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Fic: Infinitas Infinitio Infinitus (4/5)
Also, don't judge Buffy too harshly here. She really is making progress.
Title: Infinitas Infinitio Infinitus
Fandom: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Characters/Pairing: Buffy/Spike, Angel, Dawn
Genre: Romance, Angst
Timeline: post-"Not Fade Away"
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Learning to live is a lot harder than learning to die. And just when Buffy masters one, she learns she's a novice at the other.
Installment: Chapter three of five.
Previous chapters: One Two Three
Chapter Four
He follows her scent, catches up with her in
The moon is full above the bare arms of the trees, and he pauses a moment to watch her. Her hair flashes silver in the half-light, the wine color of her dress now dark as shadows, and he can see the tiny clouds of her breath condensing in the January air. She’s forgotten her coat, and he has no idea how she’s fighting in those heels (though after twenty some odd years, you’d think he’d’ve figured it out), but the cold and the supposed lack of balance haven’t slowed her down.
Not, at least, until the vamp calls and five others coalesce out of the shadows. He sees her waver for a moment, and then he’s at her back, slipping into game face, falling into the fight, and, for the first time since he awoke alone, things feel—almost—right.
Almost, because the first time his back brushes hers, she tenses. Almost, because other than a few jeers from the vamps, the rasp of her breath and thud of her heartbeat, and the slaps and scuffles of battle, they fight in silence. Any other night, any other battle, they’d be bantering, trading quips, innuendos, flipping the words back and forth and never letting them drop, throwing out the occasional taunts at their enemies. There would be laughter, not this heavy silence.
But the motion is familiar, the warmth of her back occasionally brushing against his, the anticipation of where she’ll be: the dance. They still do this better than anything; he still loves it more than anything.
Minutes later, clouds of dust settling around them, he finds himself lying on his back on the ground beside her. She’s panting for breath and he watches it puff above her, then stares up at the moon through the tree branches. He listens to her breathing, the low hum of traffic beyond, the wind in the trees.
“Better?” he finally asks.
“A little.”
He wants to reach for her, pull her into his arms. She probably isn’t feeling the cold yet, not with her blood pounding through her veins like that, but he knows that her skin would be nearly as cool as his.
But he doesn’t reach for her. Because they still haven’t gotten there yet. Closer. But not yet.
“I’m not okay,” she says after a moment.
“I’m not askin’ you to be.”
“Good. ‘Cause I’m not.”
He’s not usually good at this, but he waits. Then she sighs.
“Tomorrow I’m talking to Giles and
“Okay.”
Something sinks in his stomach, though, even as he answers; he hadn’t known till now how much he was depending on her being beside him forever; even if he knows intellectually, as Dawn pointed out, that she wouldn’t be, that sooner or later some nasty thing would get a taste of her, he still imagines a forever for them.
Maybe that was why he never pushed the issue, never asked her to face it, because the knowledge that she would be with him was too fragile, too precious. At the beginning with her, when he found her after the alley battle that gave Angel his Shanshu, when she chose him instead of a normal life, there had been room for nothing in his soul but bliss. After a time, though, fear crept in: only the tiniest bit, so small that he almost couldn’t have named it, but there nonetheless: one day he would lose her.
But demons think only of the moment, even if souls are all about the past and the future, and so he let that portion of himself remind him how to live only in the present.
But slowly, Buffy’s perpetual youth became undeniable, and hope crept in. He never examined it too closely, but his soul throbbed with the promise of having her by his side until the end (what that end would be, he never really took the time to examine). Heaven is not a possibility for him, he knows that, but Buffy with him for decades, perhaps, if they’re lucky, centuries—how could he want for more?
But it isn’t till this moment, till she speaks of rejecting any chance at that forever, the he realizes with a sudden spasm of terror how much he’s grown to accept as fact the certainty of her immortality.
“Don’t you have anything to say?” Buffy’s voice is sharp, but he can hear a hint of desperate fear in it. It’s that fear that keeps his anger in check.
“You know I only want to see you happy. If that’s what it takes, luv….” He isn’t sure that he manages to keep all the negative emotions that are eating away at him—fear, anger, hurt—from his voice.
“And what will you do if one day, after I’ve lost everyone I care about, I go after some demon on purpose—a really strong one I know I can’t beat—or an apocalypse? What then?”
Again, that sick feeling he’d never felt until today. He knows exactly what she means. Buffy would never out-and-out commit suicide, not ever. But Spike knows Slayers better than anyone.
Suddenly he’s back in the alley behind the Bronze in a Sunnydale that lives forever in his mind, kneeling in front of her, her disdain and lust, revulsion and fascination burning white-hot as she looks down at him, his own desperate longing fueling his bitter words: Every Slayer has a death wish. Even you. Nikki, she had been ready to die, had come to him to be her partner in her last dance, knowing she wouldn’t win. The Chinese Slayer was the same. And he’d even seen the signs in Faith in the days leading up to her death.
Yes, if Buffy couldn’t die naturally, if she had to watch all of her friends and family leave her for death, sooner or later—probably later; Buffy is nothing if not stubborn—she would go chasing death till it caught her.
And even if she didn’t, Dawn’s voice echoes in his head, it would find her anyway. Sooner or later.
“I’d be fighting right beside you. You know that.”
She leaps to her feet, then reaches out to drag him to his. As soon as he’s upright, she shoves him, and he stumbles back. It’s as close to hitting in anger as she’s come in nearly twenty years.
“You’re not supposed to be all calm and reasonable! You’re supposed to fight me!”
Her words unlock the door holding back his anger, and he feels his game face slip into place as it all comes rushing through him. “Oh, yeah? That what you want Slayer? Want us to go back to hitting? Thought we’d moved past all that.”
“You’re supposed to fight to keep me here!”
He can tell by her tone that she’s as aware of her own unreasonableness as he is, but she’s clinging to it with both hands.
“You think I haven’t been doing that since you clawed your way out of your grave? Can’t say I’ve always gone about it the right way, but I do it every soddin’ day! My unlife is all about giving you yours!”
She opens her mouth, probably to throw a sharp retort at him, but he cuts her off before she can even begin.
“You think there’s anything for me here? You die, Dawn, Angel, Dawn’s kiddies, what have I got left? The mission, that’s what, and I’ll fight it till the day I dust, but you can’t curl up with a mission or laugh with it or love it. So you’re it, Buffy. If you think for one second that I wouldn’t give up everything I have to keep you safe and happy beside me, you don’t know anything about me, even after all this time. But I also won’t keep you here if all you want to do is rest. Of course you’re homesick for your heaven, and the Powers are fucking bastards to give you at taste of it then keep it from you. I know that. And I want you here beside me, always. Want to spend the rest of eternity exploring every single thing this world has to offer—with you. But I know that isn’t fair. And I know it won’t really be forever—even my century and a half isn’t that long compared to eternity, and who knows if you’ll have even that long? I know all of that. Don’t you think I know it?”
Silence then, a kind even the sounds of traffic and wind, the noises of a city going about its night, can’t penetrate. He’s never known any part of
She stares at him for a few moments, breathing harshly, the exposed skin of her arms and neck silver as her hair in the moonlight. He can’t really see her eyes, and for once he has no idea what’s going on in her head.
“Spike.”
The way she says his name threatens to tear him to shreds: husky, broken, scared, loving. The way she says his name tells him they still have a chance.
“I know,” she whispers, her voice stricken. “Oh, Spike. I know.”
Her hand steals up and caresses his cheek: gentle and loving, but she’s trembling. His eyes sink shut. She slips her thumb into his mouth, cuts it on his fang, just a little. A drop of blood wells up, and he tastes it, the essence of her: rich, warm, heady, and so fucking alive that he almost can’t stand it. It’s rare for them still, this offering of blood, a gift she gives only when she knows he most needs reassurance of a kind not even words or sex can bestow, and it still retains the aura of something sacred, holy. He holds her taste there in his mouth for a long moment and doesn’t swallow her down till she removes her thumb.
Then she spins away from him and is gone, running through the trees back in the direction of Giles’s.
After a moment, he shakes back into his human face and follows.
Continued here