One Old Tux

[dragonyphoenix]

Title: One Old Tux
Fandom: BtVS
Category: Angst
Characters/Pairing: Spike/Xander
Rating: PG
Concrit: Please, in comments
Disclaimer: They aren't mine, not yet, but the will be once I've taken over the world. Bwah-ha-ha.
Warnings/Squicks: Suggested death of a major character
Summary: How do you mourn when his death has taken your life away?
Notes: nekid_spike had a prompt for Dec 31st: formal wear. This came to me shortly after midnight.

Their final year together, they'd planned to dress up for New Year's Eve and paint the town red. Spike had kept clarifying but not in blood. It had been funny at the time.

The girls insisted on putting up a tombstone. Xander never visited it. Not once. Even if they had managed to gather the scattered ashes, he wouldn't have been in there.

Each year, on New Year's Eve, he dons his tux, carefully preserved for this one purpose. He doesn't go out. He turns on all the lights, making his apartment as bright as possible, so he can see the wasteland his life has become.

Comments

[mulder200.livejournal.com]

Ouch! Poor Xander!

[dragonyphoenix.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that about sums it up.

[whichclothes.livejournal.com]

Oh, so sad!! So much angst in so few words.

[dragonyphoenix.livejournal.com]

Squee! Thanks. I was pretty impressed that I could make it both so angsty and so short.

Course it had to be short. I'm writing one for Taming the Muse that is both taking forever to write and due before Sunday.

[whichclothes.livejournal.com]

Good luck with it! I'm much too wordy to manage a good drabble like yours. I'm currently 35k into a Spander fic. :-)

[dragonyphoenix.livejournal.com]

I just realized I have no "What the?" icon. 35000 words? Wow. Is that one story or a series of related stories?

OK, I got curious and checked the word counts for a series of stories I wrote: For six related stories I totaled 56k but the longest story, in and of itself, was 15k.

[whichclothes.livejournal.com]

That's one story. My longest fic was over 100k words. Like I said, wordy. ;-)

[dragonyphoenix.livejournal.com]

I so need a my jaw just dropped to the floor icon. 100k words? Wow.

[whichclothes.livejournal.com]

That was it exactly: WoW. With or Without. That one started out as this kinky little thing and then an epic plot fell into the middle of it. ;-)

[dragonyphoenix.livejournal.com]

Ha! Something similar happend to me as well, in fact in relation to the series that I was wordcounting in an earlier response. It did start out as a serious story but it was just supposed to be one story.

Then I had a sequel. Then another. That kept up until I had a series of six stories. The original story was, I think, my second story so I totally had no reason to expect that anything like that might happen. Actually, most of my series happened that way; I wrote one story and next thing I knew I had a series. I've only planned out one series ahead of time. And OK, do I ramble on or what?

[whichclothes.livejournal.com]

It's great when the stories get carried away, isn't it? :-)

[dragonyphoenix.livejournal.com]

That's true enough.

[spazlady2002.livejournal.com]

oh fuck this hurts!! so sad!! thanks for sharing! Hope 2010 is awesome!!

[dragonyphoenix.livejournal.com]

Thank you. I did put plenty of warnings at the top.

I hope you have a great 2010 as well.

[zilentdreamer.livejournal.com]

Melancholic, but good.

[dragonyphoenix.livejournal.com]

Thank you. I appreciate the review and I'm glad you liked it.

[chaoskir.livejournal.com]

Gahh, poor lonely Xander. Very sad.

[dragonyphoenix.livejournal.com]

Thanks. I was suddenly feeling blue so I took it all and put it into this story. Now I feel much better but, apparently, I'm bumming out anyone who reads it.

[chaoskir.livejournal.com]

*LOL* Good you find a way to feel much better now. *grin*

[dragonyphoenix.livejournal.com]

Sure. I put it all into a story and make my readers miserable instead...

And doesn't that sound like something out of a horror story?

[theladymerlin.livejournal.com]

This is really sad but so well written. I'm impressed with the amount of emotion you were able to fit into a drabble.

[dragonyphoenix.livejournal.com]

Thank you. I think I surprised myself with this one. I've been reviewing my stories and I could not have written this a year ago.

[etaureau.livejournal.com]

This story chokes me up. Your writing is lovely. And it really packed a (enormously sad) punch in this story.

[dragonyphoenix.livejournal.com]

Thank you very much. I really reached something beyond what I've ever been able to reach before when writing this story. It was one of those flow situations where it just came to me. I'm really glad you liked it, even if it did choke you up.

[laazikaat.livejournal.com]

Ouch! Awesome in a tiny package. Poor Xander.

[dragonyphoenix.livejournal.com]

Thank you. I'm still impressed I managed to cram that much angst into one short drabble. I'm glad you enjoyed it.

[stretfordditto.livejournal.com]

Aw no?! :(

[dragonyphoenix.livejournal.com]

Aww. Sorry?

[skargasm.livejournal.com]

*quiet sob*

[dragonyphoenix.livejournal.com]

Awwww.

Tomorrow's posting should be happier?

[skargasm.livejournal.com]

Please *sniff*

[dragonyphoenix.livejournal.com]

Not the one I originally had in mind (which is a sequel to someone else's story and won't be posted until/unless I get permission), but it'll be up as quickly as my ludicrously slow internet connection allows.

One Old Tux

[koshweasley.livejournal.com]

OMG - that is so sad. Poor Xander. Excellently done.

Re: One Old Tux

[dragonyphoenix.livejournal.com]

Thank you. I certainly wasn't nice to Xander there.

[singedbylife.livejournal.com]

So, so, so sad :(

Exellent job.

[dragonyphoenix.livejournal.com]

Thank you. I was in a sad mood when I wrote it.