Timeline: Sometime during mid-season 6 of BTVS
Warning: Angsty, DARK Ficlet. Character Death.
Rating: R
Summary: Buffy reflects on some things. Buffy/Spike implied.
Feedback: Yes, please!
Not So
Different
The bath water sloshes as Buffy slips into the tub, settling
slowly beneath its surface. Air hissing through gritted teeth as the hot
liquid envelopes her body, tingeing the skin pink. Pleasure, pain, heat,
passion, cold, cold, cold…
The cold inside her refuses to ebb.
It’s constant, the buzzing inside her brain. Telling her she’s wrong. She’s just some used up shell, cracked wide open and left for maggots to feed on.
Buffy?
She can feel them crawling around inside her, eating away at her core. Wriggling about her flesh as it seals itself around exposed bone. She can still feel the blinding agony of it as she became aware again; yanked back inside a corpse buried six feet under ground.
Go away, Spike.
She doubts her friends thought about that either. The logistics of what they were about to do never crossed their well-meaning minds. They wanted her back, at any cost.
Whatever the price.
She remembers the words he’d whisper in her ear as she would cry for release; remembers the disgust that rolled around in her belly. Not at him though. Not at the sweet, albeit, pitiful sonnets he’d chant as they moved together. He was the only thing in this world she could touch now that didn’t make her stomach turn.
My sweet, Buffy; taste like sunshine and lavender. So soft, so perfect…
No, no the disgust was directed completely at herself. She should feel something, shouldn’t she? Her heart should flutter when he says I love you, but instead it just sits in her cavernous chest, unmoved. Dead like the rest of her, dead like him.
She thinks about how easily his flesh gives beneath her fists and teeth. Thinks about how satisfying it is when she bites down on his shoulder, his arm, or his chest. But the satisfaction never stays.
For a vampire, you’re awfully fragile, Spike.
They aren’t so different now, maybe that’s why she craves him the way she does. Craves the life he breathes into her. Craves the heat that he causes to rise up in her stony flesh. They are both nothing more then animated corpses after all. Feeding on the life of others to give their own bodies cohesion. But how long can they feed from each other, before one of them crumbles to ash?
You’ve marked me, Buffy. All the pretty blues, and purples, and blacks; stained me with your soul. Can’t you feel it, Buffy?
As the water surrounding her turns cold, she thinks she knows the answer.
Your delusional, Spike.
A metallic clatter sounds out as the blade falls
non-to-gently to the ground. Warmth spreads through Buffy’s limbs; soft and
welcoming, just like him. Slowly the water warms around her, all the tension
flowing out of her finally, flowing as easily as the blood from her veins. Pleasure,
pain, heat, passion, cold, cold, cold…
She thinks she finally knows.
