Carefully To Tread

Part One

Summary: Set mid-season 6. Begins at the end of ‘Once More With Feeling’. Buffy needs something to make her feel alive, but she already has something, if she’ll only open her eyes.

Disclaimer: Joss Whedon, Fox, Inc. and Mutant Enemy own BtVS and its characters. I just treat them better.

The music swells and carries them towards each other, the promise of what’s to come exhilarating and terrifying them simultaneously.

I touch the fire and it freezes me.

I died…

I look into it and it’s black.

…so many years ago…

This isn't real, but I just wanna feel.

“What?” This isn’t real?

Spike pauses, his face hovering inches from his destiny. The flash of pain shows so briefly in his features that Buffy doesn’t have time to interpret it. She tilts her head and, for scant seconds, he feels the pull of the inevitable before he disengages.

He steps back.

“No. Buffy…no.” His voice is heavy with emotion. The pain of that one word, ‘no,’ weighing on him like an anchor. Buffy, her eyes half-closed with expectance, freezes mid-motion. She looks up at him and he retreats even further. He throws up his shield against what he knows will be her attack.

“No.”

She blinks once…twice, confusion knitting her soft brow. Then the tears begin to collect in her unfathomably dark eyes. Hazel was never a color associated with the night until she mastered it and made it her own. Spike’s unnecessary breath catches as her arsenal of beauty threatens him. The dim streetlight rises above the call of duty to cast her in the most flattering light. She looks like an angel to him; dark and troubled and falling; looking to him to break that fall. Break it or perhaps hasten it.

“But I thought…”

“That I wanted this? Wanted you?” The strength in his voice is betrayed by the tremble in his limbs.

“Yes.” She doesn’t say it, she breathes the word. It’s a prayer, a plea for help; for penance. She takes a step towards him and the sounds of stringed instruments fill the air with a melody so sweet, so melancholic that it makes him shiver. He doesn’t want this. Not like this.

You said that I was your…everything.

“You are, Buffy-“

You said, since you’d met me, nothing’s been the same.”

“Buffy, please. Don’t. Not like this.”

I stand before you an empty shell, trapped in a personal Hell and I ask you to

give me what I need to survive.

He squeezes his eyes shut just as hers open wide to release a torrent of tears. The muscles in his jaw clenching as his nostrils flare.

Buffy wants so badly to forget. Or to remember. Just to feel…something. She reaches for him in a moment of desperation and, only sensing her movement, he counters it, staying just beyond her reach. She stops, on the brink of collapse at the rejection from the one…person…she thought understood.

I need you…to make me feel alive.

He opens his eyes and a wall of emotion breaks over him. He opens his mouth to speak and nothing comes out. Not a sound. His mouth snaps shut and he begins to slowly back away, shaking his head. There will be no 76 trombones, not for them.