Walking the Edges

Title: Walking the Edges (1/1)

Author: Sandy S.

Disclaimer: I own nothing. All belongs to Joss...

Rating: NC-17

Spoilers: Set a handful of years after “Chosen.”

Summary: Buffy POV. Buffy has been with Spike for some time, and she’s still haunted by a few demons. But aren’t we all?


Walking the Edges


My eyes fly open to the rush of reality. A nightmare flees to the far reaches of my mind, eluding my consciousness. It’s just as well. I’ve had enough nightmares in the waking world to last a lifetime.

Shivering at the after effects of the dream, I roll over beneath the thick layer of blankets and reach for the opposite side of the bed.

Empty.

Now I understand.

The only time I have nightmares now is if he’s not beside me. It doesn’t matter if he’s holding me close or lying on his stomach with his arms over his head, lost in the heavy, innocent sleep of youth. If he’s present, I’m nightmare free.

Sitting up, I let the covers fall away and blink my heavy lids, shaking my head against the drowsiness. I don’t want to slip into the dream again. Through the open bedroom window, moonlight loans its silvery cloak to the room, accenting furniture with fragile sheets of diamonds. Cool air wraps itself around my limbs and upper body, and I shiver again.

My bedroom is a winter wonderland. . . only without the actual snow, and it’s eighty degrees outside.

He’s the one that keeps the house so cold at night. He says it’s because he’s used to sleeping in cold places like cemeteries and dusty tombs. I argue that he just likes to snuggle close to me and that he’s still not acclimated to his body heat.

Guess adjusting to having a warmer overall body temperature takes a while if you haven’t been living for over a hundred years.

I wouldn’t know. I’ve never been dead for over five months at a time.

Although, I could possibly argue that I was a member of the walking dead for about a year at one point.

With that thought, I feel the tug of depression in the depths of my soul, and as usual, I fight it.

Sometimes, I’m afraid of slipping back down into the pit.

Despair and hopelessness is unequivocally a pit.

When you’re in the midst of it, you don’t realize what’s happening. In my experience, it wasn’t until I began to claw my way up the slippery slope toward the fragile precipice of life that I could see where I’d been. . . .

and see what I’d done when I was feeling so bad. . . how I’d hurt others they way they’d hurt me.

My stomach turns, and I feel a rush to get out of bed, do something. . . anything to avoid thinking about falling into the darkness. . . . I’m like a recovered alcoholic, addicted to the worst kind of emotional concoction. . . self-pity and misery.

The cold air rushes about my legs like icy fingers grasping at my soul, and my feet pound over the chilly hardwood floors to the one place I know I can get warm. . . the bathroom.

Scrambling as if I’m being chased by an unseen foe, I wrench on the water faucets so that water splashes over my arm, encasing it in liquid fire. And I take a shaky breath.

I can breathe now.

And I feel a little silly that I’ve forgotten to turn on the light. Of course, the moonlight has followed me here.

This is the one room that *he* insists have a window. . . a big window that’s hazy enough that the neighbors can’t see us at night but is able to open and close so naughtiness can occasionally ensue.

Once, he was mowing the lawn. . .

I suppress a giggle.

Never thought I’d witness him mowing the lawn, but he does so. . . with the requisite amount of complaining. He always waits for a reminder to mow the lawn; I think he just likes to give me that drop-dead look of his that makes me want to. . .

I digress.

Anyway, once, he climbed in the window in the middle of my shower, covered in sweat and dirty jeans and the heady smell of freshly cut grass. I gave a playful shriek, but he merely ordered me to quit moaning about my innocent little soul and commenced to touch me in all the right places. Needless to say, we didn’t leave the window open long.

However, the bathroom remains one of those awkward, painful places for us. Something we avoid talking about like couples that avoid talking about their previous partners and their significant other’s parents.

I say that because after our mid-afternoon romp, he pulled his sodden jeans back on and exited out the window. He refuses to be with me in the bathroom outside of the shower.

I know why. And I wish I could forget.

I blink and am suddenly aware that steam is curling around my ankles and face and that my arm is dripping over the tiles. I gaze around the cloudy room.

This bathroom is a far cry from the one where the incident from so long ago occurred. For one thing, the new bathroom is much bigger with its soft blue tiles and blue-marble wallpaper. There are three sinks, a shower, and a whirlpool bathtub. The mirror stretches wide and long. Sometimes, I catch him studying his reflection as if he might have lost something important but can’t quite remember what.

My heart catches in my chest with a motley palette of feelings that I can’t sort out, and the urge to hide surges back. I strip off my nightgown and tumble into the liquid spray.

The droplets fall as hard pebbles on my flesh, scraping at my flesh and sloughing away the shroud of darkness that’s sinking into me. At first, it’s refreshing. . . like the astringent that strips the dirt and makeup from my face. But then, it begins carving deeper, and my emotions flood my eyes.

Sobs wrack my body as the layers fall away. . . layers of painful memories. Some are more vibrant than others, and for some reason, what the ones that hit me the most tonight are the memories of my mother and of Tara. . .

. . . not the memories of their life but of their death.

I hate the unknown of death. Death can be quiet and stealthy, skulking in the shadows until. . . BAM! Someone you know is dead, and you weren’t there. At least, if my gift is death, I deliver it with a loud roar. Every being that I’ve slain has known I was coming. I don’t sneak up on vamps and demons when they’re not aware; it’s never been my style. . . or his.

With water cascading over my cheeks in torrents, I close my eyes and envision my mother and Tara smiling and alive.

Even now, the images just don’t align properly with the sight of them without movement, without breath. And I try to imagine what the final moments for them were like. . .

. . . and I can’t. I will never be able to, and I’m not sure how I feel about that.

Just as I hate hospitals, I hate guns.

I believe that we choose to involve ourselves with people that reflect our needs at whatever point we are in our lives. It must be like a radar or sixth sense, but people do.

After Angel left me, I chose Riley to fit what I needed at the time. . . a sense of normalcy amidst the chaos. That certainly didn’t end up being quite the way I planned. Turns out that chaos had other things in mind for me. . . and my relationships with others.

And after Sunnydale’s demise, the loss of my job as the Chosen One, and the deaths of people I cared for, I threw myself into being normal again. I wasn’t ready for a relationship, and I knew it. So, I chose someone as emotionally closed off as me. Let’s call him. . . “Sam.”

Sam liked guns. I couldn’t stand the sight of the pair of guns he kept locked in the safe in his bedroom closet. Just knowing they were there sent prickly tingles up and down my spine when I spent the night with him.

Once, Sam decided to take me along with him to his favorite shooting range, located in a canyon somewhere near where I lived at the time. I went, but he didn’t understand why I felt so ill at ease with bullets flying and popping in my ears. He didn’t know that every time I heard a bullet sing, I pictured Tara’s blood splattering the wall.

(For some reason, I can’t remember anything about being shot myself. . . just Will. . . . all black and covered in veins. . . hovering at the edge of my hospital bed with the bullet from my chest between her pale fingers.)

Most of the time Sam was shooting at unmoving targets, I sat on a nearby bench and studied a grasshopper whose head had been ripped from its body. I marveled that despite having no body, no sense of control, the poor creature was fighting for it’s life against the breeze blowing around it. . . its antenna still flicking back and forth.

Polishing his gun before he put it away, Sam joined me on the bench. He spun the tiny half-alive grasshopper into the dirt and told me that he didn’t know if he could love me.

That’s when I got the call about Spike being alive in L.A.

And this time, I chose someone who loves me for me. . . who knows my history as I know his and still accepts and believes in me outside of the labels others put on me.

He and I’ve come a long way.

As he struggled with the transformation from powerful vampire “who cut a bloody swath through half of Europe” to one human among many, I struggled with mine.

I’m not needed by the world anymore. Others fulfill that role now.

He and I found our voice together, and to my surprise, our voices resonate best when we’re together. . . despite our individual flaws. . . despite his temper and tendency to obsess over things and despite my matching temper and penchant toward depression. Overall, we balance each other out.

And together, we’re happy.

I never fail to be amazed by how fortunate I am.

The water is cold now as it slides between my shoulder blades. I’m reluctant to leave the cleansing fluid behind.

As I switch off the valves, my ears catch the sound of a crash followed by loud cursing from the direction of the kitchen. Not bothering to grab a towel, I clamor out of the shower with a brief grin.

He’s home. . . in more ways than one.

Donning a neutral expression, I tiptoe. . . er, more like squish. . . down the hall and pounce on his bent form. Too late, I remember that he’s smashed a glass and is picking shards of sand out of his foot.

“Buffy!” he grunts with annoyance binding his tone. “Watch what you’re doing!”

I ignore him, determined to show him my fresh wave of enthusiasm for us. “So, what’d you kill?” I ask as I twine my arms around his neck.

When he can’t sleep, he often goes out alone to kill things. . . stray vampires and demons. I tried to go with him once. Apparently though, it’s a manly hunt thing from which I am banned.

His hands slide over my naked, very wet skin. “You’re all wet,” he observes. The trace of exasperation with me is gone, and although his face is placid, his eyes twinkle at me in the moonlight.

“Yeah. What of it?” I say as if everyday I greet him at the door drenched and in my birthday suit. “You killed a you’re-all-wet demon? He look like me?”

Running his clean hand through his bleached curls, he pushes me gently aside and resumes picking glass from his bloody foot. “If you must know, Miss Nosy-Pants, I dusted two vamps and snapped the neck of a Tur’gath demon tonight.”

I pinch his bicep teasingly. “Ooooo. All manly. Did you bring them home for me to cook for you?”

“Um, no.” I love the way his voice deepens when he’s telling me “no” so firmly. “I don’t suppose you like to eat fried dust and leftover goo excretions.”

“Yuck.” I survey him. Outside of his foot, the only thing askew is his shirt, which is torn, exposing a nicely defined midriff. “You sure didn’t get all goopy.”

“Unlike *someone,*” he says, lifting an eyebrow at me, “I don’t require showers after I kill slimy things. What’d you kill tonight?”

He thinks I went out hunting, too! I pause, cocking my head to the left in the way I know drives him wild. “Only some inner demons.”

He does opposite of what I expect. . . as usual. Instead of jumping at the chance to respond to my advances, he touches my cheek tenderly and asks, not for the first time, “You okay?”

“Yes,” I respond in earnest. Then, I pout, crossing my arms and giving him a glare. “I’m throwing myself at you, and you’re not noticing.”

“I’m *trying* to clean up my foot, and *you’re* not noticing,” he returns, leaning over his wounded, bare foot.

“Awww. Poor Spike. Attacked by the killer coffee mug that leapt off the kitchen counter that *someone* forgot to clean.”

“*Buffy* forgot to clean,” he insists. “And this wouldn’t have happened if you didn’t make me take my shoes off at the door.”

“Hey, now! That’s *your* rule. You put it in place after Xander’s little boy tracked mud all over the carpets,” I say, patting his hip.

“Oh, yeah.”

As I kneel to the ground to examine the injury, I’m reminded how utterly human he is now, and I’m also struck by how utterly human he’s always been. He hisses as I remove the largest piece, and fresh blood wells and then rolls in a bead down the flesh of his arch.

Letting his life-force surge over the pad of my fingertip, I look up at him to find his unfettered eyes probing mine. Blood and Spike always feel like a primal combination to me, and desire shoots raw and urgent through my torso.

Before I know what’s happening, he’s scooped me up and wrapped my legs around his t. Ht. He props me on the portion of the kitchen counter that’s free of dishes and buries his head in my damp neck, growling, “You should greet me at the door all the time like this.”

He presses his hips against mine, and I feel his need swelling against me beneath the denim of his jeans. I groan and wriggle back a little.

I twine my fingers through his curls where his hand had been earlier. “You’ll get all spoiled if I do that.”

Gripping my behind, he tugs me back against him so that I give a short gasp. “Spoil me.”

Snaking my fingers under his shirt, I tug the ruined material over his head and toss it aside as I kiss him hard on the lips so that he catches my chin in his hands to regain his balance and meet me tongue for tongue. My hips unconsciously maneuver to rub against his, and I feel as if the world could collapse around me now and I wouldn’t care.

Several seconds later when we both gasp for air, I whisper, “If you’re lucky, I’ll spoil you.”

His eyes are liquid navy in the moonlight peeking in through the blinds. “I am very lucky,” he says with such honesty that my heart skips.

Without another word, I take that moment to hop down from the counter and grab his hand, tugging him down the hall. Water droplets trail down my back.

“Where are we going?” he asks, voice husky with desire and surprise as if he’s just woken up.

“We have to wash off your foot before you bleed all over the place.”

“*Now* she worries about the floor and carpets,” he grumbles, but he’s not irritated, just curious.

When I lead him to the bathroom and he recognizes where I’ve brought him, he halts, backpedaling, “No, pet. Not here.”

I almost ask him why not until I catch the panicked look on his face like he’s a deer caught in the headlights. “Yes. Here.”

And I calmly guide him into the bathroom. Not flipping the switch because our eyes are adjusted to the dim lighting, I lace my fingers with his and position him on the back of the toilet. He watches me with wide eyes, and I carefully keep my expression neutral as I tend to his foot with soap, water, a washcloth and medicine. I move slowly, a little afraid that he’ll run away if I make any sudden moves. . . maybe a little afraid that I will, too.

When I’m done, I set aside the tools and wash my hands. Then, I go to him where he sits frozen on the back of the toilet. He looks as if he’s expecting me to hit him and so, I do the reverse.

I bring my lips to his with reverence and kiss him so quietly that I can hear the crickets humming outside over the sound of our breathing. I hover over his lips as I end the brief kiss so that we share air between us, and I wait until he opens his eyes. I hold his gaze, my long, drying hair a curtain, shielding us from the world. . . from our fears.

“I love you,” I whisper as if for the first time. “And it’s okay for us to be in here together. Look around. It’s just a bathroom. . . not even the sa. . . .” My voice catches a bit, but I keep going, “We’ve been together for five years. And I love you.”

Tears spill over the lashes of his fathomless blue eyes, but I won’t let him sob. I fill the space with an intense kiss that develops rapidly into something more passionate than I’ve ever felt. With urgency, I fumble for his jeans that are now straining again, waiting for his release.

He groans as I bring down the zipper and free him. I stroke him until his hips move in time with my hand, and he’s trying to brush past the only obstacle to my entrance. I won’t let him, so he takes matters into his own hands, pulling me closer to him with one hand and plunging his free fingers into me, thrusting them deep inside me until I’m moaning with desire.

I let go of him finally, and with a guttural rumble from his chest, he pushes me against the bathroom wall and kisses my neck and continues down to briefly taunt my nipples and then my belly button with his tongue. In response, I nip at his neck and earlobe, pressing my own kisses to the sweet hollow of his throat and the soft place near his collarbone.

Then, he lowers me along the wall so that I feel his moist, engorged tip brush over my thigh to throb at my slick entrance. I cry out a bit and rock against him, wanting him inside me, but he resists, caressing the backs of my thighs.

I feel as if I might burst into all-consuming flames.

He waits for my eyes to lock with his so that he’s sure I feel completely and utterly safe in his arms.

Then, he slowly, achingly enters me, and I hold completely still, breath coming in shallow gasps, heart pounding, until after what seems like a beautiful eternity I contain all of him.

Just as gradually, he pulls out, shooting hot waves over my torso and through my limbs to spark at my fingertips and toes. Now my throbbing pounds against his, and before he can make another move, I sheath his shaft again. We begin to move as one. His thrusts build speed and intensity until he’s hammering hard and fast into me, keeping time with my bucking hips.

His body starts giving off tiny shudders, and as he climaxes, he presses his forehead against mine to remind me that he’s here with me and no one else. My own orgasm comes soon after his as I feel his hot warmth against my thighs and feel the beating of hea heart against my own.

Boneless, we slide to the floor together, cradled in each other’s arms. . . .

Waves of exhaustion hit me, and I blink sleepy eyes at my lover. “Take me to bed.”

He regards me with his adorable bedroom eyes. “Is that an order?”

I rub one eyelid and yawn. “Uh huh.”

“Okay. Just this once, I’ll take your orders, love,” he whispers in my ear, tugs on my earlobe with his lips, and stands with me in his arms.

“That’s a first,” I murmur, hugging his neck with both arms and feeling heavy with the aftereffects of making love with so much emotion.

“And the last,” he returns as we enter our bedroom.

He sets me down so lightly that I hardly notice I’m in bed. Then, he joins me, pulls the covers over us and snuggles close, wrapping his arm around my waist and tucking his legs up under mine.

Before I know it, he’s asleep beside me, snoring quietly. His arm is heavy on my waist, and I finger the hairs on the back of his arm thoughtfully.

I’m not sure exactly what happened tonight. . . how I got from terrible fear of my past cg ing into my present to making love in a room similar to one that carries such emotional weight for Spike and me.

Maybe that means I have personality issues.

On the other hand, maybe it just means I’m human . . . a flawed human being who’s in love with another flawed human being.

And maybe. . . maybe we’re just two people walking along the edges of the stuff of nightmares. . . facing the world together.

I close my eyes, ready to face my dreams once more.

The end.