Title: Bitter
Author: Robin the Crossover Junkie
Rating: PG
Summary: Because sometimes you feel like writing something depressing.
Characters: S/X, Spike’s POV
Disclaimer: I don’t own anything but the depressing mood I’m in.



She tastes the same, even after all the time we’ve spent apart. Bittersweet, but it’s home. The taste of her mouth is sweet with blood, bitter like roses, and the taste I’ve loved for a century.

So why does it turn my stomach?

Why do I wish she tasted like chocolate, heat, sage? Why do I wish the tongue delving into my mouth was hot, slick, and flat, rather than cool, thin, and moist?

Her skin tastes the same as her mouth. Bitter like roses. So why am I wishing for salt and sawdust on her skin? The salt of a day of hard labor.

When I’m with her, I taste blood and roses.

When I go home, I taste salt and sawdust.

All my life, I’ve loved the taste of rose petals on skin. Now, it makes me nauseous.

When I go home, the taste in my mouth is no longer bittersweet. It’s just bitter. Like bile. I can taste guilt, and sadness. It tastes wrong.

He tastes like summer. But I can’t get roses out of my head. When I’m with him, I can’t stop thinking about what I’ve tasted only hours before. And wishing I hadn’t tasted it.

Now he tastes of sadness, defeat. I know he knows. I wish I could tell him why I go. And why I come home.

Instead, I pour myself into him, taste every inch. Getting her taste out of my mouth so that I can taste only him.

How can I make him understand that it’s not him? He’s not the reason I go to her. But he’s the reason I come home again.

“Why?” he asks me this time, when I come home from her. His eyes are dead, and he smells of pain and whiskey. I can taste it in the air.

I just look at him for a long moment. His heart breaks more and more with every ticking second, but I can’t answer for a long time.

“You know why,” I finally tell him. He responds by pushing me against the wall, angry.

“Then why are you here?”

“Because I love you.” He’s everything to me. Why can’t he see that he’s all there is?

Maybe because I keep leaving.

“You’re killing me, Spike.” And all I can taste is the bile rising in my throat, the bitter guilt and pain as he steps away from me, his shoulders slumped in defeat.

“Want me to go?”

“No. I want you not to go. At all.”

“Pet…Xander.”

“Then go. If you can’t be mine, then don’t be.”

And then I taste blood as I bite the inside of my cheek. I can taste the salt of my own tears as they slide down my cheeks, between my lips. A mirror image of his tears.

I kiss him, and I taste desperation. Pain. Both his and my own.

Mostly, I taste bitter loss.

END

A/N: I was talking to my friend Craig today, and I said "Everyone deserves British cock" (I was, of course, referring to Wesley, and some Spike and Giles.) He said, "Not Wesley. He deserves MY cock." and *I* said "But I deserve his!" And Craig said, "No, you deserve the Master's cock for putting Spike and Xander through hell!"

I was disgruntled.

Anyway, my point is, YES, they are in hell, and I put them there. But honestly, all I ever write is angst fic! ESPECIALLY when I'm feeling a little down! And then it just continues. There's one more part after this, which is as yet unwritten. Basically, I don't know what's going to happen. They might be happy, they might be sad. Hell, if I wanted, I could kill them all and turn it into a Balthazar/Jinx-the-minion fic. Why? Because I'm the damned author. BWAHAHAHAHA!!

*ahem*

Sorry. Power trips are a bitch.