herself_nyc (herself_nyc) wrote in herself_nyc_fic, @ 2008-02-12 15:05:00 |
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Entry tags: | distance: redacted part |
FIc: DISTANCE (pt 57 of ?) - redacted
This section of the fic has been redacted. I've left it here as an out-take.
Author's note: I changed the amount of time Spike spent in London before going to Dawn in St Andrew's from a couple of week to more like a couple of months. I'm not revising what's posted here but the change will be reflected in the final archive of this fic at Bugger This.
Previously
"Expect if I do that to you two or three times a day, you'll be quite cured in a coupla weeks."
"We should try it and see."
"Gonna fuck your pussy and make you suck me off in every corner of this old castle."
"Yes," she whispered dreamily into his neck. "Yes, you will."
"An' if you're very very good ...."
"Yes?"
"Well, say no more about that. Don't mean to get your hopes up."
She laughed. Her body was loose and heavy on his. She kissed him some more.
He'd gotten it right. Been Spike, the correct Spike, the one she looked for and needed, first tender and understanding, then swaggery and presumptuous and lewd. He'd managed that and yet held back when she'd bared her neck, though the sight had stirred the repressed demon. Half-drowsing, lazily accepting her kisses, Spike felt as if he'd opened some long unseen Latin grammar, and been able to parse out the complex text without a dictionary.
Buffy hadn't changed all that much in this second year of his separation from her, at least, not in ways that were terribly obvious. She'd been brittle and tense and uncommunicative plenty enough before, so it stood to reason she'd be more so now. None of that ever interfered with his loving her.
The great alteration was in himself. He'd washed up in London like some shipwrecked spar, sea-changed. Being taken by Illyria, and the journey back, had forced him to rely on his demonto be more of a demon than he'd ever beenjust to make it through. It was that, more than the physical challenges, the stymying setbacks, that ate away at him, so that by time he made it through the final portal, spit into the London night like some Thames-side flotsam, he was nearly feral.
Buried in the mind of that wild unleashed demon, the memories were intact, waiting to be relevant again. Out of them, he tried, in those first days at Cruikshank's, to put himself back together into Spike. Spike who was made of nothing but distant memories, all the things Illyria had boxed him off from with her dimensional mixing. Spike who might as well have been a character in a much-conned book, known through and through though not recently reread. Made tissuey, separate. Distant.
The demon didn't want to relinquish the reins of him. It had waxed larger, grander even than his soul. Had to, to keep soul and body together.
The sanity he'd kept on the journey slipped and slid most when the destination was reached.
The hardest part of the whole damn thing was those few brief weeks in London, at Cruikshank's and then at the hotel in Muse Street, trying to get himself right, or at least, right enough to pass. It was in that same room at the back of the Fowlers Arms that he'd first bleached his head, back in late '75, bending over the sink in the corner of the room, while Dru hovered behind him, singing and giggling and clicking in the air the scissors with which she'd just snipped off some of his hair.
The costume helped. Finding the right leather, putting it on, gave him the same snap inside as hefting a well-balanced sword. The last night, before heading north, he went to a vampire bar he'd once frequented. Telling himself that if he was recognized there, even if only by a single solitary patron, that it would mean he was good to go, ready to make the last little leg of the trip back to Buffy.
He'd sauntered in, barely aware that in his weakened state he might not survive a challenge.
Dusting everyone in the place wasn't part of the plan. But once he got started, the demon of him wouldn't stop until the place was a shambles and every threat quashed.
Yet after that, he'd felt almost normal, what memory told him normal was supposed to feel like. He's stepped firmly into Spike. The vamps he'd done for knew who'd killed them. He was ready as he was likely to be.
Buffy nipped at his jaw, recalling him to the present moment.
"What about your hopes?"
"Eh?"
"Are your hopes up?"
It took him a moment to recall what they'd just been saying. "Rampant, they are."
"I only want you to bite me if you want to."
"You never used to want that."
"Falling in love with you changed that. I'm allowed to change, aren't I?"
"Sure."
"I dunno. It's not that important. I want it because I think it'll be good for you. Don't worry about it." She smiled, kissed him again. "Really, don't. This is so good. You're perfect."
"Perfect, am I?"
She glanced away. "I was so worried you wouldn't want me, when your amnesia was cured, when you remembered how it really was with us, in Sunnydale. And the aspects of you I saw while your memories were gone and you fell in for me like a stranger might'vethey were different than the ones I already knew. Not better or worse, just different, so it felt like"
"Like Big Daddy Spike would come back an' kick that other self's arse an' pack him off to Coventry."
She nodded.
"I never wanted to leave you. You know that, yeah? Blue took me 'gainst my will."
She nodded again. She'd gone all thoughtful.
"Ah, you weren't sure. Poor girl. Was only tryin' to protect you there, talkin' about lovin' nothing but the Mission. No chance to explain myself, or even to say good-bye."
"When she blasted us away, when we couldn't find you ... Willow went on searching. She held out hope. But I couldn't stand hope. I made up my mind that you were dead."
"Figured, yeah. All the while I was tryin' to get back, sometimes it made it easier, thinkin' you were waiting. An' other times I'd catch myself thinkin' that you couldn't be expectin' me, an' it didn't matter if I laid down an' died, so might as well."
"Except you're not the lie down and die type."
"True that. S'what got me through. Figured even if there'd be no Buffy Summers for me at the end, there'd always be the Mission. An' I do love the Mission. Nearly as much as I love you, who led me to it."
She sighed. "You make me sound like a religion."
"You are my religion."
"A religion you fuck? Please."
"Only kind that's any good."
She giggled, a reflex; she took in that he was serious.
But the next moment he cracked a smile. "Mind you, in my religion, the little goddess does her share of worshippin' on the high priest as well."
"I wouldn't have it any other way. We're going to have such rites!" She laughed, and kissed him again, and sat up. "We really should get out of here. Anyway, it's freezing."
[[This part edited 2/13/08.]]
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