Better Buffy Fiction Archive Entry

 

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