The Adventures of Captain Peroxide and Deadboy
The Angel/Spike Zone of the BtVS Writer's Guild
Title: With a Whimper
Author: Meg
Email: [email protected]
Pairing: Spike/Angel
Rating: R
Summary: Even eternity ends sometime….
Feedback: Like cookies, feedback is necessary for a full and happy life.
Website: http://home.insightbb.com/~phaelstya
Disclaimer: Characters property of Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, Kuzui, Fox, and all kinds of people with more money than me. No copyright infringement intended.
Dedications: Happy Birthday to Amy! (I don't have to sing do I?) This is all for her.
Author's Notes: Many thanks to Lee for not spanking me, and to Siege for the wonderful beta job.
Dawn hangs on the horizon, sallow rays not yet strong enough to pierce the muddy shadow that clings to the lower atmosphere like death. Though cigarettes have long ago been outlawed, a column of grey-blue smoke hugs a pair of full lips before fading into the brightening sky. The only thing left to him aside from the swirling smoke serpents currently slithering from air to useless lung and back again is time. Years. Decades. Centuries. Relentlessly marching, bent on some grand finale to which a lonely, scattered few will bear witness and weep. Father Time and Mother Earth have no care for death, for destruction, or loss or love. Nor do they concern themselves with the scores of wayward children who turned their planet into a barren, windy wasteland of ash and dust. In fact the only thing that tickles their collective fancy any longer is the dirge, a cry signaling their plodding, relentless stride towards rebirth. Cigarette butt crushed to embers against crumbling brick, he stands, stretching with the supple feline grace of someone eternally caught on the cusp of true adulthood. Then again, the good points of a preternatural font of youth are moot when you feel every single blessed or cursed second of your 437 years.
"Things are winding down, here, aren't they?"
Blind hatred for someone you once loved beyond reason seems even less sensible these days.
"Yeah mate, they are." He pauses, tucking an errant wisp of wheat-colored hair behind his ear, words soft and heavy on his tongue like the Coney Island taffy Dru used to feed him in the thirties. The 1930's. Stuck in his fangs like confection jaw clamps, it did. The taffy. Not Dru. No, she fancied a stroll at daybreak and took it once when the stars whispered to her that she'd seen all the beautiful suffering she was meant to. No heady crimson-streaked denouement for his Princess. And humanity, such as it was, slouched slowly towards extinction with a whimper instead of a war cry.
Angel has always said he spit and sputtered like some mongrel fishwife, talking for the simple satisfaction of hearing his own voice. Now though, age and experience have taught him the value of silence. After a couple centuries you learn some things are better left unsaid, and the ones worth saying have been screamed, whispered, sobbed so many times they sound hollow and empty on the ear. Everything spun in a silken, shattered web of bittersweet longing or lust, and wrapped with the blasphemous blanket of a soulless creature's regret.
Once the all too fragile human tethers loosed the tentative hold they had on this earthly plane, he drifted. They both did. Not meeting again until apocalyptic circumstances drove them to a small village just outside Belfast. Angel still seeking his redemption. Spike in search of a memorable bloodbath. Creatures of habit, still.
When the fight ended, the world again spared from eternal damnation, they had clung together like two rusted scraps of steel wool. Scratching, snarling, screaming. Both glad to find themselves chafed by familiar skin. Each lost in the vacuum of the other's mind where a petite form with shining hair slumbered alongside her friends. Further still, to the time when gutters ran red with their spoils.
They'd never spoken of it. Blonde trailing behind brunette into hazy half-light, these not quite demons swept up into the bliss and warmth of family where once they walked alone.
"Not long now." Hairs prickling on the back of his neck as large callused fingers fluttered then settled against still tender skin.
"Guess not. Weeks, months maybe, a year tops." Loose curls falling forward into his eyes as he taps another slim cylinder of contraband against his thigh. "Care to wager on it?"
The hand resting lazily at his nape rears to cuff him across the back of his head. "Only you, Childe. Only you."
"Only me what, tall, dark and Neanderthal? And who in the name of Satan's sirens are you callin' a child?"
"Emphasis on the E, Will. Listen more carefully. You're the only creature I've ever known who's arrogant enough to place bets on the real end of the world, knowing full well you won't be around to collect winnings or pay the piper after the fact." Short sharp nails rake against his scalp, tangling in the gold, both of them fighting to keep the memories of tow-tressed others at bay. Hers had been the easy way. Snuffed out at the end of demon claws long before the true rot began to set and steam.
"What can I say? Always been a bit of a bloody gambler. I think you're just afraid you might lose. End up owing me something. And wouldn't it just bugger that soul of yours into the sweet hereafter."
"Can't have that now, can we?" Angel's thick fingers softer now stroking, petting rather than pulling. Muscular arms slip around a slim waist to pull Spike's cool sinewy flesh back against him. Lips, soft and moist, almost tender hovering near the blonde's ear. "Were you planning to sit up here brooding all day?"
"I don't brood," he snaps back, screwing his head away from the sweet supple mouth scant centimeters from wrapping itself around his earlobe. "That particular vice only looks good on linebacker vampires with dark, poofy hair and soulful eyes. Remembering is all. I'm allowed."
"Does it help?"
Icy hard gaze sweeps out across the sand, unfocused…seeing nothing of dune or rock. His only anchor, the light touches flickering on his abdomen and the flesh brushing against his neck. Thoughts skipping, tripping down hidden, brambled memory paths of whiskey, blood, cloves, pain, fang, family.
"Well?" One word so quiet as to be almost sub vocal, and if he hadn't felt as well as heard it, Spike might've thought it a mind-spectre.
"Hmmmm?" Body nestling back against wide, hard chest.
"I asked if it helps," he mumbles, voice oddly devoid of the usual stinging, irritated tone it takes when Angel has to repeat himself.
"No."
"Then don't." Hand dropping from his hair to wind with the other, both arms wrapping tightly around him, chiseled chin edging over to rest on his shoulder. Then Spike's fingers snaking amongst thick, dark locks his head turns ever so slightly to capture Sire lips with his own. The touch, the taste of his timeless flesh sends a flood of memories spilling over to splash silently on the ground. Breath soft and cool making his cheek tingle as Angel withdraws. "Let them rest, Will. They've earned it." Enormous paws fall firm against pale skin, spinning the blonde around. "Personally I'd rather spend my last days doing something more constructive than wallowing in long gone ghosts and guilt."
An undisguised look of shock flickers across Spike's animated features. His Sire never says things like that. Remorse has forever been his faithful bedfellow, giving the younger vampire a wide berth after he crept back into Angel's life a century and a half ago. And it's now, not before, that he realizes this is it. No last ditch acts of heroism, no split second flashes of brilliance, just this inevitable crumble into oblivion. Neither hide nor hair to mark that he'd once been here. In the end, only ashes sifting through the ones that already blanketed the ground would be all that remained. Nothing more, nothing less. For the moment, however, unlife rolls on much the same as it has for ages. What his Sire has planned for these final fleeting moments is anyone's guess.
"So enlighten me, Peaches. Just what would you like to do before the lights go out?"
"You."
A derisive snort extinguishes the flame intended to light Spike's second fag. Not as if he can help but laugh when Angel says things like that. "And exactly how is that different than any other bloody day, Angel? We shag like minxes, not that I'll ever claim to know what their mating practices entail. Somehow I think you get the idea." This time, Zippo meets Marlboro without incident and the blonde sighs heavily around the smoke. "So why?"
"You're really asking that question?"
"Yeah. What of it?"
"I want to make love to you until the world ends, and you're asking me why?"
"Oh." A pregnant pause ended with the sharp flick of wrist that sends a half-spent cigarette sailing over the roof's edge and down. "Well, when you put it that way…"
Spike sheds his second skin, clothes scattered like breadcrumbs, leaving a trail of black in his wake as he strides toward their shared bedchamber. His lithe, lean form framed in the doorway for mere moments when he pauses, wiggling a sculpted backside at his Sire. And the slow, low burn that started in the deep, dark of Angel's gullet flares up, consuming him as each step closes the distance between him and his once-loved, once-hated, loved-again Childe.
Damp, musty air mingling with the heady aroma of old and new arousal assails his nostrils as Angel creeps slowly down the steep stone staircase. He finds Spike already sprawled out across silken sheets, hand languidly stroking his erection.
"This what you fancy, then?" Pale, slender fingers sweep across sensitive flesh and he brings them to his mouth, the picture of a sulking child suckling on his thumb. Tongue darting out between swollen pink lips as he looses the digit with an audible pop. "Want me hard and aching for you? Howling your name to the rafters until I can't remember mine?" Light feathery touches dance down across his silken skin as his fist reclaims its grip. "Until we get so lost, so tangled in blood and bond we both forget where and when and what? Can you drown the shades in screams, Angel?" Sighing softly, he turns onto his side, propping a sharp chin against his idle hand. "Will it help? Can you spill centuries of sorrow onto sheets and skin? Rutting out all the loss and love and hate and bloody fear until we're nothing but phantoms ourselves?"
Short silence broken by the quiet rasp of a zipper just before Angel nudges his pants down over his hips, followed closely by the whisper of cotton on skin when he tugs off his shirt.
"No, Childe. We can't. Those burdens are ours to bear, and only when we're stuck between cracks in the stone will we no longer be forced to shoulder them." Mattress dipping slightly as brunette slides in next to blonde, fingertips playing gently across the taut muscles of Spike's chest. "This is solace. A paltry echo of the love I've always had for you. And if eternity ends today, I want it to end right here. The only place I've ever been whole, happy, sated. I want it to end in you, Will."