All About Spike - Cotton Candy by Circe

Cotton Candy
By Circe

Thanks to my beta, cerdd_gwen

Rating: NC-17

Summary: Written for the Livejournal Flashfic-A-Thon. Set post-Innocence.

It’s only been three days since Angel lost his soul, but Buffy isn’t going to cry any more.

She’s doing something else, something productive, something that she should have done long before this, though it’s only been three days.

Buffy strides purposefully down the empty streets. There’s no one around, not ghost or ghoul or simple pedestrian. Maybe they see her coming, a pretty little blonde with fuck-me boots and a fuck-off scowl. Maybe they understand that today is not the time to mess the Slayer. It’s only been three days, you see.

She crosses Montrose and heads south on McLaren Avenue. This is the way to the factory. She knows this because once, not too long ago, she walked this route with her boyfriend. Of course, she didn’t pay much attention, then. When she was with her boyfriend everything else faded away and there was only him, gentle and tender and intense. But her boyfriend’s left town forever and the guy who packed his bags has gone to live with his old pals. He thinks he’s too cool to hang out with a bunch of teenagers; he’s got different interests now. The factory is where Spike and Drusilla hole up. This is where she’ll find Angelus.

Three days ago she turned seventeen. Seventeen years. She wonders if she should define her life by this measure, or by the day a stranger found her on the steps outside her high school. Or even by the move to Sunnydale, the baptism by fire that was being a Slayer on the Hellmouth.

She knows that Angel defined his life by this last. He gasped this truth into the underside of her breasts and the curve of her belly that night three days ago. “I live for you,” he told her. “All that I am, you make me. You give my soul meaning. You take away the curse so there’s only love.”

You take away the curse. She wants to cry, but she’s busy. She has places to go, people to kill. Vampires to slay.

The factory looks quiet. It’s daylight, of course, which means the minions are abed and their masters can’t leave. Buffy scales the chain link fence and makes her silent way across the deserted parking lot. Once this was a place of industry, now it’s a morgue. The things inside are dead. They pretend differently, but she knows better. She’s coming to finish this farce once and for all.

See her resolve face. See it?

It’s not as impenetrable as it may seem. The tears in her eyes give this away. Because she’s come up to a window now and she’s looking in and first time lucky, there’s Angel. There’s Spike. On the bed. In each other.

It’s like being drawn to a traffic accident, like the feeling in the pit of her stomach when Xander looks at her that way. Repelled, yet secretly, unwillingly, attracted.

Because Spike, though thin and obviously still in pain, is lying supine on the bed while her boyfriend—no, another man—fucks him. It’s all pale skin and blood-tinged lips and sharp hissing intakes of breath, which she can’t really hear through the thick panes of glass, but can only imagine by the shape of their mouths, the arch of their necks. It’s all silky sliding of rippling muscles and fingers pinching nipples and purplish love bites in intimate places.

It’s the sight of Spike’s never-before-seen naked body, all deadly symmetry and feral grace. With his cutglass cheekbones, the slant of his blue fire eyes, the deliciousness of his taut belly, the feminine pout of his lips.

It’s the sight of Angel’s naked body, familiar yet strange outside the safe cocoon of cotton sheets and candles that marked their time together.

Was it only three days ago?

And it’s crazy, but she sees a look on Spike’s face that makes her draw in a quick breath and press her hand over her heart, because it hurts hurts hurts to see anyone look at her Angel that way. But this is his Angelus, and Spike’s staring at him like he did Drusilla that day of Ford’s betrayal. There’s darkness in his eyes; something warm, rich, and velvety. And what’s that on Angel’s face? What’s that in the way he holds Spike’s slight body against his own, the way he fists his cock, and devours his mouth?

It’s primal possession, and in that instant Buffy knows that this passion is one of those parts of Angel that she’ll never have, can never understand, even if time could roll back and mistakes could be undone. Even if he’d never lost his soul.

His lovemaking was simple, deliberate, careful, sweet. This is bubbling fury and raw sex, two male creatures writhing against each other, dark and light, heavy and lithe, blood calling to blood.

Buffy drops the stake to the ground. Angel whispered, you see, as he moved against her, moaning, that she tasted like cotton candy. And though she didn’t at the time, she knows now what he meant. To him, she tasted of lazy summer afternoons in the garden; of powder-soft newborns cuddled in their mother’s arms; of caramel apples and laughing kisses and rides on the carousel at the local fair; of love, free and easy and without despair.

Things he’ll never have, never savour, not then and certainly not now.

She watches Angel as he rides Spike, his head buried in the crook of the blond vampire’s neck, his lips working feverishly against cool skin. And she wonders what Spike tastes like.