DISCLAIMER: Joss owns the characters and makes the money. I right the wrongs of the Evil Writers who refused to get Buffy and Spike together where they belonged.

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Thanks to everyone who took the time to review and sorry for the long hiatus before the final chapter.

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Chapter 12 - Only This



She touched the white package and scooted the black ribbon off with her fingertip. The tissue paper rustled and fell away. A small tin object, a bird, nested inside the paper. It had been crushed flat and the metal around its neck torn. It had been pretty once, but it was ruined. Why had he kept it?

She recognized the sound of Spike’s boots as he came through the sewers. Buffy snatched up the box, crammed the bird and the photographs back into the box. Spike’s footsteps on the cement outside the crypt came closer and stopped. As she shoved the box back into its place and replaced the stone, she heard the rasp of his lighter and the sound of him sucking hard on a cigarette. To her relief, he’d stopped just outside the crypt, giving her time to put the box away without being caught. She plopped back on the bed and composed her face.

***

He stopped outside the crypt. She was here. He couldn’t smell her or hear the beat of her heart, but he knew. His whole being vibrated with excitement when she was near. It was beyond love, beyond thinking or experiencing. It was the collision of atoms singing from some other dimension, calling to his long dead heart to awaken for the mirror to the broken slivers of his missing soul.

He heard her soft footsteps. She was walking on her toes to keep from making any noise. She wanted to surprise him. Maybe she’d sensed him, too. He sighed. More likely, she heard him, clumping his boots on the cement floor of the sewers. He heard the scrape of a stone, then her steps and the squeak of the mattress springs as she got into bed. His bed.

He took out a cigarette and flicked his lighter. The sound of the stone meant she’d been snooping in his hidey hole, looking at that fool box he’d been dragging around with him for the past century. A bad ass vampire like himself shouldn’t be such a sentimental fool.

***

Spike came in and sat down on the bed. He sat very close, without touching her. He didn’t have to touch her to make her tingle all over. She wanted to scoot closer so he’d put his arm around her, but a faint feeling of guilt and the possibility he’d heard the scrape of the stone as she put it back in place made her hesitate.

“Been snooping around, have you, Slayer?”

Buffy’s face burned red. Busted. “Me? Of course not. Why would I care about your stuff?” Her eyes cut to the stone. Was the stone a little out of place? She couldn’t remember how far it stuck out before she moved it.

He drew another drag on his cigarette. “Cause you love me.”

He knew she’d looked through his stuff and he didn’t care, but leave it to Spike to over interpret a little case of the nosies. “I never said that.”

“Didn’t have to, pet.” His fingers brushed her neck, lingering on her bite scars, and slid down the neckline of her top. “I know you don’t want to admit it.”

“Okay, I looked at your pictures.” Pictures of you and your murdering friends.

“Not much to show for a century of kicking around.” He flung away the butt of his cigarette, the red tip carved a fiery arc through the air.

She didn’t have much more herself, not of things that counted, besides her sister. Spike didn’t even have that. She caught herself feeling sorry for him and pushed the feeling away. It wouldn’t do to feel sorry for Spike. An emotion like that could let in other feelings. Feelings she didn’t want to have.

He held out his hand and she placed her tiny fingers in his palm and let him enclose her hand in his own.

She hesitated. She wanted to know, but she didn’t want Spike to imagine her curiosity meant something more. He would build a mountain of hope and longing on the thinnest shard if she let him. But, he was her lover, well her sex partner, and she could ask things without stirring up trouble, couldn’t she?

“Why’d you keep the bird? Is it magic?”

“A bit of magic, I suppose. More of a reminder.”

“Of what?” What could be so important that he wanted to think about it more than a hundred years later? Spike suddenly seemed very old to her.

He pulled her close for a kiss. “If I catch a bird with holly green eyes, I should never let her go.”

She squirmed herself into his arms, interested for once in Spike as an item of friendly gossip. “There was a girl, wasn’t there?”

“There was a girl,” he said. He studied her for a moment. “Yeah, Cherchez la femme. You want to know?”

She’d never before wanted to know details about William. What was there to know? He died, he became a vampire and he killed and killed and killed. Killed his family, killed his friends, killed strangers. Killed for food, killed for fun, killed for convenience, for boredom, for sex, for thrills, killed for the hell of it. He was drenched with blood. He was saturated and soaked in gore. He rolled and swam and bathed in blood. But here was something from before the blood started to gush like a river through Spike’s existence.

She could know something about William that wouldn’t turn her stomach and make her hate herself for being here tonight.

She nodded.

“She was a Yank, like you. Blonde hair, green eyes, pretty as a sunny day. Sang as sweet as any bird ever did. I loved her. Thought she was going to change my whole sodding life.”

“There’s always a girl with you, isn’t there?”

“Can’t help it if women fall for me.” He grinned and tickled her and pinned her to the bed.

She should let it drop. She should stay with the pleasant moment of a secret shared, but she couldn’t. “What happened to her?”

His smile disappeared and he rolled away. “Angel. Angel happened to her.”

The pleasant moment vanished. “I don’t want to talk about Angel. I don’t want to know about all the evil stuff he did or all the evil stuff you did, either.”

“He did it because he wanted to hurt me. Told me so. He bragged about it.”

She was a fool. She knew better than to ask him about the past. There were no pleasant moments for them, no fond memories for Spike, or Angel either, no mementos untainted by death and destruction. “Shut up. I don’t want to know. I’m sorry I asked.”

“More convenient for you that way? If you don’t know anything about me, then you can keep believing I don’t love you.”

He didn’t get it. She knew he loved her. Part of her had known for years. He loved her more than anybody had ever loved her before and more than anybody ever would love her. Angel didn’t begin to love her with the obsessive twisting desperation Spike loved her. Love had nothing to do with it.

He didn’t get it because he didn’t know that every morning she woke up and wondered, was this going to be the day she’d have to kill him? He was behaving himself today, but how long would it last? How long would it be before she had to rip her own soul to shreds as she thrust a stake through his heart?

She touched the splintery dry wooden stake that was lying in the bed next to her, hidden from his eyes by a rumple of blankets.

“I don’t want you to be real. I don’t want any of you to be real. Not you, or Angel or Bob from the bank. It only makes it harder when I have to kill you.”

“Got it all planned out, do you? One day old Spike is going to return to his wicked ways and you’ll be there. You’ll slip in, stake in hand.” His blue eyes snapped and the muscles in his thin face twitched. He reached across her lap and picked up the stake and touched the point to her rib cage.

She’d made him angry and she’d only wanted some little piece of him to convince herself that he wasn’t all bad, not always bad. What was there to say, after all, but yes? One day, he’d go back to the dark side and she’d be there and she’d have to kill him, or maybe she wouldn’t be able to kill her lover this time. Maybe, he’d kill her. Maybe, she’d let him do the killing.

“What do you want from me, Slayer?”

She wanted everything from him, time and love and happiness. She wanted things she’d never have and he’d never be able to give, so she settled. She took what he could give in the little time they had.

“Only this,” she said. “Always this.” She pulled him down on top of her and kissed him hard.


The End.