So. Technically, it’s my Seasonal Spuffy day. Just a little past midnight. I… suck, and have the most woeful of contributions. I’d throw out the general excuse of being too busy to produce much, but that’s boring and redundant so I’ll just say: I do have some fic! I wrung out some stuff I’ve had on my harddrive for a while and, well, this is what I have to offer.
Title: The Want of Need
Summary: Buffy hates Spike. Except she also kinda needs him, too. Set in s6.
A/N: Not beta’d in the slightest!
Sun barely setting in the West, with oranges and pinks the color of Creamsicles melting into grays and blacks the color of suits men wore to get buried in, Buffy aimlessly strides through Restfield cemetery, mind not really here or there, anywhere, instead stuck on a replay of blankness. Completely void, really, unless you counted the very serious thought that popped up briefly about bunnies and their fierce fight tactics. Blame Anya for that one.
Buffy sighs as she drags her way in between headstones. Life was, without a doubt, just not the same. She felt like she was living a double existence, walking in two worlds–the one before that big, supposed-to-be-resolving, almost kind of peaceful leap off the tower to defeat Glory, and everything else that’s fallen in her lap or been thrust in her face since.
Before death. After death. How many people can say that? Twice?
Happy thoughts, she reminds herself. That’s what she’s supposed to be thinking. There’s some kind of spring social dance-thing-whatever that Dawn’s having at school, which means Dawn has been chipper times a thousand. Teeth-gnawingly upbeat. And Willow, in her typical clueless way, has become an instant supporter in the ‘Let’s Pretend Everything’s Fine!’ way of life, becoming a one-woman cheering crew when it comes to encouraging Dawn to find a (quote) ‘perfectly nice, not-demony highschool boy that hopefully won’t end up trying to kill you or, oh, also unleash a pack of killer, psycho hounds because they’re grumpy and unpopular and probably just need a lot of attention’ (end quote).
It was the familiar sound of earth unsettling that broke her out of her thoughts, and while the distraction was welcoming, it wasn’t exactly being met with a parade.
“Of course,” Buffy complains on a sigh, tired eyes lifting skyward, as if some higher being (one that, apparently, seriously had it in for her) was currently looking down and listening, having itself a good ol’ laugh at her expense. “A night off, she asks. Just one relatively vampire-free night. Stupid calling.”
“Talking to yourself now, is it?” a British, instantly familiar voice calls out from behind, and Buffy spins around in both surprise and–well, no, mostly surprise, but a smooth, calm kind of surprise that’s absolutely full of inherent stealth and not at all awkward and off balance.
And there’s Spike, of course, leaning against the stone wall of some centuries old mausoleum, one foot lifted and resting along the bottom length of it, all Rebellious With Intent and look how casually I hang out in graveyards.
“I always knew you were a bit cracked,” he adds, and she can see the smile on his face wrapped around the glowing orange ember of a cigarette. “Guess it was only eventual proof started to rear its ugly head. Well, more so, anyway.”
Glare of Intense Loathing, aimed in his direction. “Spike,” she says. Seething. Deceptively calm. It’s less of a friendly greeting and more an instant warning. She’s really, really not in the mood to deal with him, and, believe me, pointy sharp stick currently swaddled in the linen liner of her jacket would so welcome the relief of being shoved through the more cardiac places of his body.
“Now, now,” he drawls in mock reproval, the very picture of unconcealed mirth as he pushes off the wall in a move that just screams, Watch me. There’s a crooked grin on his face, sharp around the corners, one that fits surprisingly well on the face of a mass murderering former-current-former psychopath. Buffy stays stubbornly determined to stare only into his eyes, but even so she notices the way his coat falls to his sides, cascading like water, how his hips all but roll with his slow forward steps. Then he tucks his head down and, she swears, even in all the shadows his eyes darken, his voice thinning out into this steady, silk-soaked limber. “Before you start running through that list of insults you’ve got slipped beneath your sleeve,” he drawls lightly, “what’dya say we indulge ourselves in a bit of late-night romping?”
There’s a sputter of indignation and disgust and automatic protest on her lips, right there in the back of her throat like a wedged piece of too-dry bread just ready to be unleashed, but a growl from behind distracts her enough that it remains unspoken.
Oh, right. Vampire. Or another one, anyway. Hence the initial interruption of the Happy Thoughts.
Spike looks past Buffy and over her shoulder, but not before giving her one of those, Naughty girl looks, the knowing one, complete with widening of eyes and widening of smile, the one that lets her know he knows exactly where her less-than-vanilla thoughts had drifted off to with his romping-suggestion.
“Hey, mate,” he calls out, casually and conversationally, voice directed at the vampire Buffy’d all but forgotten about that’d apparently now crawled its way out of its grave. In her defense, though, they usually took their time. “If I were you,” he offers, with this playful little leap of his eyebrows, tongue-poking-behind-his-teeth action, “I’d run.”
The vampire looks confused, but reasonably so. I mean, Spike completely withheld on the introductions and everything. Plus the cockiness. Bound to throw anybody off. “You’d… huh?” it says, blink-blink-blinking away.
And this is where Buffy starts to feel a little bit like control has slipped back into her life. She turns to face the vampire, pasting on a bright smile, one that’s only a little fake, and says, “I believe he said run.” Like a seasoned pro, her stake gets unpocketed from inside the cotton-length of her jacket, and she waves it around in plain view, as if to solidify its existence. “Unless you want to make this a whole lot easier for me? I mean, today has really, really sucked, and, really, who am I to complain about an easy–”
She doesn’t need to go any further, because the vampire had bolted about 15 seconds ago, leaving behind a pretty dusty cartoon-esque trail of dust in its wake.
“Alright, Slayer,” Spike says, low and in this conspirative tone that makes her skin tingle. “Fair game now.” He’s right next to her, except not so much at her side as a little behind her, so that the back of her shoulder touches the front of his. She wants to pull away, she knows she should pull away, but instead, almost defiantly, she stays put. “Or,” he adds, and his voice drops down even lower, “You want I could give you a headstart?”
There’s a vampire sprinting off in the distance, bloodlust probably at an all-time high, but even so she stays budged in place. Well, not exactly in the same place, not really, because she turns around to eye Spike with a heated glare. “A headstart?” she repeats, resisting the urge to gape. Cocky bastard. “Slayer. Professionally. Pretty much an out-standing gig. Ringing any bells? If anyone needs a headstart, it’s you, Mr. 10 Packs A Day.”
He dutifully flicks his cigarette to the ground, not bothering to stomp it out. “Got a point there, Slayer, but you’re forgetting one thing.” He takes a step forward, a step that puts them more or less boot to boot. On cue that fallback leer starts to take form. She stays locked in place, refusing to back away, and it pleases him, she can tell. “I happen to be of the same exclusive club that our runaway corpse belongs to,” he reminds her. “Vampire, here. I know how he’ll think, how he’ll move. Where he’ll go. Call it predatory instinct, or what have you.”
Instead of backing down like any sane-thinking person would do, because, hello, job to do!, Buffy pushes herself up into his personal space. Her face is a face of stone, entirely unreadable, almost completely emotionless aside from the anger burning at the edges. “Funny how your ‘predatory instinct’ hasn’t kicked in yet, Spike. In fact, I don’t think I’ve seen it in a long… long… time.”
The smile that turns his lips upwards is anything but amused. “Is that so?” He drops his head to the side, moves in an inch, and whisper-says, “Guess I’ll just have to prove myself, won’t I?”
The double-meaning in his words doesn’t go unnoticed, and there’s this instant urge to deny, but before she gets the chance to, he’s gone. In a flutter of blackness, Spike darts around her and spurts off, chasing after the vampire that’s no doubt already gained a sizeable lead.
Stupid vampire.
With a frustrated growl, she sets off after both of them, aware of Spike up in the distance. His duster is flapping behind him, hitting at his heels like it’s fighting to be left behind, and he’s moving so seemingly effortless, with such free-flowing, unstrained ease, that she can’t help but feel a swell of admiration. Fleeting and insane, but it wells up inside despite inner-logic.
It doesn’t take long for her to catch up to Spike, and it takes even less for the two of them to cover enough ground to be able to spot the other vampire again.
Buffy, with a new surge of adrenaline, brushes past Spike and closes the gap between her and Seriously Hideously Dressed Vampire. She feels that familiar ache and burn in her legs, that tightness in her chest, and it makes her want to laugh, cry, quit, never stop. It’s ingrained in her. She pushes off the balls of her feet, leaping through the air like a weightless blonde cannon, and tackles the vampire from behind. Then she’s gasping for air, colors blurring together all around her in blacks and blues and greens, and, as they fall like dead weight to the ground rushing up from below, she sees out of the corner of her eye Spike come screeching to a halt beside them.
There’s this still moment where she breathes in, out, in, out, in, out, catching her breath. Her stake had been knocked loose, hell if she knows where it rolled to, but she feels confident. This is what she knows, it’s what she does.
The vampire suddenly bucks from beneath, though, and a heavy elbow connects painfully with her jaw and sends her reeling. She falls backwards, landing on her back with enough force to knock the wind out of her. There’s a sudden view of the sky and stars spinning above her, like some long ago class trip to the museum when the yearly astronomy exhibit was featured. Blood is in her mouth, a small cut on her lip the damage, and she can taste its bitter metallic taste in her spit as she tries to switch off the inner-jackhammer currently pounding at her temple.
A pale hand suddenly looms above her and she grabs it without hesitation. Spike pulls her to feet, this moment of dizzy weightlessness, and after the few first seconds her brain starts to un-muddle itself.
Spike’s got a good grip on SHD-vampire, the thing pulling a Wile E. Coyote by practically running in place, thrashing in a vain attempt to shake itself loose. No way is that going to happen.
Buffy’s still a little dazed and breathless, but mostly she’s pissed off. Not only are her ribs sore and on fire, she can tell that Spike is mere seconds away from breaking out into full-out Gloat Mode. Currently, though, he’s exercising some impressive self-restraint, probably on account of the If-Looks-Could-Kill Glare she’d given him prior to releasing her hand from his.
The vampire bucks like a bronco, but Spike yanks it back towards him. Pulls it by the collar of its tacky suede jacket so that its back presses up against his front, and his mouth, his lips pressed tight into a sneer, hovers next to its ear. “Not so fast, mate,” he says, or more sort of playfully drawls, “I believe the lady has something of yours.”
On cue, Buffy pulls out her back-up stake. Not like she doesn’t recognize a set-up for a decent quip. “I think you dropped this back there,” she says with a bouncy-type cheeriness that’d impress even the Buffy Bot. “Lucky I found it, huh?”
There’s some responsive growling from the vampire, but it’s mostly posture. Spike only smiles, and Buffy commences with the slaying part of her job. A quick, clean jab to the heart, and the vampire explodes into nothingness in front of them. There one minute, gone the next. Simple as that.
“Well?”
She looks up, and there’s Spike looking like an overly-excited puppy. Clearly pleased with their accomplishments, probably expecting some kind of ‘job well done’ or a pat on the back or, you know, a thank-you fuck. Buffy sighs. She suddenly feels tired, exhausted, weary to the point of heavy limbs, even though it was only the lone vampire she had to deal with. Not counting current company. So she turns on her heels, pocketing the stake as she does so, and starts heading for home. Her bed. A restless sleep where, foolishly hopeful, she may get some actual rest in.
“Oh, come on,” Spike protests, immediately falling in step with her. Their shoulders brush, his a little higher up than hers. “You can’t tell me that wasn’t fun.”
A pointed look is shot in his direction.
“Yeah, alright,” he says, an accompanied roll of his eyes that means he’s going through the motions simply to placate her, “It was horrible and dreadful, and any second now the world’ll come crumbling down on top of us. That make you feel any better?”
She clinches her jaw tight. Doesn’t bother to stop walking or look at him, but says, “You know what will make me feel better, Spike?”
“Oh, this oughta be good.”
“You, out of my sight.”
“Knew you were heading there,” he breathes out dryly, with a shake of his head. “You’re getting predictable, you know that?”
“Seriously, you could leave Sunnydale. California, even. Hey, maybe a trip abroad is the way to–”
The rest of her words die an instant death on her lips as she suddenly finds herself being shoved against the hardness of a mausoleum. To quick for her to even begin to be aware of this sudden change, Spike is moving in, moving close, pressing her against the stone with rough, calloused hands until there’s nowhere else to go. Her elbows throb from where they first connected, there’s a burn or a scratch or some other stinging kind of pain in her back, and Spike is pushing himself onto her.
“Now why would I go and do that, Slayer,” he says, his shadowed face only centimeters, if that, in front of her own, “when it’s such a convenience for you to have me here?”
It takes a second for her to play, and then replay, his words in her head, but when she does, white hot anger starts bubbling inside, looking for an outlet. “Convenience?” she bites out. “For me?
His hands slide from the collar of her jacket, down her arms, further still until he’s got a hold of her wrists. It’s mocking, really, the almost intimate way he grabs on to her. One of his legs is stuffed crudely in the space between hers, and, as if they were both noticing this at the same time, he roughly jerks up so that it hits against the inner part of her left thigh, making her skirt climb an indecent inch upwards. He leans forward, his mouth hovering near her ear, and purrs, “How would you prefer me to answer that?”
She knows where he’s going with that, and even as she acknowledges what’s about to happen, she can’t seem to make her brain and body connect in a functioning way enough to fight back. He’s using the silky-bedroom voice, and silky-bedroom voice leads to nothing but badness, and, yet, there she stays, rooted in place.
“You know what I think?” he says, and she can hear the smile in his voice despite not being able to see his face. “I think you like playing this game of ours. Hot and cold. On and off. Got me wrapped around your little finger, tighter than a bloody drum, and the both of us know it.” Then his mouth moves from her ear, down, meeting almost hesitantly with the exposed skin above her collarbone. Her breath catches in her throat, even as disgust starts rising like bile, and he plants a soft, light kiss there that makes her legs tremble. “Don’t hear me complaining,” he whispers while he traces a path, wet from his lips and tongue, upwards. Along her throat, across her jaw, until he’s lingering just below her mouth. That spot in the corner, where her lips meet together. He all but pleads, “Stop fighting it, Buffy,” and there’s this vulnerability in his voice that makes him weak; a weak man, weak for her.
Then he’s kissing her. More than kissing, it’s like he’s trying to devour her from the inside out. Rough and demanding, he doesn’t even give her time to gasp for air, only keeps pressing and pressing and pressing until she feels like her head is being smooshed against the hard wall behind her. There’s this painful kind of pressure, but at the same time this weightless feeling that has her almost light-headed, too wrapped up in the feeling of being kissed to think twice about it.
Almost as if they have a mind of their own, she tugs her hands out of Spike’s. He doesn’t seem to notice, but that’s only a brief, fleeting observation that soon gets forgotten when she winds her arms around his neck. That gets a low, low groan of approval out of him, and he starts grabbing at her thighs, tugging and pulling and lifting upwards until she complies, breathlessly, wrapping her legs around his waist while he mindlessly thrusts forward.
“Spike,” she gasps, loving the sick churn in her stomach, the heavy weight, the rising nausea and excitement and fear and, God, the way he pulls back, open-mouthed and face raised to the Heavens above, and starts rolling his hips into her, again and again and again until she feels like she might pass out.
“Buffy,” he breathes, “Buffy, Buffy, Buffy.”
She hates her name sounding so sensual, so intimate, so personal from his mouth, so she shuts him up with a kiss just as brutal as the one he’d gave her. His nose collides with hers, flattening against her cheek, while her teeth scrape against his lips, and she can feel herself losing control. She needs this, needs him, needs that moment, that careless, carefree moment where the only thing that matters, the only, only thing, is that spiral of uncontrollable desire, that release.
Buffy reaches down and fumbles for his zipper. She can still taste blood in her mouth, but now she’s not sure if it’s hers or his. Could be both. Her fingers feel too numb, too shaky, she can’t get the stupid thing down, and Spike’s hands, with his fingers pressing almost painfully into the fleshy part of her waist, are currently preoccupied and therefore useless so she temporarily abandons that task. Instead she starts untucking his shirt, pulling it up and up, her fingers skirting across the revealed bare skin she finds along the way, grabbing and groping at his waist, his back, his shoulders from behind.
“Need you,” he moans into her hair, desperately, hotly. Demandingly.
With her nails raking across his skin hard enough to make him tremble, she reaches down again, this time managing to send his zipper on that downwards path that leads to much goodness. She tugs at his jeans, using her hands, her legs, to push them down enough so that, there, right there, she can feel him, feel him hard against the warmth of her bare inner thigh where he’d scrunched her skirt up before. It makes him jerk forward again, that contact, and she squeezes her eyes shut to try and maintain a semblance of control. She’s slipping, free-falling. Her mouth is dry, way too dry, and her jaw hurts from forgetting to unclench it.
Spike, with one clumsy hand, grabs impatiently at the waistband of her panties, this sort of crude, male-type caveman gesture of the ol’ Faith Want-Take-Have kind. He doesn’t bother to slow down and slide them off of her, because that’d mean removing her legs from their current position altogether, and he doesn’t rip them away, because he’s smart enough to remember that every time he does so he owes her one night free of showing up for patrol, so instead he nudges them down just enough to not be in the way.
With a groan that’s both a gasp and a curse, he thrusts up and in, and Buffy’s seeing stars. Splotches of white dance behind her eyelids, yellows flickering like lightening, and all she hears is Spike breathing in her ear. Indecencies, sweet nothings, endearments that are more vinegar than sugar. Vaguely it hits her that they’re outside, they’re outside for God’s sake, pretty much a big blinking target just begging to be stumbled upon by her friends. You’d think common sense would come barreling in at that, but instead Buffy shoves it down with Slayer force.
She unwraps her arms from around his neck, unwinds, pulls down and away. Grabs for the wall behind her instead, palms flat, and holds on for dear life as Spike pounds away remaining coherent thought.
The real world, she decides, with its real problems and its real-life badness, can wait.
Originally posted at http://seasonal-spuffy.livejournal.com/145625.html
