The Trouble We're In

AUTHOR: Nyxie

Part 3

**

Nina drags heavy on her cigarette, staring at the platinum haired man across from her with a feeling like trepidation in her heart.

“Why do you love her, Spike?”

He blinks once at the unexpected question, eyes narrowing suspiciously on her. And then he must see something in her expression, because all at once he looks away, fingers fiddling with his cigarette.

“She’s the best woman I’ve ever known,” he says simply, with a shrug. “The way she shines? She’s always shined like that.” He nods. “Saw it, even when I was evil.” He shrugs. “She’s not perfect. Insecure about her looks, her lovers, her brains. Whines and bitches, and sometimes she’s such a girl.” He gives a soft snort of annoyance and appreciation all at once. And then his expression softens as he goes on, eyes staring out on the horizon of memory.

“But if she cares about you... if she decides you’re worth loving, or even just believing in… she’ll make you believe it, too. And once you know that… you’ll follow her to the ends of the earth, just hoping to get a taste of that light. Hoping she’ll see you.”

“I wanted her to just be his hero,” Nina says, softly. “A girl-shaped ideal made of aspirations. But I knew the second I saw them together... I just knew.”

“They’re soul mates.” Spike drawls out the word, rolling his eyes, and sarcasm itself bows before his mastery over it.

“Soul mates?”

“Yeah,” Spike says flatly, arching his brows at her. “Haven’t you heard? They’re the reincarnation of Joan of bloody Arc.” Shakes his head. “Martyrs. Just love to sit around and mope about how they can only die one more time for the masses,” he says with an arch exhale of cigarette smoke, and even his leather crackles with sarcasm. “It’s sodding perfect.”

“Jealous?” she asks with a bemused arch of blonde brows.

“Aren’t you?” he asks, meeting her gaze evenly.

She looks away first.

“Even if they’re not soul mates, he still loves her,” Spike challenges, leaning toward her across the table. “What are you going to do about it?”

Nina purses her lips, drags deep from her cigarette, then stubs it out in the ashtray, exhaling with a certainty like brittle steel. She looks sideways at Spike, meeting his gaze across the table.

“I’m going to let him.”

His eyes widen fractionally, going distant with surprise and slowly, after a moment, contemplation. He lets the weight of his thought carry in his expression for a moment, and then he arches one dark brow and shrugs, settling back into his seat in a slow sprawl.

“You want a drink?” he asks.

“Fuck yes.”

*

“You really do like it rough, don’t you?” Spike’s voice moans into her ear, hot breath and hotter mouth devouring sensitive flesh with pricking teeth and teasing tongue.

Breasts pressed flat against the cool hotel wall, skirt hiked up around her waist, one of his rough hands digging into the hollow of her hip, holding her possessively as his cock pumps in and out of her from behind, the other hand straying between her legs, finding things to play with, rolling, rubbing, teasing in time with his relentless rhythm. She tries to speak and keens instead, orgasm seizing her hard and fast.

Spike groans, then cries out, body stiffening against her, and she can feel him pulse inside her, filling her with fluid warmth. He holds her there a moment, leaning against her with all his weight, sagging into her, cock still rock-hard inside her, his mouth like fire against the curve of her neck as he breathes, ragged and shivering, into the hollow there. After a long moment, he slides from her and draws away, his mouth leaving her last, a final nip of pointed teeth against her pulse-point.

She stays there for a long time, trying to catch her breath, legs still spread wide, breasts still pressed flat and cold, aftershocks shuddering through her. When they resolve themselves into a low, pleasant warmth, she slowly turns, pulling her skirt back down over hips. Spike is splayed out naked across the bed, grandiose in his unabashed nudity, a cigarette already clenched in one hand as he watches her with a knowing half smirk.

She takes a deep breath, feels cool air move over her nipples, and pulls her shirt back down, looking him over just as unabashedly as he displays himself for her. So beautiful, pale skin like milk, sharp planes and angles between the muscled places, body like a dancer, cock still impressive, even in its diminished, satiated state.

“Wow,” she breathes. “That was...”

“Amazing? Incredible? Best orgasm of your life?” he offers with falsely modest generosity, brows rising.

“I was gonna go with dysfunctional.”

And Spike throws back his head, laughing like that might be the funniest thing he’s ever heard.

“Hell, luv,” he says, leveling his eyes on her with a grin that is as genuinely amused as it is bitter. “There’s dysfunctional, and then there’s... whatever the hell this is.”

*

Angel watches as the last pinks and purples drain from the sky, the veil of night covering the sky with sparkling splendor.

When the sun sinks fully and darkness claims the world at last, the door to the room swings open, as if on cue.

“Where have you been?” he asks without turning.

“I kissed her, too.” No preamble, no leading in with guilt ridden tones and overt apologies; just simple truth. A statement of fact that loosens his jaw muscles, turning them to jelly, and he gapes, openly and stupidly, as he turns to look at her.

“What?!”

“I kissed her, too,” she says again, briefly, almost perfunctory as she crosses the room and sets down her purse in one of the chairs by the window. She stands there, gazing out upon the city below, a strange, half-smile quirking at the corners of her mouth, bitter and sweet all at once.

“I thought… why should you have all the fun?” She stares out across the clay rooftops of the city, an expression caught in deep cerulean that he can’t decipher.

“Nina.” The ache that grips him is complete, a symphony of destruction that sings through every nerve in his body like a million, tiny, live wires.

She still doesn’t turn, her profile cast in yellow lamplight and deep shadow, and he wants to step toward her, take her in his arms, protect her from this, but how can he protect her from himself?

“I don’t belong here,” she says, simple and soft, her head tilting to the side, curtain of blonde hair falling toward him, obscuring her face almost entirely.

“Don’t say that.” His voice is a dull ache, broken and resigned, so lacking in conviction that even he is surprised.

“It’s true. I never belonged here.” She tilts her head back up, considering the world outside, contemplating. “I was only a layover on the way to the destination.”

“Nina.” His voice finds strength at last, a sad, sad, sorrowful reprimand that is as angry as it is desolate, and his muscles tremble with the effort of sitting still.

“You love her.” Her eyes find his at last, and he wishes fervently that they hadn’t. He can’t stand the truth in them, the love in them, slowly ebbing and dying. Her words crack against the air with the force of a whip, and he flinches, stricken by the way they fall.

For all his deeds, for all his heroism, struggling and straining against the darkness, he is nothing more than this; a man, still in love with a woman who will never belong to him, loved by a woman he will never belong to.

She turns away again, not wanting to see the shame implicit in his face, perhaps, and folds her arms over her chest.

“I had sex with Spike.”

He recoils as if slapped, rising from the bed. “What?”

Something primitive and dark comes alive inside him, raving and snarling, feral in its complete and utter rage.

And she only stands there, shaking her head, oblivious, something sad and distant in her eyes.

“You idiot,” she says, not unkindly. “Can’t you see I’m trying to make this easy on you?”

“Easy?” he thunders, exploding as he leaps half the distance of the room to face her. “You think hearing you fucked SPIKE is easy?” he rages, fuming. “What the hell did you think that would make easy?”

“You leaving me!” she screams.

“What?!” His brain whirs and clicks, trying to process it all. “I’m not—-“

She snorts, derisive. “Yes, you are. You’ve been leaving me since the day we got together and I’ve just been too blind...” She shakes her head slowly, closing her eyes as if in pain. “Too full of hope to see it.” Tears slip from between her closed lashes, lamplight catching in them, making them glitter like ice, and at last he moves toward her, meaning to take her in his arms after all.

“Don’t,” she whispers. “Just... don’t, okay? I can’t...” She heaves a great, shivering sigh, a single tear slipping from her chin and falling to the carpet, staining deep crimson the color of blood as it falls.

“If you touch me now, I won’t be able to do this. I’m not strong like you.”

One hand stretches out toward her, fingers unfurling, then withering, coming to rest uselessly against his thigh.

“I don’t understand.”

“Do you love me?” Eyes brilliant with tears, clear, naked blue flecked with suffering, pupils wide and black with knowing.

“You know I do.”

“As much as you love her?” Choked and aching, bleeding and dying.

He could lie. Every instinct and iota of compassion within him screams at him to lie, but she would know. Already knows. Stillness sweeps over him like the hush of dawn, and he holds his silence, for anything else would be an affront to her.

And it comes, storm shaking free as if from the heavens. Her hands climb to her shoulders like small children seeking comfort, and she rocks forward. Cradles herself as a ragged sob tears free from her chest like the sound of the world ripping itself apart.

“Nina, please.” Broken whisper, dead words. He feels like a child playing at adult games, and he wonders why he always fails.

“Don’t.”

She spins away and grabs her purse, wiping desperately at her face as she runs for the door.

Helpless, he stands and watches her go, the taste of her name upon his lips, blooming and dying, unspoken.

*

Spike turns off the bathtub faucet, cutting the flow of water in time to hear the bathroom door slam open.

He shoves back the shower curtain and steps out, still dripping, wearing nothing but a mocking grin.

“Was wondering when you’d show up.”

The words are scarcely out of his mouth before Angel’s fist connects with it, spinning him sideways like a top. He pitches backward into the tub, ending in a graceless tangle of limbs, pale white against paler porcelain. Touches his hand to his mouth, finds blood, and he smirks up at Angel’s towering form.

“You just can’t keep your hands off what’s mine, can you Spike?”

He is furious, livid, caveman brow dark and stormy above eyes that flash steel and promise pain.

“Aw, you feeling left out, Angel?” he asks, tongue slowly licking blood from a lewd grin. “Not to worry.” Tone too light and dripping sarcasm. “I already had both the girls today. Might as well go for the hat trick.”

Before the words are even out of his mouth, Angel’s hands are on him, rough, cruel and cutting into bone as they yank him up onto his feet.

“You’ve been wanting this since the night I left you in that alley, haven’t you Spike?” Angel asks, hissing hot breath into his face. His eyes are narrowed slits boring holes into the back of Spike’s brain. “Did you feel betrayed? Did I break your heart?” Angel’s voice is cruel, mocking as it cascades through him, cutting closer to the bone than the pressure of Angel’s hands.

Spike chuffs in pain and surprise, retreating from those burning eyes, and then Angel’s mouth fastens to his, kissing hard, pushing against teeth that slice into the flesh of his lower lip.

Angel growls at the sweet taste of blood, coppery and thick, and Spike rises against him, mouth opening, letting blood flow free, giving everything over completely to Angel, and taking everything all at once.

Sweet, God, so sweet. Those hands in his hair, tugging and twisting, moving his head this way and that as Angel’s rough, demanding mouth devours every whimper that shudders free of his naked, shivering form.

Angel spins him around and the world flies by in slow motion, ending against the lip of the sink, hard hands digging into his hair, his back, pushing him down, and then there are spit-slicked fingers pushing into him, and he forgets how everything Angel said to him is true--how he’d felt betrayed and hurt, still, after all these years--and there is only pleasure and the arching of his back as he thrusts backward, greedy and wanting, undulating against fingers that stroke and nudge and know.

“Did you miss me, Spike?” Angel leans close, body pressing against Spike, hard muscle and harder cock and Spike arches into him. “Must have killed you, me ignoring you the whole time we’ve been here. You always were an attention whore.”

“You’ve got my attention, now,” Angel whispers next to Spike’s ear, and he shudders at the heated breath that fills him, his world contracting to a tiny pinpoint of light. The crunching sound of bone and the flowing of features like melted wax, and fangs sink deep into the flesh of his neck, claiming him, possessing him, owning him and oh, God—

Teeth retract and withdraw, and that voice whispers hot in his ear again. “What did you do to her?”

It’s an old game, one they haven’t played in more than a century, but Spike remembers the rules, knows those fingers will stop their rough, rending pleasure, knows Angel will pull away if he doesn’t answer, leave him hot and writhing against the sink alone, passion spilling out into his hands.

“I brought her up here... could barely keep her hands off me—“ He gasps as Angel’s cock nudges against him, pushing him open.

“She was soaking wet--Pushed her up against the wall and slid my dick—“

Angel shoves deep inside him, and Spike groans, pushing back against him.

“Keep talking,” Angel growls in his ear, twisting his cock inside Spike.

Spike does. Tilts his head back and closes his eyes, words pouring from him like fiery rain as he tells Angel everything. And somewhere during the litany of sins that fall from his lips, he must say something pleasing, because Angel wraps a merciful hand around his cock, pumping and squeezing and fucking until the words become meaningless, strangled sounds.

He’s poised on the edge of exploding, fingertips stroking the underside of his cock in time with the savage thrusts of Angel’s hips, and he gasps, biting the very air as the muscles in his groin tighten and—

Suddenly all movement ceases. Spikes eyes flutter open in panic, need, surprise, to find only an empty mirror before him, weight of Angel’s body keeping him firmly in place bent over the sink.

Angel’s voice is rough and gritty against his ear, hot sand and growling vampiric purr. “Did it make it sweeter, Spike? Taking what you knew was mine?”

“Hard to take what’s being given awa--,” he gasps out, and before the final word escapes his throat, Angel’s got his free hand wrapped around Spike’s neck, squeezing him into silence.

“You’re mine, too, Spike. Never forget.”

“Not...” Spike rasps.

Angel tightens his grip. “Shut up,” he hisses, grinding and slamming into Spike, and God, it’s so good, sweet friction, angling just right, hitting that perfect spot. And this is the way it’s always been between them; sudden, violent, intensely exquisite. Equal parts power and possession, and they might be fighting, the way they stretch and strain against each other.

Angelus was always about power, punishment, and this is that, but it’s something more, too.

Revenge. Release.

Thrust and tongue and slickly sweet, consuming from the inside out, he knows what he is to Angel; a funeral pyre burning slow and long. The final resting place between what might have been and what will be. He is fire, bright and clean; pure and cleansing as it consumes the ghosts of the past--the ashes from which a phoenix will be reborn.

Confession. Absolution.

He is the altar that Angel lays his sin upon, and he spreads himself wide.

It is only in these moments that they understand each other.

*

When it’s over, they disengage and drift apart without ceremony, without fanfare.

“Ought to thank me, you know. Nina, too.”

“What?” Angel voice slices through the tense silence like a razor, and his eyes flash amber beneath the soft, round globes of bathroom light.

“Come on, Rico,” Spike smirks, drolly. “You don’t think your girl knew you’d never walk away? That you’d hang in there forever, just barely loving her? Did you really think that’d be enough?”

Angel just stares at him, like he can’t quite make up his mind whether to hit him or fuck him again.

Spike figures, either way, he’s pretty well prepared for both.

“Easier this way. Cleaner.”

“Remind me to send you a fruit basket,” Angel sneers, eyes shooting sparks.

“Already had all the nummy treats I needed today, thanks,” he says, grinning around the filter of a cigarette.

Angel draws back his fist and Spike ducks under his arm, spinning around behind Angel in time to see the larger man’s fist hit the mirror and shatter it into a thousand glittering fragments.

“Oh, don’t be a spoil-sport,” Spike chides. “You get the win, after all.”

Angel turns on him, hulking and glowering, breathing fast and hard, as if he needs anything the air could give him.

“Surprised you didn’t go to her first,” Spike says, and his voice is much steadier than he’d imagined it would be. So much less bitter.

Surprise registers in the planes of Angel’s faces, dark eyes narrowing fractionally with understanding. For a single, surreal moment, Spike imagines that he can see himself reflected in their opaque, liquid depths.

“Are you jealous over her? Or me?” Angel asks.

Spike snorts, sending smoke curling around his angular features, and cuts his eyes dismissively away from Angel. He turns his bare back to the other man and strides into the hotel bedroom.

“Don’t know what she sees in you, after all you did. Killed the gypsy then tried killin’ all her friends, then tried killin’ her and ending the world to boot.”

“You weren’t exactly a prince,” Angel mocks.

But Spike isn’t listening. “I died, but she mourned you.” His eyes fix somewhere on the horizon of memory. “Some part of her never stopped mourning you.”

He turns and Angel looks at him with those eyes, those dark, brooding eyes that he hated once when they were cruel, and hates still, now that they brood and fume.

“She mourns you still. Loves you... in spite of it all.” His mouth makes a startled, bewildered sound of laughter.

And he could have exchanged the word “she” for the word “I” and it would all have been just as true, and Angel knows this, as surely as he’s ever known anything.

Angel stares at him for a long moment, a strange smile, caught somewhere between sadness and mocking twisting his mouth. Finally, he lays a hand against Spike’s cheek, and his eyes are as much an enigma to Spike as they have ever been.

“Love’s a funny thing,” he whispers.

*

Buffy lies in bed alone in her hotel room, restless and torn.

Images spin inside her mind, visions of history bearing guilt and blood and remorse. She and Angel kissing as the beach swirls around them, the twist of guilt on his face and in her heart as she pulls away, knowing fate will always place something between them, keep them apart.

Nina, kissing her with bittersweet need, the scent of exotic flowers surrounding them both, swallowing them whole, and the spark of warmth in her chest, and then lower, between her hips, suffused with longing to become something neither of them fully understands.

Spike, touching her, the soothing touch of rough, callused hands on her skin and eyes the color of the sky, looking at her with such—

Reverence. Devotion. Love.

Of them all, only he is without implication, only he is without consequence. Within the quiet fires of his remembered eyes, the only guilt she feels is self-inflicted—self created.

Why won’t you love me? He implores—

Propelled by something she cannot quite lay name to, she rises.

*

Spike goes to answer the door, towel slung low around his hips.

Angel stands, hiding from view inside the more than modestly sized bathroom, turquoise tile fitted between tiles of baked red-brown; earth and sky. He stands still and ceases the artifice of breath, tiny sounds drifting to him across the silence of the room.

Small, concerned noises over the state of Spike’s face, and then that girlish voice, even lower, murmuring words that whisper of caring—

Buffy.

Angel steps from the bathroom, out into her view, and she’s standing close, oh so very close to Spike in the split second before she sees him, and there’s a look in her eyes as she gazes up at Spike, one that if he were mortal would give his heart pause and steal his breath away.

That look in her eyes.

“Buffy?”

“Angel?” A quick step taken backward, away from Spike. “What are you...? WHY are you...?” She stops, folds her arms over her chest and stares at them both, wary and belligerent, as if they’d been trying to trick her.

“What’s going on?”

He and Spike stare at each other wordlessly, silence stretching out like eternity between them, until at last the younger vampire looks away with a bitter, sardonic curl of his tongue inside his cheek.

“I...” Angel stops, clears his throat, looks at Buffy again. “Nina left me.”

Her face blooms with a thousand expressions, flowering and falling over and over again as she takes that in.

And then she is in his arms. It feels like home and it feels like tragedy, his mouth filling with all the bitterness of years.

He’s wanted her for so long, spent so long trying to deny it, push it down and forget it, tried to love Nina more, they way he knows he should, but he can’t, never has, and she’s always known it, somewhere deep down inside where secrets go to live.

This beautiful, golden girl who embodies everything that has ever been best and bright in him. Yes. He wants her. Wants her like the desert wants the rain, like the flowers cry for the sun.

And it could be everything, the turning moment between them, kisses and exultations and the pure, simple joy of their true reunion shared. But he knows this music, knows that the path they’ve set foot upon doesn’t end like that. Fairy tale endings and happily-ever-after’s aren’t for such as them, no matter how much he wants to believe in them. There is too much that has come between them.

That look in her eyes.

He takes a breath.

And still, even with all the courage he’s found, it takes him a moment to find the words, to force them through the numbness of his lips.

“Do you love him?”

And he knows how much this hurts--for him, for her—how it tears at her heart. He knows she loves him, knows she always will, but there’s been someone else in her life, someone who’s been friend and lover; everything he could never be, and he has to know, has to hear it said aloud. Has to make it real, believe it somehow.

He stands silent, face carefully expressionless, breath caught in his chest like thin, bright wire, waiting.

*

Angel.

God knows she loves him, but somewhere in the wild, open fields of her heart, there is a place set aside, a quiet hearthstone where she sits alone sometimes and her dreams are of a platinum-haired man who’s been... what, exactly?

Spike. Enemy, friend, confidante, partner, lover; devoted in every sense of the word. They have been drawn and bound together as surely as any two soul mates had ever been. Knowing him is like breathing, and they’ve had so much time… nothing but time... side by side as they stepped through the years, friends and leaders and comrades in arms. But never truly together.

Spike. Bright blue eyes, hard and brittle as steel cut into Angel, the angle of his jaw set tight with the rage of his beautiful, blazing heart.

What does she feel for him? The million dollar question. If she could answer it, this would have all been set straight long ago. But she doesn’t love him. Has spent time immeasurable considering just how much she does not love him.

“I... You were gone for so long, and then I... we...”

And what she’d meant to say is not at all what leaves her mouth.

*

“Do you love him?” Angel asks again, his face still as stone.

“I...” She shakes her head, eyes afire, and then slow, slow and steady, she turns her face downward away from him, bowing her head as if seeking penance. “I... thought I did...”

“Still do?” he asks, almost insists, feeling pain lance through his heart with the words. But they are truth, and he’ll take the truth over a lie any day.

Her very breath shivers in her chest like dying bird, and her silence is hole right through the middle of him, carving out everything that matters.

That look in her eyes.

“Yes.” She stills, and tears streak her face like tiny diamond rivers as she lifts her eyes to him, so confused and perilously frail as they beg his understanding. Those round eyes, so surprised, and he thinks she did not know the answer to the question, herself, until just now.

It doesn’t touch him at all.

Not on the outside. The outside is cool, calm, collected, together. Inside, his mind falls apart, shards shattering into even tinier fragments and then sown back together against his will with all the sorrow and knowing that has come to pass.

She is still the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen, and she still takes his breath away, even now—-especially now. How can it be this? He wonders. How can it be now?

Words turn over like a soft sigh in his memory, kisses given in rain, fingers entwined and promises given. Forever and always, she says, and she binds his wounds and caresses the scars in the shade of memory, a fusion of sizzle and twist and sear as they merge together, forming mezzotints and mosaics in tiled patterns he can scarcely comprehend and wants to even less.

He feels like a picture, all tinted and plastic; not real, but with the patterns of reality painted across his breadth. Indelible, unchangeable reality, held frozen, time in a bottle, a boy in a doorway who only wants her in his arms, only wants her here in his arms. Not these fractured pixels and jagged ceramic shards of memory that cut as they fall together, breaking him to pieces all over again, but it’s not that simple anymore, hasn’t been that simple in eight years, and it’s his fault, his fault, his own stupid, irrevocable folly.

He hates it. He rages inside at it like a savage beast, teeth bared and growling, and it only stares back at him, unmoved. He hates it, and he doesn’t understand why it has to be this, had to be now...

He sucks in air, takes a deep breath, and takes it on the chin.

His lips curve in a sad parody of a smile, and he reaches out to touch her cheek, fingertips stuttering with awkward gentleness against her cheek. He opens his mouth to speak, shakes his head lightly, and then swallows instead, fingers trembling as they leave her skin. He turns, sharp lines and curves of the world dissolving into wet fractals of white light that fill his eyes, and he blinks away salt, closing the door behind him softly before she can see.

*

And all her dreams drop like stones plummeting from the sky, tiny birds with dull, empty eyes and burning wings.

Go to Part V

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