Title: Daemons Luminati
Chapter 3: Light
Author: Kalima
Contact: hkalima1@aol.com
Rating: R
Summary: Can a vampire be dragged, kicking and screaming into the light? We'll see. Spike's a complicated guy, isn't he?
Author Notes: Herself, the most, in bunches. Liz who's unapologetic lust for Spike first made me want to march in Spike-pride parades – we're here, we love evil soulless things, get used to it!
This is dedicated to the yellow balloon. All creatures that can love and grieve have souls.
Story Notes: Season 6 through, oh, I don't know, let's say after she wore the lilac blouse of breaking up and before she wore the gray robe of victimization.
Completed just before my birthday in July 2002.
Warnings: none
Disclaimer: Spike, Buffy, et al belong to Mutant Enemy and Joss and all those people with a legal posse who could come after me and sue my ass if they wanted. Still. Blood. Turnip.
~Light~
...deserted by the blackbirds and the staccato of the staff
and though you trust the light towards which you wend your way
sometimes you feel that all you wanted has been taken away
you will walk in good company
_~Jane Siberry~_
The world was a snow globe turned inside out. Instead of flakes of plastic, the snow was made of cottonwood seeds and dandelion fluff set floating on the ether, stirred by the nearly imperceptible movement of wings.
Tara wondered how she'd failed to notice this simple fact before. Delight bubbled up and came laughing out. Yes! It really was all a matter of perception!
No. Not cottonwood or dandelion. The stuff of light these were.
The fuzzy bits of light danced over her flesh, warming her and stimulating her even as she felt her limbs go languid. A vague thought meandered. Deadly radiation? What felt like the after-effect of a full body massage was actually organs melting, bones crumbling into dust? Was that it? She flexed her fingers experimentally. Reassured that her body still functioned, she focused her concentration on the dark mass of fear somewhere to her left.
Oh, poor thing! Poor trembling creature. It's okay. It's all right. She reached out, but the beast was trapped, cowering from the pinwheel light that bumped and bounced against its black little world.
There is a spider, a filigree button at the center of a web, spun sugar bright. It's a very pretty spider. It's a very pretty web. Caught on the last blazing spikes of the sun, suspended between the pinions of wings that span a universe. Reminds him of snowflakes, how there are no two alike. And who figured that out anyway? Who goes about comparing snowflakes to determine that somewhere somehow in billions of bits of crystallized water there weren't two exactly the same?
Doesn't matter.
Snowflakes, spider webs, just patterns burned onto his retinas. His retinas are fried most likely. They'd recover of course, because he's got all that supernatural mojo going on. Or they would, if he didn't happen to be on fire.
Not even a hot fire. He's burning nonetheless.
Are my eyes open or closed? Am I standing, sitting, or crouched? How many of them are dancing on the head of a pin inside my brain? Do the answers matter when one is ablaze?
When Buffy was a little girl she heard the expression "written in the stars" and, like a perfectly normal kid, took it literally. On nights like this one, she used to lie in the back yard of her house in LA hoping to see the stars writing in the heavens, imagining it would be kind of like seeing the witch in Wizard of Oz writing "Surrender Dorothy" in the sky with her broom stick only with a less scary message - something meant just for her, like "Hi Buffy!" maybe or "Buffy, the next Dorothy Hamill." It wasn't until she was twelve, not looking for it at all, so past those childish notions because she was in Junior High and wore mascara and lip gloss and an almost bra, that she saw what seemed to be the stars rearranging themselves overhead. Her stomach had done butterfly loop de loops and she silently congratulated herself. Oh my yes, she was special. Here was proof at long last. And she watched and she waited, breathless, trembling with a wonder she thought herself far too sophisticated to feel anymore. But unfortunately the message etched across the sky was as mysterious as the stars themselves, written in glyphs or secret letters of some secret alphabet. She had no idea what it said. Later she wondered why she hadn't thought of UFOs or that maybe she was hallucinating because of bad sausage pizza or any number of possibilities other than the really odd notion that stars were trying to tell her something she couldn't understand.
"Right," she said looking at those same stars from her porch in Sunnydale o'er the Hellmouth. "Probably said, 'Chosen Ones, Apply Here Now."
She remembered one afternoon not so long ago, after the flayed-alive, knife-to-the-bone activity that often passed for sex between them, discovering she'd been dozing, her cheek resting on Spike's stomach like the cool side of a pillow. She lay there for a bit pretending she was still asleep to save herself the sight of his smug contentment, and drifted off into a fantasy of him as an alien, the two of them star crossed lovers whose planets were at war. Sleeping with the enemy seemed tragically romantic under those circumstances, the crimes he'd committed more distant, less personal. It was war after all. They'd never meant to fall in love. It was simply destiny. Of course she'd leapt up and fled as soon as the concept "fall in love" wriggled into her semi-conscious mind - ran off "virtue fluttering" as he said.
Now, a sudden rush of raw feeling overwhelmed her, and it had no definition this feeling, just sharp in the gut as she jack-knifed forward, head to her knees, arms wrapped tight around her ankles, folded into the tightest little body-ball she could manage, hiding from stars and destiny and the terrible thing she'd convinced Spike to do because she wanted answers - answers that ultimately would make no difference.
~Poof. No more~
And if it were true for him...
"I'm going to have to stop punning while slaying," she whispered to the stars. But she wanted to flail and kick her legs and cry that it wasn't fair to her! How could she do what she did every night, fighting a war that was never going to end, if she couldn't slay vampires with a witty bon mot and a casual brushing of dust from her clothes? What if she condemned the souls they'd lost to a hell of non-existence - erased from continuity, from the promise of renewal, of recovery, of any hope?
"Vampires don't care, pet. It's not a part of us anymore. And I doubt a soul is some sort of conscious entity languishing in limbo and fretting over its fate."
Still, he didn't know for certain, did he? He'd admitted as much. And she had to know even if it didn't change what she had to do, or what she was destined to do.
Destiny sucked harder than a newly risen vampire.
The backdoor opened. "Whoa," Willow said softly, "Heavy-sigh alert. Should I fetch my bumbershoot?"
Buffy raised her head, saw Willow's green sneakers out of the corner of her eye. "I can't love him," she said to the shoes.
The shoes stepped down, and Willow's arm slid across her shoulders as she sat beside her on the porch steps. "Yup. He's no damn good. But hey, since when has that stopped any of us?"
"This isn't funny."
"I'm not - not making with the funnies. You can't love him. I get that. I don't think you should. Doesn't mean you don't."
"I don't. Not the way the he wants. I can't spare the room in my heart."
"Your heart is suddenly a 5x7 locker at U-Store-It?"
"I thought you weren't going to make with the funnies?"
"Look. I'm not advocating for Spike here, believe me, and this thing, with him and Tara - it troubles me. A lot."
"She's just being Tara. You don't have any reason to be jealous."
"That's not it. She doesn't know him like we do. He punched her in the nose once, but she's never had the broken bottle in the face or been pinned to a bed while he tried to-" she broke off, shimmied her shoulders to shake the memories loose and brush them off. "Okay, so he's changed - a little - and I'm willing to acknowledge that this change may be because of how he feels about you. But it wasn't all that long ago that he was all about killing everybody. And I know something happened between them. Something serious that scared her. So I don't get this sudden Spike lovefest..."
"But?"
"But...what you're saying right now about having no room in your heart? Big scaredy-cat bullshit. Love makes room for itself. You add new rooms to your heart house every time you love someone."
Buffy looked at her askance. "Mixed messages, here. And sorry, but...heart house?"
Willow grinned. "My reign as champion of metaphors may be coming to an end. I'm not suggesting you make a trip to Home Depot to build the Spike love room, I'm just saying...why impose limitations on the size of your heart?"
Head in hands again, Buffy moaned, "Is it love if I just don't want him to die?"
"Already dead. As I'm sure he'd point out if he were here. You know...you could be feeling this strange and unusual sensation some of us like to call compassion. Like, you know, the way you do for lions at the zoo. God, I hate zoos. Even those new-fangled habitat ones, with the big fakey Star Trek rocks and -"
Suddenly Buffy threw her head back and roared, and the roar that came out of her would have put a lion to shame. Willow slid sideways so fast that if she hadn't been wearing sturdy denim she would have got huge splinters in her behind.
"He loves me, Will. I mean loves me in a big romantic epic movie kind of way. With self-sacrifice and all that crap I can't possibly give back to him. Even if he wasn't, you know, a soulless vampire who for some stupid reason has decided to change his evil ways for me - I can't give the big love anymore. Not if I'm going to be saving the goddamned world all the time - and not if I - oh god Willow! What have I done?"
"Um...not really sure."
"It's just - I had to know. I needed to know if I'm-oh God-"
Willow waited, her eyes probing for any minute hint at the Big Truth she sensed was coming. Of course, with Buffy she'd learned the Truth had to be pried out with a crowbar sometimes, but she was willing to give it a few more seconds.
The whispered words were so low Willow wasn't sure she got them right. "I need to know if I'm a soul killer."
"What? Of course you're not! Why would you think-? What does that even mean?"
"There's this possibility when I dust a vamp, that somehow... somehow the human soul they lost when they were turned, that-that it sort of gets dusted as well. In a matter of speaking."
"Oh my God. But-no, that can't be right. Giles never said anything like-"
Buffy moaned, and her face fell into her hands. "He's going to die. I've sent him off to die."
"Wait. Okay. We're back to Spike now, right? I thought he was with Tara."
"She's - she's summoning the Luminati for him. At the Magic Box-"
"She's summoning...? Do you have any idea how crazy that is?" Willow was on her feet now, up and down the short steps, her arms stiff at her sides, fists balled up. "She didn't tell me that! She said she had a way to find out what they were or- or find them or something. She didn't tell me she was summoning demons!"
Buffy looked instantly horribly guilty. She gulped. "Calm down. It's okay. They're - they're angels."
Pacing the yard now. Stiff grass and pebbles squeaked a protest beneath the rubber treads of her sneakers. "Hello! Angels! Demons of Light!"
"But- but Tara's not the one in danger. She's a good guy. She's got the soul and everything. They won't hurt her. Spike's the one-"
"Soul schmoul, they don't care! They don't even have souls."
"No...angels have souls. Don't they have souls? They're good."
Willow waved away any and all distinctions along with Buffy's silly notions of good and evil. "It's a whole light or dark alignment thing. They're all demons, even according to Judeo-Christian tradition. It's just a matter of who they call boss."
"Oh. Oh crap."
"What are they doing, Buffy? How did he talk her into this?"
"He- he didn't. He didn't want to. I-I- it was my idea okay? She said she could call them and I talked him into it so he could find out-"
"Shitshitshit. Tara's done some dark stuff with us, with me -they'll totally sniff it out! Oh god. We have to go there. Buffy! We have to stop it, stop her-"
"I'll grab some weapons."
"Don't bother," Willow shouted over her shoulder as she ran. "Won't help."
It occurred to Buffy as she loped beside her and raced ahead that Willow's dark mojo wouldn't be any help either.
The first conscious memory of his life - the life in which he had a heartbeat - was of diffuse sunlight pouring through French doors. His mother was doing something mysterious to potted plants with an atomizer. He thought she was making them smell nice, because she had similar atomizers on her dressing table full of lemon verbena and Rose attar. As he watched her leaning, bending, turning; as he listened to the familiar rustle and squeaking noises that in later days would be associated with taffeta and whalebone stays and not merely mother, he was struck with the realisation that he and she were two distinct and separate beings. He was alone in his body, which meant that she must also be alone in hers, and that this was a wonderful, amazing thing. They were both inside their own unique containers. He tried to express this to her. But as he was not quite three he lacked the sophistication of language adequate to express the concept. The sheer awesome power of his discovery was misinterpreted as anxiety and the need for comfort.
"No, no, my darling boy! You're not alone," she exclaimed, drawing him into her lap. "Your mamma is here. She will always be with you. And you will always be with me, my beautiful, sweet little boy." Then she gave him her breast, which wasn't what he was after, but as she didn't offer the teat nearly as often as he desired only seemed right to enjoy it. How easily she'd seduced him away from his discovery.
Drusilla also seduced him with breasts, and the more alluring and mysterious promise of bare thighs above her stockings, and strange exotic words that made him gasp in wonder and alarm. Her voice and eyes told him the truth of himself, saw inside him and knew he was alone in there, special, unique in all the world. She took everything he'd become in his short life into her own body and gave it back to him transmogrified. The mingling of their blood was the blood of generations going back to the once-upon-a-time before there was Time. And he became everything. At once.
For a moment.
After that moment, the birth into darkness. Clawing his way out of the earth to find his new mother waiting even as his old mother wept beneath her mourning crepe somewhere far away. Baby bird feedings and learning to hunt.
He completely lost the desire to pour his pathetic soul onto the page. There was nothing left to pour. But he didn't feel empty. He'd become so much more than feeble expressions of soul and self. He was connected to all Life in the most intimate way possible. He took it away.
Yes, she'd saved him from mediocrity. From rejections, or possible acceptance, from marriage and fatherhood, money woes or success, sickness, aging and shuffling off the mortal coil, from becoming worm-food, decay. But she didn't save him from love, the bitch.
I burn for love, he thought and then began to laugh.
Spike was laughing. The fluffy bits of light stopped flinging themselves against the magic that protected him and began to multiply, filling up the room now, purging the shadows and softening the corners so that everything was illuminated, cold and bright and edgeless, making the dark dome near the wall seem like a haven. Tara's throat tightened. She couldn't breathe; it was in her mouth and nose and lungs, choking and gagging her at the same time, even the pores of her skin were clogged with light. She struggled to stand up, to warn Spike, or beg him for help, but her legs had the consistency of gummy worms.
Her throat opened as if to vomit out the light. She heard herself speaking instead and the voice that issued forth was legion.
"WHAT AMUSES YOU BEAST?"
So many voices in the one voice.
Spike tested his eyelids - blink, blink - then his eyes. Focus. He could see. He wasn't burning. A trick of their light. He was safe inside his circle. Soft dark in a ring of candles. The candles flames weren't moving though. Not a flicker. Static, glowing like little flame shaped bulbs. Beyond the circle, searing light had taken on the strange blue-white luminosity of an iceberg. He could still hear the annoying florescent hum of their wings, but saw only Tara in her white dress with her white white bones gleaming through, and her hair rimmed in white gold, and the flesh of her face layered over her skull like mother of pearl. He smelled lilacs and lemon blossoms and burnt sage, distinct, unmingled.
"The things I do for love. That amuses." His voice was raw as if he'd been screaming for hours. "Tell you what doesn't amuse - whatever you're doing to the witch, she's not liking it. Got this thing 'bout having her mind messed with by powerful beings. Pisses her right off."
"HER BODY IS OUR MOUTHPIECE. HER MIND IS YET HER OWN. WHY HAVE YOU SUMMONED US?"
"I have questions."
"YOU HAVE ANSWERS."
"What is it with you pure demon-types and your soddin' riddles? The questions are not my own. If you were as all-powerful as you like to think you'd know that, wouldn't you?"
"STEP OUT OF THE CIRCLE."
"Glinda advised me against it. Think she knew where she was at."
"YOU FEAR US."
"There's a little matter of the odds being in your favour-"
"YOU ARE WISE TO FEAR US, UNCLEAN THING. TO SUMMON THE LUMINATI ONCE IS FOOLISH. TWICE, DEADLY FOR SUCH AS YOU."
"Yeah, about that first time. Was it good for you, because I always like a cuddle after-"
"STEP OUT OF THE CIRCLE. WE WILL ANSWER."
The voices in the one voice seemed suddenly too much for Tara's body. It shuddered, and shimmied, a subtle eruption from within. The light covered her eyes like frost.
"What are you doing to her? Stop it!"
"THIS VESSEL LOSES COHESION. IF YOU WANT ANSWERS STEP OUT AND ASK THEM NOW."
Fuck! Of course she couldn't contain them. Of course he would have to choose yet again some pointless noble gesture that would avail him nothing. He wasn't the one that wanted answers. He knew the goddamned answers already. When I go, so goes my soul. The End. He knew at that moment he wasn't ever going to get what he wanted - that illusive effulgent something Dru promised so long ago. The lightness of being he'd hoped to find in the darkest part of darkness, in the poetry of love and death, in bloodsong, or Buffy's body. He would never ever get what he wanted.
"It's easier if you let go," Tara said. And the softness of her true voice hurt his ears.
~Chiaroscuro~
I almost ran over an angel.
He had a nice big fat cigar.
"In a sense," he said, "you're alone here,
So if you jump, you best jump far."
_~Tori Amos~_
No Admittance. Xander was attempting to challenge the admonition on the training room door with an axe. One of those fireman types you were supposed to "break glass in case of emergency" to use. Buffy could never figure out the point of having an axe behind glass or really what the average guy was expected to do with one. Neither could Anya apparently. She was pressed close to Xander, looking drawn and anxious, digging her manicured nails into his arm that held the axe. He spared only a cursory glance for them as they burst into the shop, as if he'd been expecting a Slayer and a Witch arriving any moment.
"We can't open the door and she doesn't want me to use the axe," he explained. His calm seemed preternatural, stillness before the inevitable apocalypse he'd learned to anticipate from years of living on the Hellmouth. Considering the high frequency whine in the air and the molten intensity of light Buffy saw leaking out around the edges of the door he wasn't far off. "I've tried to explain that I can replace the door at no cost but-"
"I don't care about the freaking door!" Anya cried. "I'm afraid of what will come out through the hole you make in it! There must be thousands of them in there. What if Tara wasn't strong enough to put up proper warding spells? Or... oh god. Oh god. This door could be part of the circle. If we break the circle then - oh god." She clutched at Xander's biceps, her entire body quivering with terror. "The cavalry is here. Can we leave now? Please, Xander."
Of course she wanted to leave. Who could blame her? Anya had been a favoured demon of the Lower Beings for a thousand years. Behind door number one was likely a painful reckoning for the dark vengeance she'd once wielded.
But Tara was behind that door. And Spike-
Buffy moved towards it, reached to turn the knob. "You guys get out, I'll-"
"It won't open!" "Don't open it!" Xander and Anya said at the same time. And beneath those cries she heard a rumbled chanting, Willow's voice. She spun to shout at her "No!" but found she had no voice of her own.
Willow's eyes were like jet, focused but not seeing, and her arm arced in the air. Lazy tracers followed the motion. Her fingers curled around a dark mass and with just the barest flick of her wrist something black and oily left her hand, gathered more of itself to itself then rose up to crest above their heads before crashing down and rushing towards the door - and everything standing in the way.
Paralysed, Xander and Anya wore identical expressions of open-mouthed horror. Buffy flung herself at them, pushing them out of the path of the wave, all their limbs tangling as they rolled like a kitten's ball of string. She was on her feet in an instant, though she had no idea what to do next.
The wave broke against the door. It was as if the "No Admittance" sign announced a universal law of physics - "immovable object here" - and naturally, the magic had no option but to rush back the way it came. Willow's had only enough time to emit a little squeak of surprised annoyance before she went under, tossed and tumbled, toppling books from the shelves, shattering glass and sending goods flying everywhere.
Xander yelped, and was scrambling to her aid even as the sobbing Anya tried to hold him back. And suddenly, Buffy didn't care. Not in a mean way. She knew they were all right, or as all right as they could be under the circumstances. It was a simple thing to dismiss them from her thoughts. Turn her back on them. They didn't need her right now.
She eyes the door with the same peaceful certainty she'd experienced diving from that tower, into a vortex and certain death. Under her gaze, the bold lettering on the door tore like gauze. She laid first her hand, then the whole length of her body to it, feeling the cold light penetrating the wood and metal from the other side, seeping into the marrow of her bones as if to freeze her, as if she didn't know that trick of heaven already. She felt her palms pressing in and through, felt her breath flowing in and through the barrier.
"I'm here now. Let me in."
Spike was experiencing an unaccustomed sympathy for the Brooding Hulk and his "moment of happiness" clause.
His very own moment of happiness had led him here. He didn't realize how hard he'd been clinging to it until now, how desperately he'd sought to recapture it ever since that first night, when the walls came down.
They'd been at it for hours. The violent urgency of their initial couplings had passed, and she was malleable as Silly Putty by then, stretched long beneath him, or pressed flat over him, or folded over and over and over, bubbles of satisfaction bursting all around him with soft little pops.
Long past exhaustion and well into an altered state of consciousness, he played at rearranging her molecules with his cock and his tongue and his fingers, heard her breath catch, thought he'd hurt her, which was an odd thought considering they were both covered with abrasions, bruises, and dirt. But he kept fucking her, slow languorous ins and outs, a nudge to her sweet spot on the upswing, watching her face with a kind of anxious fascination, wondering if he'd just discovered the very best way to kill a Slayer. She gasped again, her little oh oh oh my god's dissolving into ... something else. Not pain though.
Joy.
Her eyes flew open and locked onto his. Saw what he saw and knew what he knew in that moment. She looked surprised, and the breathless laughter that came out of her, unexpected and utterly foreign, almost made him stop, or at least some part of his brain thought he should stop. But his body kept moving, because by then he was coming again and he couldn't have stopped, not even if the sun had chosen that moment to burst through the cracks in the roof and fry his bobbing backside.
Still she'd laughed as the tears rolled down the sides of her face and into her tangled hair, laughed as she thrashed her head and clutched at him, fierce and almost angry that he'd drilled so deep into her and brought this huge joy welling to the surface, this very joy that lapped over him, moved through, poured back into her, a perpetual loop of cascading, effervescent, good good good vibrations. And after, when they'd finally collapsed unable to go on, he felt scoured, squeaky clean beneath the dust and sweat and territorial marks they'd inflicted on each other. She slept at his side and he didn't even feel the need to touch her just to convince himself this was real. Because he knew he'd brought her joy. Cracked the ice and got the waters moving again. He was her joy. Him!
It all went to hell in the morning, of course. But he'd refused to accept that he might have been deluded about the joy no matter what she told him later. He was so fucking certain. Yet as many times as she came to him, as hard as he tried, that moment of her joy and his happiness never came again. And it was that moment he'd held onto so hard for so long until he'd squeezed all the juice out of it. It was the moment that led him here, to this existential terror hovering beyond the ring of darkness.
The Luminati inside Tara's body were rattling the cage of her bones hard, hard. Her mouth and eyes wide open, tears flying out, blood coating her teeth from where she must have bitten her tongue. They would burst out soon. Soon. Burn everything.
"STEP INTO THE LIGHT." Blood coursed from Tara's lips with the words.
He was safe in his circle, the circle she had made for him. She was going to die for it.
He shivered, an absurdly delicate sensation, before calm settled in. The look of horror and regret on her face told him what he himself hadn't been sure of until that moment.
He wasn't going to let her die for it.
A step. "Self-righteous pricks." Another step. "You get off on this shit, don't you? Whip the dog until he cowers, then get him to do tricks. Jump through fiery hoops, walk a tightrope on his hind legs, do anything for the Scooby snack you dangle in front of his nose, right?" He paused at the perimeter. Felt his lips stretch and assumed he was smiling. "Oh, but I forgot. Gave me the gift of free will, didn't you? Expected me to fail spectacularly, I imagine."
The hum of wings beat faster and the light in the room began to coalesce, a swarm of diaphanous insects gathering, making ready. "News flash, motherfuckers. I knew I was never gonna get the girl."
He slid his right foot between a black candle and a clump of rose quartz.
The solid mass of the door shifted with a nauseating squelch. Buffy fell/pushed through it like phosphorescent Jell-O, heard herself say "eeoowww," thought how stupid that sounded, even as she tumbled into the light. No sense of up or down or anything else then but cold blinding white. Was she actually blind now? Is this what blind people saw, this vast white void instead of the comforting darkness she'd always imagined? There was something - not quite a sound. It was vibrating in her sinuses and her nose started to run. White light and white noise. Every movement brought vertigo. She swiped a hand across her nostrils, squeezed her eyes shut, took a couple of deep snotty breaths, let them out through her mouth and then, slowly, slowly, opened her eyes.
She saw everything, too much of everything, and her stomach lurched.
There was Tara, hair crackling around her head - Medusa's snakes struck by lightning. Her mouth and eyes were open wide. Blood on her teeth and chin, and splashes of blood on the fabric that covered her breasts were the only bits of colour in the room. The white void had dimmed to the glint of sun reflected off snow, and then the glinting disassembled and took a new shape. Lots of shapes, but all the same.
Daemon Luminati. Too many to count. Too many to fit in this room, let alone the world. The sudden silence was marred by the plash of Tara's blood hitting the floor, and Buffy marvelled that those drops could seem so loud, louder than her heart thudding in her chest, which was very loud indeed. And then there came another sound, one that made her Slayer senses surge and gather in her solar plexus. Her fingers clenched around a phantom stake. Her muscles coiled, ready to leap, kick, kill.
The sound was a demon screaming and the demon was Spike, and it was stuck to the sole of Spike's left heel, trying to get away, and also trying to reel Spike back into a ring of black candles with static flames, and Spike was pathetic, and Spike was brave, and Spike was a nightmare, a wraith, a monster, and a beautiful man with pale bare feet trying to shake a demon off his heel like it was a yippy little terrier.
She saw all of him: the mind, the personality, the experiences of a hundred forty odd years of his existence on earth writ on his flesh, carved into his bones - He was some woman's baby once. Tiny and new. Oh God - she saw the demon that made it possible for his body to walk and talk and kill and feed. Two separate things that could never be independent of each other. If Spike managed to break the connection, there would be nothing left to animate his flesh. She felt it in her gut like memory and prophecy and the dream-stories of mortal women whose lovers had been seduced away by faerie queens. He'd been too long in that twilight everlasting. As soon as his feet crossed the barrier of magic, the weight of a hundred years would crumble his body to dust faster than any pointed stick.
Why had she sent him on this quest? Why was she always asking the impossible from him? Why did he try when he knew, by the very nature of the beast that made his existence possible, he would fail her?
Even as she thought it, she realized with a sudden wrenching pain, that he wasn't doing this for her.
Too big for her body, the feelings were. Sorrow. Regret. Compassion. Loss. She loved him at the very moment he wasn't thinking about her at all. Breathless wonder, awe, even. She felt the moment pull tight, fraught with exquisite tension as she watched him struggle in this very moment that she loved him, amazed at his stalwart determination to leave one demon behind him in the dark, and run open armed into a nest of wasps. All he was, or ever would be, burned away. Head long into a furnace of non-existence.
Not for Buffy.
For Tara.
It made her sad. It also opened her heart wide. She knew now that she had room for him in there, between her sister, her friends and the rest of humanity.
So when he placed his foot between the black candles and broke the circle, and Tara whispered "I'm sorry, I'm sorry," and the Luminati rushed towards him with a sound like a million hummingbirds zeroing in on the same black blossom, the Slayer moved, made of her body a wall, between the light and the dark. She wore the armour of her soul on the outside. To save a vampire and a witch from angels.
Tara fell, a puddle of white. He smelled ozone tinged with blood, heard her heartbeat stutter, slow, then pound steady, a soft drumming backbeat for the tiny voice growing louder in his head, words he couldn't quite make out. All the questions were meaningless. There were never any answers to be had here. He could feel the Luminati coming for him, and he felt a tug at his heel and another tug - something at his wrist was chafing, pulling.
He looked up. Blue sky. Yellow balloon. It was like those dreams he sometimes had of light he'd never see again, impossible blue of the sky, bedazzling yellow fields of barley, and gaudy, sequin-spangled leaves dancing the in the wind. Colours as viewed through astigmatic memory, intense to the point of nausea. And his soul was floating there in that impossible blue, bobbing yellow on a very long string, high, high above him. He saw that it was tethered to his wrist and that it had been ever since he'd died, though he hadn't noticed the string until now - now, when the knot was unravelling, now, when he could do no more than watch helplessly as it drifted higher, while a dog worried one ankle and his foot stepped out over a precipice. The tiny voice got louder, and he only realized he'd been hearing this voice for a long time because the words were clearer and had begun to make sense and sound true -
you do not exist you never existed you never will exist no one ever loved you or hated you or knew or cared to know you existed you are not seen no one sees you no one will ever see you you are not heard nothing you say or think matters not even to you you had no impact on anything ever because you never were and are not now and never will be you are nothing you are nothing you are nothing
And the demon wailed. And his soul floated up to far in the blue sky, and he would never know the moment it burst, because he and it and the demon at his heel would never have existed to worry about the moment they ceased to be.
nothing nothing Spike nothing ever nothing always less than nothing never were
And he wanted to mourn his own passing into non-existence but what was the point? Even he wouldn't remember him. And this moment, before the big Nothing, was the cruellest Hell ever devised.
Spike you are nothing Spike nothing nothing "Spike."
He gasped, blinked, scrabbled at the string as it curled away from his wrist and wiggled up into the air. No!
"William!"
Balloon, string, wrist, fingers... Yes! Caught it!
Small fingers lock about his wrist, twisting, grinding against the bone. Pain, sweet and solid. Buffy.
She looks at him. She's got a little girl frown of worry between her brows. Blue sky. Her eyes aren't that color, are they? "I caught it," he says. He can't help grinning.
Spike had evidently lost his mind. Broken the circle of protection and now stood there, grinning like a lunatic at her - a mentally challenged lunatic - while the Luminati rushed towards the breach.
Don't have time for this.
Buffy planted her hands on Spike's chest and shoved, sending him sprawling to his ass in the center of the dark circle. He scrambled right back up, looked to have every appearance of trying to get out again. She stamped her foot, pointed to the middle of the pentagram on the floor and said, "Stay!" God, he really did look like a kicked puppy sometimes. "I mean it! I'm like the only thing between you and fiery demise right now-"
His eyes went wide, then narrowed to mean, mad slits - a matched set for the grim line of his mouth. She realized nearly too late that he was reacting to something seen over her shoulder, and whirled round. Tara. Shit.
Her second thought when she turned was "ugh." The Luminati were moving away from Spike now, swimming through the light towards Tara. Weird glowy wriggly things that looked repulsively like sperm trying to beat each other to an ovum. They weren't moving really fast, but they sure as hell had a goal in mind. Tara was on her knees, struggling, tangled in her dress, her face a study in quiet panic.
"Stay away from her!" Buffy cried, hoping like hell the stern, commanding authority in her voice was enough to get their attention. She didn't dare move her body from the break in Spike's protective circle.
She felt his hand on her arm. It was dry and hot. She shook it off.
"Slayer." His breath tickled the hairs at the nape of her neck, but his voice was hard and harsh and so fucking intense. "It's me they want. Get out of the way."
"NO!" She felt him flinch, heard the gritty slide of his feet on the floor as he moved back fractionally, but she didn't turn around, didn't take her eyes off the Luminati. "I'm not exchanging one of you for the other. Not letting anyone do the big, stupid, bloody self-sacrifice thing here!"
A beat, then a snort that came dangerously close to a giggle. "You said bloody."
"Shut up," she squeaked in un-Slayerlike manner. It was the sort of offended girl-squeak usually accompanied by girl-slaps to boyfriend's chest and followed by pouts that demanded moderately priced jewellery.
Warrior of the People was going to be a hard sell if her body was acting like a teenager at a mall food court. She batted behind her at his hands reaching for her again, concentrating on projecting an imperious...something. Or maybe just - Slayer here, really dangerous Slayer.
"Yo! Angels! You touch her and you answer to me! And you are not gonna like what I have to say."
The thing about bluffing is that you had to feel in your gut that you weren't bluffing. She was usually really good at that. So good in fact that it transcended the realm of bluff and became fact, assurance, certainty.
The Luminati slowed, bobbed in the air. They appeared to be looking at her - though strictly speaking, in present form, they had no eyes. Damn. They were calling her bluff.
She steeled herself and waited. Waited and waited some more until she was tight as a wire and ready to snap. "What are they doing?" she hissed. "Why aren't they doing something?"
"They were using Tara's body, her voice, to speak before," Spike said quietly, "maybe they can't-"
An explosion of light sent her crashing to the floor. All the oxygen in the room seemed consumed by this sudden burst of energy, yet her aching lungs continued to drag in and out, and she suspected she was breathing pure angel. She'd brought her arm up over her eyes automatically when the burst hit, but it was useless as protection. The light passed through her flesh, muscle, bone. Her shuttered eyelids felt seared away. The light filled every nook and cranny in her head. Damn, her nose was running again. No. It was bleeding. And her ears wanted to pop. She could hear Tara sobbing far, far away, and somewhere behind her she could also hear Spike, curses echoing in that hushed and hollow way of prayers in a cathedral. He might be praying for all that she could tell. The words no longer mattered. She knew without looking he was on his knees.
After a moment, she could feel the brightness ... contract somehow, and she peered cautiously over her arm.
There was now one enormous angel, a pillar that should not have been able to fit into the room. It had a kind of classicism about it, a Renaissance angel, painted from life, bathed in soft opalescent colours, modelled, perhaps, on some rich patron's kept lover. Aloof and serene, it loomed above her, compassion implicit, cascading from the elegant folds of its silken robes. Every line, subtle hue, and contour said, I am so far above you that I have to squint and bend very low to the ground to even see you, let alone see your suffering. And yet I do see it - and you. I see inside you, tiny creature. All that you are, were, or ever will be exists between a breath in and out, the blink of my eye, the raising of my foot and the putting it down again. Yet I deign to look upon you now and pity your sorry mortal existence.
And she found herself gasping at her own insignificance.
You have let the unclean thing crawl between your legs, infect you with its poison.
"Buffy. Sweetheart."
You were weak. "Yes." You could not help yourself. "No."
"Whatever it is they're telling you, don't listen."
Even now it tries to get inside you.
"They're powerful, yes, and so far above me they might as well be God-"
Putrid matter that masquerades as a man.
"-but what you're seeing, what they're showing you right now, all resplendent, and beautiful, and terrible to behold-"
You need never succumb to its corruption. You needn't swallow its foul seed nor be seduced, nor enslaved to the flesh again.
"-that's a reflection of you, love. Your light bouncing off them. They have no true reflection of their own. They don't have souls. They're still-"
Let us be your strength.
"-demons. You can fight demons, Slayer. It's what you do. Doesn't matter whose team they play for. Get up now. Show 'em what you're made of."
Leave this earthly plane and be one with us, your kindred.
"Buffy, come on! You're the only one they won't touch here. They can't touch you! You got the mark of the Chosen One stamped on your butt. Now get up, or me and the witch are gonna fry!"
It was getting hotter. Anya would be so pissed if the shop burnt down.
"Slayer! Goddamn it! I'm not keen on what they've got in store for me, right, but Tara? Why should she suffer just because you were hoping for different answers than the ones you already have?"
Bastard. "Guilt trip? Not helping." Any sting of facetiousness was lost in the horrible sincerity and wrenching sob attached to the words. There was a giant angel foot on the back of her neck grinding her nose in her messes, and a giant angel hand trying to pull her up by her hair. Couldn't he see that?
She heard him sigh. Such a deep sigh. "Sorry, baby." She could feel him close. "Bloody hard for a girl to shine when those buggers have stolen all the bulbs, yeah? Know you're trying your best. So I'm right here. Got your back like always." And his words were so soothing, and made her heart ache and swell, and she was grateful, just grateful. She didn't realize he was stepping out of the circle until his hands were on her shoulders, lifting her up, and then it was too late.
The Angel broke into a million pieces and every piece came at them.
There was a word for it. Something to do with atomic bombs and volcanic eruptions, a word for when sound broke, for when things arrived before they'd left. And who was screaming? Screams swallowed up in the roar. Tears swept away by the wind that wasn't. Particles of angel light hurtling forever and ever on their way towards her, beautiful, terrible, wonderful, inevitable. They were clasped together somehow, her and Spike and Tara, and the roar and the rush set each molecule in their bodies dancing in this great cosmic mosh pit and she closed her eyes, not out of fear, but to make a shield - You must go through me to get to them - and then
POP
Darkness seemed so much darker than Buffy remembered. Like the ocean, but not, because although she floated in it, on it, there weren't any waves, because there wasn't any wind, because there wasn't any sun, and she could just listen to the whoosh of her blood in her ears, her heart beating at every pulse point, the soft steady sound of her breath in and out. She even thought she could hear her hair growing-
"What- what wasn't that?" Somewhere in this liquid darkness, Tara was also floating.
"What?"
"What didn't-didn't just happen?"
"Huh?"
"If this is non-existence, how come I can hear two silly bints asking nonsensical questions?"
"Maybe we're all non-existing together." It sounded dreamy.
A beat. "Yeeaahh. Slayer...perhaps you should consider going back to university before that brain of yours turns to utter mush."
"Hey. A little disoriented here."
"I-I think we're just ... on the floor. In the dark."
A creaking noise. Narrow beam of light sweeping across the black. Xander's voice, shaky with hope and dread. "Hello? Anybody alive in here?"
"I'm not."
"Oh thank God." Shouting. "They're okay!"
Tara started laughing, a low, sweet rumble.
~Apoca-lite~
"Okay." Xander plunked his beer down on the table, his gaze catching Tara's eyes, leaping over Spike's out of habit, and continuing onto Buffy's where it stayed fixed, also out of habit. "How long are you three gonna play this 'buddies back from Nam' routine?"
"What are you talking about?" Buffy said
She wasn't fooling him with that mildly exasperated look. Not fooling him one iota. She knew exactly what he was talking about. The three of them sitting there, all Deerhunter and Platoon-ish. And yeah, sure, probably lots of mutual sustained abject terror while they were locked in that room together with big scary things. But the people outside that room were experiencing plenty of abject terror themselves. To a lesser degree, he'd give them that much. And he'd concede that it might be hard to explain what happened if you hadn't been there, but jeez, it had been over a week since they stumbled out the door, looking beat and bloodied, hair standing on end - literally standing on end which he thought only happened after wacky comedy electrocutions - and trying to hold each other upright but failing because they were laughing so freaking hard they kept falling down. Which anxious friends could only pray was cathartic in nature despite it being deeply disturbing to witness. Like the current buddy buddy routine, which Xander was now drunk enough to comment upon.
"This," he said unfurling one finger from those still curled around the bottle. He wagged it back and forth at the three sat across from him. "This thing. This, we've shared something none of you can understand, thing." Three pairs of eyes were on him, steady, calm, blinking in eerie tandem. "That! That's what I'm talking about! Plus, Dead Boy Slim is way too introspective-"
"Not...inordinately so. I don't think. Considering."
"See, see? What he just said there? It's not natural." He lifted the bottle to his lips and took three long swallows. Anya was still in the little girls' room doing whatever it was little girls did after they peed.
"Stop talking around him, Xander," Buffy said. "It's impolite."
"There. Another indication of wrongness. I have to be polite to him now."
"Needn't be polite on my account, Harris. Feel free to insult me regularly and I'll happily do the same for you."
Buffy thumped at Xander's fingers locked around the sweating beer bottle. "How many of those have you had?"
"A couple or three. Five. I dunno. We're celebrating averting another apocalypse, aren't we?"
"Wasn't exactly apocalyptic proportions," Tara said.
"How d'you figure that?"
"Well, we were the only ones who were going to die...probably."
"And probably not me," Buffy chimed in, "on account of I have Chosen One stamped on my butt." She glanced obliquely at Spike and grinned. "I haven't seen it myself so must defer to those in the know." Spike also grinned, sly and smug, and Buffy lowered her batting eyelashes to concentrate on slurping up dregs of Diet Coke by vigorously churning the straw in the ice.
Xander shuddered, partly from the noisy ice sounds, partly to shake the curtain of denial over that particular "place Xander must never go." He could go a lot of places in his head, but Spike and Buffyland wasn't one of them. It had been hard enough to leave them be that first night when they all three fell asleep on the sofa together and he'd just wanted to thrust pillows between those he considered his womenfolk and the undead guy in the middle. But there weren't enough pillows in the world to accomplish the task, and Anya had insisted he quit trying. More distressing the next day, when he came by at lunch and none of them were on the sofa. He'd even checked for a coating of dust on the sunlit cushions, relieved when he found none, and berating himself for being worried he might. Then watching Tara come down the stairs, looking serene and ... resolved. As she left the house he heard Willow crying softly upstairs. He didn't know why, exactly, though he suspected it had something to do with the magic tsunami she'd unleashed at their heads, and since he was still kind of mad about that he didn't go upstairs to find out why she was crying. So he'd gone into the kitchen instead to chat with Dawn while she made a sandwich. And standing there, commenting on the gross-factor of refried beans and salsa on Wonder bread, was when he heard the rhythmic creaking and groaning coming from the basement. That haunting, familiar protest of faulty springs, and the grunts and sighs of carnal comfort. Dawn had glanced at his face, whatever expression was on it, cranked up the radio on a battered boombox, and looked out the kitchen window, thoughtfully munching her sandwich. She offered to make him a sandwich. He'd declined and fled out the backdoor.
The band started their next set - lots of verve and raucous guitar. Xander had something to say, something important on the tip of his tongue, and he knew it would wend its way from brain to tongue tip to tirade as soon as he started talking. He took a deep breath to compensate for the noise level and opened his mouth-
"Harris." The vampire leaned across the table, and for some reason, Xander tilted his head to make his ear more accessible. "Your woman's out there on the dance floor about to become the creamy middle in a hunk sandwich."
Xander's head shot around. Anya had, in fact, been waylaid on her return from the facilities by two hunky youngsters and was now happily jerking and gyrating between them. The conversation, as well as the half empty beer, was abandoned in favour of territorial imperatives.
"Ooh, look," Tara hissed, "Bad Poets Couch is open. Hurry." Her fingers grasped both the sleeves and skin of her companions' arms in a pinchy little tug, jerking them in the direction of the tatty sofa sprawled in bohemian grandeur against the wall beneath the stairs to the catwalk. Her eyes were fixed on her target with the kind of unabashed avarice Buffy thought of as "Anya's look," and when another group moved in on the coveted sofa - upscale versions of disaffected youth and dreadlocked vegetarianism - Tara let go their arms and sailed forward with a gesture and a whispered word that both repelled encroachers and cleared a path. The two girls took up positions at either end of massive couch, stretching their legs out to the middle to save Spike's spot while he went off to fetch another beer for himself, and beverages for the ladies.
"I thought you were against using magic for non-important stuff."
"Getting a good seat isn't important?" Tara asked with a pawky grin. "Nothing wrong with a little magic to grease the wheels of opportunity as you long as don't hurt anyone in the process. Like... invoking the parking space deities so you can get a spot close to the student loan office before they close the week of Thanksgiving."
"You can do that? Wow...wait, does it have to be parallel parking?"
"Besides," Tara went on, "the Bad Poets Couch is very rarely open. You'll notice I didn't compel the people sitting here to leave, I just made sure we got here before anyone else."
"How come I didn't even know this couch had a name? I've been coming here forever."
"You don't come here poetry nights, pet," Spike said, tossing little cans of apricot nectar to each of them. He jerked his chin at the photocopied poster taped to the wall over her head, announcing Wednesday Nights Poetry Open Mike.
"And you do?"
"Hell no. What kind of a ponce do you take me for?"
She gave the question no consideration, being too busy examining her beverage with wrinkled nose of displeasure. "Wanted a Diet Coke. With lots of ice. Wah."
"I'm not your tavern wench, wench. Tins. Easy to carry."
"We call them cans in this country. Jeez you've been here for how long now?" But her eyes were teasing him. He smiled menacingly at the two pairs of legs taking up the middle portion of Bad Poets Couch. Tara sat up with a squeak of apology, but Buffy was still playing at snotty brat, daring him to move her. So he did. Quick as the preternatural beast he was, he'd grabbed both her ankles in one hand and flung her legs to the floor. Didn't even spill his beer. As soon as he sat down she put her feet in his lap. He seemed fine by that.
They sat a while in what is often called companionable silence, two drinking thick juice with a tinny aftertaste, and the other working on his second bottled beer, each lost in their own thoughts, which Buffy was pretty sure revolved around the same subject.
Well, somebody sure as heck ought to start talking about it. She sighed. Might as well be the superhero.
"So ... why aren't we dead?" She glanced at Spike. "Or deader. I mean, why did they stop? Why did they just go poof like that?"
Spike turned his head and stared. Tara leaned out to stare. Both wore similar expressions of astonishment.
"You're kidding, right?" he said. And she felt anxiety fluttering in her gut, that sense of being out of a loop you were so sure you were in. They knew something she didn't. They shared something she didn't.
"No," she said, aware of how tiny her voice sounded. "I don't know what happened at the end. Pretty sure we were done for. Weren't you guys?"
"Well, yeah, until you stopped them."
"I didn't stop them."
Tara and Spike looked at each other.
"I suppose it makes sense," Spike said to Tara, making no sense at all.
Tara smiled. "Yeah. She wouldn't see it the same way."
Suddenly, inexplicably ticked off, Buffy dragged her feet off Spike's lap and scrunched down into Bad Poets cushions, arms folded, glaring out at the noisy dance floor. "I feel like I'm nine years old and you guys had a slumber party and didn't invite me."
"Slumber party, eh?" The smirk was back. "You two in babydoll jammies, jumping up and down on the bed, pillow fight, feathers flying everywhere. Me with a camcorder."
Tara snorted. Buffy was not amused.
"Okay, you need to close the Pervert Funhouse in your mind now and get back to what I don't seem to know or understand. Which, may I just say, totally sucks, because we were all there together, about to be incinerated or whatever. Together." She sank deeper into the sofa, wishing it would swallow her, because she felt so little and alone and she wanted to cry, and it pissed her off. "So, clearly I don't get it, and you're both much smarter than me, so why don't you just tell me what happened? And talk slowly and don't use too many big words."
"No one's saying you're stupid, luv."
"No, no, Buffy, that's not- I guess we assumed you knew because you did it."
"Did what? Oh. Oh no. No! It wasn't me. I didn't do anything-"
"We're both pretty sure the Luminati left this dimension because you made them leave."
"No I didn't. Did I? How'd I do that?"
Again, vampire and witch exchanged looks. Tara smiled at him, inclined her head in what was very nearly a regal nod. Spike looked at the bottle in his hands. Didn't bring it to his lips. He seemed almost...embarrassed.
"'Cos you loved us," he said.
A jolt. Hot and white and aching and true. That moment when she'd loved him.
His voice went from soft to gruff. "Me and Glinda here were under the protection of your banner, Slayer. And a thing of beauty it was too. Glorious." Again they exchanged looks, smiles. "They tested you on it, of course. Right up to the last. But, you being cut from the same cloth as them and all, well, in the end they had to respect what you felt was true. Even...even if it was mostly a proprietary love in my case."
"Like you belonged to me, you mean?"
"Yeah." He took a swallow of beer, didn't look at her. Tara was sitting sideways now, one leg drawn up beneath the satiny blue of her skirt. Her elbow was propped on the backrest, hair bunched around her hand where her head leaned on it. She gazed at him with heavy lidded, catlike contentment, a little half-smile still playing with her lips. Then she gave his knee a pat. He knee jerked a little, and he blinked at her, bemused, before his default mode smirk settled in.
"I'm going to see if I can catch a ride from Xander and Anya," Tara announced, unfolding herself from the sultry comfort of Bad Poets Couch. She smoothed her skirt, grabbed her bag and slung it over her shoulder, then stood in a moment of uncertainty. Like there was something she should do or say. Buffy found herself folded into a quick, tight hug.
"Thanks for loving us," Tara whispered in her ear.
"Not a problem," Buffy murmured as she squeezed back. Her throat was tight with an emotion she couldn't quite identify. Or many. Lots and lots of emotions.
She barely registered her friends even as she watched them leaving - not Xander's belligerent glower, nor Anya spinning him about and shoving him towards the door that Tara was holding open. Anya and Tara both gave little waves. Buffy kind of waved back. Anya mouthed "call me" and did the hand gesture. Then they were gone. And she was left alone in a room full of people. Alone with him.
"That's not it, you know," she said.
"What's that, pet?" He had his cigarettes out and was patting his pockets for his lighter, dots and dashes that telegraphed his nicotine addiction to the world.
"It wasn't proprietary. It wasn't about how you belonged to me. Mine to kill or save. Not that."
He stopped the frantic search, one hand frozen as it reached for the breast pocket inside his jacket. Poised over his heart. "Oh?" he said. Oh. And oh god, too much hope in that little word. Too much. "What was it then?"
"Something else."
He sighed, resigned to never knowing. And it wasn't fair. She knew it.
"Look. Spike. I can't ignore your past. And I wish I could say - I mean, I wish that I were truly righteous enough, or noble enough to say that I can't ignore your past on this earth, your history with other people, the deaths you caused, but it's much less honourable than that. What I can't ignore, can't forget is your history with me. I will never be able to look at you and say it wasn't you who did those things to me, who said those - those horrible things to me. You aren't a different person. Wait, let me finish-" She'd held up her hand as if he'd been about to protest before realising he hadn't. "And apparently I've seen too many television movies on the Lifetime channel." That got no reaction so she plunged on. "I'm not saying you haven't changed, but-but, see... with Angel, I could think of him as two different people, the one who hated me and the one who loved me. You are the same person who hated me. You understand?"
He wasn't looking at her, but he was listening intently and he nodded.
"You said those things to me. You. Said them in such a way as to cause the greatest pain, to cut to bone and make me feel miserable and worthless before you killed me. And even after, when you were all chipped up, and full of rage about it, when you didn't have the power to take my life with your own hands anymore - not that you could have, ever," she added just to remind him who was boss. Saw his mouth quirk. Almost a smile. "You've always been able to get under my skin, find the stuff I don't want anybody to see and rub my face in it, like it was all this broken glass on the pavement. And it hurt. It hurt me bad. Just telling you this is really hard for me, because it acknowledges the power you still have. So even if I'm thinking we have some kind of destiny together now, I can't forget the past, and I can't promise you any kind of future. I don't know what you'll do in the future, do I? I can't promise love knowing it's possible I might have to take you out someday. But I can offer you right now. This moment. I love you this very moment."
He closed his eyes briefly, and all the tension in his face fell away. "Moments have a tendency to string themselves together."
"That they do." She stood up, held out her hand. "So, you wanna dance or what?"
FINIS