onlythebranch | (no subject)

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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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."