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kerk_hiraethOkay,
so this was written way back in January and, after what has been; even for me, an excessively difficult year I have had to accept that I am never going to be able to get it looking right. I cannot use html and dreamwidth will not let me use rich text as I would wish.
Until I was typing this out again I did not realise the appropriateness of now trying again to post this; which you will understand if you read, at this time.
My eternal gratitude to the inestimable elisi, without whose support I might not be here posting this. This is the first of five very different fics I wrote back at the beginning of the year; various others are at different stages and may get posted before the year is out.
TITLE: 'Til Death Do Us Die
AUTHOR: kerk_hiraeth
FANDOM: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (S6);
LENGTH: 200;
CHARACTER(s): Spike; mentions of (in order) Angel(us); Darla; Dru(silla) & Buffy Summers;
'SHIPS: Spike/Buffy; Spike/Dru; Angel(us)/Darla; Angel/Buffy;
A/N: Spike in contemplative; slightly inebriated and bitterly self-pitying, probably after another empty encounter with the re-animated, and depressed, Buffy.
Always been my head canon as to where Spike was when the Armistice was announced; especially since reading a fanfic (long since sadly lost as far as I can tell) which told of Darla in Sarajevo in June of 1914; deciding not to eat a manic Serbian terrorist, because she had a vision of the chaos his shot that rang around the world would cause.
If anyone recognises that fic and can send it me I would be so happy as I don't believe I ever printed it up.
He'd wondered aloud once; twat that he was, whether being bitten by women was why they; group they, were so different from the other Vampires he'd met.
Only time the great pouffe had called him a poof.
Still did sometimes, wonder; now he was banging the Slayer.
Plural.
Chuckling, he chugged back a beer; reminded him of that grand Belgian stuff got him plastered back in November of '18.
He was still Spike; not William the Bloody Awful Poet, who could quote every verse he'd composed in over a century of not writing them.
Angelus had been an artist in his own way; Darla too.
Not even Dru had been in his class though; all too tactile; even Dru, to appreciate his abstract nature; buried deep as it was.
Never explained why Angelus had been so willing to play pussy whipped by a woman whose intelligence could have turned them all inside out.
Never seemed the type.
Then he'd gone ass over tit for the Slayer.
It was clear to him then why Angel would still die for Darla; why, if it came to it he ~ they'd both die for Buffy.
Abandon her too.
For Dru; his Ripe; Bloody Queen.
'What is the Jay more precious than the Lark
Because his feathers are more beautiful?
Or is the Adder better than the Eel
Because his painted skin contents the eye?
O, no good Kate! Neither art thou the worse
For this poor furniture and mean array.'
~ This is part of a speech from Act IV, Scene III of William Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. The pocket-sized book collection I own entitles it 'The Mind Enriches', but it's the second that catches my mind's attention and inspires Spike's alcohol-fueled train of thought here.
That and this passage from an early Star Trek novelisation; back when some could compete with the best science-fiction around back then.
“ 'Mnhei'sahe, ' “ she (Lt. Janice Kerasus) said promptly. “Captain, I'm sorry, but you would ask me to render one of the most difficult words in the language (Rihannsu, or what the unimaginative PTB at Paramount insist on calling Romulan). It's not quite honor – and not quite loyalty – and not quite anger, or hatred, or about fifty other things. It can be a form of hatred that requires you to give your last drop of water to a thirsty enemy – or an act of love that requires you to kill a friend. The meaning changes constantly with context, and even in one given context, it's slippery at best.”
(Ch. 10; My Enemy, My Ally by Diane Duane, 1984)
kerk_hiraeth
