Through The Keyhole by Claire, Geliot99

Summary: Updated! Manips of favourite scenes from my stories! Created by the ridiculously talented Claire who must have a keyhole view straight into my mind's eye.

Banner Art By: Claire
Categories: Graphic Arts
Characters: Buffy, Spike
Genres: None
Warnings: None
Completed: No Chapters: 10
Word count: 10 Hit Count: 1,340 ePub Downloads: 0
Published: 10/07/24 Updated: 01/06/25

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He smooths a square of gauze over her wound, and takes a bandage ball out of the box.

"Take a deep breath in." She does and he starts winding around her abdomen, savouring the moments his fingers graze her warm skin.

He blinks in shock, momentarily freezing in wrapping the bandage around her. Her voice is tired, on the edge of pain, but there's no disgust or contempt lurking underneath her words. For just a moment it sounded like she was speaking to a man, not a monster. To a friend.

She looks calm enough that he thinks he can maybe push her out of her misery just a little more. Edge her further away from the brink of despair...

"Come on, pet. I can't give up until I get at least an eye roll. What's it going to take?"

Her face doesn't change but he thinks, desperately desperately hopes, he spies a malicious twinkle in the back of her eyes.

He takes a few steps closer as she does, meeting at the foot of the bed but still with a chaste amount of distance between them. A just-friends distance, until she reaches out and cautiously, tenderly, places a hand over his heart.

Spike rests his hand on top, thumb caressing her skin in light, gentle strokes, and in the freefalling couple of seconds before their eyes meet it feels like he's falling in love with her for the first time. Without the lurching dreams that felt like an invasion, or the sucking empty lust that consumed him for days after he finally gave into it, but a deeper, aching love that fills every vein with a gold glow.

After a surprisingly long pause he resurfaced like a crocodile—heart-shaped eyes just above the surface, swimming with the same movementless grace—and commandeered the pool floaty Willow and Dawn had forgotten about amidst their water battle with a deft leap upwards.

Buffy shook her head in tight-lipped indignation as he stretched out over the pink plastic, tucking an arm underneath his head. Flexing shamelessly.

She relaxed slightly at the compliment, but the tension restrung itself as he picked the camera back up from the heap of makeup and Polaroids.

He snapped one, capturing the rumpled mess of her hair, the creases in his shirt, the strip of bare stomach beneath.

She didn't protest as he took her hand and placed it at the edge of the waistband, staging her arm to make it seem she was about to slip them down onto her thighs for him.

She tilted her head brazenly as he raised the camera and snapped the shutter, capturing the way her thumb hooked beneath the lace and the dark red marks over her neck and chest that the lipstick on his lips had left behind, mapping every kiss and bite against the honeyglow of her skin.

As the photograph tumbled from the slot he handed her the camera, slipping down between her legs and resting his head against her thigh.

Spike blows on the still wet nails of his right hand, his left splayed out over her knee as she paints in with black, his fingers held gently in hers so she can keep them still as they sit side by side in opposite directions on the fresh sheets of her bed. Knees touching in casually reinstated nonchalance.

Spike adjusts his position so he can look at her without it seeming like he's staring.

Her face still looks gaunt— dark purple circles still highlight the sockets of her eyes, and her lips are still too anemically pale— but a shower, more sleep, and a couple of bowls of oatmeal seem to have been enough to revive her back into herself a little. Not quite square one.

He'd added smoked fish and parsley to the shopping list in the kitchen before Tara left for food supplies. His girl needs protein, and a few more bowls of kedgeree would probably do it. It'd do them both some good probably.

The shower seems to have done the most to revive her complexion, ridding the grease from her hair and bringing a bit of color into her slightly hollowed cheeks. He'd showered after her —taking a moment to stand in the green tea-scented steam she'd left behind— and brushed his teeth with a spare toothbrush to rid his mouth of a week of cigarettes and booze. His jeans and shirt were tossed into the laundry downstairs and he lounges now in her clothes again.

White sheep jump over a picket fence on the sky-blue background of the pajama bottoms she'd unearthed.

"I'm really going to murder you one day," he'd said when she produced them. But every time she looks at his legs a mocking grin attempts to blossom on her face. Paired with a Sunnydale High School t-shirt in dark red and gold, the ensemble is distinctly unthreatening. Though even if he eventually ends up wearing her dresses he doesn't think he'll honestly care.

Buffy blinked, mentally changing trains and getting on board the Rage Line, Destination: Punch. "What, Slayers can't date? Is that your point?"

"I'm saying the reason you lasted as long as you did with the Ancient Sulk was because he got it. He was as much of the dark as you are, luv. As much a part of it. Dealing with death and destruction and global annihilation like it's a goddamn nine-to-five isn't conducive to date nights on a Friday and tedious sex with the lights off. Sooner or later you're gonna need some sort of release."

Buffy's hand curled into a fist (not altogether realizing it meant holding Spike's hand that much tighter).

"Like you're the expert on release," she countered, her blood beginning to boil, refusing to let any more of what he'd said penetrate deeper or else she might crush the shoulder gripped in her other hand.

Buffy snorted, barely hearing the music over the pounding of her pulse in her ears. "You can't bite, can't fight, and you live in a bathtub. 'Release' is so not the word I would use. You're about as constrained as it gets."

His smile faltered, dropping into a snarl. "Get this chip out of me, luv, I'll show you constrained."

"Promise?" Buffy took a step forward as the chorus surged again, and Spike just about managed to move his foot out of the way. "Because you talk a lot about being the Big Bad-" another step and an ember of malice warmed her gut when his eyes hesitantly dipped to their feet as he stumbled back. "But I'm pretty sure you're nowhere near as bad as you say you are."

Another step nearly tripped him and he glowered at her. The hand around her waist dug in just shy of ripping a hole in the fabric of her shirt. She took one last step forward, and Spike bumped up against Giles' bookcase, his jaw sharp as glass.

"Oh, I do think. I think a lot of things. But do you know what I know?" His nostrils flared as she pinned the hand clasped in hers to the shelf by his hip, his shoulder with the hand over his collarbone. "You couldn't take me on, even if you tried."

She watched as Spike's eyes dilated in outrage. She was so close to him she could feel his lungs rising and falling, panting in anger. A mirror of her own.

High on their shared fury she leaned in, lips parting as his head dipped, seemingly just as hypnotized as she was.

What am I doing? she thought, a single brain cell of sanity trying to batter its way into her consciousness. What am I…?

She glanced up at him. At the ravenous look on his face. The murder in his eyes.

She stalled, her brain trying desperately to find a foothold on the situation as she leaned back a half inch—

But in a lightning flash Spike's free hand was off her lower back and around her neck. Too fast for her to react, too fast to do more than blink, Buffy braced herself as he pulled her forward in a sharp tug.

He reaches out a hand, fingers trailing softly down Buffy's arm, and she grabs him hard by the lapel of his leather duster, pinning him against the banisters of the stairs. Spike grins, biting his tongue in between his teeth as the warmth of her arm spreads over his chest.

-Make me. He mouths back, feeling himself harden against the stiff denim of his jeans.

-Buffy He mouths her name, mocking Riley, leaning in closer. She lets him off the banister an inch just to shove him back harder.

Spike shrugs himself out of his coat leaving Buffy holding it as he slips out from underneath her arm. She snarls, dropping it to the floor.

"I-," she stammers as Spike slips past her moving up the stairs to her bedroom, "I uh-"

Spike turns at the top of the stairs grinning, before disappearing into her room. Buffy rolls her eyes in exasperation.

She pushed the door shut with a slam, and without relinquishing her mouth even a fraction he pulled off his coat, letting it thud to the floor, weighted down by the jar in his pocket. The air between them became heated by Buffy's panting and Spike's proximity as outer-layers shed—shoes and boots, jacket, shirt—as he walked her backwards, or she pulled him forwards.

The back of her calves hit the stairs and she lost her balance, landing sprawled up them, his mouth latched onto her neck.

"God I want you," he growled, his fingers under her top, then around the back, tugging it up over her head, leaving her in the mauve cotton bra she hadn't thought to change. "Ever since I first saw you, I wanted you. You're an addictive nightmare and I can't stop dreaming you. Tell me you want me too, Buffy."

"I want you," she breathed back, and all the suffocating denial that had coiled around her lungs like a snake eased back now that she could finally say the words without consequences. Now that she could finally admit it, because she'd forget it all later. "I shouldn't. Have to stop—uh!" His lips caught a spot behind her ear, making her spine arch dramatically off the stairs. "Have to stop… after this. Need to stop. It's getting worse."

"Getting worse," he agreed, pulling off his t-shirt so his bare skin could slide across her bare skin as he straddled her legs, both hands on the back of her neck this time as he kissed hard enough to bruise.

Buffy moaned, getting lightheaded, pushing him back a little for air, and then back crawling on her elbows out from between his legs so she could climb the stairs, scrabbling to turn and sprint for her bedroom, his footsteps loud behind her.

"Buffy—" Spike said again, more sternly, but with no effect as Buffy began to hyperventilate.

"They're going to take her away!" Buffy moaned, burying her head in her hands. "She's going to end up with some other family somewhere else and I'll be even more alone and Mom said to take care of her, she said to take care of her, she said look after Dawn and I'm failing! She fractured her arm and it's my fault because I didn't stop Willow from going nuclear and it's so much, it's all too much, it's too much—"

"Stop!" he snarled, suddenly only a foot away from her and shutting the taps off before the sink threatened to overflow. She whirled to face him, backhanding him on instinct as blood pounded in her head, drowning out everything but her fight or flight instincts, a nauseating cocktail of cortisol and adrenaline making her gut roil.

He reared back from her assault without even a second's pause—as though he'd been expecting it but hadn't cared to stop it—and took hold of the back of her neck in one hand and her forearm in the other.

He spun her and slammed her into the kitchen island, pushing her over so she was bent double, her face pressed against the countertop.

Buffy gasped, and this time the air seemed to penetrate through the hysteria clogging her lungs to bursting, a sharp breath drawn in and clearing the mental fog.

Her eyes fluttered closed briefly as she gulped in another breath. She was sure this wasn't the way it was meant to be. People weren't meant to be pressed out of a panic attack, right? There should be soothing touches and brushed-away tears. Hushed words softly whispered.

Of course, those never worked for her—not since her mom had died, anyhow—and even if they did, she'd never ask for them from Spike.