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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.

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"Time," he says, his fingertips surprisingly gentle on the back of Spike's hand, tracing the fine bones under the cool, pale skin. "Madness. How much did I lose in the years I spent in the trees?"

He shakes his head after a moment and finally twists a little to look back at Spike.

"Got this name in my head. Eorann. Don't know who the hell she might've been. I can almost hear her, but I can't see her face. Don't know when I knew her. Don't even know if she was before I fled Magh Rath or after. I forgot enough of her that Wednesday didn't know to use her against me, however he might've, the one-eyed cunt."

Taking a drag from the cigarette, Spike passed it back, looping his other arm around Sweeney's shoulders in a loose embrace.

"Happens to my kind, as well. I'm not near old enough for it, but I've heard stories. We start forgetting who we were, what made up human," he admitted, "The more than happens, the more the demon takes over. Twists us, inside and out."

For a moment, he let his fangs emerge, just a taste of what he might look like if he were to ever live as old as a vampire like The Master.

"You're still looking rather human," he murmured, lifting a hand to Sweeney's hair. "More or less. Must not be too far gone, eh?"

Taking the cigarette, Sweeney presses it between his lips and inhales as he watches the way Spike's face shifts. He calls it a demon and hell, maybe that's what it is, but for a man who's been stuck in a war of gods for years now, it's not such a terrible face to look at. There are far worse things than some teeth.

In fact, he kind of likes the teeth.

"Must not be," he agrees with a huff of laughter that sends cigarette smoke billowing out his nose. "Don't even know what I might've forgotten. There are moments when I think I might have somethin', but truth is, I never chased it too hard when it happened. Maybe I didn't wanna know."

He's not sure what's changed now, if anything has. Maybe he still doesn't want to know, but maybe it's not his choice any longer.

"Anything more you remember?" He asked, knowing that the telling of a story tended to close those hazy gaps, the words tumbling out before the thoughts had time to fully take shape.

He'd done it often with Dru, walking her through their past as if telling bedtime stories. Remember our last time in Paris, my love? Do you remember the dress you wore? Tell me what color it was...

He's quiet for a moment, thinking, then says, "A dress. Yellow, I think, with red."

But he can't picture the woman wearing it, can't even decide if she's the Eorann he's been thinking of without even realizing. There's just a dress, the fabric yellow under his hand where it's placed upon her hip.

"Don't know why any of this shit is choosing now to resurface. Or fuckin'... swim by still six feet under the surface, just close enough to take a bite out of my foot as it goes. Must be this fuckin' place."

Maybe not. Maybe he can't blame everything fucked up on Darrow.

"Don't think you were wearing it, do you? Yellow's not your color, love," Spike said, and perhaps making a joke of it wasn't the kindest thing to do, but he felt the moment needed a bit of levity.

"Could be. The mind's a funny thing," he said, sobering a bit, "Dru would be... completely lucid. Months at a time. Years, even. Then she'd slip away, for no reason at all. Locked up with memories of a past she could hardly remember. I don't think time's a straight line. It comes at us in fits and starts. Some of the things I remember of childhood are as clear as memories from a week ago, but then there are decades I can hardly recall. And I'm nowhere near as old as you, love."

Sweeney opens his mouth to make some sort of joke in return, something about blue being more his colour, but then there's something else at the hazy edges of his memory. A battle. A spear. A giant of a man. It's gone almost as soon as it surfaces.

"I can't remember havin' ever been a child," he admits with a rough laugh. "Must've been at some point, but the first clear memory I've got is those fuckin' church bells ringing. Bloody Ronan comin' into Ireland and putting churches and Christianity all over the damn place. Everything before that..."

He flutters his fingers, hand moving away from his temple and off into the distance, indicating where his memories have gone.

"Well, it's a bit overrated," Spike admitted, "Remembering what you had, what you lost. I wouldn't give up the memory of my mum for the world, but... youth wasn't particularly kind to me. I know you're shocked to hear it."

His mouth twisted into a rueful smile.

"No," he decided, after a moment. "I'll bet you were an adorable child. And a bloody handful. A mad, ginger bastard, toddling around in nappies."

"Wish I could see you then," he says without realizing he's going to. He twists on the bench, looking back at Spike, a faint but warm smile curving his lips. "Whoever the fuck you were. Whatever lad it was the world wasn't particularly kind to."

He doesn't even know why this is something he wants to see, the person Spike was before he was a vampire, it wouldn't change any of this, but he feels a little like he's grasping for the past at the moment. If he can't find his own, maybe Spike's would do the trick.

"I would've told you not too long ago that he wasn't worth meeting. I spent quite a long time snuffing him out, but I suppose there's more of him in me than I'd care to admit," he said, draping his arm across the back of the bench, just shy of putting his arm around Sweeney's broad shoulders.

"Have I ever told you about the night I was turned?"

Sweeney shakes his head and closes his eyes for a moment, then opens them again as he turns to look at Spike. Time was he wouldn't have wanted to hear it. Would've said the past is best left in the past, even with someone he loves like this, but the past is coming for him now. Hounding at his heels. For a time it might not be so terrible to bask in someone else's past instead.

"Tell me," he says, tipping his head over, not quite resting against Spike, but close. The words are a demand, but the tone of his voice isn't. It's a request for some sort of relief from these damn memories that keep poking at him without being complete.

He just wants to think of something else for a time.

"I'd gone to a party. Now, I wasn't a particularly welcome addition to most society gatherings— I was a bit of a bore, and something of a joke among my peers. We were wealthy enough, but with my father dead, and my mother often taken ill, we didn't bother jumping through the hoops of entertaining guests, and in London society, that as good as made you a hermit. And I'm sure rattling on about my poetry didn't help," he said wryly, letting the hopefulness of that night, at least the first few hours, wash over him.

"But I kept trying to find my place among them, because I knew that I would see her there. Cecily," he said, speaking her name with a bittersweet knot tightening in his chest. This story, of course, changed a bit, after knowing just what Cecily was, but that was a complication that didn't need explaining for the moment. "Now, Cecily was a proper lady, and lovely to look at, and I thought very sweet, and perhaps she was. She never laughed at me, and to a lonely, pitiful man like me, that was as good as a declaration of love. I was so sure, I mustered all the courage I had to tell her that very night that we were destined to be together and all that rot. Of course, she turned me down. Rather harshly, in fact. Told me I was beneath her. Which was true, of course, but me, being the soppy bastard I was, I went stumbling out in the streets, sniveling like a child."

Edited 2019-05-21 04:01 (UTC)

Sweeney knows Spike was different then, but it doesn't make him feel any less inclined to judge the bitch less harshly for having been such a cunt to him. Fucking figures, that's what love does to him. He'd rather like to teach her a lesson for making Spike feel like it was true. Like he was beneath her.

He reaches out, smooths a hand over the side of Spike's face, back into his hair and doesn't say anything at first. He wonders at the poetry, at what Spike might have written all those years ago, but doesn't ask about that either. Far as he knows, as far as he's seen, Spike doesn't write poetry anymore. It's too fucking bad.

"Guess you weren't left alone for long," he says, resting his hand on the back of Spike's neck.

"No," Spike said, his eyes softening as he thought of the vision that met him in that darkened alley. "She came out from the shadows. As if she were a part of them. My dark beauty. My Dru. She offered me things, told me I was meant for better. That I could make them all sorry, that I could make them all pay for what they'd done."

He smiled sadly.

"It wasn't much of a decision at all. I said yes. I pleaded for it. We were going to lay waste to the world, Dru and me. Her teeth sank into my throat, and the pain was... fleeting. As the fog settled over me, I'd never felt more awake. More alive. It was death, so that I could live. Or I suppose that's one of the lies we tell ourselves."

Sweeney's big shoulders rise and fall. It sounds a little bit like something Wednesday might say, but in an entirely different context. He doubts that one-eyed bastard would die for his cause, even if it meant living further down the line. Wednesday is too much of a fucking coward for that.

"What was it like?" he asks. "Wakin' up again?"

No more heart beat, no more breath, no more warmth. Sweeney's been through a lot of worlds and a lot of years, but his heart beat has always come with him. Never had to leave such things behind the way Spike has.

"Complete, unfiltered terror," Spike admitted, one corner of his mouth twitching into an odd smile. "The dead were buried quickly, in those days, so I awoke in my coffin. Cold, feeling like I was suffocating, before it occurred to me that I didn't need to breathe. I clawed my way out of the dirt, my own teeth cutting my lips. She was waiting for me. She looked so happy. So serene. My sweet William, she said, her cold hands against my face. And I knew I would never have to crawl again. I would never have to beg for their respect. I didn't need their respect. I needed their blood. And that was all."

A tear rolled unexpectedly down his cheek. He didn't bother to wipe it away.

"I'd never seen so happy. We rutted like animals, right there in the dirt. I'd never touched a woman before, but touching Dru felt like second-nature, from that very moment."

There's an uncomfortable moment when Sweeney remembers something. A girl in his lap under the stars. Whispered words. A prediction of his death. He can't hear it, though, can't pick up what she's saying and as soon as it washes over him, it's gone again. He's back with Spike, shifting his hand from the back of his neck to catch the tear with his thumb as it reaches the edge of Spike's jaw.

Laura had crawled out of her grave like that. Because of what Sweeney had given Shadow and what Shadow had given his dead wife. He doesn't like to think on that very much.

"And it was only her," he says. "For how long?"

Longer than he's ever devoted to anyone, that much is certain.

"Over a century," Spike said, lifting a hand to card his fingers through Sweeney's hair. "She tried to get me to take others into our bed, now and then, but I never liked it." He laughed softly. "Suppose even a demon can't change a man completely. Turns out I was much too traditional for her, even as a vampire."

They'd had other problems, of course, and ultimately their separation had come down to Buffy, but they'd always ignored the ways they weren't compatible. She was a wild, lusty thing, but he'd wanted only her.

Sweeney grunts at that, not willing to say anything one way or the other, but he figures his silence speaks clearly enough for him. He's always been a strangely faithful man, dedicated wholly to the people he's loved, seeing any sort of infidelity as the ultimate crime against a relationship. When he loves, as he does now, it's with his entire heart for that one person and for them alone.

He's a cruel bastard at times, but that is one thing he'll never do to someone he loves.

"Never had that long myself," he says. "But when I've been with someone..." He smiles and shrugs. "Guess I'm too fuckin' traditional, too."

"Who'd have thought we'd have that in common, eh?" Spike said, smirking as he reached out to take Sweeney's big hand in his own.

"I think she'd rather like you," he said, after a moment. "Dru. The idea of the two of you in the same room makes my head hurt, of course, but oh, she'd have fun with you."

"She likes 'em big and mean, huh?" Sweeney asks, flexing his fingers between Spike's and then curling them again. Hard for anyone to take him as someone who's mean when he's got his fingers threaded through Spike's and looks for all the world like he's got no intention of letting go. "Guess you and she have that in common."

He doesn't know what to say next. What he's thinking is that he'd hate her and be grateful to her in equal measure. Grateful for having made Spike what he is, for having made this possible, and hating her from having had him for so long. For having something with him no one else ever will. It's a bullshit thing to feel and so he doesn't want to say it.

"Don't really know who made me," he says instead. "Saint Ronan with his bloody curse? Somethin' before that? Brân only knows."

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