Lyrics from "Breathing," by Lifehouse
(Jason Wade/Ron Aniello)
For Robin, who found the song before
I went insane.
Thanks to Dene' for beta.
"I'm finding my way back to sanity
again
Though I don't really know what
I am gonna do when I get there
Take a breath and hold on tight
Spin around one more time
And gracefully fall back in the arms
of grace."
"I don't know what I
would have done if you'd gone up those stairs."
She cups his face
and smiles at him, and he can almost forget the sight of her in Angel's
arms as her warm fingers curl against his cheek. But who is here now?
Who's standing here in front of her, looking into those soft, green
eyes, taking her in? It's not bloody Angel.
For a moment he
thinks she might kiss him, but that would be too prosaic. Instead, her
fingers slide away from his face and she turns her back to him, walks
toward the cot.
"Buffy?" he says
softly, but she doesn't turn until she reaches the cot and sits down.
Then she looks at him, questioning. "It'll be all right," he says, but
his tone wavers, and in the end it sounds more like a question, as if
he's requesting reassurance rather than giving it.
She smiles sadly
and shakes her head. "No, it won't. No matter what happens, the one
thing it will not be is all right."
He knows she's
right, deep down. Hesitant, he takes a step toward her. She folds her
hands in her lap. There is plenty of room for him on the cot next to
her. He comes to her and sits, still hesitant, still not certain how
much she'll accept from him. But as he lays his arm across her
shoulders, she leans into him, accepting his comfort, his embrace.
She still smells
like Angel. There's no getting around that. He'd had her in his arms,
had kissed her thoroughly, and his particular odor covers her. It's
even in her hair. Spike remembers nights spent with Drusilla, when she,
too, dripped of Angel's smell. It seems Angel has had a previous claim
on everything he has ever loved.
She takes a long
breath, and it comes out of her and spreads warm across his chest.
Looking down at her, he sees her eyes closed, a soft, half-smile on her
face.
"You're thinking
about him, aren't you?" The words come out before he can stop them, but
he knows as soon as he says it that he doesn't want to know the answer.
Her smile changes
to a frown as she peers up at him. "No."
"What are you
thinking, then?"
"I'm trying not to
think about anything, because when I think I think about how we're all
probably going to die tomorrow." She sounds irritated, and pushes back
a little from where she has settled against his chest. He regrets
having spoken at all, and gently draws her back.
"Sorry, luv." She
settles against him, still a little taut, reluctant, and he kisses her
hair. "Do you really think so? That we'll die tomorrow?"
"Somebody will.
Maybe all of us."
"Bad thinking,
that. Think about winning." But he knows she's right. More, he knows in
his heart what the medallion means. A souled being, a medallion of
power--he'll be more than surprised if he makes it through this
confluence of coincidence alive.
"I don't want to
think about anything." She nestles back into him, reaches across him to
pick up his other hand and cradle it in her own. He closes his eyes a
moment. The contact, soft and warm, touches him deeply. He has never
loved anything the way he loves her, and that she does not entirely
return those feelings doesn't matter. What matters is that he has had
the privilege of feeling the hot, sweet love pour through him,
strengthened and purified by the presence of his soul. Sometimes he
thinks it's more than he can contain. It comes out of his eyes whenever
he looks at her; he can't help it even though it hurts when he doesn't
see the same thing reflected on her face.
It doesn't matter.
If he keeps telling himself that, perhaps someday he'll actually
believe it. Right now she is warm in his arms and is beginning to smell
less and less like Angel.
She sits there with
him for a long time, her soft warmth melting into him. Her breathing
has slowed and he listens to the rhythm, begins to breathe a little,
himself, in time to her rhythm. It feels good, to match her intake and
release of breath with his own. It feels good to draw in her
smell--almost wholly her own again now--and let it fill him, nostrils
and mouth and lungs. It's addictive, like cigarette smoke but ever so
much sweeter.
He thinks she might
be asleep, but he isn't sure. Then she shifts and her hand moves up to
stroke across his chest. "We should rest," she says. "I had no idea I
was so tired."
"Course you're
tired, pet. Been a long day." She moves against him and he moves with
her, until they are side-by-side on the narrow cot. She is so small, so
warm, and he puts his arms around her and draws her close.
"I am looking past the shadows
of my mind into the truth and
I'm trying to identify
The voices in my head
God, which one's you
Let me feel one more time
What it feels like to feel
And break these calluses off me
One more time."
Buffy nestles
against Spike's chest. There's something about his coolness she finds
comforting. She reads books that talk about the heat of a lover being
soothing, and she can't relate. To her, a lover should be cool, room
temperature, and his body should warm as you make love to him,
responding to his arousal, to your touch.
She lied to
Spike--she has been thinking about Angel. But not in the way he thinks.
She saw him tonight, and as much as she basked in his presence, as much
as she loved the taste of him on her mouth, the touch of his big hand
against her waist, the smell of him enveloping her, she saw something
she's never seen before. Angel has changed. There is something in his
eyes she doesn't recognize, and this disturbs her.
Of course, she has
changed, too, but that is different. She's a young woman, just
recovering from the plague of girl-hood--she's supposed to change. He's
two hundred and fifty years old. He's too old, too entrenched, to
change this much.
She still loves
him. She's certain of that. But, for the first time since he left her
four years ago, she is faced with the possibility that she will
actually have to let him go.
But Spike is here,
and he loves her. There has been too much between them, too much of it
painful, for her to be able to say she returns the emotion, but right
now it feels so close she could almost reach out and touch it. Soft,
warm love, enveloping them both like cotton. She wants it so much,
wants to wrap up in it and stay there forever, because she wants to
feel, because she knows it may be the last time she ever feels anything
like this. Or anything at all. If she dies tomorrow, she wants to go
knowing she was loved.
She knows Angel
still loves her. Behind the strangeness, the not-Angel in his eyes, she
saw that. And she knows Spike loves her, adores her, would die the last
death of his unlife for her if need be. But she needs to feel it, needs to have it spread
into her skin, kissed into her mouth, thrust into her body. Because
tomorrow, she is almost certain, she will die.
She lifts her face
to him, kisses him, gently at first, then pushing into his body. She
needs this, needs to feel it. But she has used him before and this
feels too much like that. How many times has she thrown himself at him,
let him pound her until she hurt, ached, just to remind herself she was
alive? Too many to count, certainly enough to be ashamed of.
She tries to tell
herself this is different. He needs this, too. But she can't help the
thought, and she pulls back a little. His sapphire eyes look down into
hers, and she sees there his understanding.
"It's all right,"
he whispers. "God, it's all right."
"I don't want a thing from you
Bet you're tired of me waiting
For the scraps to fall
Off your table to the ground
I just want to be here now."
He knows what she
wants, and why. Maybe better than she does, herself, he realizes, as he
slides his hands under her shirt, touches her warm skin, cups her
breasts through her thin bra. She is so hot, it almost burns him, and
he relishes the feel of her as she pushes against him. If this is the
same thing as what she demanded of him last year, when she was dragged
out of heaven, it doesn't feel the same. It's desperate, yes, but in a
different way. Last year, she had tried to break herself on him, tried
to break him, they had bruised and bloodied each other but had never
really reached each other.
Now, he can see
something in her eyes that's deep and open and needy. Needing him, his touch and his body.
Desperation, but a reaching out for him, not just for anything to make
her feel alive.
She wants him, and
he is there, and he loves her so much he thinks he might burst into
flames from it. He pulls her shirt aside, the bra, clasps his mouth to
her breast, as she rolls him over onto her in the narrow cot. She is
small under him but oh, so powerfully strong, drawing him in, her body
arching under him, her knees clasping his hips. He pulses into her and
he can feel her heat through his jeans, can smell her rising arousal.
His hands go under her, flat against her back, pushing her up against
him as he suckles at her breast, the hot nipple hard against his
tongue. She lets out a raspy breath and her hands go to his belt
buckle.
He realizes as she
unzips him that he will take whatever she offers him, happily and
without complaint, even if it isn't everything he wants. Even if she
never loves him, never says it, even if he never sees it in her eyes.
If that makes him whipped, or her bitch, than so be it. It's the only
way he knows how to love--with everything he has.
Her hand closes on
him too hard, pulls at his cock. She doesn't want foreplay, though he
wants desperately to give it to her. But it's up to her--it always
is--so he pushes at her clothes, and she pulls at his, until she is
open to him and she grasps his hips and jerks him forward, clenching
her thighs on him, making him shove into her too fast, too hard. He's
sheathed in her before he's quite ready, but she is wet and hot and
open and she arches up under him, pulling his face down to hers and
kissing him until he can taste her blood on his lips.
It's too much--it's
Slayer blood and he dives into her mouth after it, his tongue seeking
whatever small slick of its flavor he can find. He's pounding her, deep
inside her, but she is silent under him, straining, only her breath
guiding him as it speeds up, deepens, rasps into his mouth. She is taut
under him and suddenly stiffens, her breath shuddering out as she pulls
back from his frantic kiss and tips her head back. There are tears in
her eyes as she comes, her body pulsating on him as he keeps pounding,
impaling her, hard and sharp and deep, and then he's impossibly deep
inside her and his own body lets go. Her fingernails dig into his back
and he smells blood again, this time his own.
Her breath
hitches into sobs. He strokes her hair, gentle, even as he spills the
last of his orgasm into her, even as her fingernails tear deep into the
flesh of his back. She is crying, sobbing now, with no control over it,
and he carefully kisses the tears on her face.
"I can't do
it," she says through the loose, deep sobbing. "I can't."
He cups her
face in his hands. "You can, pet. You can. You're the only one who can."
"I can't watch
them die."
He has no
answer for that. He pushes hair back from her face and looks down into
her eyes. He's still inside her. It feels good, better than it ever has
before, in spite of the frantic speed, the desperation. Or maybe
because of it.
"If a few of
them die," he says quietly, "then a good bloody many won't. You
understand that. It's the way it has to be."
"I can't. I
can't lose any of them. Not Xander or Willow or Dawn or Giles or
Anya--God, even Andrew. I can't... I can't lose you."
She will,
though. He is certain of it. He doesn't mind, but he hopes she might
mourn for him. "It'll be all right," he says.
"What if it's
not?"
He holds her
close. There's no point repeating the lie. I love you, he thinks, but he can't
quite bring himself to say it, because he knows she won't answer him
the way he longs for her to.
Does it really
matter? He will be gone after tomorrow, and she will move on, perhaps
to a long and happy life with the bloody great Poofter whose name he
doesn't even want to think anymore.
"If I come
back..." he starts, then realizes what he's saying and closes his mouth.
"I don't
know," she says. "I don't know."
No promises,
then. It's all right. He wonders fleetingly if she promised her heart
to Angel, back there in the graveyard, but if she did, then why would
she be here, under him, with him still inside her? Perhaps there is
some hope, after all.
"Spike," she
says, quiet, and he waits for more but there is no more. She holds him
against her, the sobs gone now, and finally he slides away from her,
out of her, and pulls her clothes back into place.
"Sleep," he
tells her. "God knows you'll need it."
"I am hanging on every word you say
And even if you don't want to speak
tonight
That's all right, all right with me
'Cause I want nothing more than to sit
Outside heaven's door and listen to
you breathing
It's where I want to be."
After a long time,
she falls asleep, soft in his arms. He lays awake for a long time,
listening to her breathing. It's sweet, gentle music. He can hear her
heartbeat, the movement of her blood, and for the first time in a long
time he doesn't crave it, even though he can still taste it on his
tongue. It's the sweetest thing he's ever experienced, just lying with
her, holding her. There is nothing else he has to do except this.
Nothing else he wants to do.
Her breath is like
music, a quiet rhythm. She lies facing him and he begins to breathe,
himself, inhaling as she exhales, drawing her breath into his
unnecessary lungs. It tastes good. It tastes like Buffy. Like love. If
these are, indeed, his last hours, they are good ones. He can live with
that, for however much longer he is allowed to live at all.
#
It's over, it's
done, and she is free. She can hardly believe it, but it has all worked
exactly as she thought it would. She is no longer the Slayer but a Slayer, among tens, perhaps
hundreds of girls who will shoulder the burden now along with her.
Never again will she fight alone.
She smiles down at
the gaping hole that was once Sunnydale, thinking of this. She is free.
But he is gone. She
knew last night when she woke in his arms that it would end this way.
And now she smiles for him, because he showed her, he showed himself,
he showed them all, that he was, indeed, a Champion. Worthy, in the
end, of the love she could never quite give him.
She regrets that.
Regrets that only now the feelings have come to her, deep and wide and
pure. Only now that he is gone, does she truly, honestly love him.
But she can't
grieve for him. He sacrificed himself willingly--gleefully, even--and
he would scorn her tears.
So she smiles,
and lets herself love him.
END.
