InsaneJournal

Fic: DISTANCE (pt 55 of ?) - redacted
This section of the fic has been redacted. I've left it here as an out-take.





Previously

"Hey Dawnie."

Buffy had stolen up behind her; she slipped her arms now around her sister's neck, hanging over her chair, pressing her cheek to hers. Buffy's face was hot and moist.

"He's sleeping again," Dawn whispered. "That's what he needs. To feed, and sleep, and be with you."

"He drank this, good." Buffy took up the empty thermos from the nightstand, peered into it, tucked it under her arm. Then picked up the abandoned cup of her own blood, and carried it out. When she returned she hugged Dawn again. "I'm going to get into bed with him now, so ...."

"I'll see myself out." Dawn paused. "Are you okay?"

"I will be. I really really will." Buffy was already shrugging out of her clothes, turning back the sheet on her side of the bed.

Dawn waited another moment, to see her sister slide in, hitch herself over close to Spike.

Then she put out the light, said goodnight, and closed the door.

Buffy listened to Dawn's footsteps retreating across the living room. Through leaden seconds she lay, tense and stiff under the sheet, sure she'd never fall asleep—possibly ever again. And not at all sure that she belonged in bed with Spike, not after her outburst earlier.

Gingerly, careful not to disturb him, she got up again, slipped on her robe, went out to the kitchen. In the old days, when she felt similarly restless and unsettled and vaguely guilty, she could go out to a cemetery and in five minutes find something to chase and slay. She really missed that, sometimes.

The other two thermoses of slayer blood still sat on the table. Two quarts each—that was six quarts they'd had donated for him.

He'd drunk two already. After refusing hers.

She knew why. She knew. But still it hurt.

She picked up the bottles, carried them back into the bedroom. Spike hadn't moved. As she set the thermoses on the nightstand, his packet of cigarettes tempted her. She'd never smoked, but she imagined now how lighting, taking a drag, might calm. But she left them there—they were his, he might want them. Back in the kitchen she poured out a glass of wine and carried it and the bottle up to her battlement.

The rain had stopped. There was a brisk wind, moving the thick cloud cover, making the sky seem like it was right on top of her, a lid on a box she was shut into. A sense of displacement crept over her, like she was outside herself, looking on. As she finished the first glass of wine, the spacey feeling amplified.

She was afraid, and didn't quite know what she was afraid of.

Maybe his return was nothing but her pathetic fantasy. She'd go back downstairs and there'd be nothing, bed empty, room smelling not of tobacco smoke but only of the scented candle she'd burned a couple of nights ago.

Because that was how it went.

Those she loved—and she'd never loved like this—always left her.

Spike was the only one who ever came back.

What he'd come back from this time, the hardship of it, the effort, was unfathomable.

What if she just wasn't worth it?

Three large glasses of cabernet sauvignon to the good—or the bad—she returned to her bedroom just before the sunrise. Made sure again that the draperies were closed, no chance of a stray beam reaching him.

Spike still slept—she thought he hadn't moved, but a second glance showed that another thermos was empty, and there were two more cigarette butts in the ashtry.

When she came back from dumping them in the toilet, the bedside lamp was on, and Spike was sitting up.

The change in him was startling. Thrilling. He'd let the sheet fall, so she could see how he'd regenerated in the last few hours, healed by the cocktail of slayer blood. Already he was less attenuated. The lurid scar around his neck was paler, less protruding. The marks on his chest and arms which she saw now for the first time, obviously once a lattice of deep cuts, were pink and fading.

Spike said, "You're back."

The room and everything in it, as well as her perception of her own body, drifted slightly like a balloon on a short string, all the objects, Spike himself, floating just a little further off than they should be. The wine hadn't caused it but it made it worse. She longed to look at him, to touch him—a phrase arose in her head With my body I thee worship—but a strong chill of embarrassment and uncertainty held her back.

"I've been close by all the time. You look better." The words sounded reproachful to her. In her imagination, she was in the midst of an orgy of indulging him—tending to him in a hot bath, serving liquor and tea and food and kisses, giving him extravagant head, all at the same time like some eight-armed double-faced goddess—even as she stood sulking like a caught-out teen.

He sat forward, his legs tenting the sheet, arms crossed on his knees.

"What's wrong?"

She shook her head. She didn't know herself. How could she feel so thick and confused and blocked, when she'd been given the greatest happiness she could imagine?

"You angry because I wouldn't drink your blood? Dunno what I was thinkin', to refuse that gift."

"I know what you were thinking." Again the words sounded harsh to her. "I mean ... I think I understand, as much as I ...." As I can ever understand you, which was never enough before and impossible now when I can never comprehend what you've been through. "It's okay. I wanted you to heal, and you're healing." Again her words sounded sulky to her. She struggled to control her stance, her tone, to change them, but still she couldn't move, and he just looked at her, patient.

"That I am." He stretched his arm into the light, where it glowed. He seemed satisfied with his resurgent vitality. Preening a little. "Fed on kindness. Will repay 'em however I can." He leaned forward. It wasn't quite, she thought, an invitation. Anyway, she still couldn't pick her feet up off the rug. "Buffy. How've you been?"

She started to say working hard, but snatched the words back before they emerged. In the face of his palpable suffering, his trek—she pondered, with a sick insufficient pity, Dawn's assessment that he'd been laboring towards her for years and years—there was nothing she could say about her own state that wouldn't be offensive and absurd.

Spike said, "Little sis told me you've seen plenty of action, this year."

She shrugged. "Like every year."

"That's my girl. Thought of you like that while we wuz apart, gettin' on with things."

"Yes, I ... got on." She longed to ask him what he'd been through, but some strong sense of impropriety stopped her. It felt wrong—as if she expected a toting up of his suffering, took a grotesque interest in the wretchedness he'd endured. Or as if she was jealous and required some proof of his whereabouts in the fourteen months, why it had taken that long for him to return. Wouldn't it be selfish, to make him relive his ordeal by recounting it? It was obvious enough that he'd experienced something heinous and prolonged. She turned it round and round in her head and could find no way to ask that didn't feel obscene, prurient.

"I'll be good as new in a day or two. Able to go on missions with you if you like it."

She wanted to say Are you sure? but that felt rude, so she just nodded. No good sounding like she didn't have confidence in him.

"Dawn said you were supposed to go to Montevideo tonight."

"Yes, but of course I'm staying here now." She wanted to pull out her own tongue. Why did every answer echo as a rebuke?

Spike cocked his head. "You wishin' I hadn't come here?"

"Wh-what?" Her knees went watery. The room spun. She put a hand up against the bureau to steady herself.

"Worried me, that it might be too late, after all. Life's not like in some fairy story, true love eternal. Better to have it out, if that's so."

"I thought ...." She couldn't breathe, so it was hard to speak. "I thought you had your memory back."

"I do."

"Then how could you ... how could you—"

"Time fucks things up. Separation does too." He reached suddenly for the cigarettes, made a clumsy business of taking one from the pack, striking the match, lighting up. Meanwhile her heart had lost track of itself, taking a long pause, throwing off odd beats that made her throat constrict. She coughed.

Spike tamped out the cigarette. "Yeah, sorry, guess I'd better not."

She wanted to ask Are you telling me that time has fucked you up? Is that what this means? Because I don't know what it means!

How long—years, decades? Maybe longer? Perhaps, the wild thought arced through her like a bolt of electricity—perhaps so much time had elapsed that she was a distant memory, no more important than someone he'd loved back in the eighteen-seventies, before he was turned. Remote and irrelevant. In her twenty-five years of life, how could she fathom the meaning of such a long existence? So much territory covered, so much pain endured?

Maybe he'd come back here just because he thought he should. Because he really had nowhere else to go. And now faced with the reality of her, as opposed to the memory, he saw his mistake. And was trying to let her down easy. Make it her idea that it couldn't work.

Why couldn't she say any of this? Her mouth was dry, the tongue stuck to her palate.

He toyed with the matchbook. "Or maybe you're just not ready. Should've sent you word, given you time to get used to the idea? Make up your mind?"

She found herself shaking her head. She could move that much, but she was also somehow plastered to the ceiling, looking down on them both from above, these two sad people who didn't know how to talk to each other anymore, if they ever had. It was like one of those terrible plays, where everything slides into despair because neither character has the right words, and from the audience it seems so simple, if they'd just say what they were feeling, thinking, all would be well!

"Slayer. If I'm right, tell me." He reached for her at last, and now she was able to step to him. His hand was wonderfully solid and strong; he clasped hers, drew her down to sit beside him.

It was hard to meet his gaze. She focused instead on his hand, now wrapped in both of hers. He brought the other up to her face, his thumb lightly tracing her jaw. The skin jumped and ticced beneath his touch. Buffy forced herself to wait, two beats, four, six, before she pressed his fingers to her lips.

She was aware of him watching her, as she kissed the palm, the back, the fingers. His hand remained solid. The skin smelled cool and salty. She couldn't get enough of it. She was frantic. Holding so tight to his hand that he grunted before she realized what she was doing and eased up.

The sight of him so close was water on a thirsty day. Now she'd finally laid hold of him, she couldn't imagine having to let go. She was afraid to break the silence. Speech—hers especially—so easily went awry. If he took his hand from hers, she knew—knew—she would die.

But he was stroking her hair back from her cheek, tucking it behind her ear as if to make sure there was nothing to block her from hearing him.

"Tell me the truth. What's the matter, Buffy?"

That question again. Matter matter matter. Matter mass and weight. She'd taken two weeks of physics in high school and dropped the class—too hard, too much math. The function of matter. She didn't know what matter was.

"Buffy."

She wished she could disappear into his palm. Be small enough for him to hold there. She whispered into his hand. "I'm afraid it's been too long, that you don't really remember me anymore."

Saying it made her shake. She hated herself for her fear, for feeling so small and wanting to be smaller. Her voice sounded to her like a child's. She was full of shame. This was all wrong. The reunion she'd longed for wasn't supposed to be anything like this.

Spike's laugh startled her. She wanted to hit him, for mocking her. But when she looked, his eyes were full of tenderness. "Remember you used to call me sweetheart."

"Oh. Oh ...." Tears rushed to her eyes.

"There you are. There's my girl. As if I could forget you. My shinin' star."

He pulled her into his lap then, kissed her wet eyes, her trembling cheeks, then homed in on her mouth, stilling the quivering of her lips with his. She couldn't control her crying now. She wept into his neck. Beneath her thigh, she felt his cock fill. He always had been excited by her in tears. That at least hadn't changed.

Nor had his easy acquiescence when she pushed him back, straddled his body, pinning his arms, sinking down on his springing erection. She was a hot mess, taking him with no preliminaries, no words, still sobbing, flushed with excitement and shame and desperate need. Spike grunted, fucking up into her. She strained, holding him down, her face once more buried in his neck. She tasted the scar on his throat, licked at its acrid salt. Spike bucked; she heard the crunch of his game-face emerging. She wished for one of her own, imagined the ruckus of two vampires fucking, how their fangs would clack together as they sucked each other's mouths. She spent on the image, shuddering.

God, what is wrong with me? This wasn't how it was supposed to be—how she was supposed to be. Not now.

She worked Spike hard, fucking him in short hard jabs of her hips until he seized up and bellowed.

The game-face remained. He seemed far off, as if his orgasm had thrown him back into the depths of himself. She still held him down, all her weight on her arms pinning his, watching for the change.

"No need to ask if you've been gettin' much." At last the gold eyes turned blue, the fangs receded. He licked his lips.

She wished she could undo all this, roll back to the moment she'd gotten out of Xander's SUV. She knew now, how she should've proceeded, to tap the joy and sweetness there should be, the exquisite care she wanted to impart through every early moment of this reunion, the great longed for thing. That time was already expired. Instead they'd had these hours of misconnection and misconstrual, culminating in this weird raunchy vibe that circumvented all her intentions, that reminded her too much of the bad past.

He wriggled. "Gonna let me up?"

"Sorry." She sprang up, even as she realized that he was moving to embrace her; his arms closed on nothing. "I'm sorry."

"No chance of a cuddle?"

She longed for nothing else, but she found herself picking up her robe, shrugging into it. She couldn't look at him. She didn't know what was wrong with her, with him. She went into the bathroom and turned on the taps.

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