Not Anymore [Closed]

[rae_of_sun]

[Takes place after this terribleness.]

Sunshine bolts upright in bed with a gasp, wards and light-web flaring, her fingers clenched around a nonexistent palmful of ash. There's a singed smell lingering - in her mind? In the air? Oh gods, it's real, and she casts about her bed in a panic until she remembers that he didn't spend the night. It's coming from her pillow, as it turns out. There's a thin, brown line branded into the fabric. Her necklace-scar. It must have… gods. When was the last time it put out heat like that?

Don't think about it.

She sits back against the headboard and clutches her pillow to her chest, waiting for her necklace-scar to fade and her light-web to dim and her heart to stop trying to hammer its way out of her chest. She's used to nightmares, to the degree that anyone can be used to this kind of thing. Bolting out of bed in a blind panic and finding herself halfway across the room by the time she actually wakes isn't common, but it's not so unusual that she hasn't lost track of how many times it's happened since she came through the rift. It's not even unheard of for the nightmares to feature Spike, because that's just what happens when you have a whole carthaginian mess of vampire trauma that predates your vampire lite boyfriend.

But it's never been like that before. It's never been that real.

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[erratic_hematic]

He wakes up screaming and clutching to his chest. He's still alive? Still alive, yes. He takes a deep breath and flings the already disheveled covers off of him. That was just a dream, but God, Sunshine had been there. She'd killed him. He'd attacked people.

He grabs for his phone and first texts the other faces that had appeared in the dream, then Sunshine. His body trembles slightly as he devotes his entire attention to the screen, waiting for her response. He feels tires and weak, and shaken by the dream.

Getting up and and drinking some of the blood he's got stored away might help his fatigue, but he doesn't think that he could stomach it at the moment. When Sunshine finally replies, he pulls on some clothes and heads straight up to see her. He needs her right now, because he's terrified about what the dream means for him. Is he losing his grip on himself just because of some shitty blood? The last thing he wants is to go back to being that thing. It would mean the end of everything he's been striving for here, and back in Los Angeles. He wants to hold her, and reassure them both that that's not what's going to happen here.

He knocks gently at her door and waits. When she answers, he steps forward and pulls her into a hug. His breath hitches in his throat before he speaks. "I'm sorry."

[rae_of_sun]

She starts when her phone buzzes, her hand pawing at it in a hasty bid to make it hush. The moment her fingertips touch the device, she knows who the text is from. Her little compass points down and over, straight and true: there. Spike is fine. Spike is alive. It is an absurd relief, even now, the nth time this has happened. Gods. Get a grip, Sunshine.

Then she thumbs open the text and actually reads it, and her stomach drops. That… no. That can't be right. That can't have been him. She'll take the worst her own, warped, post-everything subconscious has to throw at her before she'll accept that. What, did the rift just… did her mind just trap him there, forcibly cast him as Horrible Nightmare-Vampire #47 and make him sit through it?

But this nightmare was different, worse, bad enough that maybe her own subconscious, warped as it is, can't take full responsibility. Maybe it had help.

It takes her several fumbling tries to text him back. He wants to come up. He shouldn't want to come up. He shouldn't want to be anywhere near her. What if he's coming up to finish what he started? But he already has a standing invitation, so what choice does she have, really? Face him now, now that she knows he's coming. A belated courtesy.

Don't think about it.

She waits by the door, feeling his approach and starting at the knock. Everything sounds louder this late at night, and 'jumpy' doesn't even begin to cover her current state. He looks like hell, paler than usual (which is saying a lot), sleep-rumpled, freaked; some small, dispassionate part of her notes these things as if preparing a recipe. For what, though, she doesn't know. She doesn't know what she is supposed to make of him, even if she trusted her hands to do good work.

Then his arms are around her, and he's apologizing, because he has something to apologize for, and maybe the calm inner baker part of her notes that this is nothing like the way he'd… restrained her… but to her deer-self, that panicky prey animal, it is near kali goddamn enough. She tears herself out of his grasp in a sudden, clumsy flailing of limbs that aren't shaped right, and stumbles back into a tense halt seven feet away. "Don't," she says between shallow breaths, "touch me."

[erratic_hematic]

"Sunshine." His face drops into a tense, horrified expression when she pulls herself away from him. "I wasn't me." He takes a step forward, then stops himself, not wanting to scare her. He should have realized, he thinks, that she'd have trouble separating the dream from what she knows he is now. Still, it hurts to see her act like this. He wants to comfort her- to be comforted, but for all she says he's not a real vampire, he can still see fear and disgust there in her expression.

"I don't know why that happened, why-" He looks down at his hands. He feels a little unsteady on his feet, and he hadn't expected this confrontation. "The rift, or just...yknow...a bad dream." Bad doesn't even begin to cover it. Maybe the rift is punishing him for what he is- or trying to show people the truth.

[rae_of_sun]

So, what, he wasn't himself? Is that a fact? She's always known that he used to be different - worse - that he'd done things she wouldn't like to know about, or think about. And it hadn't been that hard to… compartmentalize (whatever that says about her). But it had been easy because she'd never had a front row seat to the sort of carthaginian awful things he'd done before, and now she can't claim blissful ignorance. Gods, how many times did that scenario play out with women who couldn't defend themselves?

"But it was you," she says haltingly. Her voice sounds off, like she's listening to a recording of herself. "You did those--things. You used to." Sunshine wraps her arms around herself, a comfort and a cautionary measure. She did things, too, and she doesn't want to do them again.

"What," she continues, stupidly, because there's no right answer to this question, "did you not even recognize me? Did--" she cuts herself off, biting down on her bottom lip and shaking her head. It doesn't matter. 'I recognized you but wanted to kill you anyway' has the same end result as 'I had no clue who you were and wanted to kill you;' his fangs wound up in her neck either way. Gods. She leans against the back of her couch and shivers.

[erratic_hematic]

"I'm not a good man. You knew that." She had known what he was before. Regaining his soul had changed him for the better, but it hadn't erased the past. Nothing will ever erase his past- but that means moments like this one, where he has to pay for his sins with his own suffering.

When she continues, he steps back, shocked. Does she really think that he'd have attacked her if he had had any control at all? "I didn't. It was like the past twenty years never happened. Not any of it." Not Buffy. Not the trials and his soul, not Angel and the stupid bloody law firm. When he was in the dream it had felt just like it did back then. Good. Amazing. A fucking thrill, right up till the moment where she was holding his heart in her hand. Waking up had been torture.

He fixates on the image of her with his heart in her hand, and the look she'd had on her face as it went black and started to crumble. She'd been confused and horrified, and he never wants to see that look on her face again.

His gaze goes distant and he loses his concentration. "I was..." He runs a hand back through his hair and looks around at the little apartment, lost, as if he might find a solution to this conversation in the hum of the refrigerator or the stacks of paperback books. When he finally finds her gaze again, he looks desperate and unsteady and unnaturally pale. "Soulless. It's not what I wanted. Not ever again."

[rae_of_sun]

Right. She knew that. The objection that he's not a bad man now dies before it can leave her, which is probably just as well. Because what she'd really be saying is, 'I was okay with it when it didn't affect me.' Like he's such a lousy excuse for a vampire anymore that she'd forgotten he ever was one at all. Just dangerous enough to be a thrill. Not dangerous enough to have countless murders to his name. Let me just write those off for you. Not my problem.

Looks like there are two monsters in the room.

And he has being dream-regressed as an excuse (apparently). He can say he never would have done that if he'd been in his right mind. But she'd been as lucid as she ever is in dreams. She'd known exactly what she was doing when she'd reached into his chest and closed her fingers around his heart. There's no 'it wasn't me' or 'I would never' that she can offer him, because it was her, and she did. And if she had to, she'd do it again. Her hands would get the job done, no matter how she felt about it.

She can't look at him, so she looks down at her hands, which is worse. She killed him with these hands. "What are you even doing here?" she asks, a miserable question she didn't entirely mean to externalize. He should be running.

[erratic_hematic]

The question is like a slap to the face. He'd come here because he was worried about her, because he's scared and wanted comfort, but it seems like she's not even willing to talk about it. She's realized the mistake she made in getting close to a monster and now she wants him out.

"I don't know." He feels so tired and frustrated and incredibly sad. Of course this is how this ends. It only took the truth to make her hate him. He swallows once, and squares his shoulders. He can survive this. He's survived everything else, why not this? When he grabs the doorknob, he doesn't look back. If he does, he'll crumble.

"Have a nice life, bitch." He pulls open the door, walks through, and slams it behind him.

[rae_of_sun]

He should leave. That's the sensible move, if self-preservation is a concern, and why wouldn't it be? He should leave, because if he comes any closer there's no telling what she'll do. She can't be trusted.

Bitch still lands like a blow, though, and her head snaps up just in time to see the door slam shut. It drives the air from her lungs, and she's at the door a moment later, hand on the knob, ready to... what? Go after him?

Finish what she started?

She presses her lips together, barely aware of the tears streaming down her cheeks, and lets her forehead thud against the wood. No. He's gone, and she should let him go.

Let him go, and make sure he doesn't come back.

She has her palms against the door before she can second-guess herself. Never mind that there's no sun. She grits her teeth and shoves, hard enough that the recoil knocks her back into the couch. But it works. The ward against Lucifer is joined by others, a desperate wreath of every anti-Other, anti-vampire symbol she can think of. The cross, the sun and the moon, the singing lizard, the six-pointed star, and several others chasing each other in a golden circle that runs through the entire door, visible on both sides.

The staked heart is missing, but she could never bear that one, anyway.

She shouldn't have done it after sundown. It's glowing, and she feels shattered inside. If she moves, the edges might grind together, showering the floor with ceramic dust. It takes her a minute to lower herself onto the couch, gingerly, like an old woman. She sits, and looks at what she's done, and barely notices that she's weeping.