[A/N: A small bridge chapter to tie everyone down until the next big event. I don’t expect this chapter to be a runaway hit as things are getting even worse on the Spuffy front. Yeah, anything’s possible, I guess. I wrote this in some sort of flat, bland, quasi-sarcastic fashion, like The Catcher In The Rye or something. Don’t tell me how that happened; maybe I’m just not the greatest at recap chapters. Title from the Alice In Chains song, which reminded me of the chapter not only because of the line “My gift of self is raped” but also because this chapter is pretty much a nutshell.]
A whole wanton week whisked by since the wicked whirlwind at the party. Spike still felt completely justified with his actions; he had to seize the gun from Faith somehow, and nobody else looked up to the challenge. Who cares if he went a little crazy in his speech about the chopping down of certain unchaste populars. He didn’t have any cruel intentions, at least at the time of delivering the hyper-exaggerated spiel.
And in some ray of sheer brilliance, Buffy got that. She talked with Spike the following day about the whole ordeal and conclusions were met. Oh yes, Buffy and Spike reached a conclusion on something. The same person that ruthlessly picked on him throughout grade school was believing adamantly in his justifications, maybe even creating a few rationales on her own. It was quite amazing; Spike thought he should have held a parade or something of that effect. But that would have been a little weird.
And the next day even Cordelia – the person he almost got shot – ate lunch at his table. Little angry glares were exchanged at first, yes, but Spike’s rampant quips about the state of devolution among the putrid minds of teenagers quickly broke the thin ice between the two of them. In no time, they were all joking about the party, sometimes even reenacting the dramatic scene in some type of mock parody that one would see on Saturday Night Live. Everyone either wanted to act as the cracked out Faith or the insane wacko Spike, so the odd person out had to act frightened as hell and kinda drunk like Cordelia was that night.
Sadly, though, Angel was nowhere to be seen the entire week. Spike was deeply hurt by Angel’s absence and, as a result, some intangible feeling of despondency overwhelmed him that week. He tried to call Angel – he tried to call Angel a lot. And Spike filled up Angel’s answering machine with mindless drabbles about how he was sorry and how he wanted a return to normalcy (mocking Warren G. Harding is fun) and that they should continue to be the bestest of friends and that he didn’t really want to kill Cordelia, although later in his long revealing monologue with the answering machine he withdrew that little statement because Angel knew better than anyone else that a blabbering preppy Cordelia was quite bullet worthy. At least to Spike.
Spike even apologized on the phone. Mind you, this is Spike; the man watched the remake of The Wicker Man, starring Nicolas Cage, and absolutely laughed his ass off when Cage would repeatedly punch different eighteenth century women in the face. Spike couldn’t decide whether he was really sorry or not about what he did. He thought that all those melodramatic soaps had ruined Angel. Too much Days of Our Lives, All My Children, and Passions.
Spike primarily felt a nameless dread about the situation with Angel. Well, there was probably a long German name for the dread, like Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz, or something, with the umlaut and everything, but Spike didn’t know German. Anyway, he felt a dread that nobody knows the name for, like those little table-like white plastic devices that they put in the middle of the pizza so the box doesn’t cave in and ruin the yummy goodness that is pizza. Or those multi-colored plastic gizmos that close potato chip bags. Spike didn’t know the name of those things either.
Spike feared that he’d somehow lost Angel. I mean, seriously, the man hadn’t spoken a word to him in a week, and they usually talked every day. They hadn’t even spotted each other in third block Weight Training. Hell, Spike hadn’t even seen Angel in third block. That was either a testament to the elusive that is Angel or the ponderosity of the situation.
The lack of Angel was really starting to get to him. Spike needed a friend – a person he could trust and a person he could confide in – and he just didn’t have that now. Sure, he had Buffy, with the twice daily blowjobs and the hidden feelings and the profane desecration, but he needed someone he could really talk to and not this whole symbolic retribution thing he had going on with Buffy.
Yeah, symbolic retribution was probably the right name for it. Or some other stupid literary device they made students memorize the definition of in school when merely showing an example of such device, like The Inferno for symbolic retribution, would suffice.
So anyway, Spike treated Buffy kinda sorta badly that week. If a person defined “badly” as twice daily forced blowjobs and Spike’s incessant mantra of “no affection at all in this relationship.” The asymmetrical relationship took its toll on Buffy and created some type of disparaging obsession within her, turning her into a craving nympho of sorts. She always looked addicted, obsessed, and exhausted when she was around Spike, specifically when she was giving him head. She tried to make it seem like she was living vicariously through the activity, with the little giddy giggles and that extra satisfying swirl thing she did with her tongue, but she was most definitely not having the time of her life. Not in the slightest. Maybe unlife, but even that’s pushing it.
Every day it was the same thing. Spike passed a note to Buffy in class. They both inconspicuously excused themselves at different times. In the closet they went at it like sexually deprived bunnies. A few minutes of intense, intemperate kisses would ensue first, and that was the part Buffy liked the most. She was a hopelessly destitute nympho, after all, and found some solace in that at least Spike could kiss her. Of course, things would always end with Buffy being forced down to unbuckle his belt, but the kissing... the kissing was good. Buffy found some affection in his kisses – even with Spike denying such affection time after time after time – and that gave her some good ol’ fashioned needless hope.
At least they got some good studying done Friday night for the SAT. Everything was going great; they were reading lame passages about people eating too much fish, answering the on-the-surface idiot-proof questions that followed, remembering slews of SAT words that were overused by eight-year-olds, and adding backwards while multiplying by one without a calculator. Yeah, studying for the stupid test was good and fun.
That was until Spike wanted some more. He didn’t even kiss her that time. Good enough to suck his cock but not good enough to kiss... how demented is that?
Indeed, Spike was very lucky that the essay for the SAT on Saturday was on pestilence. He knew his diseases quite well, and he probably would have wrote about Buffy in some impromptu way even if the prompt stated otherwise. At least this way he could mention diseases like smallpox and the Black Death and how they destroyed lives and created obsessions and started abusive sexual relationships.
Okay, maybe just the first... Spike thought he did a bang-up job on the essay, though.
And yes, at the five minute break between tests, Spike and Buffy met in the closest for another quickie. They came back halfway into the next test looking disheveled as hell. Buffy wasn’t able to finish that test because of their little lewd get-together. Not a real big deal, though; Spike was caring about Buffy’s future less and less, probably due to the fact that Buffy was becoming more and more obsessed with him and so he didn’t really need to show any affection whatsoever to get what he wanted.
He got hammered after the SATs at Willy’s bar. He didn’t remember much that night, just that he drowned his sorrows in a good ten pints of whiskey. Maybe it was even more than that; he couldn’t really remember. He thought he did something wrong that night because everyone was looking funny at him. But then he also saw Faith that night, and that couldn’t be right. No, Faith was in jail, alright. He could remember that.
Spike didn’t know things were going to completely fall apart that day in class. Fall apart even more than they already were. He didn’t know that, and he honestly couldn’t know that. Wasn’t his fault, though. He didn’t have those premonition things like that minx, Alyssa Milano, on Charmed. And even if he did, he’d probably use them to get in bed with Milano or win the lottery or something, and probably not use them to steer the wind in the right direction in his abusive relationship with Buffy.
Because that was the thing that was going to fall apart that day in class. Their relationship.
Gosh, that was so drabble-esque... “That day” is next chapter, so stay tuned to your keyboards and monitors. And yes, the German word really has a definition. It means “cattle marking and beef labeling supervision duties delegation law.” I swear it does. Look it up on Wikipedia if you don’t believe me. ;)
Um... uh... me gusto reviewos? =]