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Ruination in Red
by Annie Sewell-Jennings
DISCLAIMER: The characters of Buffy and Spike are the property of
Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy Productions, and are not of my own
creation. I borrowed them for fun and absolutely no profit, as I
am ridiculously poor. The song is "Every You Every Me" by
Placebo, from "Without You I'm Nothing" and the "Cruel
Intentions" soundtrack.
AUTHOR'S NOTES: An odd, twisted, and bittersweet piece of
erotica. Are you that surprised? Thanks to Heather, who is
delightful and fun, and who is the best damn beta-reader in all
of North America. Also thanks to Amy, for agreeing with me that
Xander should be beaten for what he said to Buffy and for
engaging me in some excellent "Buffy" discussion. :)
*****
A Ruination in Red
*****
"Sucker love is heaven sent
You pucker up, our passion spent
My heart's a tart, your body's rent
My body's broken, yours is bent
Carve your name into my arm
Instead of stressed, I lie here charmed
Cause there's nothing else to do
Every me and every you"
--Placebo
*****
He never knew despair until he kissed her and she never
understood suicide until she kissed him back.
Underneath the candles, where angels fear to tread, the sheets
move and rustle, cotton sliding over skin, dyed in crimson color
and shimmering with redolent firelight. They always make love by
candles, because the only electricity exists underneath the
sheets, yet there is enough energy there to power a metropolis.
Hands creep up her waist, spanning across her breasts, fingertips
touching and sparking the wicks of her nipples, cupping the soft
curves reverently. He worships her with every touch, as though
she is some idol to which he sacrifices himself. Bliss makes her
back arch, and he watches her with heavy eyes, never able to take
his vision away from her, since she is exquisite when in ecstasy.
The graceful curve of her neck, the spare, lean muscles of his
body, the constantly roving fingers and hands...
She does it because it is wrong.
Candlelight sweeps across the two writhing bodies, draped in
vermilion cotton and blanketed by simple fire, and they exist
beneath the sheets, locked inside of this bed. They do not always
make love in the bed; sometimes he ravishes her on a makeshift
altar surrounded by candles, and he recalls a memorable occasion
of groaning in rapture while she took him in her mouth in a rose
garden. Creativity is the key to sensuality, but they make love
in the bed tonight, since it is somewhere where neither one will
ever be found.
His mouth snares hers again, with the barely restrained passion
that she recognizes as love. He is in love with her; he has never
confessed this, always lied to her to make her come here, passing
it off as nothing more than sex, but she knows. The truth is not
difficult to conceal. It is exposed in the tremor of his hands
when he touches her, in the fragile kisses that he can sometimes
bestow, and in the way that he watches her when he thinks that
she is asleep. It pains her to know that he loves her like this,
that he breaks himself everyday just to be with her, when she
does not reciprocate the feelings. She only loves the feeling of
falling when she is with him.
Fiercely, she kisses him back, tangling her tongue with his,
dying inside of his mouth, and there is that blissful feeling of
being lost. This feeling of being filled with shadow, of reveling
in sin, is what she finds in his bed. She erases a part of
herself with every coupling, addicted to the rush of his hands
and mouth, to the incinerating heat that scorches their skins
whenever they collide in conflagration.
Fingers trail down the side of his face, caressing the carved
cheekbones, and he moans underneath her skilled touch, arching
his hips against hers and allowing a hand to descend down the
length of her body. His fingertips scamper like slender spiders
between her breasts, skimming her navel, before they caress the
rise of her mons and the inside of her thigh, lightly whispering
across her molten inner lips. She hisses out a coppery sigh, and
he dips his finger inside of her, embraced by the heated walls of
her, and then exits, sliding up until his thumb brushes against
her clitoris.
The reward of her moan is a tarnished treasure, but he keeps it
anyway since it has to be better than nothing at all.
Sometimes he is in awe of her, like when she enters into his
crypt in the middle of the night and slips into bed with him
without warning, caressing his body with the slender length of
her own. She can be beautiful, mischievous and wicked, like when
she wore flowers in her hair stolen from a grave, and he picked
them out and dried them without her knowing. These are souvenirs
of who she is, of the love that should be preserved, because he
knows that it will never last.
It's killing her, after all.
The slide of his finger against the center of her arousal makes
her insides go weak, as though a thousand butterflies have been
released inside of her bloodstream, pounding for release against
the walls of her veins and capillaries. Her skull hits the
headboard as she throws her head back in unrestrained rapture,
thrashing against his hand, demanding more. He always gives it.
Sweat breaks out all over her body, and she digs her fingernails
into his back, making him bleed from crescent-shaped wounds. She
wonders briefly what his blood would taste like against her
tongue, and so she tears a kiss from his mouth, biting into the
lush silk of his lower lip, and she tastes his history inside of
his lifeblood.
She tastes love.
Swollen, unfurled, she grinds against his fingers, feeling the
tip of his finger move in a quickening flurry against her
clitoris, slicked with arousal. Incoherent moans fill the crypt
in varying tones of contralto and bass, and she feels his blunt
teeth nip at her earlobe, just adding to her uninhibited
pleasure. Relishing the sensation, she clasps his head to her
ear, and feels his tongue slide across the various piercings in
her lobe and cartilage, looping through silver hoops.
"I always knew that you'd jump through rings for me," she
breathes, her voice hoarse with desire, and he effectively
silences her by making her scream with rhapsody.
But they both know that it's true - he'd do anything for her, and
she'd do anything to fall.
Hips fly against him, and he pulls away from her ear to watch her
as she nears orgasm. This is the woman that he loves, the woman
who often cries when he makes her come, whose mouth tries to
speak but loses the words. Language is often forgotten in this
bed. She is now dyed in shades of red, her hair set afire like an
autumn blaze, and she clenches his back with her fingernails,
scraping down his skin and making him bleed. She is good at
bloodletting, at least when it comes to him. She always knows how
to hurt with agonizing skill, his maiden of malice.
The spiteful siren now is stretched out underneath cotton sheets,
and he hastens his fingers, causing her to jerk and writhe,
rutting in the bed, tossing and turning, tingling with firefly
pinpricks. She never wants to leave this brink, this cliff that
leads off into the abyss of orgasm, because this is when she
feels most alive. She aims for this, not climax, because this
place of frenzied sexuality is what makes her whole. She arches
and she flutters, twitching and reveling in his chipped
fingernails, the ornament that he never cares for.
But it always ends, this champagne-dizziness, and she explodes
into a blizzard of drunken bliss, undulating in spasms, moaning
as he massages her clitoris, allowing her to wash ashore in a
tidal rush of elation.
She gasps for breath that he doesn't need, and then smiles at
him, her legs still spread, and speaks in a raspy voice, hoarse
from screams. "Now," she demands, and he hates the fact that she
can order him to perform and he does so desperately.
Entering her is like sliding into honey, hot and sweet, and he
shudders, hard and heated from borrowed blood. She once joked to
him that she could write a book of vampire biology based solely
on experience with him, in that vampires can smoke and vampires
are hot when aroused. He replied that if she were to write such a
reference guide, he'd take her ice skating in hell. The banter,
the arguments and the insults are as invigorating as the sex
itself.
She clenches around him instantly, fitting him perfectly, as he
is slender where others were large and intimidating. They seem to
complement each other in bed, even though they ruin each other in
all other areas, and she feels arousal steal across her again,
like a trick candle. Amazing, that he can do this to her.
Sometimes, she wonders if she is beginning to love him, but she
knows that if she does, it will break him. Love ruins everything
and redeems nothing.
Sheathed inside of her, he begins to thrust, needing her heat,
her warmth, the flame of her passion and her strength. He groans,
kneading her breast with one hand, and she tightens around him,
hissing in breath as he quickens his pace. Ecstasy is beginning
to enflame him, and he has never felt so hot before, so alive, as
inside of her. Eyes wide open, he throbs and pulses inside of
her, taking her back to the levels to which he earlier brought
her, suspending her there because he knows what she likes. She is
addicted to the chasm, to the brink of it, standing on the edge
of the cliff and closing her eyes.
But eventually she falls again, throwing herself against the
rocky cliffs, and, as always, he flings himself after her, always
trying to follow her self-slaughter.
It is after the sex is over when things become dark, when she
closes up and he is left to watch the aftermath of his
destruction, as she separates herself from her and sits up in the
bed. Smooth, still hands reach across his body to the pack of
cigarettes resting on the nightstand, and she lights herself a
cigarette using the wick of a candle scented by jasmines. The
dark scent of tobacco dominates the purity of the floral candle,
and he sighs, tiredly reaching for a cigarette himself.
"Smoking's a nasty habit, pet," he says quietly, and she shakes
her head numbly, inhaling and sighing out plumes of light gray
smoke.
"Not as nasty as some habits," she says, and there is something
so dead in her voice that it hurts even more than her words. She
has become skilled at the art of insulting, and it bites into him
more than any flesh wound.
It is his fault that she has started to smoke. It's just
something that she does now, inhaling poison and exhaling air. He
blames himself for this destruction, and he has tried to hide his
cigarettes, tried to make her stop, but she doesn't care, so he
stopped trying. She always finds a way to make herself die. It's
just one of the many things that she is an artist at.
Smoke curls into the air, and she looks through it at him, as he
closes his eyes and lets the cigarette burn itself into ash. He
is exquisite, her lynx of a lover, all muscle and skin, with
those majestic cheekbones and eyes that are startlingly blue. She
never thought that a creature like him could have such vulnerable
eyes, but in spite of his often treacherous actions, his eyes can
never hide anything. Now she is glad that they are closed,
concealed by lovely long lashes, so that she does not have to see
that he loves her.
It's a love that she won't ever give back.
This is all that she wants from him, this blistering sex. She
often thinks that she should invent a new term for it, enter it
into the dictionary, because their couplings are more like
hatemaking than lovemaking. It is destructive, what they do to
each other, and she feels herself fall away into something more
savage every day. It is magnificent, this descent into hell, and
she would much rather hurl herself into misery than stumble along
towards heaven.
In the tainted afterglow, he sometimes thinks of what he once
said to her old lover. He told him that he would rather have the
physical than nothing at all, but now he regrets such longings.
He knows that what he does to her is killing her, that their
cruel courtship is turning her into ash and cinder. Loving her is
murdering her, and he knows that he will have to turn her away
before she is nothing more than rubble. It is a tragedy beyond
all tragedies - that he can love her from afar, but never love
her in person.
She thrives on the ecstasy of his electric heat, and he burns the
kerosene of her purity.
So they sit in their bed together, the sheets rumpled into
wrinkles of red, and watch as their cigarettes turn to ash.
*****
"Like the naked leads the blind
I know I'm selfish, I'm unkind
Sucker love, I always find
Someone to bruise and leave behind
All alone in space and time
There's nothing here, but what here's mine
Something borrowed, something blue
Every me and every you"
--Placebo
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