Title: While She Slept
Rating: R
Timeline: AU Season Six where Spike and Buffy are a couple, but things are still hard for our Slayer.
Summary: Spike struggles with constrictions of being a good guy.
He used to be bad. The kind of bad they make horror stories out of. Here’s the secret though, even though he’s fighting on the side of the angels nowadays, he’s still just as bad. Sure, he doesn’t go around ripping out throats and testing out all the different ways to make a person scream like he did in the old days. But the thought’s still there, just channeled in a different direction for the most part. He’s still a killer. He’s just batting for a different team now. She likes to pretend she doesn’t see. But she does. And she’ll turn a blind eye just the same.
“Buffy.”
She was almost asleep, warm, content, wrapped up in a pair of strong arms. “Mmm?”
His voice was low, halfway off to sleep himself. “Those boys… I have ways of getting around the chip, you know. Just cause I never exercised them against your lot…” He watched her blink, slowly, as his words sunk in.
“I know you do. Let’s not talk about it now. I don’t want to think about them right now.”
He nodded and brushed a kiss across her temple. “Whatever you say, pet. You just go to sleep,” he said, even though he was the one to wake her up.
He sat awake at night, thinking of ways to kill them while she slept by his side. While the little sister slept in the next room over. It would be so simple if he didn’t have the chip.
Track ‘em down. Slip in, evading their little geek gadgets easy as sin. Rip out the dark one’s throat. One long pull of that liquid red before turning on the smaller ones. Snap their necks. Presto. No more nerds making life harder for his girl. They’d near driven her over the edge, making her think she’d killed that girl. And then the psychiatric hallucinations. She had hurt Dawn before she finally got it under control. And now the kid sis was barely talking to anyone. So these things had to stop. They were making life harder and harder, and Buffy was barely standing as it was.
It would be so simple if he couldn’t already see the looks on their faces when they heard the news. He didn’t give a fuck how the sidekicks felt, they could kiss his white arse for all he cared. It was Buffy and Dawn he cared about. And if he killed the nerds, the expression on their faces would be shock and disappointment, and finally just blank. They’d stonewall him. Push him out. Out of their house, and then out of their hearts. The girls had put their faith in him. Faith. In a vampire. Spike sure as hell didn’t know why they’d done it, but they had, and he’d stake himself before he fucked it up.
It would be so simple if he didn’t know it’d make her hate him. If he killed three human boys, she would stake him. The girl had proven long ago that she could kill the one she loved if she had to. And she didn’t even love him. He knew she didn’t. For all her soft words and soft looks, he knew she never would. She wasn’t made to love dark things like him. Staking him would be hard, no doubt, but she wouldn’t hesitate a second.
So he sat awake, night after night, watching her sleep. Studied the way the light of the moon fell on her through the window. Studied the splay of her hair across the pillow, the curve of her shoulders. He never thought he’d make it here. By her side, in her bed, in her heart. And it was hard. Harder than he thought it’d be. This struggle between monster and man.
Originally posted at http://seasonal-spuffy.livejournal.com/250837.html
