Worthy of the Pain

[midorisakura]

Word Count: 1627

Prompt: Playing with Hair

Fandom: Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Characters: Xander Harris, Drusilla, Spike

Summary: Missing Spike, Drusilla takes a human, hoping that he will be able to satisfy her needs. When the stars tell her what the future holds, she realizes that the human isn't hers, and she doesn't handle that very well.

  

 

Drusilla liked when Spike brushed her hair. She liked when he twirled it around his finger, and kissed it. She liked how it made her feel –safe and loved.

Sometimes he even washed it for her – fingers digging into her scalp, massaging – bathing her dark curls  in perfumes that covered up the stench of death, and almost made her feel like a living girl again.

She’d be giddy for weeks afterwards, living off of that high.

When Spike disappeared, she had to get creative, play with her own hair, twirl it round and round with the brush herself. It left her hair in horrible tangles, and made her scalp hurt.

Playing with her own hair didn’t give her the same sort of satisfaction, and left her feeling empty, so she brushed the hair of her dolls, made their hair feel soft and silky, poured perfume on each of them until they stank. It wasn’t the same, and she grew bored with her dolls. They never played with her hair in return, after all.

It was shortly after she’d punished her favorite doll for telling her that Spike, when he came back, would no longer be hers, that she saw the answer to her unholy prayers as he was leaving a party. He was dark and tall, like Daddy, not light and small, like Spike.

His smile was big and goofy, and made his brown eyes light up with humor. He had large hands, too, and long, thick fingers that she knew would work loose the knots that had settled in her hair with Spike’s absence.

He was perfect, and, no matter what Miss Edith said about Spike claiming him when he returned, Drusilla wanted him for as long as she could have him. She ignored his protests, voiced in high-pitched, squeaky tones that hurt her ears, and punished him when he called her a ‘deranged dead thing.’

When he slammed his mouth shut, rubbing the bloody spot on his forehead where she’d hit him for calling her ‘dead’, Drusilla was happy, because his voice had been giving her a headache, but then she grew bored of his quiet. Got tired of the human’s refusal to touch her no matter what she did to him – burning him with the tips of the cigarettes that Spike had left behind, cutting him with her prized dagger and lapping up the blood (tasty blood should not be wasted), hitting him...none of it had worked, none of it had gotten him to talk to her the way that Spike had, and he tucked his hands underneath himself, hiding them from her.  

He was quiet, and sat in a corner of the crypt, sometimes rocking. And then he began to stink, and when he opened his mouth again, it was to mutter and babble, and beg for food, beg to be set free. He was spirited, and while Drusilla might have admired that, had she been a different sort of vampire, she found it to be vexing.

“Brush my hair,” she demanded, hissing at the human, thrusting her brush in his face, the hard, wooden handle clacking against his teeth. “Or…”

“Or, what?” asked the human, Xander, he’d called himself during one of his nonsensical ramblings.

It was the first time he’d been bold, and defiant, and Drusilla bristled at that, smacking him around the head with the brush, adding to the bruises and lumps that were already there. When he started laughing, she lost control, wanting to make the sound stop.

She was unaware of when the sound of Xander’s laughter first stopped, continued hitting the human with her brush until nothing met her ears but the echo of a strange wheezing gurgling sound, like a bubbling brook. When she came to herself, blinking and taking in the sight of the boy she’d taken from beneath the Slayer’s nose, she was surprised at how much blood there was, and how broken the human looked.

“Oops.” Giggling, Drusilla brushed the human’s blood-matted hair back from his face, licking the blood from her fingers. “Don’t worry, Mommy will fix you.”

Drusilla ignored the human’s moan when she drew him to herself, placing his battered head in her lap, and humming a lullaby. She ran her fingers through his hair, gently disentangling the bloodied knots that her beating had left behind, and skimming her fingers carefully over the bumps, lightly massaging them.

“S…sorry,” the human’s voice was quiet, the single word coming out stuttered and slurred.

“Sh,” Drusilla whispered, placing her finger on the human’s lips. “You’re going to make Miss Edith jealous. She doesn’t like when Mommy plays with the other dolls.”

The human’s eyes widened at that, and his heart started to sound like the fluttering of butterfly wings. “I’m not…not a d…doll,” he said through cracked lips, wincing when he tried to shake his head.

Drusilla placed her lips over the human’s, wanting to silence him, because the stars were trying to speak to her, trying to warn her. She drew back as if scorched, and pushed the boy from her lap. She circled him, cursing and hissing.

“How dare you trick me, how dare you, how dare you,” Drusilla shouted, pointing accusingly at the boy, tearing at her hair, pulling it out in clumps.

The human stared at her – curled in on itself, eyes wide with fear – mouthed words of apology that Drusilla couldn’t hear over the screaming of the stars, of her own voice. It wasn’t until arms wrapped around her from behind that the stars stopped their incessant shrieking, telling her that she was naughty in hurting the human.  

Seconds later, she smelt him, smelt Spike, and she simply stopped fighting herself, the stars, the arms that were wrapped around her. Turning her face toward him, she let him run his fingers through her hair, let Spike soothe, and kiss, and shush her.

“What’s this, then?” Spike asked, his voice low, cajoling. He was looking at the human, the Xander who was now watching them, his lips moving without sound.

Spike crouched in front of the human and touched his hair. Jealousy burned a path through where Drusilla’s heart used to be, but she remembered what the stars had told her and held her tongue.

“He’s yours,” Drusilla said, hating the taste of the words as they left her mouth. They were chalky and bitter, and felt wrong.

“Mine?” Spike said, turning toward her, an eyebrow raised in question.

Drusilla backed away from her lover, nodding, knowing that she’d done wrong in hurting the boy, though she hadn’t meant to hurt him. She’d just wanted him to brush her hair, like Spike had.

“I didn’t mean to,” Drusilla said, picking up Miss Edith from where she’d banished the doll when she’d grown angry with her for telling her what the stars had been shouting at her.

“He wouldn’t brush my hair,” Drusilla spoke to her doll, knowing that if anyone would understand her, it would be Miss Edith. “I missed Spike, missed him so, so much.” Drusilla rocked on her heels, much as the Xander human had rocked after she’d gotten angry with him and burnt him with Spike’s forgotten cigarettes.

“Come ‘ere,” Spike said, holding a hand out to Drusilla, wriggling his eyebrows and his fingers when she shook her head. He smiled, and coaxed her, and held up her brush.

“I’m not angry, love,” he said.

Drusilla crawled to him, crossed her legs and sat down in front of her Spike, let him brush her hair and sing to her. She hummed along, pushed her fingers into the human’s hair, and played with the sticky strands.

Closing her eyes, she leaned back against Spike, smiling when he kissed the back of her neck. The human whimpered and shivered, but didn’t speak.

“I think I broke him,” Drusilla confessed.

“Don’t worry, love, we’ll fix him,” Spike promised, his fingers working loose a nasty knot in her hair.

Sighing, Drusilla nodded, and relaxed. It was good to have Spike back, and reassuring to know that the stars hadn’t lied to her, that, though Spike and the human belonged to each other, she was Spike’s, too. He wouldn’t abandon her.

“Make him right as rain,” Spike said.

The human shifted and sniffed, and Drusilla mirrored Spike’s gentle caresses, touching the human in the same way that Spike was touching her. The human stilled, and Drusilla smelt the rain that Spike spoke of – it was salty and reminded Drusilla of when she was a little girl, before Daddy had come for her and made her special.

“Miss Edith and the stars told me,” Drusilla confessed, not wanting to say the words.

“What did they tell you, love?” Spike asked.

“That he was yours,” Drusilla said, something tangling in her stomach. “That I shouldn’t touch him.”

“Don’t worry,” Spike said. “Looks to me like you barely touched ‘im.”

For some reason Spike’s words caused the human to shudder, and Drusilla giggled. The stars had given her a glimpse of the future, had promised her blood and burning up in glory with the sun’s rise. It was glorious. They’d showed her what her Spike and his human-Xander would accomplish, together, how well they’d fit with each other– like puzzle pieces. No jagged, unfinished edges or missing pieces lodged in between floorboards or lost beneath tattered rugs.

Spike’s heart, dead, yet full, and the Xander-human’s heart, warm and beating with an unequaled passion, when combined, would change the world as everyone knew it. Drusilla, when the time came, would not stand in the way. It would hurt, stepping aside, letting the Xander-human hold that special place in her Spike’s lost and damaged soul, but it would be a good hurt, worthy of the pain.