lucetilogs | you gave your heart to me

you gave your heart to me

Who: [Bad username or site: univalent title= @ livejournal.com] & [Bad username or site: slaying title= @ livejournal.com]
What: The vampire and the Slayer work through the war and just a few of their abundant issues.
When: Backdated - last full evening of the draft.
Where: Battlefield/Dorms
Summary: It's a lot of violence with an extra punch of emotional turmoil. This is their typical canon recipe for sentimentality.
Rating: R (violence, etc)

Buffy closed her eyes tight against one more spray of blood. She felt it hit her face, warm enough to cause her stomach to heave with an instinct of disgust. It was a sign that even her resolve was beginning to tarnish. It wasn't that she enjoyed killing. Or, at least, it wasn't the kill she enjoyed. The fight was separate to that. The punches, the hits, the bruises and the adrenaline. They were all so easily separated from that final blow, the scythe slicing roughly through the base of a person's wings. Just like the General. It was that much harder when they didn't burst into a cloud of dust. So much more personal.

The Slayer had fared well enough throughout the week of battling. A few serious injuries, but they had been dealt with. Tonight, fighting in the eerily extra black-and-white moonlit night, she had collected an assortment of superficial cuts and slashes. Her jeans were torn on both knees--it could have been from any number of attacks. She couldn't remember which ones, specifically. Far too focused on the task at hand. She tugged back. Hard. Disengaging her weapon from deep in the back of her latest enemy. In the early days of the battle, she had tried telling herself not to care too much because--enemy or not--these were people and they would come back. Just like the rest of the dead in Luceti. Only that rationalization lost its appeal rather quickly. Resurrection rarely translated to hope for Buffy Summers.

She breathed out. There were so few members of the Third Part left in their little slice of Hell. She dropped out of slaughter-mode for a moment to try and catch her comrade's eyes. Spike. She knew he was close. She could feel the vampire's vampire-ness all the more strongly thanks to the removal of whatever restrain the village normally had in place on her abilities.

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"Don't really have the right to withhold them, given what I am and what I've done," tumbled out of his mouth. He didn't necessarily mean her as he did with second chances as a whole, for it had yet to click into place what exactly she was getting at. "Doesn't mean I'm going to give them. Not having that right and obeying it are two completely different things and obeying, not really sitting firm in the seat I was told to sit in. I'm more standing against the wall in the back, because let's face it, watching the teacher squirm is a hell of a lot more fun than caving to direction."

He smirked slyly at that, but her looked made his own melt off his face. She was... She couldn't, could she?

Spike took a step back, then two forward - a third, then stopped. "You're not...asking what I think you're asking, are you?"

"No, I'm not asking." She stood in place, arms quick to fold over her chest. "Not yet, at least. I mean--it's more like I'm asking about asking. Not actually...asking." Her babble kicked it into high gear.

Congratulations, Spike. The teacher was squirming. Except it might have been more accurate to say that the Slayer was shaking. She felt her nerves rather keenly. It wasn't because of what she thought the felt. It wasn't even from any fear of rejection. The slight tremble came from her pride, as it took a beating. To turn to Spike with any kind of supplication was not necessarily the best food for her ego.

"I said I didn't regret it and I meant it." She began again, quickly. This was an easily decoded reference to evening they had tried (and ultimately failed) to find Drusilla. "And I just thought..."

Buffy shook her head. "Never mind. This? This was a bad idea. The baddest of bad ideas. I call do over."

Buffy isn't good with words and Spike knows it. He likes that they're back, partially, into a realm of the know. Her word failure is a bit adorable, but that's not getting voiced. In other situations he'd voice it to be sweet or voice it to get on her nerves, but right now, he doesn't much trust himself to speak in the face of the plate of information she's just served him. She wants a second chance with him. It's not the second chance that's got him, it's the with. When they were...whatever they were two years ago, it had been about the sex for her, about her feeling and taking out her confusion on him where she wouldn't allow herself to with others. He'd taken and given selfishly back then because he'd been incapable of fully understanding it due to the lack of his soul. Now that he had it..

This wasn't the same confused girl who'd clawed her way out of her own grave after being brought back to life by her best friend. This was a young woman tempered by battle and losses, both her own and others. And he'd never seen her look quite so serious. If she was playing... He'd deal with it and kill her for it or something later. He took chances and didn't think. It was his way. Thinking was overrated.

"No, no do over. No need for one. No need for asking, either, love. You should already know. If you want one, you've got one."

There were other things that she wanted to say. Other paltry offerings. Like telling him that he had been right, that time on the Hellmouth. She had told him I love you and he had called her bullshit. But she wanted to explain how she thought that, now, she could feel that way; however, that had way too much of a chance to turn ugly. To be misconstrued. To make it sound like she was forcing things.

Well, wasn't she? Buffy closed her eyes for a brief second. "I want one." Her arms unfolded. Folded. Unfolded again. "I'm a walking disaster and you're a walking...typhoon." Her shoulders sagged.

"And you said it yourself that we can pretty much practically manage not destroying each other and--right now? That's a serious plus in the dating column--" Buffy snapped her mouth shut. She didn't really just say that. Please, let her just tap her heels together and wish those words unsaid.

Yes, she had been full of bullshit then, down in the Hellmouth, hadn't she? He'd seen it as clear as he could see his own hand if he were to wave it in front of his face. Spike didn't know what he was more startled by now, though, the fact that she was actually offering this - asking this or the fact that she was genuinely sincere about it. Part of him felt like he'd wake up any minute from some mockery of a dream, for it wasn't like he hadn't had those before. His mind liked to taunt him, especially now that there was a soul attached to it, which just made the kind of fucked up dreams he was capable of producing all the more special. (Special, of course, being code for 'horrifying' and something he would sooner walk into traffic than admit was bothersome.)

"You sure about this? 'Cause I'm not in the mood to play push-me-pull-you or whatever it was we were doing back then. If you want to do this, then we're going to do it the way it should be and not like we're having secret club meetings where instead of a secret handshake, I get punched in the face while you scamper off."

"I'm sure. I mean--it's not as out of the blue as it sounds." And that was about as wordy as Buffy was going to get on just how much thought she has put into this possibility coming to pass. It hadn't been easy to come to this conclusion. In fact, Buffy would probably never had acted on it if not for the strange comforting cooperation of the battle. It had strengthened the already strongest link between the two of them--what they could offer each other in the most basic, primal capacities for violence and the instinctive support they could give. It had made her feel just close enough to take this leap. Buffy could only hope that it would not prove to be as fatal as her last split-second jump.

She untied her hair and redid the elastic-held ponytail. More fidgeting. "I'm not interested in getting back on the rollercoaster of secrets and subterfuge, either. If we do this, we do it right." She was unable to meet his eyes at that point. "I do it right. I mean...I will. I want to. No face-punching." Another pause. "Okay, minimal face-punching."

Spike reached out, placing his fingers gently under her chin and tipping her face up so that she would be forced to meet his eyes. "No playing, then. No games, no secrets and subterfuge. ...yes." His fingers trailed along the line of her jaw to her ear, where he traced the shell of it with his fingertips and slipped his hand against her hair.

"Your call, love. You've already seen my cards. Showed them to you long ago."

"My hand's a little more recently dealt, but..." Buffy shrugged and did not shy away once eye contact had been re-established. Time to throw the baby out with the bathwater. "But that's it. If there's gonna be an anyone, then it's gotta be someone who already owns the cliff notes. I don't deal so well with the slow reveal and even a blind and deaf and dumb chihuahua can see that there's sparkage, here."

John Hart had seen it. So had others. Buffy was now becoming retroactively amazed that they had kept their indiscretions from the Scoobies for so long. She nodded and planted a palm firmly against Spike's chest. Vampires were her type, after all. While she felt him not breathing, her own breath quickened in a heady mix of nerves and insecurity grounded in the firm believe that this could definitely have gone worse.

"I want you because of those reasons and...and because of what you've got to offer." She licked her lips, quick to clarify: "Not because of what I can take. That was then and this is now."

And this was probably the last time she would go so far as to verbalize the difference. It came far too close to an apology and she did not like to do those.

Spike was well aware of how many saw the sparks between them. John Hart, Jack Sparrow - hell, he suspected even that doctor saw it. He'd either denied it or hadn't acknowledged it, for a variety of reasons that were largely wanting to not fall back on old habits he hadn't sought out for a reason after he was de-ghostified and not wanting to deal with her outrage for letting on that there was something going on that wasn't there. Yet, apparently Spike had been wrong about that. There was something going on, he'd just missed it because seeing something there like this was such a shot in the dark that trying to aim and shoot hadn't been worth it.

Yet, here she was. Cards on the table, wanting him. Wanting him. If this was a dream, he was going to kill someone. ...more someone's.

"I already said yes, love. Don't need to keep on trying to convince me."

Buffy knew that it was herself that she kept on trying to convince. Time to shut up those last screaming nodes of common sense before they send her running from the room after punching Spike in the face just for good measure. But she realized that she was already past the point of no return. Having said so much, to back off now would be to relapse into the cruelty of the last time. And here he was, treating her so gently and handing the second chance over like it was nothing. Casual as could be. God, but she envied him for a fraction of a second. Buffy also knew that he could not be so cool and collected beneath the surface and this was because she knew him. The knowledge went both ways.

But she stamped down on that jealousy and instead took a step forward into scintillatingly new territory. This involved taking a step closer to Spike. One hand--the hand not currently engaged in pressing against his chest--reached to the back of the vampire's head. At the last moment, Buffy remembered being head-to-toe'd in other people's blood. Oh, well. What was another slice of temptation thrown into the mix?

Buffy leaned upward to kick-start a kiss that was newer than anything she'd had in a while. New because there was an important lack of shame involved in this kiss. And an absence of weighty guilt. It wasn't kicked off quickly or furtively. The scariest part was just how new it felt to open up this Buffy to the vampire. This moment was still held down by enough hesitation to power a whole production of Hamlet, but it was a very small taste of an unforeseen possibility. Being more then enemies in arms or violent Sunnydale equivalents of booty-calls.

To be fair, Spike was half expecting that knee-jerk reaction in the face of such naked truth. He'd been wound up tense, prepared to take a hit and was honestly surprised with himself for not flinching away when she reached up. Perhaps it had been because her hand had been relaxed, fingers out instead of curled into her palm in a fist ready to strike. Once her intentions became clear, he rather happily met her halfway in that kiss, letting actions, rather than words, show just what this offer - no, this request of hers meant to him. Neither were very good with words. Best to let that which wasn't their futile attempts at making the English language work for them do the expressing.

And express he did, with unabashed fervor as he gathered her into his arms and held her in place, kissing her like he hadn't ever before.

Old urges pushed hard. Kissing Spike felt like opening a can of well-worn worms. It made Buffy want to kick things into old gears--where kisses turned tough and needy and laced with all the fire that secrecy could muster. And it could muster a lot. She was having difficulty accessing that softer, more romantic side of intimacy. The one reserved for--she'd choke on the word if she ever tried to say it aloud--boyfriends.

Slowly, she relaxed the dig of her nails into the back of Spike's neck. The rough edges could be electrifying. The two of them knew that better than anyone. But she had to show him that she was capable of more than that. Of more than greeting him with just her animal wants and instincts.

She was thrilled to feel how such relaxation paid off. From what reserves did Spike conjure up his own half of this exchange? Buffy--vaguely humbled by his fervour--turned soft and leaned into the kiss. That is...until she had to stop (predictably) to breath. But it wasn't the gulping, desperate affair of past instances. Nope. She breathed calmly, pulling barely back and setting her forehead against his shoulder.

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you gave your heart to me

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/keywords, since they seem providential

so fitting.

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