Red Ribbons

Rating: R
Summary: Shanshu. Wedding. The end. Isn’t it?
A rosebud fic, written for the Blood Roses Forum’s second birthday. And, at just under 500 words, it really is a rosebud. Yay, me!

Feedback: Pretty please. Send it to Jo

**

The wedding guests would no doubt carry on partying well into the night, but Angel and Buffy had been seen off in traditional manner, with old cans and boots clanking and bouncing on their red ribbons as they drove away. Their first night as a legally married couple would be spent in Mexico, and they couldn’t wait to be alone.

It had happened. For years, they had fought and bled and died, trial by fire time after time, without being allowed the consolation of each other. Then the miracle had happened. He had woken up one morning, with a thumping noise in his ears, a bad taste in his mouth, and feeling unaccountably hot.

Shanshu.

The first thing he had done was to see her. When the tears were over, he’d asked her to marry him, feeling as if his heart were definitely in his mouth as all his doubts and fears overtook him. But, she’d fallen on his neck and cried some more, and then she’d said Yes. Now, they were on the way to their hotel, and she was feeding him little titbits as they drove, revelling in his still-new enjoyment of the pleasures of the flesh. The rest of the fleshy pleasures were coming up soon.

That night, he showed her that he had lost none of his old skill. She found that she loved the new tastes of him as much as she had loved the old: the very humanness of his lips, and the salt of his sweat. He’d brought the red ribbons from the car – they should have been white, but whoever added the decorations seemed to have wanted to remind him of his past. Xander, he’d guessed. Now, he used the ribbons as different decorations, nestled close to the throbbing blood in her wrists and throat and thighs.

It was later, as they lay sated and drowsy, and as he thought of how much he had now been blessed, that the pain came. He doubled up, clutching his chest, and he was terrified that he was having a heart attack. So did she, and was in the act of reaching for the phone when he stopped her.

“It’s fine. It’s gone now, and I’m fine.”

“Angel, are… are you sure?”

He leaned over to her, nipping at her ear, and then whispering his reassurance, his grip on her arm tighter, more possessive, than it had been before.

“Never better. Who would have thought it? They turn me human, but leave the gypsy bugaboo behind… Guess I’m the one who gets the girl in the end, after all. I think it’ll be a great life. What do you think, Buff?”

She looked into his dark, soulless eyes as he grasped the ends of the red ribbon still around her throat, and pulled her to him. There would be more red ribbons before he’d finished tonight, even if he no longer drank it.

There is a hell, she thought, despairingly. This is it.

THE END
August 2005

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