CLOSED ♔ I'M ONE STEP AWAY

[slays]

♬ stupid thing ; nickel

WHO || Buffy Summers & Spike
WHAT || Buffy and Spike clear up some issues.
WHERE || out front of the hotel, Chicago
WHEN || Two days after the Chicago mission's conclusion, while Gar's off calling Des.
HOW || Prose.

Back to slumming around the hotel. Not that Buffy was exactly eager to get shot again (although, all things considered, between Myri's heal-job and her own apparent propensity towards quick recovery, not too bad on that front), but sitting around a hotel for days on end once again wasn't high on her list of things that ranked as lovin', either.

Particularly because it involved stiffly sitting in a corner with a book, one of the hotel's courtesy notepads slapped down on the pages as she doodled instead of read. Mostly meaningless patterns of lines, but eventually the scratch of the hotel pen would get more aggressive and other things would come out. Only in the most professional of manners, of course. The whole deal with this Nightscape-y place is that nobody really remembered the dream they had there. Better she get it down before her fun experience conveniently slipped her mind, too, even if she somehow felt like that face and the feeling of the bullet tearing through her gut were things she'd never forget.

She waited until Spike slipped downstairs for a smoke break to corner him. Snapping her book shut on the notepad, she dropped it into her chair and casually headed after him once he'd gotten a minute or so's head start. She pulled her jacket around her as she stepped outside the front of the hotel just as he was lighting up, coming to a stop with her hands tucked into her jacket pockets and a narrow, accusatory expression on her face.

"Do you get it, yet?"

Comments

[slay]

It'd be nice. If she really didn't know a thing about vampires. If she didn't know what they looked like, if she didn't know what it felt like when they bit you and you wanted to scream but couldn't, if she didn't know how strong they were, how fast, how terrifying? It'd be nice if she didn't dream of killing them, or getting killed by them. It'd be nice if her teammate wasn't one of them.

But, she did. And he was.

Her expression is tired rather than antagonizing and she just shakes her head at him. There was no point in baiting him or fighting him. It didn't get either of them anywhere, and the point was … she didn't want to be right.

"I wish I didn't," she expressed plainly. Her voice grew to be more raw as she continued on. "If you honestly think that I want to be right about this, then you don't know me at all." She stepped around him and walked through the sliding doors back into the lobby. She wanted him to be right. She wanted him to not be a monster.

But, she was right, and he was a monster. And it hurt to know that. To know that she was wrong to fight against her gut instinct when it gave her icky vibes off of him. As nice as denial would be, moments like this one just drove home the point: she was wrong to ever be his friend. To ever feel bad for him when she broke him the news. To ever feel for him at all.

She'd gone to Kat in hopes that there could be some kind of exception. A nice, unbiased opinion from someone who didn't dream so frequently about having their throat ripped open. And the verdict was in.

[bigbad]

Spike let her go. That had been... something of a disaster. Like all his conversations with Buffy tended to be. "But I don't want to be a monster..." he said it at her back, and he wasn't even sure if she'd heard it. He wasn't sure he wanted her too. It wouldn't make a difference to how she felt about him. That much was clear.

He stared after her for a moment, then turned away angrily, stalking off into the night. He needed a drink. Again.