Spike
He watches as she rides him, hungry for the sight of her, writing every detail in the anthology of his memory. He makes a map of her body, of its contours, its softness and hardness, coolness and heat, sight, taste and scent, refines it every time she comes to him, corrects and perfects it until he knows her body better than 100 plus years have taught him his own.
He knows the way the muscles move in her thighs as she straddles him, firm beneath the smoothness of sun-brushed skin that glows with life. He can replay at will the sight of the pale, thick column of his cock plunging into the heat of her, the warm, wetness of dark curls, sliding out slick with her juices to disappear again as she drives herself to release, and each time the sight catches a breath he doesn't need in his throat, causes a leap of something in his long-stilled heart, fills him with awe. The muscles of her stomach are tensed, tight with effort, but her skin is soft, covered with a suggestion of feather-light down that glints gold in the candlelight. He has mapped the tiny imperfection that marks her there, a ghost of a scar, the faded badge of slayerhood.
He can feel, although his hands are bound above him, the fragile, corrugated cage of her ribs, and, beneath, the echo of her heartbeat. He can read its cadence, the change in its pace as she moves to release, the hitch in its strong rhythm when she comes. In his head he can move his hands to cup the soft firmness of her breasts, tease nipples bruised red from his lips and teeth, make her gasp and arch into his touch. As he watches, a single bead of sweat trickles slowly downwards, drawing a trail of silver between the valley of her breasts to the shadowed dip between bird-delicate collar bones, sharp below the long curve of her throat, where her blood pulses, strong beneath flushed, defenceless skin.
Each detail of body, of its strengths and vulnerabilities, its hardness and softness, is written in his being, each element as precious to him as his own unlife.
But her face. If he looks at her face he's never sure if what he sees is pleasure or pain, passion or self-loathing, lust or disgust. The uncertainty cuts to his heart; but worse is the one certainty, the one thing he's sure about. He doesn't see love.
And that might yet tear him apart.
But he watches her face, despite himself, despite the hurt.
Because he never stops hoping.
Buffy
He is her rock. What he does to her, the way he makes her feel, the mind-numbing oblivion his body brings her, is the one certainty in her world, her one escape from what she has become. He's the rock on which she returns to dash herself, night after night, driven by the warring elements of her mind and body and ice-cold heart to seek something to drown the emptiness in her soul.
Stretched out beneath her like a sacrifice, she knows his body with the intimacy of a lover, hates it with the intensity of an addict.
His skin is porcelain perfection, gilded by the candle light to a pastiche of sungold, a parody of life. Its flawlessness is marred only by the red welts carved by her fingernails and teeth, by the burgeoning bruises of her desperation. She looks down to watch as she draws him into her, as she tilts her hips to feel the cool length of him fill her, hard against the spot that makes her gasp with a pleasure so intense that it feels more like pain. Beneath her hands, fingers clenched against the churning breathlessness in her gut, the muscles of his stomach tense, hips rising to meet her, to grind the hardness of bone against her aching clit. She slides tensed fingers up and over the cool plane of his chest, up to where the muscles of his arms are taut, straining against the metal that binds his hands above him. His head is arched back in a groan of passion, exposing the long, strong lines of his throat, the firm line of his jaw. Even as she is, she cannot deny the thought that he's beautiful, with a beauty that catches the breath in her throat and fuels the pressure building inside her, clamouring for release.
But when he drops his head and looks at her she cannot meet his eyes; she fears what she might see, and that what she sees might tear her apart.
She can't let herself recognize what sparks in the too-blue depths of his eyes; she can't believe that this evil, soulless creature could feel what she cannot. It's wrong that so much passion burns in him, that his still heart lives in its silence, stronger and more vital than hers, that a dead man's fire is brighter than her own.
So she closes her mind to what she sees and closes her ears to the words of love he speaks when he thinks she sleeps. Whispers from a dead man's lips doesn't make it real.
This is not love.
It is wrong; he is wrong; she is wrong. What she lets him do to her is wrong, wrong, but if she doesn't think, if she closes her mind to what he is and just feels, it feels so right. His nearness blunts her pain, and each night with him she feels her loss a little less, and the ache of her return burns a little less strongly.
So sometimes now she dares to look into his eyes, and sometimes she lets herself believe, for a moment - the briefest of breathless moments - that what she sees is real, because when she does she feels, deep in the coldness of her heart, the frail, bright beginnings of hope.
And she needs to learn to hope again.
Author's Chapter Notes:
Season 6 Spuffy was painful and desperate, but not without hope.