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Poppycock (formerly Dead Things fic) by slaymesoftly
 
Two
 
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Chapter Two

Buffy watched with quiet affection as her friends bounced around the dance floor, allowing the music to carry them away from the day’s problems. With a sigh, she got up to get another beer, then abruptly changed her mind and headed for the stairs leading to the balcony. It was an unusual place for a girl to go by herself. A place usually reserved for couples more interested in each other than the dance floor or bar. But tonight, a weeknight, it appeared deserted and Buffy leaned her elbows on the railing and looked down on her oblivious friends.

She felt the tingle in her neck just before his husky voice came out of the shadows. She stiffened involuntarily, but didn’t turn around as the vampire slipped up behind her making her shiver from his cool breath as he spoke into her ear. When he ran his hand lightly down her arm and then slowly up her leg, pushing her skirt out of his way, she felt the moisture pool in her underwear. His rings glinted in the reflected light from below as his hand slid into her underwear and her breath caught with a gasp.

Before she succumbed to the lure of his touch and the excitement of being fucked in a public place, she had a brief moment of panic at her behavior. Spike’s voice, suggesting once again, that she belonged in the dark with him, rather than downstairs in the lights and music, only confirmed her sense of the wrongness of her being.

Even as his hips moved against her and she pushed back into the hard shaft entering her from behind, she was trying to maintain some distance from her actions. She shut her eyes, as though not seeing the lights and people below would make it all right to be enjoying a quick sexual interlude with a soulless vampire while her friends danced on. But Spike would not let her have that denial, ordering her to open her eyes and see just what she was doing and where she was doing it.

His insistence that what they were doing was not the sick action of two dammed souls but the freely expressed desire of two extraordinary people who loved and respected each other fell on deaf ears. It was somehow easier to think of herself as so damaged that an evil monster could turn her on anywhere, anytime, than it was to see herself as part of a passionate and inventive couple indulging in some exciting semi-public love play.

She shuddered around him as his expert fingers rubbed her clit to bring her to orgasm just as he growled his own release into her ear, but his whispered, “I love you, Slayer,” was not enough to erase the memory of his earlier words and she shuddered again, less pleasurably, at the thought of her own depravity. When the vampire had melted away into the shadows as silently as he had appeared, she made a quick trip to the ladies room to clean up and then went downstairs to rejoin her friends.

As they all sat around the table, laughing and enjoying their night out, she vowed that she would resist the unhealthy lure of the vampire’s arms and prove to him and herself that she belonged in the light. That she was not the kind of woman who sought out a violent, bloodplay-loving partner for sexual release. Nor was she someone who could lower herself to fall in love with a man/vampire whose idea of foreplay involved handcuffs and hot wax. Whatever strange compulsion that drove her into his arms when she first returned from the grave was not normal and not to be indulged. The Slayer was made of stronger stuff than that.

And yet, when evening fell again, she found her feet carrying her in the direction of Restfield cemetery, making unerring tracks right up to the heavy wooden door with the faint light streaming out under it.

Inside, the vampire’s head went up as he sensed her approach, and he put down the glass of wine he’d been preparing for her and moved to the door. He could feel her on the other side, separated from him by only a couple of inches of old wood and wondered why she wasn’t throwing the door open in her usual fashion. Fear clutched his unbeating heart as he sensed her indecision, heard her heart rate increase and her breathing become uneven as though she was fighting back sobs. Resting his hands lightly against the door, he unconsciously leaned toward her, as though his yearning would be enough to bring her into his home.

Outside the door, her hand touching the barrier between herself and the vampire she could feel on the other side, Buffy fought and won the battle to stay away from her only refuge from the cold world she’d been forced to live in once again. Before he could open the door and say or do something to change her mind, she turned and sped away, repeating to herself over and over, “Do not think about the evil bloodsucker. Do not think about the evil bloodsucker,” as though by repeating that mantra she could erase from her mind all thoughts of Spike and the pleasures he could bring.

The fight with the time-shifting demons, which culminated in her apparent accidental murder of the tall, brown-haired girl, drove all thoughts of anything except her own guilt from her mind. She allowed Spike to drag her away from the scene, her brain too numb for her to fight him about it.

By the time she had determined to turn herself in to the police, and had garnered more guilt for her soul when Dawn chose to see Buffy’s surrendering to the legal system as a way of leaving her troublesome sister rather than the right thing to do, the Slayer was moving under her own black cloud.

A cloud that suffused her entire being with a sense of despair and longing for her peaceful grave. Nothing she’d done since she came back had been right or good. She’d neglected her little sister, run to a soulless monster for the physical release that helped her forget her life for a while. She worked in a dead-end job that made her exhausted and smelly without providing enough income to make their lives easier, and, now, in the process of doing the job for which she’d been chosen without anyone asking if she wanted it, she had killed an innocent bystander.

So wrapped up was she in her own misery and sense of the wrongness that was her life that she failed to notice the vampire until he stepped in front of her. When it became obvious he was not going to give up the argument that she shouldn’t turn herself in, it was frighteningly easy to slip into a physical confrontation with him.

When he exploded at her that he’d tried not to love her – that he didn’t want it any more than she did, it was the final insult to her sense of self-worth.

“Try harder!” she snarled, turning her back and taking the first steps toward the entrance to the police station.

If she’d been asked later how they went from her angry reply to her sitting on him and beating his beautiful face to a bloody pulp, she couldn’t have told you. Words fell from her mouth- ugly, hurtful words. Words meant to wound as much as, if not more than, the blows she rained down on his face and body. The monster who claimed to love her just lay beneath her, encouraging her to take out her emotions on his unresisting body.

A sudden pause in the rage fueled by her self-loathing, and she shrank back in horror from the battered man in front of her. Even with his face swollen and bleeding, he managed to smile at her as he said softly, “You always hurt the one you love, pet.”

Leaping to her feet, she tried to block his forgiving face from her mind as she stepped over his reaching hand, ignoring his frantic call as he realized she was still intent on turning herself in.

Ten minutes later, when she had overheard the victim’s name and remembered Warren’s ex-girlfriend, she left the station as quickly as she’d entered it, turning away from the alley in which she’d left Spike’s bruised and wounded body. She walked home in a daze, her innate ability to deny what she didn’t want to see, allowing her to concentrate on plans to find the real killer and ignore the fact that she’d left the man who loved her lying helpless on the ground.
 
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