Title: Blood Like Roses
Author: Mandy C
Email: amanda@beingdrowned.com
Summary: "You can't stand the thought of them finding out what you've become." Three itty-bitty vignettes on Buffy and Spike's relationship.
Spoilers: "Buffy" season 6.
Rating: NC-17
Disclaimer: If I owned 'em, Buffy and Spike would never have gotten together (and what fun would that have been?), and I wouldn't have been woken up at 4 a.m. to write this garbage.
Distribution: I'd love for you to put this on your site, but let me know first. All of my stories are archived on http://beingdrowned.com/fanfic, and most are archived on http://fanfiction.net/~mandyc
Feedback: This is definitely a break from what I've done before. I'm curious to hear what people think about it. E-mail at amanda@beingdrowned.com.
Notes: Nope. I got nothin'. No excuses. Except that I wrote this at four o'clock in the morning, when I decided to stop trying to fall asleep. Actually, that's a damn good excuse. Anyway, this is not meant to be one coherent piece: just snapshots. They're in a vaguely chronological order.

"I'm in your system now. You're gonna crave me, like I crave blood." --Spike, "Wrecked"


I.

She thinks of it as masturbation: sliding up and down on his cold hard plastic cock and his cold hard plastic chest. Even friction and the heat in her core can't make him feel human.

After she's done, she pulls on her black panties and size one leather pants. She's still losing weight.

The first time she fucked him, she kept her eyes screwed tightly shut.

They don't kiss anymore. His corpse and her steely, muscled body slide past each other, never melting, never healing, never leaving a lasting impression. He only serves to fill one tiny gap in the abyss that has swallowed her whole, and he knows this. Still, he doesn't complain when she shows up uninvited, all tousled blonde hair and spaghetti straps. He doesn't complain when he comes in her mouth, or when she cries out as he slams into her.

She showed up six weeks ago with cuts splayed across her face and collarbone. He told her, All the light's gone out of your eyes, love.

She punched him across the face and sent him sprawling to the cold floor. Don't call me that, she spat, glaring down at him.

He propped himself up on his elbows. What's that, love? She hit him again. That's why you come here, isn't it, love? You don't want your precious gang to see that your pretty green eyes have gone dark, hmm? You can't stand the thought of them finding out what you've become.

She straddled his hips and leaned forward. And what have I become, huh?

He flipped her onto her back and growled close to her ear. What you always were inside, he said, unzipping her fly. A whore, he said, reaching into her panties and plunging his fingers into her. A monster, he said as he pulled down his pants one-handed and guided his erect cock towards her entrance. He pushed into her, hard. A dead thing. Like me.

He thinks of it as training. He'll turn her into ice and she'll never feel the pain again.

II.

Now that he owns her, she's not allowed to close her eyes. He makes her beg for it, say his name with every plea. She chants it like a mantra or a dark, primal prayer, asking him to hurt her, to fill her with his cold cock and his dead seed, to do it hard and fast and over and over so she won't feel anything anymore. Like maybe the numbness between her legs will spread to her ankles, her hands, the backs of her eyelids. Wipe out the memories of another pair of cold arms that would have held her. Wipe out the voices that echo so sorrowfully in her skull: It doesn't have to be like this.

She knows it does. He calls her demon, animal, slutbitchcuntwhoremistake. She came back wrong, he says, and she knows it's true.

If she were right, she wouldn't go back every night to these comfortless arms and icy, relentless eyes.

He thrusts into her.

One, killing Angel.

Two, Riley leaving.

Three, her mother dying.

Four, losing Giles.

Five, heaven.

Six, heaven.

Seven, heaven. Eight. Nine and she can't think fast enough so she stops. Heaven.

One million, Hell.

She feels like her insides are burning and she screams but the pain is good. It's deserved. And she'll leave with a little less hope and a little less pain than she came with.

She knows that this hell is the only solace the world can provide.

III.

All he really wants is to break her.

He knows it's working. She doesn't fit in with anyone else, and he is more than willing to take up their slack. She is intoxicating: the softness of her hair, the scent of her skin, the delicate workings of her tongue. She is the most beautiful creature he has ever seen, his Slayer.

He doesn't tell her these things.

Instead, he tells her what she needs to hear. What he needs her to hear, what she needs to realize before she'll let herself go to him. He tells her that she belongs in darkness, that she belongs with him in the shadows.

She is becoming a thing of the darkness now. The radiance has gone out of her smile and her eyes. She is dead to the humanity she worked so hard to save.

She isn't the woman he fell in love with, and both of them know it. Neither one of them cares.

It bothered him the first few times. He'd seen the way she acted around Angel, around Riley. She was sweet, soft, feminine. With him, she was just an animal, acting on instinct and lust. Her spark was gone. She was still a good lay, but it would have been better if he hadn't known her when she was whole.

Now, seeing her as a shadow of what she used to be, it felt like fucking a corpse.

Then he decided that since he was a corpse as well, it was probably all right.

She walks outside without a word, leaving him alone, as always.

He doesn't say I love you when they're together like that. He isn't gentle. If he held her, kissed her, it would be the end. She could get that anywhere. What she got from him was something she could find nowhere else.

It isn't enough, really. But he'll take what he can get.

Sometimes he dreams about taking her, impaling her neck with his teeth and inhaling her life force. She lies beneath him, eyes wide and frightened as he drinks her. He feels her energy coursing through him, his arteries and veins seem to come alive with the heat of her blood. He can almost feel her pulse in his neck.

He tears out of her neck, leaving a gaping wound, and blood pours out into a pool the color of dying roses. He laps it up greedily. Sweet and silky, delicate and strong. He gets drunk off of this sweet ambrosia. There is nothing like the taste of a Slayer.

Finally she says it, dying, gasping, IloveyouIloveyouIloveyou and that's when he knows that it's a dream. He snaps awake to his empty bed.

All he really wants is for her to love him, but he knows that's impossible.

For now, he settles for need.