Elegy (1/1)

[sevendeadlyfun]

Pairing: Spike/Angel

Rating: R

Summary: He can remember all their befores.... Angel thinks about his relationship with Spike.

A/N: Set in the beginning of AtS S5 and written for a request made by fajrdrako as part of Fall Fandom Free-For-All. This is a sestina masquerading as a ficlet and hopefully, I haven't made a hash of it.




It’s almost enough to make him ashamed. Spike
stalks away, his body nearly transparent and touching nothing.
Angel grimaces because he doesn’t want to feel
ashamed. He should feel vindicated (vindictive? Where does that word come
from? he wonders).He’s managed to make Spike go away.
But the victory is hollow, and these days all too easy.

He can remember all their befores, when an easy
kill and a sweet fuck were ways to keep the peace with Spike.
Now he struggles not to snap and snarl, desperate to find a way
to keep it together. At the end of the day, he often says nothing
because nothing is easier. He doesn’t have any civil words come
nightfall and sometimes, he enjoys how uncivil he feels.

That’s Angelus, pushing him towards thinking, feeling,
being a monster. When he’s around Spike, being a monster is easy.
Simple, simpler than civility and affection because those never come
easy to a monster. He spends a lot of time fighting the monster. Fighting Spike.
Fighting Spike is simple, simpler than admitting he’s a monster, a thing.
A thing wouldn’t know how to love (no matter that Spike always found a way).

And Angel does know how to love. That’s what he tells himself, a way
of whistling past the graveyard of fear he lives in. He feels
things deeply is all. Much deeper than Spike, the shallow bastard; there’s nothing
to him but sound and fury. All that passion, wasted on that little prick. He has it easy.
A few days of crazy and he’s off saving the world. What the fuck does Spike
know about love? It’s all the same to him, loving and hurting and coming

back for more. Battered and bruised, and he looked beautiful dappled in come
and bruises and bright red hand prints, his curls pushed up away
from his face…Angel quickly gets lost in his memories, fingers tracing Spike’s
non-existent body. Firm flesh yields sweetly under his fangs and Angel can almost feel
the thick hot blood pour down his throat, flavored with sex and sin. They flow easily,
memories and blood. It’s hard to feel alone with memories like his, even with nothing

else to keep him warm. He shakes his head, pushing the thought away. Nothing
matters but the mission. He shouldn’t even be thinking about Spike. Come
tomorrow, he’ll have tucked the memories away. No more regrets. Sure, it’s easier
to live in the past. No surprises in his memories, no challenges. That’s the way
the past works, sweet and simple. Simpler than the present with its complicated feelings
and fears, the ones that keep him in his office late at night worried about Spike.

He shakes his head. It’s coming up on sunrise and still no Spike.
Nothing he can do. Spike’s a big…ghost now. So what if they push each other away?
No matter how he feels in his memories, they live in the now. In the now, hate is easy.