Mad Sweeney

It's Christmas Eve and it's snowing, a light dusting falling over the city. Mad Sweeney is standing on their balcony, a cigarette between his lips, his flask held loosely in his hand, watching Christmas lights twinkle across Darrow below. Out there are people gathered, drinking and exchanging presents and going to parties with fancy wines and cheese and all that shit he never really did. (Except maybe as a king, he thinks, all the years he doesn't really remember.)

Hundreds of years. Hundreds of Christmas Eves. These ones in Darrow are by far his best.

"You gotta think, the real Saint Nicholas would blow his fuckin' lid if he saw what a world of belief created out of him," he says, speaking to Spike through the open door into the flat behind him. It's cold, but neither of them really feel it the way other people do. Regular people.

And they've been not-regular together for a time now. Maybe not that long in the grand scheme of it all, the length of their lives, but long enough that Sweeney is long past the self-destructive desire to fuck things up. It never even occurs to him these days. Spike and Darrow are the two constants after a long bloody time of there being nothing consistent at all.

"Met Santa once, y'know," he continues, blowing smoke out into the evening air. He takes a swig of whiskey from his flask and closes his eyes, turning his face up into the snow. "Krampus, too."

People might not look at Spike and Mad Sweeney and see a romantic couple, but they'd be really goddamn wrong.

There's a poem Sweeney carries around everywhere with him, folded around his lucky coin, that says otherwise. Spike might not like it, might be pretty fucking embarrassed by it, but Sweeney doesn't give a shit. He loves it. Maybe it isn't great, it's not a poem that's going to end up published in a book or even some shitty student poetry pamphlet, but it's his. It was written for him.

It goes everywhere with him. The poem and the coin.

Their wedding wasn't exactly traditional, walking around the city and finding some municipal employee to marry them, but they don't need traditional. And they sure as fuck don't need traditional on a day like today, this dumbfuck Hallmark hijacked holiday, doused in pink and red streamers and then dipped in chocolate before being hung out to dry. Sweeney's more interested in the ridiculous alien cult than he is Valentine's Day.

Except for some reason he's found himself standing outside a florist. All the shit inside is overpriced, way too much money for something that's just going to die, but he isn't walking on. He isn't going home. Instead he stands there a while longer and by the time he does go home, he's somehow holding a dozen red roses folded inside their paper.

He'd been lucky enough to get the last dozen. Luckier still that the woman behind the counter had given him a discount, them being the last ones and all.

Now he'll just be lucky if Spike doesn't laugh his ass off over them.

Around him, there are fires burning, the light of them flickering against his skin and hair, turning him gold. Screams split the night air, and Mad Sweeney stands in the centre of a small plaza, a dilapidated fountain to his right, a broken park bench surrounded by a display of rotting pumpkins to his left, and three East Hallow villagers facing him down.

He understands the purpose of all this. It's been clear to him for weeks, the need for sacrifice burning through this place, and even without the warnings he'd known what this place wanted. Having a ghost whisper it in his ear had only clarified what he already felt and he's been waiting for this. Waiting for the violence of it, waiting for the good he knows he can do, even if he'd have never phrased it like that.

What he hadn't counted on was feeling like this. This sense of otherness. Of a flickering between who he is and who he was. It ripples down his spine, a separation of Mad Sweeney and Lugh, a leprechaun who revels in violence and a god-king who once demanded sacrifice. Was he all that different from this, he wonders? Or was he just another wild-eyed villager with blood on his hands, trying to lead his people to a greater, more peaceful life?

And does it fucking matter?

He can feel a fine trembling at the edges of his sanity. The split between Sweeney and Lugh grows wider or perhaps it's growing smaller. Is he two or are two coming together? Does that matter either? Thousands of years of life and memories will never be packaged into anything that makes a goddamn bit of sense and he thinks maybe it's high fucking time he let that be the end of it.

Spike is here somewhere, seeming like the last fucking thing he has to hold onto, and he will rain blood down on this fucking place to make sure they both make it out of here alive.

Maybe it's time for Lugh to take his own goddamn sacrifice.

"Come on then, you fuckin' cunts," he grits out to the villagers advancing on him as his hands flex and then tighten into fists by his side. "You want a gift for your gods? Come and fuckin' get it."

Never in all of his very long life did Mad Sweeney figure himself for this sort of shit, the friendship he's cultivated with a girl from a fairy tale, but now that he has he can't imagine it being any other way. Even now, after everything, his memories can be fickle and turbulent, but if there's one thing he knows for certain -- besides his love of violence -- it's that his very being will always be connected to the sun. It only makes sense that he and Rapunzel have the connection they do, even if they look utterly absurd from the outside.

And absurd they are. Especially on a day like today. Sweeney's eye is blackened from a recent fight and there's a cut on his lip he keeps probing with his tongue. He's not hungover, but he looks as if he could be, or maybe that he'd spent the entire night sleeping on the bench where he's currently seated, his arms resting along the back, his legs spread out in front of him. He's a big man and he takes up a great deal of space.

And this morning, looking as he does, he's waiting for Rapunzel.

There are few things in the world he could care less about than the opinions of the people who live in this place. He's got the folks who matter, the rest can go fuck themselves, and when they glance his way, whispering at the state of him, he just bares his teeth in a deranged grin that tends to send them all scurrying away.

Rapunzel won't approve, but she always seems to forgive him. He figures she's got a soft spot for him, just like he has one for her.

They don't go on dates, not in the traditional sense, but as Sweeney and Spike wander down the street just after sunlight, Sweeney's arm slung heavily across Spike's shoulders, he knows that's still what this is. A fucking date. Like he's some goddamn smitten teenage girl.

And ain't that just the crux of it all. He is a goddamn smitten idiot. He never figured this sort of life for himself again, not after Eorann, and while he's generally pretty good at lying to himself about a whole host of things, there's no lying about this. This is right where he wants to be. He thinks about it every now and then, about how it was, being married to her, being married at all, and he doesn't say anything because it's the only damn thing he's not certain about.

That's not the sort of men they are, he figures. Only it was at one point. They've both been there.

But these days, this city, there ain't no promising forever. He thinks someone would be a fool to even try and yet... well, he's a goddamn fool.

"Want me to win you another stuffed prize to go with that vampire I got you... when the fuck was that?" he asks, smirking as they near the boardwalk and some of the game booths set up during the summer. "Christ, I'm too fuckin' old, I can't remember shit."

These days his mind is a fucking mess.

It helps that he can tell Spike about it, about all the shit that keeps coming up, the memories that rise and then fall, growing in clarity before fading again. It helps so fucking much that he has an outlet, but at the same time, he knows there are other people he needs to talk to. Especially after the way he was with them during that weird, fucked up week he spent as a god.

No, scratch that, he's always been that god. He just hadn't known it.

He should've gone to Rapunzel days ago, should've called or asked her to meet, but he's been so fucking tangled up that he hasn't talked to anyone besides Spike. Not on purpose anyway. But if there's anyone who deserves to see him after all that, it's her. He'd fucking worshipped her, referred to her only as the sun, and while there's always been that connection there, at least Sweeney has the good sense to treat her like the person she is rather than a thing upon which to pin his worship.

But he figures she won't beat him up over it and so he sends her a text, asking if she'll meet him on the boardwalk. As he walks, he thinks of Moira, the little girl who who had called him father. The little girl he'd abandoned, running mad into the woods. He's lived thousands of years and he's been so much, but a good man... no, he doesn't think he's ever been that.

Bringing a cigarette to his lips, he takes a drag and exhales smoke into the wind as he leans against the railing on the boardwalk and waits. Hoping she'll come.

He sleeps in the same bedchambers where he'd woken, beside this William the Bloody, never feeling entirely at ease, but never concerned enough to leave. Finding another place to sleep would not have been a problem, he could have found someone to bed with ease and yet he hasn't. He returns each night to the same place where he'd woken and he falls into the same bed and the next morning he wakes up and does the same thing he'd done the day before.

It becomes more and more obvious as the days go by that he's not to escape this prison. It's a world that has forgotten its gods and here he is, a God-King with no worshippers of any kind. Stuck. Imprisoned in a place when no one and nothing else has ever been able to imprison him before. He's angry about it, but anger does little, and so, this day, he finds himself in the park and settles on a bench to consider what his next steps might be.

No family. No worshippers. No armies to command.

As he thinks, he plucks a coin from his hoard, a special coin, turns it over in his fingers, then sends it back. Over and over he does this, plucking the coin, sending it back. It flashes in the sunlight, playing over his features, over his braided beard. He sends it back again, then reaches for it once more and in its place finds something else entirely.

A spear.

Not his spear, but something very like it. Old and etched with runes he doesn't recognize. Holding it in his hands, Lugh studies the designs on it, wishing he could read them, then turns it on its side to appraise the point of it. The spear is sharp, able to do real damage, and he stands from the bench and hefts it in his hand.

There is no one in front of him. No one he might hit by accident. If there are people behind him, it matters not, for he's not throwing in that direction. He lifts the spear, then lets his arm arc forward, his entire body carrying the momentum and the spear goes sailing through the air, slamming home into a yellow sign no regular man would have been able to hit.

Lugh grins then, pleased with his throw. Pleased with his new spear. Perhaps this place is not so terrible.

Sam's leg is fucked, but at least they've managed to get him to the hospital in the middle of the still raging fucking snowstorm. During the drive it had seemed like the wind might have been calming down here and there, but Sweeney doesn't know if he'd just been looking for a break or if it had actually happened. Either way, they're here and the doctors have taken Sam into surgery and Lisbeth's going to tear the fucking walls down soon unless he gets her to chill the fuck out.

Spike has left him to deal with this and Sweeney wouldn't say for sure that Spike is afraid of Lisbeth, but he can see why he might not want to be around her at the moment.

They're both in rough shape, but Lisbeth's wearing a hell of a lot more blood than he is. All kinds, too. Human, goblin, who the fuck knows what else. She's practically painted with it and Sweeney's not sure she's going to take too kindly to him dragging her off to a bathroom, but it has to happen. There's no way in hell they're going to let her in to see Sam once he's stabilized if she's carrying a hundred different possible ways of giving him an infection.

The trick is getting her to come willingly.

"Hey," he says, not sharp, but none too gently either. "You keep glaring at those nurses and they're gonna kick your ass outta here before they let you see your man. You want that?"

It's been days of restlessness now, near on a week, and by this point Mad Sweeney is sure Spike notices. He hasn't said anything about it, hasn't brought it up, and neither has Sweeney, not out of any desire to keep things to himself, but simply because he doesn't know what to say. He can't work out the reason for it, the cause behind this urge to move or risk forgetting everything he is.

There's no distance between them. For all his shitty behaviour and shittier habits, Sweeney hasn't pushed Spike away in an attempt to figure this shit out. He might go out and get blindingly drunk, but he goes back to Spike's place at the end of it and burrows into his bed and wraps a big arm over Spike's waist so he can properly fall asleep. He's a little more quiet lately, as quiet as a man like him is capable of being, but he thinks they've both been around long enough that Spike can understand that need.

And then one evening he's just sitting there. The sun is all but behind the horizon, dipping low enough to create long shadows and a dusky hue in the city. Dark enough that Spike can be out and Sweeney doesn't know where he is, but he thinks chances are good that Spike will find him. He's just sitting there in the park, near the lake where he had almost died, and he's smoking and thinking about nothing and then there's a voice in his head. A name.

Eorann.

Reaching up with one hand, Sweeney rubs his eye with the heel of his palm, then squints into the gathering night. Eorann. He can't place the name, only that he must have known her a long time ago, long before America, before Essie, before any of the world he knows now. He doesn't know what to make of it.

There's just so much he's forgotten.