Title: Nights
Part: 1
Author: Danielle
Email Danielle at: PrincessCashew@hotmail.com
Disclaimer: Joss Whedon is responsible for everything that is Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Summary: Spike's thoughts on life after his memory comes back. Companion to 'Days'
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: Tabula Rasa
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I can picture what she's doing right now. That's not really true. I can picture what she used to do. It's 10:43. PM. Haven't seen the AM in awhile.
She's painting her nails. She always did it at night. Bright magentas or fuchsias. Never spilled a drop. I've lost my own black bottle. She might be using it.
Maybe she's cuddling into the couch, trying to stay awake while reading a magazine, but she won't make it. She'll slowly slouch over so her head grazes the cushions. I have a feeling she's not sleeping much though.
Nine hundred and sixty-seven bloody perfect nights. Nights of nail polish and magazines. They don't even seem to have existed sometimes. The fifty-four seem much longer.
Fifty-four nights of lying in cold sheets. They don't get warm anymore. Fifty-four nights of sitting by the telephone. I lack the courage to touch it. Couldn't bear to have her hang it up. Her voice alone may kill me.
I finger my wedding band when I miss her. My hands usually don't leave it.
I wish I hadn't left her. Buffy. Joan. Mrs. Randy Giles. Spike's Slayer. It's really all the same now anyway. I wonder if she knows that in only eight sinkings of the sun, it will have been a year. I left the announcement on the bedside dresser. I can name a lot of places she's put it by now.
I didn't want to go, I really didn't. But her eyes. I heard her scream, and when I ran to her, she looked up at me with those eyes. Empty, cold, hateful eyes. She'd dropped the laundry. She whispered my name, the name of the man I was, but I couldn't respond to it. I wasn't a man.
I left her there, in front of the washer and dryer combo we had picked out, my t-shirts lying in a heap on the floor. She didn't follow me.
I don't know how it happened, how we got to be so happy, or how it could have just stopped. It was never supposed to stop. I want to dismantle whoever it was. Rip off their heads and mail it to their family in a crate. It wouldn't make it start again. It's what I have to keep telling myself.
I want to hate her. I want to wish that she were dead, that I had never known her, but I can't. I love her too much. I never stopped loving her. She just stopped loving me.
I wake up alone with tears on my face, but her lips are never there to kiss them away. There's not any perfume in the air, any nightgowns in the drawer, any pictures in the frames. It's quiet without her laugh.
If I close my eyes I can picture her. 11:57. She's brushing her hair out in front of the mirror. She's dancing in the kitchen. She's trying to get the blender to work. I force them open. 12:01. Fifty-five nights. Nowhere near nine hundred and sixty-seven. Doesn't really matter. Tomorrow can't hurt worse. Nothing can.
The End