstone!
Okay, I'm at the crypt now. Maybe there's an official samurai thing I can chant for extra courage and determination. I could run round to Giles and ask. Yeah, right. Just open the door, Chosen One.
No Spike. Oh well, too bad, better luck next time. But I can already hear Mom's disappointment. Mom said she was proud of my decision, and I'm not letting go of that in a hurry even if my decision was to bow under the pressure of Willow's resolve face. Better than a Japanese chant thing any day, picturing Mom's tired expression ... way to go, Buffy, give your stressed mother something else to worry about. Bowing is kinda Japanese, though. And since when am I so hung up on the Japanese thing?
No Spike. No Harmony either, thank all that's holy. No sounds, no movement. There's a trapdoor in the floor towards the back, though ... I'll drop down, have a quick look around, and make it home in time to work on my English paper. Things have to be pretty bad before homework is the favoured option.
There's a whole network of caves and tunnels down here. Spike's big with the ambience. Caskets, blazing torches, tree roots in the ceiling, piles of bones. The whole rough-hewn rock walls Nosferatu theme is so angsty goth I'm gonna mock Spike for weeks ... except I won't, because if hitting him is third base then teasing him is probably second, and if I tease him he'll tease me back and we'll be at third base in a heartbeat.
I take a torch and explore. Part of the wall is covered with a sheet. In a place where open coffins spill human remains, what on earth could Spike want to cover up?
Oh, my god ... a wall of pictures of me ... and my hairbrush ... and a mannequin with a blonde wig ... and ... drawings of me. That Angel did? That's my blue sweater! I've been yelling at Dawn for two days over that! Are those my stakes? Have I been doing extra whittling duty because Spike steals my stakes? What sort of vampire collects stakes sharpened by the very hand of his sworn enemy?
I'm out of here. This is sick. Not flattering. Not an indication that he really is in love with me. Just sick. Up the ladder, and home to my English paper like a normal person who is not the subject of a freako shrine in a cave decorated with human bones. Spike's not here and I'll just have to live with Mom being disappointed. When I tell her about the sweater she'll understand.
Gah! Spike is crouched by the top of the ladder, and something is badly wrong because he's changed from the soft grey and green clothes he wore to the warehouse earlier and he's back in black. And there's blood on his mouth. And his voice is cold and menacing. And he hasn't been this scary since forever.
"See anything interesting?"
Damn right I saw something interesting, but tonight's mission now consists solely of getting the hell out of here.
I climb up the ladder, and all I can look at is that smear of blood at the corner of his mouth. I start to ask him about it, and he's walking towards me. It's not in Japanese (surprise!) but I have a mantra which goes 'he's chipped, he can't hurt me, he's chipped, he can't hurt me' that I recite to myself every time I see him. The worst that can happen is I'll fall down the hole in the floor and make a fool of myself.
I'm almost stammering because I'm chanting the he-can't-hurt-me thing in my head and it's hard to concentrate on feeling safe around Spike when he's stalking towards me like a big, hungry cat. Or, looking at the blood, a cat that's maybe not quite so hungry because it recently killed and ate something.
"What happened?" I finally manage to say.
"Me," says a voice.
Falling through the hole in the floor is looking pretty good all of a sudden. Certainly better than turning around and seeing Drusilla with a cattle-prod. But I don't get a chance to choose because she zaps me and I collapse on the floor, and the only people who know I'm here are Mom and Willow and I've gone to a great deal of trouble to convince Mom I'm Supergirl so she won't have a panic attack every time I go on patrol and sure I asked Willow to revoke Spike's invitation to my house but that's not a whole lot of use to me right now.
I try to get up, pushing against the sarcophagus, but this is agony. My hands and feet are numb, and my heart is either beating a thousand times a second or it stopped beating altogether, but it must be beating because there's this intense pain in my chest. Spike and Drusilla are saying things, and he's got his arm around her, and they're grinning like ... well, like two vampires who have incapacitated the Slayer. And I remember what Spike said to me a few months ago, that every vampire is looking for their One Good Day, and Spike's chip is irrelevant now that Drusilla's here to do the dirty work, and she's obviously the one who killed all the people on the train, and now she's leaning over me and I know why she can see the skies bleeding and the cherubs burning because I can see them too, in her eyes ... and ... and oh shit the cattle prod is coming at me again ....
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I'm standing up. I can feel my feet on the ground. My head is throbbing with a dull ache, and every nerve ending in my body is jangling.
"There she is." Spike's voice, very near.
I open my eyes and I try to get into combat stance, but my arms are absent without leave. I have to stop with the commando jargon. And can we concentrate on the current problem just a little tiny bit instead of picking at the Riley-shaped scab?
My wrists are in manacles. I'm chained to the wooden supports of a doorway in Spike's basement. Basement ... I think I'm going to laugh out loud. As if he's going to have a furnace and a washing machine down here, bicycles the kids have grown out of, and boxes of old clothes no-one has bothered to take to Goodwill. Taking a couple of hits of high voltage electricity does not facilitate higher brain functions. But hey, I'm up to four-syllable words, so things are looking up in the brain department. Get it together, Buffy.
"Beginning to think you'd sleep the night away," Spike says, like we're having a conversation, like he's concerned, like his ex wasn't the one who induced the potentially night-long sleep. The blood's gone from his mouth and the gloat from his voice and his expression is sneer-free, but I'm not exactly feeling secure in his affections right now.
"Dru. Drusilla?" I force out.
Spike twitches his eyebrows and stands to one side, and there she is ... tied to a pillar about eight feet away from me. She's wittering something about musical chairs and Spike is saying something back to her. He must be used to her ravings after all those years scourging Europe together.
This is how I know for an absolute fact that Spike isn't in love with me, because how can someone be so faithful and so loyal to such a dribbling lunatic and then suddenly decide he's interested in me? I'm reasonably attractive, and I fight well, and there's that Slayer/Arch-rival bond we've got going that I never want to examine too closely. So I have some assets, but not enough to override his obsessive-compulsive enslavement to the fruitcake.
"What's going on?" I ask.
"Simple. I'm gonna prove something," Spike says, and moves right up close to me. "I love you."
Oh, my god.
I realise I said it out loud when he gets all cranky and says "No, look at me," and forces me to look at him by grabbing my chin.
"I. Love you."
Like it's the magic formula for making me believe him. I twist my head from his grasp. But it's Spike, so it's not like he's going to shut up.
"You're all I bloody think about. Dream about. You're in my gut, in my throat. I'm drowning in you, Summers, I'm drowning in you."
Oh! Lies and crazy, yes, but ... oh! His voice is so deep and raw I almost believe him.
He doesn't mean it, of course. Since he got the chip he's limited to torture of the mental variety. He lashes Xander into a seething testosterone fury, and turns Giles into Ripper on sight, and he flirts with lesbians, and this love declaration is just his latest evil plan. I'm about to laugh at him when Drusilla gets there first, giggling something about pixies. But Spike is in my face again.
"You can't tell me that there isn't anything there between you and me. I know you feel something."
I do. It's that bond. It's respect for an adversary I never managed to defeat, and admiration for his fighting skills and his general coolness, and a wacked-out sense of comradeship that we're in the same business even if we're on different sides. Except since he was chipped last year we've been mostly on the same side and he's always there when I need him. And it's that dense, humming sensation I get every now and then when I can't take my eyes off him because he has those cheekbones and that arrogant, hip-shot slouch. But I'll chew off my own leg before I admit any of this to him.
"It's called revulsion," I say, proud of my cutting disdain. "And whatever you think you're feeling, it's not love. You can't love without a soul."
For the first time I really listen to Drusilla. "Oh, we can, you know. We can love quite well. If not wisely."
A few hours ago, in the stinky vamp nest, Spike had a melty glow in his eyes and his face was ... is now ... yearning. But I'm not giving an inch here. I can only guess at what he hopes to achieve by this, but I'm not going to feed into it, and he's looking at me and he knows I'm shutting him out.
"You still don't believe. Still don't think I mean it. You want proof, huh? How's this?" he asks, grabbing a stake from the High Altar of Buffy. I figure I'm in for something nasty, but he's holding the stake to Drusilla's breast and saying "I'm gonna kill Dru for you."
Drusilla's cackling again and I have to agree with her. Spike dust his sire. To win me. Yeah, right.
"That doesn't prove anything," I sneer in disbelief. "Except that you're a sick, miserable vampire that I should have dusted a long time ago. And, hey, already there."
"Don't mock this," Spike says, sounding genuinely offended.
"Go mock yourself," I snap back, with possibly the lamest quip ever.
If Spike wasn't offended before, he certainly is now. "This is Dru, girl! You have the slightest idea what she means to me? It's the face of my salvation!" He goes to his salvation and touches its face, and she gazes doe-eyed at him. I can't see his expression, but Drusilla seems pretty happy with it and the words flowing around her.
"So you see, it means something," he finishes, looking at me again.
"Not to me," I say flatly, daring him to do it. "Kill her. Why do I care?"
He walks towards me, and the hammer falls. "Here's why. If you don't admit it, that there's something there, some tiny feeling for me, then I'll untie Dru and let her kill you instead."
Well, shit.
Drusilla is smiling and nodding, and if her hands weren't tied to the pillar she'd probably be clapping. Right up until she slashed my throat with those vicious fingernails. Then she'd sit on the floor and smack her palms in my blood like a toddler in a paddling pool.
Spike ignores her. "Just give me something. A crumb, a barest smidgen. Tell me maybe, some day, there's a chance."
There it is ... the same look he gave me in the warehouse a few hours ago. The look he's been giving me for months, perhaps longer. And that passionate speech to Dru was mostly in the past tense.
Spike just isn't this good a liar. He doesn't have the patience for it. I'm not ready to analyse the situation, but I can turn it to my advantage. I have a plan: lead him on a bit so he stakes Psycho Queen, lead him on a bit more so he unchains me, then go home. Simple, elegant.
I look at him like he's a bowl of cream, and softly say his name.
He leans in and his eyes are gleaming with ... hope? I look down, and he moves closer.
"Spike," I murmur again, and his cheek is almost touching mine. Saying his name is going over well, so maybe I can just keep saying it until Mom mobilises the rescue squad.
"Tell me," he whispers, ruining my idea already. "Something. Anything."
I'm praying that this will work, that he won't roar with victory and untie Drusilla, and they won't laugh themselves into hiccups while they drain all the blood from my body.
"Buffy, please," he says, so quietly and sincerely that if he's faking I'll be relieved when they kill me because Option B is to die of embarrassment, and I'm sure that's more painful than being drained by vampires no matter how long they take to savour their meal.
What on earth do I say? I haven't memorised a poem for the occasion. I'm not going to spill the beans about the Slayer/Arch-rival bond that ... okay, I invented the bond as an excuse for not having killed him and for being turned on by him. It's not enough to tell him he's hot. He knows what he looks like despite being reflection-impaired because even Xander sometimes stares as though Spike's a statue of a Roman god. I just want Spike to kill Drusilla and let me go home. The more I say, the more complicated I make it, the sooner he'll call my bluff.
So I whisper "yes," and he calls my bluff immediately. He's kissing me and his mouth is so soft and the kisses are baby kittens of kisses brushing against my lips.
I can't believe I said it, and obviously he can't believe it either because he stops kissing me and leans back a little to look at me, his head tilted to one side as if the world doesn't make sense straight up and down. So I say it again, a bit louder this time, looking into his eyes and showing feelings I've been struggling against since I met him.
"Yes."
He's a blur of black. Even in combat together he never moved this fast. He whirls around, whirls back, and is holding my face in his hands and gently stroking my cheeks with his thumbs. The vampire who abducted my friends is tucking my hair behind my ear. The monster who brought a shotgun to my back porch has one hand at the back of my neck and the other hand feathering my temple, and he's kissing me so tenderly that I know he's telling the truth. He loves me.
This is the point where I'm going to talk my way out of the chains and run home. I'm not stupid. I remember the plan. As soon as he stops kissing me I'm gonna get the plan going. Just as soon ... as he stops ... kissing ....
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Confessions of a former romance novel junkie, inspired by Spike on drama overload. Really bad romance novels, with pirates and tavern wenches and heaving bosoms. Even the pre-teen me knew they were adolescent fairy tales, sentimental socio-sexual ideals that warp women's expectations of true human interactions. I didn't use those words when I was eleven years old - they come from Psych classes and literary criticism texts - but I knew in my California mallrat soul that swooning was a made-up thing ... a character motivation to move the relationship from repressed attraction to bodice ripping, and a plot device to get the heroine horizontal. Real historical swooning happened because women used to be so tightly corseted that the slightest emotional or physical strain would impair the blood-flow to the brain, causing the brain to make the body collapse and thus relieve the emotional or physical strain. No-one has swooned for decades. Yay clothing evolution.
Spike's tongue sweeps across my lower lip and I'm not swooning but my knees go weak and I'm dizzy and I'm not even wearing a bra. We've been kissing for maybe ten minutes, and it's only been lips and little breaths and his hands fluttering around my head and neck. Going with the romance novel comparison again, he hasn't thrust his manhood against me or plundered my mouth, or even touched me below the collarbone.
I slump into him. He puts one arm around my waist and the other up my back so his fingers are splayed between my shoulder blades, holding me steady, and he's still gentle and not plundering or thrusting anything. I open my mouth because I have a plan and this is stage two and I have to open my mouth because stage two is talking, but instead of talking I'm touching my tongue lightly to his and now we're really kissing and oh, god, he's so good at it.
My breasts are rising and falling against his chest as I try to breathe, and it isn't bosom heaving it's just needing more oxygen. He's gasping too, and he breaks contact to press his forehead against mine while we pant. Does he know that the forehead move is as sultry as the kissing and panting? His mouth is trailing from my temple to my cheek and along my jaw, and I look over his black leather shoulder to Drusilla and she isn't there. I knew he must have either staked her or let her go, because otherwise what was the mid-kissing whirling all about, but it doesn't sink in until I see the small heap at the base of the pillar.
"You really did it."
"Mmpth," is the reply as he noses my earring aside to nuzzle my neck.
"No, you actually did it ... her. Drusilla."
He dusted his sire. To win me.
Spike turns his head to the pillar, following my line of sight.
"Said I would."
He steps away, his eyes moving slowly between me and the heap of dust, and he turns his back to me and his head is down. My arms are aching to touch him because I know exactly how he's feeling and I wish someone had been there to hold me when I was feeling that way. In fact my arms are generally aching, what with being chained to the wall.
"Spike, you have to let me down from here." I rattle the chains for emphasis.
"Oh, yeah. Right. Yeah. Sorry about that."
That last part isn't for me. It is for her. He's not struck down with grief, as far as I can tell. No tears or anguish, and his hands are steady as he unlocks the manacles. But when he finally looks at me there is a blankness in his eyes. He has the same smell of defeat I had when I stuck that sword into Angel and shoved him into Acathla's vortex, and now I know all my rants about Spike not having real feelings were sanctimonious garbage.
"Hurts, doesn't it?"
He tilts his head again. "Yeah. But .... Yeah."
I'm hugging him. There's no swooning or heaving or any moving at all, just a long hug between two people who have done the unthinkable.
"I have to get home. Mom's waiting for me."
I pull back, and he lets me go.
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Spike is walking me home. Our arms keep brushing together, and sometimes it's more than brushing, but we're not holding hands. We're numb, with an emotionally exhausted anticlimax curtain between us, and I have no idea what happens now.
"What happens now?" he asks.
What did I just say? "I have no idea," I repeat, as if I'd said it out loud the first time.
He stops walking, and I stop walking, and we stand facing each other with my fingertips resting lightly on his.
"I made a choice, Buffy."
"I saw."
"Not between you and Dru. I tried to tell you about it before, at the warehouse. A choice between man and demon. Between being worthy of you and being beneath you."
I wince. I did say that to him, and it wasn't very long ago, and I meant it. I think it's going to be a long time before I stop meaning it altogether because staking Drusilla is a really big first step but the thing about a first step is there's lots more steps afterwards. Or maybe it wasn't the first step, but it's certainly not the last step, and at most it's a plateau between a series of steps. And I have my own steps to deal with, and I'm not sure what sort of step Spike is yet.
I just blink at him and congratulate myself for not having said all that out loud.
We're walking up to my house. I open the front door and go inside, and he tries to follow but comes to an abrupt halt at the invisible barrier of Willow's brand new Spike Be Gone spell.
"Ah," he says.
"Spike .... "
"No, no, it makes sense. Knew you were scared in the car, and in the vamp nest. Even before I chained you up."
I have a lot to say about being chained up, but he's so close. I'm standing just this side of the barrier, and Spike's standing just the other side, and the barrier should make me feel safe but it doesn't. All the unsafe is inside me, in my head and my heart, and maybe I've been clinging to an ideal of safety that's even less realistic than the socio-sexual plot devices of romance novels.
I walk through the doorway and touch his face, and we're kissing like kittens again. He nudges me backwards, leaning me against the door frame, and the kisses are getting deeper and hotter only this time I can move my arms. My hands run up between his coat and his t-shirt, across his chest, down his sides, around his back. It's a while before I realise I'm searching for something that's not all muscle and sinew and snide remarks and violence, something non-Roman-statuey, something vulnerable. His belly gives a little beneath my fingers and I caress the thin layer of pliable flesh over muscle, and this is it. This part belongs to me.
Spike's hands are exploring under my jacket while he's kissing me so intensely that I understand why Drusilla talked to pixies when she was deprived of Spike's mouth. His palm cups my breast. I arch my back and moan, and the sound, the first either of us has made since we stopped talking, shocks me back through the door and into the hall.
"I have to tell Mom I'm home," I gasp. "It's really late. We'll ... I'll see you later, okay? Tomorrow night ... at your crypt."
He nods. He stands there. His eyes are naked with love and desire and hope, and now I know that all of Spike belongs to me if I choose to claim him. He puts his hands in his pockets and wraps his coat around himself, and stands there looking at me as I close the door.