How My Love's Song Gently Cries, Part 6/6

[dragonyphoenix]

Author: LAsh
Title: How My Love's Song Gently Cries
Series Index: Leaping In The Dark
Pairing: Spike, Willow
Rating: PG-13
Concrit: Please, In Comments
Disclaimer: They have never been mine.  They are not now mine.  But they will be mine, once I've taken over the world.  Bwah-ha-ha.
Warnings/Squicks: None
Summary: “Between soldier boys and the Slayer, getting a mite uncomfortable around here. What do you say to a road trip?” he smiled at Willow. She returned his smile with a look of horror, which only made his smile wider. “Don't worry pet. I'm not going to kill you, not yet anyway. Just ate. Saving you for a snack."
Notes:

• The word “Kamaya” in Spike's poem is a combination of Kama, the Hindu god of love, and maya, the idea that the world we experience is an illusion.

• His poem is based on “I Loved You and Lost You” from Cordwainer Smith's most excellent story, The Dead Lady of Clown Town.

 

For six years, Spike had kept himself away from Willow but finally, inevitably, not even certain why, he found himself climbing the stairs of her high tower. He didn't trust the elevator, not in this place that was totally hers. It was a long climb. Tallest building in the world. Headquarters of her corporate empire: computers; electronics. There was nothing technical she didn't have her fingers in.

 

He knew, hell, the whole world knew, that she lived at the top of this building. Her security was the best, of course, but still, merely human and while it hadn't been easy to find a warlock able to bypass it, hadn't been impossible either. He slipped into her suite, unseen, unlooked for, and probably unwanted, but there all the same. Stopping at the end of a short entranceway, his eyes took in the dark room – luxurious but impersonal as if she'd hired a stranger to decorate it. Her back was to him, giving him a clear view of her short, dark hair, cut in her signature style that ended above her neck.

 

She was looking out the window.

 

So, she still did that then.

 

A trick of the glass showed him three Willows. The first was a much younger Willow, younger even than when he'd first taken her, with hair longer and redder then he remembered. The Willow who had comforted him in the factory was pounding against the glass, begging for his help and, looking at her, he realized that's when he'd fallen for her. Still believing he could win Drusilla back, he hadn't let himself know what his true feelings were. That didn't come until later, after he'd taken her. His gaze shifted over to the second Willow, the one he'd kept at the hotel, and she was shifting, changing as she'd changed over time: her hair becoming darker and longer as she withdrew into herself becoming the woman he'd handed back to Angel. Shifting his eyes over once more, her hair had become the darkest of the three, shorter even than when he'd first taken her, but her face was obscured by the reflection of the glass she held up to her lips. “Who are you?” he whispered, not really knowing what he meant by that, but Willow heard him and turned. Ice clinked in her glass, bourbon from the scent of it.

 

It was late, almost one in the morning, but she was still wearing a suit. Not the jacket, which was draped across a chair, but a steel gray blouse and a business skirt so dark a gray that it was halfway to black. She was as thin, almost skin and bones. Magazines went on about how great she looked, almost like a supermodel, but to Spike's eyes her skin was too taut, like an old rubber band, stretched too far and about to break.

 

“Spike, I always knew you'd turn up sooner or later. Care for a drink?” she asked.

 

“Thanks but no.” Spike wanted to light a cigarette, to give himself something, anything, to do with his hands but smoking in Willow's rooms? Strike a spark? Bring a bit of light, no matter how small, into that sterile environment? Just didn't seem right somehow.

 

“Afraid of getting intoxicated?” she asked. The question echoed in his mind, cascading regrets he couldn't let himself show to this stranger who wore Willow's face.

 

“Wouldn't happen,” Spike replied. Intoxicated? You didn't get intoxicated in a museum. Well, he did but intoxication was passion and lust and life. Willow's room was more lifeless than a tomb.

 

Willow stared at Spike but didn't speak, which was all right with Spike because her voice had changed. It was harsh now, clipped, as if words had to struggle their way past her lips. Still, he was the one who'd come to her, although he didn't quite know why. Up to him to make the effort. “You left your friends. Thought you'd stay with them. Thought they'd help you.”

 

Willow laughed, dark and bitter. “After six years that's the best you could come up with? I. Left. My. Friends?” Her drink spilled over as she slammed it onto the bar. “I was taken from my friends.”

 

“I...” Spike didn't know what he was about to say but Willow interrupted him before he could figure it out.

 

“Yes, I know. You're sorry.” Throwing a rapid-fire volley of words, each hitting true to his heart, she continued, “Sorry you stole me. Sorry you raped me. Sorry you kept me. Doesn't matter,” she continued in a mercurial change. “You made me the woman I am today. Rich. Powerful. I can have anything I want.”

 

“I am sorry,” he whispered.

 

Her eyes narrowed at his words. “Didn't you hear what I just said? I have everything I ever wanted.”

 

“You don't,” he said, walking across the room. “You have nothing. All of this,” he said as he kicked over an artsy vase, “junk is a shell. You were more alive when you were a girl than you are now and yes, you were more alive when you were with... when I... when I stole you. When I kept you,” he finished, throwing her words back at her.

 

“When you raped me? Was I alive then?”

 

Spike thought back to that night. She'd been screaming when he came in her. Anguish? Pain? He'd never thought to ask but she had tried, before he'd laid in on her, to stand up for herself, spunky even in her terror. So unlike this cold thing she'd become. “You were.”

 

She startled away from him as if he'd slapped her. “Why are you here, Spike?”

 

I love you, I love you, I love you, whispered at the base of his brain, so far back he couldn't hear it. He couldn't admit to Willow that he didn't know so, “Wanted to see how you were doing.”

 

She looked back at him as if she couldn't believe his answer. “And how am I doing? Oh wait, you've already told me. All of this,” she gestured around the room, “is a shell.”

 

Hollow. You're hollow, but he couldn't tell her that. He'd already hurt her too much. “Oh, I don't know. Perhaps I judged it to harshly. Plenty of pretties. Nice view. Lots of alcohol.” No books, he noticed, not out here anyway but he was certain that Willow didn't read anymore. Damn, it was worse than he'd thought. “So, what do you do for fun nowadays?”

 

“Fun?” she asked as if the concept were foreign to her.

 

“Yeah, you know. Like I get into bar fights, vanquish my enemies. That sort of thing. Heard you took down that Gates guy.”

 

A twisted smile took over her face. “He was weak.”

 

“Easy to defeat then? Not much fun, that,” Spike replied.

 

“Oh, I don't know. Reminded me of why I need to be strong, why I can't show any weakness myself,” she said, almost reflectively.

 

“Need that reminder, do you?” Spike asked.

 

Willow flinched at that and then threw more vicious words, as sharp as knives, at him. “No, I won't make the mistake of being weak, not ever again. You took me because you thought I was weak. I'm not weak, not anymore. I don't help anyone.”

 

“Noticed that. Must have been upsetting to your friends though,” Spike pried, trying to figure out why they hadn't been able to heal her. They could keep bloody apocalypse after apocalypse at bay but they couldn't heal one wounded woman? They let their best friend become this?

 

“I was,” she whispered. “They kept pestering me, expecting me to be the girl they used to know. They were always watching for her. They were always disappointed.” With that Willow turned back to the window and stared into space. Spike looked at her reflection, hoping to see the Willow he'd known, the Willow she'd been. There was no sign of her.

 

“You used to call me your pet because I was empty, because you could mold me into whatever you wanted me to be,” Willow said, catching Spike's gaze in the window.

 

“You're not empty anymore,” he replied while thinking you were never empty. You always had more life in you than anybody else I'd ever known. It's why I wanted you.

 

“What am I now?” she whispered showing more hurt, in those four short words, than she'd ever shown him before.

 

Spike stared into her eyes and couldn't lie to her, not at that moment, “Hollow,” was all he said before he turned and started walking out of her life.

 

“Spike,” she screamed. He stopped but didn't turn around. “I could keep you here and do to you what you did to me. Hurt your. Beat you. Use you.”

 

Willow had meant the words to wound but they were nothing compared to seeing what his love had turned her into. Spike hung his head for a moment, and then turned to whisper, “I'm sorry, pet,” before continuing out the door.

 

He heard her crying as he climbed up, all the way to the roof. The air was cool and refreshing, full of life, after the sterility and dry, almost dusty, heat of Willow's rooms. Spike finally lit that cigarette and stared out into the distance, lost in thought, regretting what could have been. What bloody never well could have been, his mind rebelled. Face it, no human was going to willingly run off with a vampire when she had her whole life ahead of her.

 

Spike sat down on the floor of the roof, his back against the wall of the stairwell, and started to write, holding his paper down against the wind.

 

I loved you, and won you,
and lost you.
Kamaya

 

I loved you, and killed you,
my darling, my

 

Spike stopped writing and picked the paper up, staring at it intently but not seeing the words he'd written down. He loosened his fingers and his poem flew up, carried away by the wind, a tiny spark against the night sky before it was swallowed by the darkness.

Comments

[spikeslayedlove.livejournal.com]

i kind of feel good for her but then i kind of don't. 50/50 sort of thing. she accomplished all she wanted but she's empty so she didn't really win. i thought Spike was going to dust himself at the end though. i think there would've been some poetic justice in that.

[lucy-ash.livejournal.com]

Pretty dark ending but my feeling is that a person doesn't recover from abuse easily. I'll be revisiting Willow after I finish up Spike.

As for Spike, you're good at predicting where I'm going to take it next, although that's different from where it ends up; dusting himself is about where he is at the start of Demons, With Death On Their Minds.

[bknut3.livejournal.com]

I wanted to wait for the end before commenting to get the whole of it in my mind.

I like it...the pieces are strong and when they are whole it works beautifully.

Poor Willow I would like some more of her story, this is all Spike his pain, his mistakes, his weakness'. What is interesting is that he isn't thinking of turning her, possibly because he knows she won't be what he needs as a demon just as his mother wasn't his mother anymore.

I would enjoy her story how she exists now what goes on in her head.

If you could put something about her friends as well how they dealt with her that went so wrong and what they think of her now. Angel, Buffy, Xander and Giles basically.

Just a lovely, dark piece I really enjoyed reading. Waiting for the sequels.

Mary

[lucy-ash.livejournal.com]

Thank you. The fourth story will get back to Willow. I'm just starting to write it, so who knows how long it will be before I get it posted. Hopefully not too long a wait though. It will be about four years into the future from the six years later part of this story but she won't have changed much in that time.

What her friends think would be interesting. No plans to write it at the moment but this series just keeps expanding on me - it was originally just this one story and the next two were initially conceived separately before I realized they'd fit in as a sequel here - so who knows.

I have a final on Thursday and a meditation group meeting after work on Friday so I'm going to try and get the start of the next story up tomorrow (Wednesday) since later in the week won't work so well for me.

Excellent icon. I used to love the Wonder Woman tv series when I was growing up. Until they moved it to the present, that is.

[lucy-ash.livejournal.com]

Since you were interested, here's the Willow healing. It's not what's going on in her head now, but what she's thinking before she heals should give you a suggestion. It's angsty but not nearly as dark as the beginning of the series.

Lightening On The Wind (http://lucy-ash.livejournal.com/5207.html)
Reunion (http://lucy-ash.livejournal.com/5944.html)

[wildguy23.livejournal.com]

Like bknut3 wrote, “If you could put something about her friends as well how they dealt with her that went so wrong and what they think of her now” would be good information to include to really establish her new persona.
I was defiantly not expecting that ending. All in all, you did a great job over the 6 parts, and I absolutely loved the plot line. Well am off to read your next entry!

[lucy-ash.livejournal.com]

I will not succumb to peer presssure and write what the other Scoobies think. No matter how interesting it could be.

Actually, the fourth story will look at Willow starting to heal but it's set 10 years after her friends tried to heal her AND I'll probably show her starting to heal but then leave it there, too early for her to be ready to get back in touch with her friends.

[lucy-ash.livejournal.com]

Thanks, I'm so glad you enjoyed it. I'm writing another Conjuring Love from the Ashes of an Old Flame where Willow is one of the main characters; she gets vamped in that one though.

Excellent Willow icon.

[lucy-ash.livejournal.com]

This one is coming along slowly, and I hope you're OK with vamp!Willow since that happens partway through.

zoesmith does make awesome icons!