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Buffy’s dismissal of the idea was vehement. “Spike, no.”



Spike shook his head; he'd known she wouldn't agree to him sacrificing himself to get rid of The First, but she had to understand that it was his choice. “Buffy, I want to.”



Buffy opened her mouth to reply, but she couldn’t seem to find anything to say. She looked desperately at each of her assembled friends instead, pleading with them again for another answer, but they could offer none. Giles hung his head sorrowfully, but only for Buffy, Spike was sure. Willow’s lip trembled as her eyes began to swell with tears. She was crying for her friend too, he knew that, but the glance she gave him told him a little was for him as well. Wesley looked to Angel, but he could only look away.



It was not as if Spike didn’t wish he could come up her a better plan either. He didn’t want to die again, he really didn’t, and he certainly didn’t want to go back into that bloody amulet; but for all the indignant bluster of his initial protests and the small knot of fear twisting in the depths of his gut, making his mind up hadn’t been so difficult after all.



Because finishing this fight was the right thing to do, he knew it, for Buffy and for the world that needed rid of the scourge of The First. It was right for him too; the existence he had now felt like an interlude before his unlife turned crap again, only a temporary reprieve too good to possibly be true. He couldn’t explain why, but ever since he’d re-materialised in Angel’s office, he’d felt wrong, with an uneasy feeling that he’d been cheated out of his grand finish. Walking into the Hellmouth for the last time, he’d expected the fight of his life, his final battle in which he’d go down swinging and drown in the glory. And he’d been happy with that fate; he hadn’t been looking for second chances with a new skin made of star shine and Fred’s genius. He certainly hadn’t been thinking about any future with Buffy.



And all this business with The First just made the crux of his problem all the more obvious. Giles, the bloody git, of all people had been right all along: no matter how hard he may try to pretend otherwise, Spike wasn’t a man, not really, and the addition of a soul didn’t automatically make him a card carrying, living, breathing member of the human race. He shouldn’t think anything different.



Before Buffy, Spike had never been concerned about his physical state but he'd always thought he could do anything if he wanted it enough, even remould the vampire and re-make himself. The soul was supposed to have fixed everything, finally make him what he needed to be for her, a panacea for the problem of Spike. But the soul didn't make enough of a difference, just made him feel twitchy and awkward. It was about time he faced reality; soul or no soul, vampirism was a static state, and he could fight for all the souls there ever were and win, but he would still be dead. All Spike would ever be was a corruption of a man's corpse brought to a blasphemous mimicry of life by a demon inside. He would always need second-hand blood to live and would always have a black demon heart silent in his chest.



He knew, even if Buffy was finally ready to offer all that he’d ever wanted, that the darkness that kept him walking the earth would ruin her eventually, destroying everything he’d ever loved about her with its acid touch. It didn't matter what she deserved, because he didn't deserve to give it to her. He would never be fixed. There was nothing left in his power that he could to do make him right. The soul, now stained indelibly with the taint of vampirism, didn't make him a perfect person, or even the naïve young man he’d been as a human, it didn’t make him William with the weight of a hundred years of brutality on his back. He was Spike and that was the trouble. Buffy needed more than to live in an eternal night with half a man who was bound to fuck it up eventually; she deserved fun and light and happiness, and all a vampire would ever give her was despair, death and ruin.



Yet there was no way he was going to risk The First getting its way either. He’d walk into the sun if he had to watch her sacrifice all over again. He’d happily die to stop that ever happening; they needed a permanent fix and no one was suggesting any other options.



He should have known that Buffy wouldn’t see it that way.



“Excuse me; I need a word with my vampire.” She yanked his arm and hauled Spike out into the hall for privacy, although the volume of her voice wouldn’t give them much of that. “Are you insane? How could you want this?”



“Buffy—”



“You can’t do it. I won’t let you,” she ground out, her eyes mean and serious, daring him to disagree with her.



“Buffy! Listen to me.” He lowered his voice, matching and challenging hers, trying to make her really see they didn’t have any other choices. “I need to do this.”



“Need?” His words only seemed to make her angrier. “What are you talking about? I need you.”



He snorted, and his attempt at gentle persuasion was over. “No, you don’t.”



“Get over yourself! Since when are you the martyr?”


“Since I died,” he snarled. He backed away and threw his arms wide in supplication. “This, this is unfinished. I saved the world, Buffy. And that was enough for me. I finally did the right thing and if that’s to be the last of Spike, at least I went out proper. But I want what I did to mean something! I need it to.”



“It does mean something!” she snapped back. “It means something to me!” So much for maintaining his distance, she followed him, taking him by the hands. Her tone when she spoke was calmer, belying the anger that still flashed in her eyes. “You mean everything to me.”



“Me too,” he whispered. “But you and me, I know it; we’re never going to have that white picket fence.”



She looked up at him, her eyes softening with the onset of tears, offering him everything he’d ever wanted if he stayed. La belle dame sans merci. “Does that even matter?”



But it was wrong, and he should have known that sooner and not started this whole mess. He shouldn’t have hurt her. “It’s what you want.”



“It used to be,” her lips quirked into a smile, rueful and bittersweet, “but I finally realised that ‘normal’ is only what you make it.”



That was true enough, but she’d chosen a hell of a time to realise it. He broke free of her hands and backed away a little to clear his head from her intoxicating proximity before she had him changing his mind all over again. “I had time to think about everything while I was Casparing around Wolfram and Hart, Buffy.” He scratched a little at his sunburnt face. “It can’t work. Not between you and guy like me. I have nothing to offer you—”



She silenced him with a hand over his still heart, pushing him back against the newel post at the foot of the grand staircase. “You offer me this.”



“I’m sorry. It’s not enough,” he breathed. “I can’t—“



She swallowed the rest of his words with a gentle and lingering kiss; a promise ghosting across his lips with each slow caress of her mouth. With that his resistance to keeping his distance crumbled to nothing. He could argue forever with her about the pros and cons of sacrificing himself or he could go and discuss The First with a bunch of people he didn’t give a crap about. Sod it, he thought. Giles, Angel and the others could wait; he had better things to do with his final hours. He would still have to do what needed to be done, and it would still hurt her, whatever he did, but he might as well accept the solace her arms offered for the dwindling time he had left.



He pulled her closer, turning the kiss from chaste to carnally savage, pouring all the love he had ever felt into it. He’d always been, from the moment he’d spied her dancing with her friends at The Bronze, half a step away from falling for her youth, vigour and conviction, her simple aliveness, and he found himself falling for them all over again, because for the first time since they started this dance, she was open to receive every bit, reflecting it back and adding her own until it grew bigger than the both of them. That she should finally lose him again made the decision weigh heavily on his heart and that nearly broke him; it had happened so often to her in her short life, as soon as she found love or what she thought was love, it was snatched away again, like a cat chasing an elusive string. Happiness, for both of them it seemed, would be forever beyond their grasp so maybe they should catch whatever happiness they could.



***



Unlike old times, this time they made it to the bed.



With the heavy curtains drawn to shield a vampire from the grizzled daylight, the fire brought its flickering warmth to light their bodies instead. Skin brushed against skin aglow with new flame, his sun-starved and milky, hers pale with an English winter.



Astride him in the sanguine light, Buffy feathered light kisses over his face, before meeting his searching mouth with hard, forceful ones that demanded his tongue. Spike opened his mouth to a kiss that turned slow, languid and deep. Mind-blowing. His tongue tangled with hers as their eyes fell shut, twining together in loose, delicious knots that melted them both into the kiss, she into his arms as he pulled her in, closer, tighter.



As their mouths played wicked sinful games, lip to lip and cool fingertips pressed to soft, warm skin, his hands roamed the curve of her spine. He was hopelessly lost now; the pure sensation of her smooth skin moving against his as he touched her was a taste of a heaven he would never see. He’d never dreamed he’d have this again. He'd accepted long ago that after what he'd done that night, in the bathroom, when he'd been drunk and at the ragged end of his emotional rope, that to be with her again was beyond what he deserved. To be back in her bed, even this one last time, was beyond even his wildest hopes. When she’d died, his whole world had ended with her. When she'd returned, for all his anger, it was like seeing the sun again. This reunion felt something like that.



She broke from his lips, moving downwards, nipping and mouthing a gentle line of inconsequential words along his jaw and down his neck. As she brushed her lips over his breastbone, she left a cooling path of soft caresses. Where her words still left doubts, the care she took persuaded him this wasn't going to be the same as their previous encounters, sweet not raw. When she paused over his dead heart a moment before planting a lingering kiss there, as if to acknowledge the love she now claimed to cherish, he finally let himself believe her. For the first time she was joining him in more than just really great fucking; this was about her finally choosing him as a partner, not just as flesh willing to do her bidding.



And it felt simply wonderful.



Slowly, taking her time as if they had forever to finish this, she moved lower, nuzzling the tight muscles of his stomach, paying attention to each and every hard line she found there. By the time she’d kissed her winding way down to his cock it was aching, ready, but she too knew they did not need to rush. Her need to couple as soon as possible, to divorce her thoughts from the world and him, appeared to be gone, along with all her fury and frustration. Back then he hadn't had any doubt that she loved him. He’d seen what he’d wanted to see in her vacant, dilated pupils, mistook the thundering of her heart and the heady musk of her arousal for higher feelings, not the complicated muddle of lust and despair they really were. He knew better now.



There was no less desire this time, from either of them, but the urgency to join and just fuck her problems away was diminished; replaced with a togetherness he’d never felt from her before. They could still do this for hours, but there was no need to hurry, better then to draw out their time together, to learn about each other again, this time with acceptance rather than regrets.



She bent to take him. As she drew her mouth along the shaft of his cock, each stroke was long, slow and exquisitely deep, drawing out the sweet agony until it shook him apart, breaking him to pieces in a short orgasmic moment.



She sat up and grinned lasciviously, licking her glossy lips before slipping him inside, so deep, so warm, gasping as he filled her. His girl liked it on top. Oh, how he’d missed this, missed the way she looked down at him, in ecstasy, like the sun he hadn't seen in a hundred years, and he knew that he, Spike, made her feel that way. He’d missed her in the way that he’d missed the blood and the violence after he’d been chipped, an obsessive craving for her that tormented those long, frustrating nights when he’d wanted to rend flesh under his fangs and the feel bones cracking under his fingers as hot, rich blood lashed against his tongue. All he’d ever wanted was to look in her eyes and see his love mirrored there with hers. And it was.



The bed creaked softly beneath them as she slowly started to move, the springs of the mattress vocalising the ancient rhythm. She threw her head back, pressing her pubic bone yet closer to his, driving him deeper as her muscles worked for him and thrusting her small breasts upwards for him to catch. With her back arched, they were taut and hard in the cups of his hands, the tight nipples aching to be pinched into hard peaks.



Spike could have fucked her his way forever and a day, with no rush to get where they wanted to go, but soon the languorous slide of his cock was not enough and she quickened the tempo to match the rising frequency of her gasps. He gripped her hips, helping her by driving her onto him with her every down stroke. Her skin, now glittering in a fine sweat, shone like gold in the gilded firelight. Her small hands clasped frantically at his muscular arms as she moved and came, pressing him back into the mattress as she shook with shuddering waves.



As they subsided, he deftly flipped her onto her back, thrusting deep, not wanting to ever withdraw, but he paused to take her in, to savour her. In a penumbra of hair, each strand a flare in the universe of dark sheets, she lay flushed with an aroused nebula of blushes. In that moment she had never been so beautiful to him.



All he’d ever really wanted was to live forever in the raw delirium flush that new love brought, to sustain that high. He’d wanted to be someone’s world, like they were his, and share his heart with one special woman who would give him the wild and passionate ride of the lovers he’d read about when he was alive: Heathcliff and Cathy, Romeo and Juliet, Lancelot and Guinevere, Tristan and Iseult. Love was only worth the price if it soared to dangerous heights, passionate and consuming. There had still been enough of naïve little William inside him to cast himself in his own drama, those books shaping his romantic nature through his death and beyond. Poor William who’d died not for love, but for rejection, had waited for the wild love affair in his future; he never would have guessed that he’d have to die first. Now Spike looked into the eyes of a woman he had forever sought, but had for so long failed to capture and he knew that although love wasn’t always like that, he’d been given just a taste of something finer than most would ever experience.



Buffy smiled up at him, wide open and welcoming for the first time as she rode out the last of her orgasm with his quick thrusts. She was everything he’d ever wanted, and more besides, but now he was ready to let that dream go.



The huge grin that returned her smile broadcast his happiness as he released. She could have no doubts now as to how much she meant to him. He could think of no other way he'd rather be remembered.





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