Subversive

Disclaimer: I still don't own the characters.

The light was harsh against my eyes as I blinked slowly. I listened to the door shut as Angel and Wesley left the bedroom, leaving me in seclusion with Spike. I felt him. I sat still against the wall and opened my eyes to see my bloody hands. I wanted it off, but I couldn’t move to make the effort. Maybe it didn’t matter. Maybe it would be on me for the rest of my life. So red, so dark and tainting.

The pale lamplight cast no shadows. Every lamp in my bedroom was on. I realized my red sheets were stained. I couldn’t face the darkness, not again. Though I was no longer out of control. I could feel my skin crawling. I could feel the demons dancing around me and laughing, waiting to eat my soul whole. My heart was beating slowly, but it felt like it was thundering in my head.

I wanted to move. I wanted to erase everything that had happened, to wipe out my memory and my heart, but it would never go away. There would always be marks, deep scars that would affect me forever.

Spike appeared from the doorway and crouched down beside me, watching me carefully. He reached out a hand towards my cheek. I flinched, and he stopped mid-motion. “What say we get you cleaned up, love? I’ll get you some medicine, we’ll wash all this stuff off of you.” He tentatively moved to touch my hair. I turned away slightly as he stroked my head gently.

I nodded slowly, not really paying attention. “All right.”

“Right, then.” Spike took my arms and eased me to my feet. I felt unsteady and dizzy as if I were standing on moving ground. As we moved towards the bathroom I stumbled, and he held onto me tighter. “Careful. Just a bit farther, now. You’re all right.”

The harsh lights stung my eyes. Spike eased me towards the edge of the bathtub and eased me down to sit. Everything was cold and hard, nothing friendly or homey about it, not even the little knick-knacks everywhere. I stared blankly up at Spike as he pulled off his shirt and tossed it aside. He was bruised up fairly badly and had several cuts on his chest and back that were still oozing thin lines of blood.

He bent over the tub and switched on the water, the sound filling my ears. Nothing was really registering. I was looking at everything as if through a veil and I couldn’t think through anything. I knew there had to be something else, something I should be doing, but I couldn’t place it. I looked at the torn and dirtied pants that still clung to my legs. I could feel the torn skin beneath it.

At last Spike turned to me and crouched down in front of me. He was doing his best to be as soothing and non-threatening as possible. “I need to take off your shirt,” he said, looking straight at me. “Then I’m going to clean you up. All right? That’s all I’m doing.”

I cringed and blinked, vaguely registering what he was saying. “All right,” I said distantly.

He nodded once, slowly. “Right.” He carefully began unzipping my shirt. Making any stretching moves made shoots of pain run through my back, arms and neck. A dull throbbing at the base of my skull was starting to become a secondary beat to match the one of my heart, and causing a heat to border nausea. As he pushed the shirt down my arms I saw that it was covered in dark bloodstains, and then it was gone.

“There’s a girl.” Spike looked me over carefully, assessing the damage but keeping it to a purely visual observation. “You don’t look so bad, love. Nothing that won’t heal.” He grabbed a wash cloth and drenched it, then slowly moved to my face. I edged away for a moment, then forced myself to stay still to allow him to clean me. I didn’t know what was worse: having someone touch me or being covered in blood. I couldn’t help looking at him as some sort of threat. That was all touch said to me. He was a vampire. Vampires were frightening and dangerous.

“Don’t,” I began haltingly, swallowing hard and causing my throat to begin burning. My voice trembled as I tried again. “Don’t h-hurt me.”

Spike looked at me, something crossing his face, something I couldn’t quite identify but seemed very close to hurt. “I’d never hurt you,” he said firmly. There was a quiet conviction in his voice that said he believed what he said. I wanted to trust it, but God, the cold fear was still inside of me. I threatened to resurface and claim me again, to consume every part of me as it had before and swallow me down into the deepest parts of its oblivion

Very slowly he touched the cloth to my face. I flinched. My eyes were stinging, especially my right eye. It wanted to stay closed and it was doing a pretty good job. My face hurt a lot. As he cleaned me like I was a china doll I took small shallow breaths to keep myself calm. I felt dirty. I could feel every drop of blood on me, every open mark and every scar beneath the surface. I wondered if I’d ever be clean again.

The warm water dripped down my neck and chest, cold once it reached my naked breasts. I tried to blink away the white stars that threatened to resurface. Spike touched my shoulder as he moved the cloth over my eyes and I cringed, struggling not to look into the darkness that it held. I tried to ignore the shooting pains in my back and neck, but it was all-encompassing. I risked looking at Spike. He was focused on cleaning my skin, vigilant in not meeting my eyes. He seemed okay, although there was still bruising on his cheeks and forehead, a couple of cuts here and there. Nothing serious. Lucky for him.

“Spike.”

He immediately paused in his work to look at me. “Yeah?” He sat still, waiting for me to speak and break the air.

I licked my lips, only to cause my lower lip to crack open and begin to bleed. I winced, angry. For a moment I squeezed my nails into my legs, trying to find the strength to breathe, the strength to speak, the strength to live. “I d-don’t know what happened,” I said at last, barely a voice.

He kept silent as he waited on me to elaborate.

“I’ve never… I mean, I haven’t….” I frowned, struggling for words. If I shut my eyes I knew I would see that bloody heart, my bloody hands and the mutilated corpse staring blankly at me. Pain was shooting through my chest and I took several quick breaths. “That’s not me,” I whispered shakily. “I’ve never hurt anyone.”

Spike leaned back slightly, brushing back a strand of wet hair behind my ear. There was infinite patience in his face, no judgment of any kind. “I know.”

I was starting to tremble again, my hands convulsing even as I grabbed my legs and tore into them. “I’m not supposed to be a killer,” I gasped, the words coming too quickly and too shakily. “But I am, I did, I killed him…”

“Ssh.” Spike touched my cheek, trying to keep my eyes on him. “You’re not a killer. Yes, you did kill that vampire, but that was revenge. You earned that. He did horrible things to you, and he deserved nothing less back in return. It doesn’t make you a bloodthirsty killer. That’s me. It’s hard the first time you take a life, I know. But he wasn’t alive, so you didn’t really kill him.”

I frowned, my eyes watering and burning. It took me a moment before I could form the words to get it out. “But… you’re alive, aren’t you? You could die the same way.”

Spike blinked, a look of pain crossing his face. It seemed as if I’d struck right through his nice little lie. “I’m not,” he said slowly, resignedly. “Not really alive, you know. Yeah, I could go the same way. I could go a lot of different ways that you humans can’t. We vampires aren’t alive, pet. Just remember that. Maybe it’ll help.”

I shook my head, gripping my legs tighter until I was sure I’d broken the skin beneath. “No, no, you are alive. You are. I know it in my gut. You--you think and feel and fight and love and everything… I know you are, you have to be!”

He swallowed hard and touched my arms. “Eva,” he began. “Baby, we’re not. I’m not. You know this. You’re just trying to make yourself into something you’re not.”

Wrenching against his grip as I struggled to break free from what he was trying to tell me, I shook my head, kept shaking in desperation to understand. “Yes I am. I’m a killer, you’re alive, he was alive, I killed him… Spike…” I felt my eye widen. “You know it’s true… isn’t it?”

His gaze became hard and he sat up a little straighter. “It’s not.”

“But… but I did horrible things! I--I mutilated him, and I reached inside his bloody chest and took out his heart… I’m a monster!”

“Eva, stop this.” He gripped my arms a little tighter and brought me a little closer to him, shaking me just a little bit. “Stop!” I froze, staring into his face from inches away. He looked at me hard, searching my face, willing me to understand as if I was five years old. “I’m dead,” he said firmly. “That’s how you become a vampire. You know this. Some demon sucks your blood, makes you drink theirs, you die. You know it as well as I. I’ll always be like this. I don’t breathe. My heart? Doesn’t beat. Everything about me is false. I will never be alive. I exist in this bloody state is all, this demon wearing my face and living this undead life.”

My face began to crumple. I needed him to be alive. I needed assurance that what I loved was real and that I had done something horribly wrong. I needed to be punished. His harsh words were breaking through my mind and making me question things I didn’t want to change.

“But you have a soul,” I said weakly. “That makes you more than just a demon.”

He sighed and shook his head. “Maybe,” he said doubtfully. “Maybe it just means there’s something bloody wrong with me. I’m nothing inside here, love.”

“S-so you’re just a corpse?” I asked, frowning so hard my face began to hurt even more. “All this time I’ve just been sleeping with a corpse? Everything I’ve felt for you is for a thing, just a body?”

He pressed his lips together, jaw clenched tightly. For a moment he seemed to deliberate on answering. Perhaps he wanted to retract everything he’d said. Or maybe he really believed that he was nothing but a thing. I was trying to understand what he was saying, what I was feeling, where I stood in life. I needed to make sense of something, and if it turned out that the man in my life wasn’t really anything then where did that put me?

“Yeah,” he said at last. “That’s about it.”

I felt as if he’d just punched me in the stomach as all the air left me in a rush. I stared at him with disbelief and near revulsion. Hearing him admit and accept that he was just a… a thing, an object without any substance regardless of a soul… I couldn’t believe it. It was trying to upset the foundation of my life and my affections. And if he wasn’t alive with a soul, what was I, then?

“Are you telling me that I shouldn’t care for you ? That I shouldn’t feel what I feel because you’re just a thing and you don’t believe you’re alive?”

The question made him sigh and he bowed his head for a moment. My head was aching with the complexities we were deliberating. At last he looked up again, his face blank. “I don’t know. If it would help you feel better for what’s happened… maybe, yeah.”

I pulled myself back sharply, aghast at what he’d just said. The tears began to slip down my cheeks but I barely acknowledged them. I was freezing from the inside out, feeling shell shocked. After reeling from every attack and trauma that I had already been put through, now suddenly I was listening to Spike tell me that he wasn’t real and that maybe I shouldn’t care about him… so I could feel better? That maybe we shouldn’t be together because there were words he was speaking saying he wasn’t alive? It was infuriating.

Swallowing hard I raised my right hand, still bloody and still stiff. I touched his cheek tentatively, hand shaking. His skin was as cool as mine. “You’re real,” I said with certainty even though my voice betrayed me in its trembling. Weakness was all I felt, but at the moment I was clear on one thing. “I don’t believe you. Even if you are just a body, just a thing, you’re real and alive to me. My feelings are real. I won’t let you tell me not to have them for you because right now they are the only thing that is keeping me grounded. And if I let go of that then I will go insane. I cannot handle what has happened to me, what I did. I need you, whether you like it or not.”

Spike stared at me unblinking for a long time, remaining silent and sitting on his heels. In all the silence I could feel the wheels turning in his head, how half of him wanted to ride along and yet how the other half needed to go along with his version of things in some altered sense of compassion. My heart was beating slowly like the mournful call of Indian drums, and it hurt. Every part of me was on edge, ready to slide away into the mounting abyss of insanity, and I knew that he was the only one who could pull me back. The question was, did he believe that?”

At last Spike placed a hand over mine, meeting my eyes with a slow blink and a sudden wash of relief that I felt crash over me. He exhaled heavily and nodded once.

“I do care about you. More than I should, perhaps,” he smiled ruefully, gently cleaning my hand of the blood. “You’re an amazing woman, Eva. Whatever you need from me, I’ll do it. I just don’t want to see you hurt again. I’d do anything in my power to stop it. I’d steal someone else’s power if I had to.”

Something quieted inside me just a little bit. The drums weren’t beating as loudly now and my blood wasn’t running quite as cold. I swallowed hard and winced, trying to force my right eye to stay open. As I watched the blood spiral down the drain of the tub every time he rinsed the cloth out I realized that the empty space inside of me, while it was omnipresent and not budging, it wasn’t quite as unfriendly anymore.

“I need you,” I whispered, and then I realized that I had actually said it out loud.

Spike leaned closer, and for a moment a look of longing crossed his face. He placed my hand in both of his and pressed them to his chest as if willing them to make his heart beat once more. “God help me, I need you more,” he said quietly.

The air was warm. I watched Spike, half-trembling out of habit. Just looking at him and knowing he was there, it helped make the chaos seem a little less random and damaging. I couldn’t feel my legs. My back was threatening to split open and my neck felt like half of it had been ripped open and all it was remained a large gaping wound.

“When I look at you,” I whispered, “I don’t feel quite so lost. Please don’t go anywhere.”

Spike reached around and gently touched the back of my neck. He leaned in a little closer until my knees touched his torso. “I’m not going anywhere, dove,” he said. “Not as long as you need me.”

I felt tired. Spike proceeded to clean and sterilize my wounds, a lengthy process that tested my patience and made me want to disappear even more. At last he wrapped a long towel around me and guided me back into the bedroom. I was silent as he helped me slide onto the bed with much wincing and lay on my stomach gingerly, hugging the pillow under my chin. While I was clean, I felt dirty still, as if the marks of the wounds would never really go away. Maybe they wouldn’t.

I watched Spike clean himself off for a few minutes, how his lithe body worked to scrub himself clean expertly until there was no more blood and the shower was off. Finally I turned blank eyes to stare at the wall. The TV was on, playing something with the volume very low, but I couldn’t watch it. Every flash of color just made my mind work and I didn’t want to think. Numbness was spreading through me almost as slowly as the dull ebb of pain still filtering through most of my body. It didn’t matter how I lay. There was pain everywhere. The heater was on, which did help a little. I wasn’t big on clothes, but I couldn’t stand to be naked, either. Talk about a no-win situation.

There was a soft knock at the front door. I twitched and tensed, momentarily uncertain as to what lay on the other side. Who could be coming after me now? What was left to do to me? I felt the flow of fear spike a little inside of me.

Spike came out of the bathroom, towel wrapped around his waist and his hair dripping. “Better be important,” he muttered. To me, he motioned and said, “Stay here. I’m sure it’s nothing.”

Where the hell was I gonna go?

I craned my neck as far as I could without damaging myself to peer around the door as Spike shut the bedroom door and made his way to the front door. I remained still, straining to hear anything through the door. My heart was pounding in my ears until I heard what sounded like Angel’s voice approaching in conversation with Spike. Something inside me relaxed a little, although I kept myself on alert. I just didn’t want to think that anything else horrible could happen.

I could only replay the images of what had happened earlier. Flashes of fear, glass shattering, the hands that gripped my throat and tried to strangle me while I was fed upon, blood flowing in abundance as my throat was torn out… I could still smell the night air and the sickly sulfuric bile of innards riding the night and choking my nostrils. The whole thing made me feel hollow, as if I were seeing it all through someone else’s eyes. I squeezed the pillow, burying my face in it as if it were my only lifeline.

“Baby.” A knock at the door.

Looking over slowly as the door opened, I saw Spike and Angel standing in the doorway. Angel had changed clothes into a dark blue shirt over black pants, and he was holding a good-sized pharmacy bag.

“Hi, Eva,” he greeted, worry in his eyes. There was always worry in his eyes.

I swallowed hard, wincing at the pain it caused. My voice came out raspy as I said, “Hi.”

“I picked up all your prescriptions. There’s a good twenty-four hour pharmacy near the hospital and they rushed it. Told ‘em it was an emergency.” Angel shifted from foot to foot, looking slightly uncomfortable. “How are you feeling?”

I blinked slowly as Spike sat down beside me and pulled the sheet up higher over my back so my ass was no longer in view, and I sighed. “I don’t know,” I answered truthfully. “Ask me later.” Shifting and grunting in pain, I said, “So what’d you bring me?”

Angel finally stepped towards the bed and crouched down in front of me. “Just about anything you need.” He began shuffling through the bag and pulling out a vast array of bottles and boxes. “The doctor said you should start taking these right away, that it’ll help with the pain and help keep the wounds from getting infected. Um… sorry, there’s a lot.”

I stared at the sheer number of bottles in a bit of amazement when a very painful wave rolled through my back. I hunched in on myself, wincing and trying not to bite my lip and break the skin again. Clawing at the bed, I emitted a sort of mewling sound and squeezed my eyes shut.

“You all right?” Angel asked, placing a hand on my arm.

Face twisting in pain, I managed to answer through clenched teeth, “Just… let’s get started on those meds.”

“Bought out the whole pharmacy, didn’t you?” Spike observed as he gently took my arms and began helping me sit up very slowly as Angel began setting up the meds on the TV stand. Every inch of me was in pain and I just didn’t have time to care that the sheet had slipped down off of me. I just wanted the pain to stop. Angel turned around as Spike got me settled, then quickly averted his eyes as Spike propped me up between a mound of pillows and quickly adjusted the sheet to cover me once more. I couldn’t stop a whimper as I felt the wounds stretching on my back, tearing open and threatening to bleed all over the place.

“Good enough?” Spike asked, tucking the sheet around me.

I started to nod but my head was beginning to throb. “Yeah, good enough.”

As Angel began handing me pills, he read off the instructions as Spike helped me sip water. It was murder swallowing them, my throat hurt so bad. Funny how being strangled and munched on did that to you. I counted seven different pills and two forms of ointment that had to be put on every wound. By the time I was finished and lying down on my side propped between pillows, I was staring blankly at the wall, trying not to cry. Angel had seen me nude at least twice, I was sure. He’d seen Spike nude once when the towel came off. Funny how he was the only one who hadn’t been nude. The ointments had been the worst by far. I was tingling and aching all over.

La-la land was calling my name in a big way. I thought Angel had said the last pill was a sleep aid. My eyelids were mostly closed when I heard Spike talking to me, but at that point I was pulled into the darkness of ignorance and bliss.