Pairing: Willow/Spike
Summary: Spike is afraid he won’t find the right words to tell Willow the truth.
Feedback: PLEASE. Don’t make me beg, but it helps so much to know that people are actually reading what I write.
Distribution: If you have permission to archive my previous fics, you may have this. Otherwise, please ask first.
Disclaimer: I own nothing. It all belongs to Joss and a bunch of other people who are not now and have never been me.
Author's Notes: This fic was written for the Winter of Spillow Live Journal Community.
Author's Notes Two: I have to thank my wonderful betas, Emmy and Tonya, who once again went above and beyond the call of duty! I need to thank Missy, just because! And to a special friend who knows who she is...thanks for being so completely honest with me! I love you for that...among other things!
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
He and Willow needed to talk, Spike knew that. And it frightened him. The struggle to find the right words terrified him more than any demon he could ever face.
Words had been William’s passion. William...that bloody awful poet. He had spent his days consumed by words, by the combination of words to convey emotion. Words had been his dearest love, his truest passion...next to Cecily.
But Spike had left William behind the night Dru had turned him. She had done so much more than take away his humanity. She had taken the words with her as well. And then she and Angelus had taught him to replace them with cruelty and violence, the stuff with which he wrote his poetry from then on. Dark, brutal poetry that was far more beautiful than anything that pathetic William had conjured with pen and paper and weak longing for what he could never have.
That was, until the Initiative had given the chip and turned him into every bit the craven, sniveling wretch that William had been. The chip that took everything that Drusilla and Angelus had given him and left him with nothing, not even the words. He had always been a poet, in one medium or another, but now...now he was nothing. Neither ‘William the Bloody Awful Poet’ nor ‘William the Bloody’. Not anymore.
He needed desperately to get those words back. Violence was denied him now, at least the kind of violence that he had made his name with, and besides, it wouldn’t be much good in this situation. Somehow, he didn’t think that Buffy’s skillfully mutilated corpse would convey to Willow what he would want it to, that the Slayer meant nothing to him any more. That it was Willow he wanted, even loved.
No, he needed words for that. The right words, the perfect words. Not the deceitful, cruel words he had learned to use as weapons, but the honest ones, the poetic ones that would allow him to tell Willow the truth about his encounters with Buffy without losing her forever. The ones that would tell her that she meant much more to him than just a warm body to take away the cold ache that the Slayer always left him with.
He wanted so badly to just open up his heart somehow and show it to Willow, to show her the memories of her that he had built his feelings on, all unknowingly, ‘til they had become...this. This bright, glowing thing that warmed him. This thing unlike anything he had felt for Cecily or Dru or Angelus or Buffy. This thing that was just her.
It had started in the factory, the night he had kidnapped her, he was sure of that, though he had seen nothing at the time. Nothing but his useless obsession with his faithless Sire.
And then there had been the night in the dorm. When he’d tried to bite her and discovered the chip. She had been so sweet, consoling him and trying to make him feel better. He had lied that night, he was never going to give her a choice. He would have turned her and kept her forever.
But then it had all gone haywire with the soldiers breaking in. Then he’d wound up chained in the Watcher’s bathtub, Willow had wound up with the pasty-faced girlie-witch, and Spike had wound up fancying himself in love with the Slayer.
Yet, through it all, he’d always felt something for Willow. He saw that now, clear as the daylight he would never see again. She had always been there, with her sweetness, her caring, her loveliness, her fragile strength, her self. He simply had pushed his feelings back, not knowing how to deal with an emotion so different, so lacking in the promise of humiliation, disdain and inevitable rejection he was so accustomed to from the objects of his devotion.
Before that night just a week ago when Willow had given herself to him for the first time, he had succeeded in suppressing any conscious awareness that he felt much of anything for the sad witch. And maybe he never would have known that these emotions were buried inside of him if he had never known the feel of her heat, the taste of her skin, the green of her eyes when they shone with pleasure, the soft huskiness of her voice just after making love. But he knew those things now, and they blended together with all his memories until he could no longer remember how it felt not to care for her...love her...need her. Whether he had loved her before or not, it felt as if he had loved her forever.
The fact that he now thought of his feelings as love and did so with such uncommon ease surprised him. Wasn’t love always more painful and horrible than this? Oh well, that would come later, he thought. When Willow returned and they talked. When words would fail him, let him down, just as they had with Cecily. So he laid down on the bed Willow had just left, breathing in the scent of their passion as if it was the last time he would ever know it. For if William, who had devoted his life to them, had never been able to find the right words, what chance was there for Spike?
The End