lovetobrag:

“I want her out.”

Spike didn’t remember driving over.  He’d got out of the car with one tire on the curb, but he couldn’t pull the keys out straight, so he hadn’t a clue how he’d gotten ‘em in.  Made it left-foot-right-foot up her steps and to her knock-knock-knock door — that part was clear, really, no fog.  How it’d felt like he was gonna boot in the time it took her to get there.  These nights without moons always made his skin freeze.  Now it was hot underneath.  Closed his eyes and she was—

He didn’t close his eyes.  

Buffy got there when she got there.  He saw the curtain pull back and he saw her nose poke through, and it made him knock harder ‘cause maybe she’d get there faster if he showed she had to hurry.  Couldn’t she hurry? He had so much to say; that sick behind his adam’s apple was all-rolled-up should’ves.  She was the only person he had to find. And when he did — when she found him with his palms slamming open against her door and she pulled it back to let him in — he didn’t waste the time, not any of it.  There wasn’t enough.  She was wearing blue.  He threw up and words came out.  They were: “I want her out.”  She wasn’t careful steady ground like she used to be, and he didn’t need an invite to shove past her shoulder inside.  ”I want her tied to a pole on the national broadcast with her knickers on.  Call Anya! I’ve got a bloody wish to make.”  Didn’t remember the shirt she had on, but he was hardly looking at her.  ”Get you brassed enough, you can make it for me.  Did you see the show? Did you catch the end? That’ll get you brassed enough.”  He was talking straight to her, and he couldn’t hardly see a thing.

They’d gone straight for him in the wing.  Off-stage, where the rest of the people did the rest of their things, three came at him holding clipboards, waving hands.  What are you doing? You have to stay on.  That’s two hundred dollar equipment you felt like stomping on back there, you know.  He’d been heavy and light and he’d shook his head to get them out.  Not that easy.  Easy enough.  They were just people.  They’d moved when he swept half the makeup off one of the tables with the lamps ‘round the mirrors. Crash, bang, boom.  Yelled.  Yelled something.  His fingers’d come away from his face white at the tips so he’d pulled a washcloth for the drive.  And he bleedin’ well hoped it was off now, ‘cause this wasn’t the sort of thing he wanted to do lookin’ like a cold Marcel Marceau.  

So why wasn’t she moving? Said maybe four emphatic sentences, felt like he’d just ran twenty miles straight and was still runnin’, and Buffy was standing in the hallway a couple metres from where she’d let him in.  ”I mean it,” he said.  He pulled his phone out, flip-top and cracked.  ”Call Anya.  Get her over here.  We’re gonna put this bitch on the sun.  See how she likes her hotseat when it’s charring her tight, plastic ass.”  Euphoria.  It was the best idea.  It’d work.  He didn’t have a soul to keep him from wishin’ other people pain, and it’d certainly allow him to wish other people’d wish it for him.  

So why wasn’t she taking the phone?

Spike rolled his eyes.  There may’ve been a groan in his mouth.  He wasn’t paying attention.  Couldn’t focus.  Couldn’t remember what he’d heard the slag say as he was pushin’ out through the back, but it’d been bad.  Tellies in every sodding corner of the back room like they all needed to watch every damn second.  He’d caught something.  Couldn’t remember.  Hadn’t heard, really.  Couldn’t remember puttin’ his smokes in his pocket, but they were there when he turned his back on Buffy and stepped further into the den.  He wanted someone to put kerosene in her vodka and stick a candle in her mouth.  He wanted her in water up to her nose so she breathed it in real slow.  He wanted—he wanted his lighter to light, but he struck it and struck it and struck it and it wouldn’t even hiss.

Click.  Click.  He shook it and tried it again.  Tried it with his wrist twisted to the side.  Tried it with the other.  Cigarette between his teeth now, biting into the sponge of the filter so flat he’d have to fluff it back if he ever got it started, standing on her carpet pressing the plunger down.  Lettin’ it come back up.  Pressing it back down.  What the hell was she waiting for? Flashing arrows? Let’s get the pitchforks and—god damn it, the thing wouldn’t start, wouldn’t even—you know, he was just standing there looking at her look at him, and he was gettin’ real tired of hearing what he imagined was Ross’s whiny little posh voice calling him limp and pathetic and now he couldn’t even—.

“Bloody piece of shit!” Spike shouted it.  He curve-balled the lighter across the room, and when the black edges came out of his eyes, he saw.  It’d lodged itself into the wall.  His lighter.  Stickin’ out ten centimetres from the plaster, little cracks in the paint around it.  His laugh was mostly air in the quiet.  His hands, hell, they wouldn’t stay still.  ”Buffy,” he said.  ”Buffy, what the hell am I doing here?” He couldn’t remember where it’d all got lost, but now he couldn’t find it.  All the red’d drained out and left him white, white, white.

Silence.  The apartment was filled with silence- Buffy was aware you technically couldn’t be full of a lack of something, but that didn’t make it any less true.  She just sat there staring at the television screen that’d gone black when she turned it off at some point.  She couldn’t remember when.  Had they gone to a commercial break?  Had Spike stormed out of the interview?  Had Katia’s smug and manipulative grin become too much?  Or was it the way she’d twisted the truth around, said things Buffy’d never been brave enough to admit, that prompted her to turn the damn thing off?  She couldn’t remember.  She couldn’t anything.  Couldn’t do anything but sit there while it all fell apart before her eyes.  He’d been trying to do something good, she could tell that much.  She knew him well enough to read the intentions on his face even with cameras and glass screens between them.  She could read how he was trying to do the right thing but it had all turned out so incredibly wrong.

The worst part was how right Katia was.  Buffy had used Spike, used and abused and done a whole manner of things no decent person would.  She didn’t know the half of it and yet she was able to see right through to the core of it all.  And she couldn’t stand to see that look.  Spike’s face.  Maybe that’s what made her turn it off.  All of it made her sick.  Spike didn’t have to say a word and Katia’d found enough fodder for the biggest Buffy hate-fest of the year.  It was all Buffy’s fault. It always had been.  She shouldn’t have lost control that way.  If she’d never started sleeping with him, he wouldn’t have ever thought…  She couldn’t let her mind go there.  She had to fight that thought off.  Had to fight of how weak she’d felt, how small she’d let him make her.  She shouldn’t have let him.  None of it would be this way if she hadn’t.  She wouldn’t have to see that look on his face, the look that’d burned itself into her eyes long after she turned off the television.  The upset, the rage, all of it.  It hung there in the silence.

A loud banging at her front door broke it all and it took her a few moments to get up from the chair she’d been plastered in for longer than was healthy.  She walked over to the window, just to peek out.  It was him.  No no no.  She hadn’t expected him.  She couldn’t see him like this, it was all hitting the fan so hard and she couldn’t do anything.  She should be mad.  Mad at him, mad at Katia.  But she wasn’t mad, she wasn’t anything.  She just opened the door, didn’t look in his eyes as he pushed past, the fabric of his shirt catching on hers ever so slightly.  She’s been wearing that same blue shirt for how many days now?  Hadn’t changed it since the accident, there wasn’t much she’d done since the accident.  She’d been wearing the shirt for a while, it was wrinkled and she couldn’t even bring herself to feel self conscious of it.  Her hair was up in a ponytail, it never did get greasy but after a few days of not showering nobody’s hair looked too great.  She didn’t smell bad, she knew this much.  She probably just smelled extra her, she would’ve showered if it was bad.  But it wasn’t bad.  She couldn’t change her clothes, she’d almost died in them.  They reminded her she was real, they reminded her that even slayers can die in car accidents.  Even moms could get brain tumors.  Her jacket, hat and gloves were still sitting on the table.

He talked.  She listened even though she couldn’t move.  He was so angry.  She wanted to be angry too, he wanted her to be angry.  But she couldn’t feel it.  Why couldn’t she feel it?  Maybe shock.  People had an actual honest reason to hate her now and she couldn’t even deny it.  She and Spike had never been a thing, he made that much clear, and Katia filled in the rest.  Buffy had just been using him, even after the soul.  It had always been about use.  Why hadn’t she seen it before?  She wanted to ask, wanted to tell Spike it was okay.  Tell him Katia was right, but he never gave her that chance.  He just talked fast and angry about revenge and Buffy’s brain couldn’t process it, at least not fast enough to respond in a timely manner that is.  She just stood there and watched as he took out the phone.  Call Anya?  No phone needed, she could just draw the symbol or summon or something if she really needed her.  Only she couldn’t.  

She watched him fiddle with the lighter.  Watched and watched and watched, it was unbearable.  She was about to move, about to help him, but then it was too late and he’d thrown it.  It whirred past her and into the wall.  And he was shaking and asking things of her and she couldn’t do anything.  He was saying her name and she just wanted him to stop shaking, she had to make him stop.  She couldn’t see him this way, if anything could make her move it had to be watching him this way.  Watching him shake and fumble and rage and question what was even going on- watching him weak, it was too much.  

She walked toward where he’d ended up on his rampage around her apartment and wrapped her arms around him, didn’t care that she’d squeezed his arms tight to his body so he couldn’t hold her back right if he tried.  Maybe if she held him tight enough he’d stop shaking, he’d see that he could be okay if he was there.  She would make it okay, she didn’t have words yet to answer him, but she had actions.  She needed to make him okay because she couldn’t make her situation okay.  If she could make him okay…  If he was okay then she could be okay, they could be okay together and they could find a way to fight it if they were okay.  He’d come in and gone wild; made a commotion that ended in cracked plaster and questions she didn’t know the answer to.  His hands had to stop shaking.