When we were lovers, we didn't love. We did everything but, he thought as he looked at her face and brushed her hair away from her neck, stroking the side of her head. His obsession, her desperation, and sex don't add up to love, Spike had realized at some point, he didn't remember when. Maybe when they'd both finally crossed the lines they'd drawn separately, before they'd known each other. They'd acted like lovers but they had each been on their own journey, one-way trains to nowhere, passing each other on different tracks in the dark. Now they loved, but they did not act like lovers.
He held her in his arms, her breath quiet and the wounds on her face so vivid yet in the darkness. He'd found Buffy sitting with her back against a concrete retaining wall for a culvert that ran along a field far outside the town. Sobbing quietly, arms around knees, weight of the world sagging her shoulders down. He'd washed off the sweetly sickening wine and gone looking for her, bloodhound to her scent. Before he sat down next to her, he took his coat off and put it over her shoulders. These days they didn't always have to show their awareness of one another, and she acknowledged him with a brush of her fingertips along his arm.
"You have to make decisions," he said. "No matter the outcome, sometimes just waiting is as bad a decision as action." He moved his arm over her shoulders and drew her tight; she placed her hand flat against his chest.
"I can't..." The ghost of her courage hovered around her, but he knew she couldn't see it, had lost whatever tangible connection to it she'd relied on before.
"You can. You will. You're the one taught me to be strong, Buffy. Everything that happened... I'd still be back there, probably just a decaying heap of dust, if it wasn't for you."
"No. You taught me something. About just how far it's worth going for someone else. I can't be that strong anymore. I don't think I have it left in me now." He slid her sideways, cradled in his arms, head resting against his chest. She was so warm; truths were so cold.
"Did it for all the wrong reasons. I look behind me and see all those burned bridges, the mistakes... never knew what I needed till you showed me." Sometimes he thought he was in too much of a rush to fade from her life, as if by his absence he could make her work better. But when he looked down the road a ways, he could sometimes see her there, waiting for him. The look on her face the same one she wore when she unchained him from the First's dark hole.
"If you don't love, you won't get love. You reminded me of that," she said quietly. "I sometimes wondered if I could be as strong as someone who would endure what you endured just for the chance to be with the person they wanted. Even if I didn't want you to do it... I understood the sacrifice."
"You did that every bloody day with Angel when I first knew you. Look. We gonna sit here and quibble over who's stronger than who?" Spike laughed a little, but Buffy didn't. He wrapped her up more tightly in the coat, began rocking her back and forth a bit and humming some vague tune low in his throat. After a time, when she'd closed her eyes, he said, "They won't give up on you. Might look that way at first, but they won't. They can't be strong without your strength. They know that."
"Nothing is worth this. Nothing they could ever have felt for me is worth this. Show me. Show me how to survive this, because I don't know." Her voice was twisted with pain, every muscle in her body quivering with the tension of just living.
"Sleep right now. We'll figure it out in the light." There hadn't been many times in his life he'd pulled out the rubbishy hypno tricks he'd learned from Dru, but if ever there was a time for them it was now. He stared at her, focused in on her pupils, willing her to let go and relax, until he could feel her melt away in his arms. Her eyelids slowly drooped, and her breathing slowed.
He'd watched Buffy like this for a bit now, and it would be getting on morning soon, so he'd have to rouse her. But he knew her by now, knew she was done with the hiding and the crying, and would go back and do it all again, because that's what slayers did and that's what Buffy did better than any other slayer. Spike had thought she wanted him around because he could fight; now he understood that she wanted him there to love her. That that's where she got her strength from. She'd accepted it from others before, now she was ready to accept it from him. Oh, she'd never ask it; somehow they'd moved past the asking and the telling to someplace else.
A place where they loved, but were not lovers. Before they'd been alone
even when they were together. Spike would never let her be alone again.
She would stand her ground now, and he would stand with her.
End
4/26/03