Warning: rape reference – past tense

ANGELUS: Don't mistake me. I do love the ladies. It's just lately... I've been wondering what it'd be like... to share the slaughter of innocents... with another man. Don't... don't think that makes me some kind of a deviant, hmm? Do you?
            Destiny            


    Buffy woke to Spike nuzzling her fingers. His arm was around her shoulders, and his hand gently running through her hair. And she woke startled, with a feeling akin to panic the moment she saw his face.

    The night before had taken its toll. Spike had crossed a line that was difficult to excuse. He’d stepped back behind it – barely – but it had left a stain. Buffy knew intellectually what was real and what had to happen. She could understand and rationalize and forgive. But Sarah’s vulnerable body and Buffy’s own moral conscience could not be so easily placated. There was a moment of instinctual panic, her heart racing, a startled gasp, a moment of wanting to flee.

    “Hey,” said Spike quietly. “Hey, it’s okay.”

    Buffy blinked and tried to settle herself down. “Hi,” she said, swallowing the panic.

    “And that is the first time I’ve seen actual fear on your face.”

    “I just woke up,” she said. “It doesn’t count.”

    “Yeah it does,” Spike said. “You only just realized I’m a monster.”

    “I always knew that,” Buffy whispered.

    “But it didn’t strike you until last night. Not for real.”

    He was right. Buffy heaved a sigh, and was ashamed to realize it shook. “There’s a big difference between knowing, and seeing.”

    “Is there?”

    “Yeah.”

    He looked curious. “What do you mean?”

    “I mean, actually seeing horror can be as bad as having it done to you.”

    “Bollocks.”

    Buffy rolled her eyes. “Spike... vampires don’t really have it, but it’s called empathy. Humans feel it when they see it happening to someone else. To some extent, seeing pain, hearing fear, we feel the pain, we’re made afraid. To a lesser extent, but it’s real, it’s there. It’s why we like watching porn, or romantic movies. We feel it.”

    “Seeing pain...”

    “Only makes you feel good, I know. But to me, it hurts.”

    He looked completely bewildered. In life, Buffy knew, he’d been sheltered. He’d never really been around actual violence. “So how the hell do humans hurt each other? They do it all the time.”

    Buffy sighed. “It’s not a superpower. It’s a neruopathway thingy. And some feel more or less than others, that’s all. Just like some enjoy music more, or are better at dancing. It’s the same as with everything else.”

    “But it doesn’t make sense.”

    “Do you really not remember? Think about it. When you were human, was there anyone you didn’t like seeing in pain?”

    She knew there was – his mother – but she wasn’t sure if he could remember. “I...” He didn’t answer.

    She skipped back to his vampire memories. “Like those girls you mentioned, that Angel attacked. They felt for each other. That girl last night... I felt for her.”

    “I... can’t even imagine....”

    “Sure you can. I know it’s complicated, ‘cause she kinda likes a lot of it, but... like that dream Drusilla had. You feel bad when Dru’s hurting like that. Don’t you?”

    He blinked. “And you’d feel that for every sodding human being on the bloody planet?”

    “Most of them,” Buffy said. “Yeah. At least when it’s put in front of you. I even feel kinda bad for Dru’s doll, and he’s evil.”

    He looked horrified. “How do you endure it?”

    “You have to try and turn it off, sometimes,” Buffy admitted. “But mostly... you help. As much as you can. That’s what the good guys do. We help, and we heal, and we save.”

    He thought about this. “So I didn’t save you last night. I just hurt you a different way.”

    “And here you’d been pretty proud of yourself, weren’t you.”

    He looked disgruntled. “What does it take?”

    Buffy laughed. This was old Spike, soulless, selfish, and flabbergasted, but she knew him. “Don’t worry about it right now,” she said. “It’s done.”

    “Is there anything I can do?” he asked.

    Not for about thirty years, Buffy thought. “No.”

    Spike regarded her. “I can treat you gently for a while.”

    “You’ve been doing that, anyway.”

    “Yeah,” he said. “I guess I have.” Then he stopped. “I’m sorry I hit you.”

    “I hit you, first,” Buffy said.

    “That doesn’t make it right.”

    That was a surprise. “Since when do you care about right?”

    Spike paused. “Never,” he said. “You’re messing me up something royal, pet.”

    “Join the club,” Buffy said glumly.

    Spike touched her chin. “That wasn’t how I wanted last night to go.”

    Buffy closed her eyes and let her head sink against him. “I know it wasn’t.”

    “You know, it didn’t even occur to me...” he hesitated. “Before I decided to leave you out of it, I didn’t think.... It’s been a long time since I was human. I didn’t realize... I thought so long as I didn’t let you get hurt, you wouldn’t mind.”

    Buffy looked up at him. “You thought I’d be just fine with being raped.”

    “Well, yeah. You’re not a virgin. There’s no one weighing a dowery on your chastity. What have you got to lose?”

    Buffy stared. Vampires looked so human. They had the memories and the voices and many of the interests of humans. Sometimes it was hard to remember that they weren’t just evil human beings – they were demons. A completely different species. Things which any human being would take for granted, they had to be reminded, or taught. She remembered before he’d gotten his soul how Spike had knocked her out and chained her up to declare his love, then offered her his kill as if it were a sacred sacrifice, and he had honestly thought that was romantic. From his perspective, it had been.

    “Spike,” she said carefully. “There is no one on earth who would honestly be okay with that. And I’m not talking rape-style role play, that’s a game, and even that you have to be careful with. No one would ever be okay with being violated like that.”

    Spike shrugged. “I don’t see why not.”

    “God, talking to a wooden post. Violated. What part of that word is hard to understand?”

    “The part where it would bother you.”

    “Wha..?”

    “No! I mean, why fret? It could be fun. New experience, something different. And whatever you live through just makes you stronger.”

    “That is so not true. Ask anyone who’s been traumatized. It can make people stronger, but it can also break them.”

    “Well, yeah, but you can learn how to deal with it.”

    Buffy was rapidly losing her ability to have this conversation, let alone touch him while having it. She sat up and glared at him. “It is not fair to ask anybody to just ‘deal with it.’”

    “It works. You just decide to, and you do it.”

    “Spike, that’s insane.”

    “No. That’s how it works.”

    “Like you’d know.”

    “‘Course I do.”

    “Like you’ve ever been raped.”

    “Sure I have.”

    Buffy stopped, and blinked. “What?”

    “Of course I have,” Spike said with a casual shrug. “Vampires don’t treat each other any more gently than they treat their victims. I wasn’t always the biggest bad in the pack.”

    “What?” Buffy asked again.

    Spike looked at her with delight. “Have I actually said something that has surprised you, for once? Yeah, I’ve been raped. By Dru, by her sire, even his sire, in whatever game they were keen on playing at the time.”

    “Angel... he did...?”

    “Angelus. You keep saying Angel. Only Dru called him my angel.”

    “Angelus,” Buffy said. “I didn’t....” She blinked at him. “You never told me.”

    Spike blinked at her. “Why would I? The subject’s never come up before.” He pulled her close to him and nuzzled her ear. “I realize it feels like we’ve been together forever, love, but I think we’re on day six.”

    “I just... I didn’t think...” Buffy was stunned. She’d known him all this time. She’d lived with him and made love to him and heard about his murder and his mother and his childhood. Spike had told her about being tortured, and being insane, and being dismembered, and being burned to ash. There were a hundred different traumas that he had discussed with her, and she had commiserated over. And he’d never told her this. “He raped you? He really raped you?”

    “Oh, all the bloody time,” Spike said blithely. The casual way he discussed it made it somehow worse. “Dru belonged to him. I couldn’t have Dru without having him, too. He started slow, of course, months after I’d been turned. Almost seducing me into it, but by the time he was done...” Spike chuckled, darkly. “Sometimes I was into it, sometimes I really wasn’t. The first time... that one was horrific. I was such a stupid kid. I barely even understood what he was after, the first time. And often he preferred it when I screamed. And... not in a good way.” He chuckled. “But he was a master at that sort of thing. The hunt. The seduction. The final sting of betrayal and what all.”

    Buffy knew this. Through experience.

    “Angelus said if I was going to be part of his gang, I had to be his,” Spike went on. “And there was only one way to be made into his.” He fondled Buffy’s hair. “Blood... and flesh... and life... and death.... Yeah, he did what he wanted to me,” Spike said, and he crept over Buffy like a hunting cat. He kissed her lips, her cheek, her throat, and breathed heavily into her ear. “He’d strip me naked and drain me dry of all my new vampiric blood, leaving me too weak to even lift my head.” He kissed her shoulder, her collar bone. “He’d hold me down and force himself on me while I cried with the ache and the shame of it. He made my body writhe with it in twisted pain and pleasure until I couldn’t tell the difference anymore.”

    He was all turned on by the thought. Buffy didn’t know what to think. It was the kind of thing that would make her go all, “That’s too thinky for me,” and make her want to go out and hit something. Also the idea of Spike and Angel, and all the times she’d touched both of them.... But the horror of it... the violation in it... that was....

    Finally she just put herself aside and decided to absorb the information now, and think about it later.

    But Spike was all about the imparting now, and Buffy didn’t want to admit his ardor was getting to her. She remembered in their earliest affair how she’d demanded he tell her some unpleasant truths while they fucked for five hours straight, talk to her in the abstract about how he used to kill, for instance. It had turned her on wildly, at the time. But they hadn’t added the discussions of violence into their lovemaking for a long time. Buffy didn’t know if it was due to his reclaimed soul, or her own less-destructive emotional state, but neither of them had really felt the need to bring anyone else into their bed, even in words. Shared blood and shared pain belonged to them now, and the victims were far away from all of it. But Spike had just brought Angel in, with himself as the victim, in a way she was sure he never would have in their own time. Buffy’s heart beat wildly. She didn’t know herself if it was horror or arousal; that would be way too thinky.

    “He pounded into me until I felt I’d split in half,” he whispered. He bit gently at her throat and his cock prodded between her legs. It felt good, and she wasn’t sure why, given the images he was painting in her head. Vampires. Vampires, being vampires, feeding on and fucking each other. She trembled, and it wasn’t entirely with revulsion.“Just imagine,” he went on. “Picture me, new to darkness. I had instincts to kill, but the rest... that was all new. I’d abandoned the rules, but I didn’t know what I was doing. I couldn’t have.”

    He kissed her, and then pulled away to stare into her eyes. “I was a thousand times more innocent than you, sweet one,” he said. “It wasn’t like now, sexual revolution come and gone, the pill on every girl’s dresser, free love made positively passé. My youth wasn’t like this lust powered decade. I’d never even kissed a girl until Drusilla turned me. Innocence... ignorance... what was the difference? Blood and death were just as taboo as sex. Actually... that era made love to death, jet jewelry and photographs of dead children. But sex...”

    He chuckled. “In Victorian England, we never even discussed the ‘limbs’ of the furniture, covering them all with long tablecloths, because thinking about legs was considered too erotic. And then to be caught up... by an Irish libertine out of a Gothic novel, who relished torture like a fine wine....” He laughed softly. “There he was... what was your word?  Violating me.” He kissed her, hard. “And I knew what it was to be evil. Finally.” He found his way inside her, and she was wetter than she’d expected to be. God, she had to be totally sick to find this erotic. He pulsed in her, breathing hard with lust.

    “Freedom to take anything,” he whispered. “Anything, and anyone at all. There were times he’d plunge himself so deep down my throat I passed out. There were times he tore me open with how hard he took me. There was even one time he used a stake... carved himself a new space for his pleasure, sliding in and out with the blood–”

    Oh, god, way too much. There it was. Spike’s pull back question, Too much for you? chimed in her. She wished she could say that now. Buffy made a sound, feeling sick, but she didn’t want him to pull away, and she didn’t ask him to stop. She couldn’t imagine the memory wasn’t painful for him, even soulless and empty. She wondered if he could only face it by contrasting it with pleasure, comforting himself with it, in the same way horror movies could make some women extremely horny. In some ways, that was how she was feeling.

    “He made me his disciple,” Spike breathed, “made himself my guru.” He slid into his fangs and scratched Buffy’s shoulder with his teeth, not biting down. Just a single scratch, a slight trickle of blood. He licked at it, and kissed along it, and then kissed her – just the slight taste of her blood still in his sharp mouth. “There isn’t an evil I’ve done that he didn’t teach me how to refine. Don’t just find a girl and kill her – slaughter a wedding party and rape the bride. The irony. The torment. That was what he taught me. He was a master of the slow torture,” Spike said. “But in the end, only I was strong enough to kill a slayer. It wasn’t until I did that that I knew... I could be better than him. I didn’t... need... him.” He chuckled. “I didn’t need to be like him, either.”

    “I didn’t know that had happened to you,” Buffy whispered.

    Spike smiled down at her. “There’s something about me you don’t know?” he said. “I am delighted.” He kissed her.

    Buffy had known that Angel had taken Spike on, acting as a kind of a mentor, teaching him the proper respect for his new darkness. She had thought he’d just taught him how to kill. Angel had admitted he’d done terrible things to Spike. Buffy had had no idea how terrible. There had been hints, but Spike had never said anything, and he’d been willing to share so much. She’d just assumed it hadn’t happened. Now she knew she was wrong. Woefully wrong.

    No wonder they hated each other so much. Their relationship had just taken on at least three new dimensions of confusion. Close family, mentor and disciple, victim and abuser... lover? She was pretty sure neither of them would want it characterized as that in her own time. And she was between them. Because she couldn’t keep her hands off these beautiful vampires.... “I’m sorry.”

    “Don’t be. He was my sire. Or, grandsire, I guess. I all but worshiped him. I grew used to it. Came to like it, even. But it could be very... intrusive... at times.”

    “I love you,” she whispered, meaning it more than she could have thought possible. Her sorrow and sympathy ached inside her. Why hadn’t Spike ever told her before?

    His darkness faded, and his blue eyes smiled down at her. “You are a wicked, wicked bitch,” Spike whispered back. “You actually care what’s happened to me?”

    “You know I do.”

    “That empathy you mentioned?”

    “Yes.”

    He chuckled. “Sounds hellish.”

    “You have no idea.” She touched his face. “Particularly right now.”

    “You mean what happened to me?”

    “I mean, what you do to others,” she whispered.

    He swallowed and pulled away. “Do you need me to stop?” he asked.

    She shook her head. “I don’t need to hear anymore,” she said. “But you don’t have to stop.”

    He gazed down at her for a long moment, crouched on the bed between her knees. “Do you want to know what he used to do to me?”

    Buffy swallowed, nervous. “I’m a lot more breakable than a vampire,” she said quietly.

    Spike bit his lower lip in arousal. “I don’t have to be that rough.” He slid over her, kissing along her torso as he did, and then turned her over. “Hang on a sec,” he said into her ear. He left her on her stomach on the bed for a moment and then came back. One finger started fondling her anus, gently sliding in and out, slippery and soft. She realized he had grabbed some kind of oil – probably the baby oil she’d seen in the bathroom. “I could use blood,” he whispered. “He usually did. I’m being nice, pet, say thank you.”

    “Thank you,” Buffy whispered. His finger inside her felt strange and wonderful, as it usually did. She and Spike were no strangers to anal sex. In fact, back home, with her own slayer’s resilient body, it was usually rougher than the gentle fondling he was currently giving her. He slid another finger inside, softening and loosening her muscles, and she slid up onto her knees in a crouch, lifting herself for him. He chuckled, and slid his fingers around in a circle, opening her wider.

    “Oh,” Spike said. “Not scared of me, are you.”

    “Not of this. No.”

    “You want to feel me in you?” he asked. “Impaled on a spike?”

    “Any time,” she said.

    “Why do you always act like you’ve shared my bed for years?” Spike asked. He got up on his knees and positioned himself behind her. He guided himself into her, and she felt him just at the opening, then pushing it wider, slowly, slowly. Buffy was in a different body. It felt different, but he was very hesitant, waiting for her to relax and take him in before he went further. And then he was in, completely, and moving back and forth, and it was far more erotic than she ever thought it had any right to be. She’d always been surprised by that. Done wrong, she suspected it could be the worst thing that could ever happen to anyone. Done right, however... as this was... she tilted her hips and pushed herself against him, moaning a little.

    “Oh, bloody hell, that’s tight,” Spike breathed. “Oh, my pet, my love. I lied, it was nothing like this,” he said then. He pushed deeper, thrusting faster. “For one... I usually didn’t writhe like that....”

    Buffy moaned again, and he growled with arousal. “I don’t think I sounded like that, either. And your heat... Oh, god...”

    They didn’t talk after that. He worked himself in her single-mindedly, and Buffy breathed into the pillow, and just felt him inside her. It always felt like he was about to slip right out, but he always slid back in with each thrust, and she stayed open for him, the pulsing, sliding fullness of him making her pelvis hum and her body quiver.

    He began to speed up, pushing himself toward orgasm, and Buffy groaned with anticipation. “That’s right, honey,” she found herself whispering. “Pour it into me. I’ll take it away.”

    He made a deep sound, then a louder one, then he muttered, “Oh, yeah,” pounded into her twice more, and then froze, rigid as a statue for a moment, then pulsing a few more times to work it all out and into her. He swallowed his cry, holding it tight in his throat, then drew in a deep breath, as if he’d just won a battle. He slid out of her, and Buffy sat up, following him to the foot of the bed. She could still feel where he had been in her, tingling. “Kiss me,” she told him.

    He did, gasping still from his release, and Buffy straddled his leg. She kissed his throat, his collarbone, took both hands and held them up above him, as if – as if – she had the strength to hold him down and have her way. He let her,  gazing up at her fondly, as she worked herself over his thigh, her clit bearing down and sliding over his firm, cool, flesh. His cock, still oily and half erect, caught beneath her hip, and he gasped when she pushed too hard.

    She came quickly, charged by what he’d done to her, and she rolled off him with a gentle hum – the contented hum he always said was her purring like a kitten.

    He took in a deep breath and let it out in an expressive sigh. “You are... mmm.”

    “You too,” Buffy whispered. She kissed his chest, caressing his nipple with her tongue.

    “What are you doing to me?” he murmured.

    “The best I can.” She kissed him again, and then snuggled in under his arm, leaving her head against his chest.

    He bent and kissed her forehead, then flipped her again, so he could bury his head between her breasts. He rested there, soft and still, for a long moment. Finally he looked up at her. “I’m in trouble, Sarah,” he whispered.

    Buffy ran her fingers through his hair. “Why?”

    “I was scared last night,” he admitted. “When I thought you might fall.” Buffy didn’t say anything. “And I was scared this morning. When I thought you wouldn’t forgive me. And I’m scared now.”

    “What are you scared of now?”

    “I wish I knew,” he whispered. “That’s my trouble.” He sighed. “Care to enlighten me? You know everything about me.”

    Buffy chuckled. “I can’t read your mind, silly.”

    He paused. “Don’t know if I can, either,” he said. “I love you,” he murmured. “I don’t want to, it’s messing me up.”

    “You’re not very good at not loving when you don’t want to.”

    “But I’ve always wanted to,” he said. “Always. Even when I was a man.”

    She was making him remember. She hoped that was right. She was tempted to ask him for his help again, but if he wasn’t ready yet, it would only regress him. Instead, she told him a truth he was going to learn one day, if not now. “Love doesn’t make things easier,” she said. “It can make things worse than ever.”

    “It helps with Dru,” Spike said.

    “It helps you,” Buffy said. “She’d be impossible to live with, otherwise.”

    “I don’t–”

    “I’m not saying you should stop loving her,” Buffy said, before his face could darken any further. “But what makes one situation nice, can make another one hell. Love doesn’t always make sense....” She looked down at him. She was in love with a vampire. She found it easier to love vampires than humans. That didn’t make sense, either. “And you don’t always have a choice in who you love.”

    “I always thought we did.”

    She’d thought he knew better than that. He was the one who had told her, after all. Then she laughed. He’d never loved anyone but Drusilla before now. Never questioned his devotion, never considered whether it might be similar to the following instinct of a minion. He’d never picked up a perfectly devoted dumb-blonde companion, and found himself unable to care for her in any way. He’d never found himself chained by his love for a slayer, like a mouse in love with a cat. He’d learn. He was learning right now. Buffy smiled at him. “Oh, Spike. You’re so young.”