No Apologies

Author: Ducks
Email: ducksfanfic@gmail.com
Website: http://www.ducksfanfic.net
LiveJournal: http://theantijoss.livejournal.com
Pairing: Buffy/Angel
Rating: NC-17
Content: BDSM, bloodplay, dirty talk. Yum. *G*
Timeline: Post-Series
Summary: Everything is different from Before… and yet nothing has really changed.
Dedication: To those of us still around.
Distribution: Please ask, chances are good I’ll say yes.
Feedback: Would be lovely, thank you. Email ducksfanfic@gmail.com
A/N: You know, I meant this to be fluff. I said I was going to write fluff. Turns out Buffy wasn’t in the mood. So it’s… sort of dark fluff. I guess. Porny fluff? Fluff with whips and chains? Happy, mushy inappropriate content? I dunno, but... although kinkier than my usual fare (for I am VANILLAGIRL!), it's also not really dark. *shrug*

The “Warty…something…wheel” is actually a Wartenberg Wheel. Wikipedia can tell you about it HERE, if you’re curious. Thanks to L. for the helpful lessons about BDSM toys. *G* S/he asked me to mention that it is NOT meant to break the skin during normal use!

Written for Inappropriate Content: The Strikethrough 2007 Ficathon sponsored by forbiddenfic. Thanks, amara_m for the inspiration!

Muchos Gracias to redscorner, ljgould and lynner_k for the beta! Any remaining mistakes are mine.

Prompt: Snow - Fire - "Talk to me"

**

No Apologies
by Ducks



It’s not the first time Buffy’s been chained to the ceiling. Heck, it’s not even the first time she’s enjoyed it. But it’s definitely the first time she’s been filled with soft, squishy feelings while rendered effectively helpless. And staring at someone approaching her with something that’s meant to be an instrument of torture.

He told her it was a Warty…something… wheel, and it looks like an item she might have found in her mother's kitchen drawer, like for decorating pie crusts or something. Or possibly in a dentist’s office. Either way, it doesn’t really look like her idea of a sex toy. But then, she’s learned about a lot of things over the past few months that she might not have considered sexy Before.

He uses the wheel on her back, pushing hard enough to break the skin. Draws a hotstickytingling line up her spine like a hundred tiny needle pricks. Then he plays connect the dots, lapping away the pinpricks of blood with his cool, cool tongue. She shivers, gasps, feels the bliss of it rock her to the core of her being. It’s not just the pain in her pleasure… it’s the thought of him taking her blood.

Her favorite part. He says it’s like heroin, LSD and ecstasy mixed in with a triple shot espresso and a mega dose of Prozac besides. She loves getting him that high… the way he smiles all the way to his eyes for hours afterward, those high cheekbones all scrunched up so he’s grinning like a fool. While she lies there and tingles and throbs and trembles and wishes they could do it all again right away.

But however stoned he is on her blood, she’s still like the antsy little kid and he’s still the responsible grown-up. He makes her drink her V-8 and take her iron pills and take a hot bath and sleep for hours.

Even when she sleeps, she aches for him. Starves for his touch, the taste of his mouth, the sound of him telling her what he’s doing, what he’s going to do, what he wants from her when she pleads, “Talk to me.” It took her forever to work up the courage, and forever again before he would allow himself to say anything you can’t say on network TV.

They talked for a long time about their relationship Before. Her immature, little girl fairy tale dreams, the pressure she put on him to fulfill them without even realizing it; his habit of putting her on a pedestal that she could never reach with a hundred ladders stacked together and a trampoline besides. There had been walls upon walls between them. Stretches of time and space, pain and laughter, love and loss. And still, when all was said and done and the barriers stripped away, they had far more in common Now than they ever had Before. In a matter of days, they were closer, knew each other better, than they ever had in all the years spent fighting and longing side by side in Sunnydale.

Pain is intimate, he told her. So is pleasure. Those things mixed together are the building blocks of a love she could never have dreamed of. Communication deeper than she thought was possible between two people. Has she ever been so open, so vulnerable? How easy it would be for him to really hurt her… destroy her utterly. Kill her in a thousand different ways. Again.

They have a safe word. He made her memorize it, say it back to him twenty times at all kinds of weird points in their lovemaking just to make sure she wouldn’t forget in the rapture some dark, electric moment… but she knows she’ll never use it. She and Spike never had safe words. She didn’t want to be safe, back then, and she didn’t want Spike to care or think twice about it if he lost control (even though he would). Funny how situations so outwardly similar could be so completely different.

Now she doesn’t want the safe word because she knows she doesn’t really need it. She wants Angel to lose control. She doesn’t want to die anymore. Now she wants to live, and see her Angel free the way she feels when they’re together like this. She loves that intimacy of pleasurepain that only he can give her. And she trusts like she trusts nothing else in her life that Angel would rather walk out into the sunrise than hurt her.

Except in all the ways she is learning that she wants him to.

Angel finishes at the nape of her neck, comes around to smile up at her, his melting-chocolate eyes overwhelmed with equal parts love, desire, and that touch of evil that she can never quite resist. Spike once said she needed a little monster in her man, and he was right.

Anything less would never do, since there is so much monster in herself. With Spike it was about shame, self-loathing, a wish beyond wishes that she could return to the warmth of whatever Heaven had been her brief resting-place. It was about spitting in the face of the Devil and hoping he would dispatch her weary, wretched soul once and for all, and she could die in the agonybliss of a world-shattering orgasm.

With Angel it’s… love and freedom and letting go. In a room full of Chosen Ones, she feels more alone than she ever did as the One Girl In All the World. But with him, here, now, dangling from the ceiling waiting for her demon to devour her whole, she is finally at home. At rest. Happy.

Happiness, he says, is a construct; a physiological response given a nice, tidy label. Perfect Happiness doesn’t exist – it wasn’t what led him to lose his soul once upon a time in a lifetime far, far away. Their downfall was the innocence to believe that such a thing could really exist. To bask in a moment where peace could really last for eternity. Now he knows better. They know better. This is beautiful, it’s wondrous, it is a moment of contentment… but it’s only a moment. A day, a week, two, whenever they have time.

Then it’s back to monsters and politics and six-hour transatlantic telephone calls. But it’s okay. She can handle all of that knowing they’ll eventually come back to all of this.

He releases the manacles, and she falls into his arms, swooning like some 18th century bimbo that he insists he hated when he was human. It’s the blood loss and the delicious ache in her shoulders that makes her weak, not the way he murmurs words of love and gratitude into her ear and holds her close to the warm stillness of his chest, oh no.

She grins up at him, half drunk herself from whatever it is being bitten – especially by him – does to her. Giggles like a stoned hippie at the dichotomy of their relationship. Right now he’s Knight In Shining Armor Guy, placing her gently in bed and leaving her with a tender kiss while he goes to get her something to drink. Later she’ll chain him up and whip him bloody and lick *his* wounds clean. And then he’ll tear the chains out of the ceiling and throw her down on the floor and fuck her like a beast until she screams and he drinks the orgasm right out of her femoral artery.

He gives her a look as he sits beside her on the big, soft bed and sets the juice on the nightstand. “What are you giggling about?”

Buffy just smiles harder and wiggles her eyebrows suggestively. He laughs aloud, a beautiful sound like winning the lottery and mint chocolate chip ice cream and a moonlit night lying by the fire, watching the mysterious perpetual snow that falls year round over Sunnydale Canyon.

A surge of desire gives her energy she doesn’t have, and she knocks him to the floor. Rips off those sexy silk boxers he wears and has at him like she’s the one starving. Sucks his dick until he nearly rips the hair out of her scalp when he comes. He snarls, flips her over, and returns the favor. So handy that he doesn’t need to breathe.

After, they’re just normal again. Like any lovers, lying together, limbs entwined, bathed in each other’s sweat, laughing and talking about forever and believing every word. Then she has a steak and steamed kale and another 600 milligrams of iron, and he slams four pints of the sweetest bovine ambrosia like a frat boy in a beer-guzzling contest, and then they sleep the sleep of the innocents they haven’t been in a very long time.

“Talk to me.”

“I’m going to fuck you until you cry, Buffy. I’m going to drive you to the edge again and again until you beg me to push you over. And as you fall, I’m going to tear into your throat and drink the ecstasy from your veins until your orgasm becomes mine.”

Sometimes he makes her come just by whispering sweet nothings…dirty everything’s into her ear.

No, dirty isn’t the right word. Or if it is, they’ve reclaimed it and made it something fun and loving and beautiful. This never feels bad or wrong, no matter how depraved their games get. Not with him. Not when their shadows fit so neatly together, as if their darkest dreams spring from the same amoral, animal source. Not when their twisted fantasies are so perfectly in tune, and what the outside world considers “normal” matters so little.

“I always wanted to have a Slayer at my mercy,” he growls, like some wild hunter finally downing his prey. She knows he means her, specifically. He’s always wanted to have *Buffy* at his mercy. He told her the things he used to dream about when he was playing human, and she was playing normal, and they used to neck like teenagers in the graveyards around Sunnydale. Things that back then would have disgusted and terrified her, but now…

She always wanted a vampire – this vampire – in control of her. Her fragile, precious, hard-won life in his big, generous, dangerous, fiercely strong, heart-breakingly gentle hands. She would never have admitted that even to herself back in those days. Now she wonders how she ever lived without it. She never understood Angel’s darkness when they were first together – not really. And neither of them wanted her to. But all this time later, she has found her own depths, and he has come to peace with his, and standing side by side, their shadows just don’t seem so frightening and ugly anymore.

“I’m going to hurt you, Buffy.”

But not her heart. Not ever again. In those softer moments after, later, he promises and she believes him.

She likes the other kinds of pain. The sounds, the textures, the scents of leather and rubber and that sandalwood lube he bought from a sorcerer who swears it will increase their pleasure tenfold.

Not that they really need it. In fact, if that stuff worked the way it was "guaranteed" to, it might kill them both.

A few hundred yards away, their Before lies buried under a thousand tons of rubble, but here in this cabin, they build a future she bets neither of them could have – would ever have dared – imagine.

It had been so hard for her to tell him what she really wanted. It had been nearly impossible for him to give it to her. When it all began, they just sat there in awkward silence, a million million moments of lives spent apart hanging like barriers of fire in the air between them.

So they got really drunk and beat the crap out of each other, then fucked and bled until they both passed out, and a new phase of their relationship was born. From that night on, it had been so simple, like this was where they were meant to be all along, and it had taken all these years and hard lessons learned apart to get them here.

She knows that most people -- even the ones who think they know her best – would think it was sick. They’d look on their fallen hero in shock and horror and suggest she get help, just like they did when they found out about Spike.

Maybe it is a sickness. But all she cares about is that it’s a sickness they both share. They both get to slip their hero skin and be real here.

“It’s like a fairy tale. With porn. A porny fairy tale,” she tells him, and he gives her that smile that makes her heart stop and her core pulse and she wants him all over again. Again.

“And they lived happily every after. With manacles and bloodplay,” he whispers, nibbling on her ear, his cock already hard against her thigh, his cool breath caressing the soft hairs on her throat until she shivers and turns in his arms.

“You better believe it,” she says, and pulls him down so she can bite his lip and draw just a little more blood.

It’s a matter of sharing. A matter of trust. A matter of having everything they ever wanted in ways that they never knew they wanted to have them. And she couldn’t think of a better reward for having saved the world than being chained to the ceiling at the mercy of a monster with eyes of shining mahogany and a Marty...barn? wheel.

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