This is my second story for the day. Thanks as always to enigmaticblues for organizing this, and now I’m off to read all the stories I’ve missed! :D
In My Life
Barb C
Disclaimers: The usual. All belongs to Joss and Mutant Enemy, and naught to me.
Rating: NC-17-ish
Pairing: B/S
Synopsis: “You and Angel used to make out beneath the bleachers, yeh?” “Not so much,” Buffy assures him, but she doesn’t argue when he tugs her after him.
Author’s notes: This story takes place in the same universe as “Raising In the Sun,” “Necessary Evils,” and “A Parliament of Monsters.” It’s set in 2024, approximately six years before the story “Zombie Barbie Says You’re It,” and contains minor spoilers for POM. Thanks to rainkatt, kehf and slaymesoftly for betaing!
“…fraudulent spellcasting, busking without a licence, and practicing destiny-altering magic without filing a preliminary timeline impact study with the California Department of Health and Human Services. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will…”
“I was wrong, Summers! You have changed!” Ethan Rayne shouts as the police escort him out, and Buffy’s first reaction is “God, I hope so!” Too depressing to think that at forty-three she’s the same person she was at sixteen.
Her classmates stumble past her, out of the gymnasium into the parking lot, blinking in the sodium glare of floodlights. They mill in confusion beneath the WELCOME SUNNYDALE HIGH CLASS OF ’99 25th REUNION banner – What happened? Who was that? One by one they drift away, wandering back to their cars, every one of them only who they are again, not who they dreamed they’d be. Buffy wonders where the spell would have left her, if she’d bitten. Dead, maybe, or playing Dorothea to Angel’s Casaubon. Ethan called the life she’s living small, but her dreams back then were so much smaller.
Spike strolls up, surveying the balding, paunchy parade of middle-aged humanity with cool amusement – partly a vampire’s proprietary concern for the unwitting minions who supply him with entertainment, company, and twenty-four-hour butchers’ shops; partly the smugness of a man whose fat pants have a thirty-one inch waist. “Berk,” he mutters, as Ethan’s packed into the patrol car, looking small and frail between the bulky officers.
She knows Spike doesn’t care about what Rayne did – he cares that Ethan did it in their town, absent their leave. The mage’s customers got what they paid for, and if the price was a bit steeper than they’d reckoned, caveat emptor in Spike’s book. Once upon a time she’d have spent half the night worrying that he cared for all the wrong reasons. Nowadays she’s simply grateful that somehow, no matter how amoral and vampiry they are, Spike always finds reasons to care.
Spike’s hip bumps companionably against hers, and she glances up. His suit jacket trails carelessly from his off hand, his shirt is rumpled, his tie askew – despite the laugh-lines framing his eyes and the touch of grey in his rakishly disheveled curls, he looks like a little boy playing dress-up, and for no particular reason, her heart’s full to bursting with the sight of him.
Buffy turns and slips an arm around his waist, feels his arm slide in turn around her shoulders. Interlocked like jigsaw pieces, they amble across the high school parking lot, past the science building and the cafeteria. The buildings are getting a little bit beat-up and worn around the edges now, but she still thinks of this as the new Sunnydale High. Right over there had been the monster sinkhole left when they’d closed the Hellmouth for good… or was it over there?
“I can’t remember,” she murmurs. Spike arcs an eyebrow. “Where the Hellmouth was. Exactly.”
He lifts his head, almost like he’s scenting the wind. Closing a Hellmouth doesn’t make centuries-millennia-whatever of bad juju go poof overnight. Demons like Spike can still feel the reverberations of the old wild magic, thrumming in the earth, humming in their bones. “That way,” he says, positively, chin jerking towards the football field.
Bright while chalk lines stretch off across the tow-colored grass, and the air still smells like spilled Coke and teenage sweat. A carousel of shadows whirl around them, pinned to the grass by too many floodlights. Pacing the length of the field with Spike at her side, Buffy feels vaguely regretful, like it’s an old boyfriend whose address she’s forgotten, instead of an all expenses paid dimensional portal to Evil, Inc.
“Should have brought my cheerleader’s uniform,” she says.
“Feeling nostalgic, pet?” Spike tilts his head, a sly grin etching those laugh-lines a little deeper. “You and Angel used to make out beneath the bleachers, yeh?”
Good change: that name’s no longer a weapon. “Not so much,” Buffy assures him, but she doesn’t argue when he tugs her after him, bent double beneath the scaffolding of aluminum and steel. The benches overhead are plastic, not wood, and that’s just wrong somehow, but the wads of congealed gum and squashed soda cups take her back, not to Sunnydale but beyond, Hemery High in L.A., sucking face with some ham-handed sixteen-year-old whose name (Trent? Dustin?) has gone fuzzy in her memory, before she ever knew what a vampire was.
Dry weeds crackle between the rusting supports and every step raises a puff of fine, powdery dust. There’s a used condom in the dirt, limp and pathetic as the shed husk of a locust, and she wants to giggle at the thought of Angel ever taking her to (or in) someplace like this. Spike kicks it aside and spreads his coat on the ground with a flourish, gallant as any knight.
“Dulcinea or Aldonza?” she asked him once, curled up on the couch watching Man of La Mancha on late night TV. Mostly just to shut him up about how Cervantes was rolling over in his grave and the whole point of the novel was that chivalry was bollocks and if you didn’t deal with the world as it was you were buggered, but Spike cocked his head in that way he does and shot back, “You can chase Dulcinea all your days, love, but it’s always Aldonza keeping you warm at night.” The look in his eyes is a hundred and seventy years deep. “But any bird worth the winning, she’ll be a little of both.”
But she noticed he got all quiet during the final number anyway, so there, Mr. Cynical.
Whatever Spike is, he’s not about the loving pure and chaste from afar, and she’s never been gladder of it. “Not yet,” she breathes, one hand cupping his cheek, the other working at the knot of his tie. She slips the noose of burgundy silk from his neck and points a finger at his stomach. “Reach for the sky, pardner.”
His grin’s the filthiest thing she’s ever seen as he raises his arms overhead – she has to climb up on the scaffolding to loop the tie around his wrists. “What’s the matter, teacher?” he purrs. “Has William been a bad, bad boy? Miss Buffy gonna spank?”
“I think we’ve got some roleplay dissonance going here.” She hops down and surveys her handiwork, tongue-tip skimming her lips at the fall of light and shadow, at blue cotton straining across his chest and shoulders. Her hands are drawn forward almost of their own volition, fingers fumbling with the buttons till his shirt falls open upon the lithe, muscled torso beneath.
In heels she’s just tall enough to command every part of him that she desires: the strong cords of his neck, the delicate fold of his ear, the sweet spot at the angle of his jaw which, teased just so, can make him break down and beg. He shudders as she palms the hard curves of shoulder and pectorals, groans as she bites at his nipples, teeth leaving swiftly-fading track-marks across his ivory flesh. The muscles of his belly quiver as she nips her way downwards.
His cock’s tenting the fabric of his trousers as she pauses, planting feather-kisses on the pokeable little curve of tummy just below his navel. She nuzzles him through his trousers and looks up: Dying Vampire by Michelangelo, but with better cheekbones. She pops the button of his fly, unzips like she’s unwrapping the best present ever, and helloooo, Little Spike!
She’s never gotten the deal about giving head being demeaning; Buffy never feels so much power over a guy as when she’s got their most treasured asset in hock, so to speak. Spike gives himself up to her with joyful abandon, swearing, sobbing, the muscles standing out in his arms as he strains against his bonds (but never quite hard enough to break them.) His hips jerk hard against her greedy mouth, and her pussy’s throbbing in time with his ragged breathing, moisture trickling down her thighs. When she pulls back, chest heaving, he’s babbling something about resurrecting his sainted mother and killing her off again if only she’ll let him come.
It’s a strategic decision – before the Mohra blood, they never had to worry about refractory time. Spike’s usually up for double (or triple) the pleasure, double the fun even now, but it takes some pacing. What the hell. You only live once, present company excepted. Buffy dives in for the kill. It’s only the little death, but he’s oh, such a willing sacrifice.
Spike likes to eat, so she learns to cook. She likes to breathe, so Spike takes his cigarettes outside. Spike stops killing people, she looks the other way when expired blood bags turn up mysteriously in the back of the fridge. Back and forth. Give and take. The little things, and the not so little, that make an us out of two I’s. So yeah, she’s changed. The biggest change of all, maybe, is that the realization doesn’t have the power to scare her any longer. She rises up and takes his face in her hands, thumbs tracing the clean sharp arc of cheek and jaw. His pupils reflect coppery-green in the shadows. She kisses him, the taste of his own spunk strong on her lips, and whispers, “Payback time.”
The crossbar’s right where she planned for it to be – a Slayer always takes advantage of her environment. She swings herself up and perches there, only inches from his face, hiking up her skirt and spreading her thighs invitingly. Spike sways forward with a lustful, incoherent little growl, and his nostrils dilate, snuffing her scent deep into his lungs. He strains towards her, at the limits of his bonds, and Buffy gasps at the first cold flick of his tongue.
He warms swiftly with her warmth. It took them awhile, after the Mohra blood, to figure out the new rhythm of him needing to breathe, but once he found it, Spike never misses a beat. He knows every tender swell and sensitive fold of her sex, when to caress and when to punish, when to hold back and when to push her past endurance. Every time she thinks she’s cataloged all his tricks he pulls a new one on her. She’s the one clinging for dear life now, legs hooked over his shoulders, knuckles white on the uprights as she fights to remember that she needs to breathe, too. Lips and teeth and tongue lash her towards ecstasy, and she wonders, briefly, who’s really in control when they play these games – and decides, as always, that it doesn’t matter.
The aftershocks of orgasm are still rippling through her as she reaches up and yanks the loose end of his tie. The knot unravels along with her muscles. She falls to the ground and pulls him after, fingers twining in those oh-so-strokeable curls. Spike’s kisses are masterful and desperate at once, like his tongue’s teaching her the secret of the universe, but it’s only her lips pressed to his, her breath in his throat, that keeps him alive to do so.
He’s rock-hard again, cock bumping aggressively against her belly, growling not-so-sweet nothings into her ear as he undoes her bra. On Spike’s tongue, every vulgarity’s a hosannah.
He slides a questing hand down past the elastic of her panties, slicking through her sopping curls. She comes again, hard, just from the sudden shock of chilly fingers. But his cock’s still warm from her mouth when he slides home with one deep, confident thrust and she whimpers in gratitude, importuning him without words for more. Spike moves above her, strong and sure, his lovemaking an elegant economy of motion. She loves the lean, sleek weight of him, the roll and flex of muscle beneath his skin, the dreamy savagery of his eyes. She loves the knowledge that at any moment the balance may shift, and it’ll be her riding him into glorious oblivion – if not this time, the next, or the time after that.
“Ever had it this good in high school, love?” he rumbles.
“Bite me,” she replies, and golden-eyed, he stoops to the worship the exposed curve of her throat, inch-long canines dimpling the fragile skin. Her lips explore his brow ridges, and he shivers as she tongues the base of the stubby little horns that bud along the bone as he gets older.
When Spike finally bites down for real, fangs sinking with luxurious deliberation into her breast, it’s almost too much to bear. Even if they didn’t have to worry about the baby thing when they do this (and oh, crap, Spike’s not wearing a condom and did she remember to take her pill and she’s not, not, not going to think about that now) she’s not sure they’d brave this sensual tsunami often. She arches into the bite with a sobbing wail and comes apart around him, body shaking, pussy spasming, suspended forever in one white-hot electric moment as Spike comes, and keeps going, and comes again, and let’s hear it for pacing!
Afterwards they lie entwined in mutual drowsy collapse, Spike sprawled blue-eyed and tousle-haired in her arms. Buffy reclines on his ruined jacket, idly massaging his back and shoulders, savoring the fullness of his cock slowly softening within her. His purr of repletion is the echo of their lovemaking, ringing through her bones like Hellmouth magic through the bones of the earth. Tomorrow she’s going to ache all over because really, they’re both getting too old for this cold-bare-ground thing, but maybe that’s the best reason to keep doing it.
Sixteen-year-old Buffy kissed Angel in game face and didn’t notice; forty-three-year-old Buffy kisses Spike in game face and is turned on as all hell. We all re-write our own stories, she thinks, to give ourselves the endings we need. Don Quixote rides again, granted a crackpot nobility by a world that desperately needed impossible dreams. That was all Ethan had tried to do, after all – write a better ending for himself. But as Ethan found out, you can’t re-write only one story; they all run together, and in the end, you’ll end up re-writing your whole world.
“Hey! You kids! Get out of there!” a voice yells, and a flashlight beam sweeps across the bleachers, glaring off the taut white globes of Spike’s ass.
“Oi! Give the lady some privacy, you bloody Peeping Tom!” Spike roars back, fangs descending.
Buffy blinks into the light. “Mr. Tamaguchi?”
The security guard’s eyes bug out. He makes a choking noise and backs hastily away as Spike whips his coat out from under them and around her shoulders in some kind of vampire sleight-of-hand. “Mr. and Mrs. Summers-Pratt?” Mr. Tamaguchi croaks. “Sorry! I didn’t recognize – uh, that is, I’ll, uh, leave you to your, um, investigation.”
“That’s OK,” Buffy says, buttoning her blouse and straightening her skirt with equal haste. “We’re all investigated out. We should be getting home, before the kids decide to totally wreck the place.” She gives the guard a sunny smile. “Good night! And don’t forget, Tanya’s lesson is at five-thirty this week!”
They head for the car, carefully avoiding one another’s eyes. It can’t last. “Should’ve told him we were in the band,” Spike says, straight-faced, and then they’re both giggling like idiots. All the changes they make, for themselves, for each other, to each other, in the end, only serve to make them more and more themselves. If Ethan had succeeded, she suspects, he’d have found out the same thing.
What would her world be, Buffy wonders, if she were someone other than Buffy Summers-Pratt, mild-mannered skating instructor by day, Slayer by night? Different, she decides. Her warm fingers lace with Spike’s cool ones, hands swinging. Very different.
But right now, she can’t imagine how it could be better.
END
Originally posted at http://seasonal-spuffy.livejournal.com/345524.html
