Got about three thousand words written on the amnesia story. I think it's got another five or six thousand words to go, and I'll be able to do some of it tomorrow. It's competent if not stunning first draft material, but if I can get a complete first draft by the end of this month, say, I'll have plenty of time to revise. It's funny how a story can stall out for weeks or months (or years, cough) and then suddenly, for no particular reason, you realize exactly what it needs, and everything starts flowing again.

(And I will try to get a chapter of "In A Yellow Wood" out too, it's just that that one is not flowing at the moment.)

In the meantime, here's a little ficlet I've had in mind for quite awhile. Someday I'd like to do some actual pre-series Spike/Dru, just to see if I can - Drusilla's such a one-dimensional character in canon that I've never felt I had a good grasp on her, or on her relationship to Spike. But here's this, anyway.
Memento Mori
By Barb C

Disclaimers: The usual. All belongs to Joss and Mutant Enemy, and naught to me.
Rating: PG
Pairing: B/S, S/D
Distribution: Ask and you shall receive, I'd just like to know where it ends up.
Synopsis: It should have been him. But it wasn't.
Author’s notes: This story takes place in the same universe as "Raising In the Sun," "Necessary Evils," and "A Parliament of Monsters." It takes place a few weeks after POM, and a week or so before "The Devil and William Pratt."



She found Spike sitting on the porch, a cigarette smoldering to undisturbed ash in his fingers, staring at the doll propped on his knee. The doll stared back, its skirts falling in prim ruffled waves across black denim. Buffy almost expected the glassy eyes to roll up in the painted china face, and the Cupid's-bow lips to part. She imagined it crooning its mistress's lilting madness into his ear, and fought down the urge to grab the thing and smash it.

Instead she sank down beside him on the steps, gathering her knees to her chin. Spike didn't say anything. And Spike always had something to say.

Why had he loved her? Drusilla had made him, yeah, but there was no rule that said vampires had to love their sires. She'd been a crazy, skanky, evil ho, and fine, until very recently Spike would have seen the evil part as a plus, but, but, but. She saved me from mediocrity, he'd told her once. And Buffy'd thought, but never said, You moron. That's the one thing you've never needed saving from.

But he had loved her, with all the depth of passion he possessed. For a hundred years, and more, and there was no way she'd ever beat Drusilla's time there.

Her hand ghosted up the arch of his spine, fingers making tentative little circles in the tense muscle between his shoulder blades. Bit by bit the taut lines of his body relaxed, and he flung his cigarette butt away and leaned into her, head lying heavy on her shoulder. Her creature of darkness, bending insensibly towards the sun. Spike drew a deep shuddering breath, and the doll toppled over and cartwheeled down the steps, its painted smile smashing open against the pavement.

Buffy nuzzled the bristly-soft curve of his skull. Still getting used to that. All those gorgeous platinum curls, shorn down to brown fuzz, but hair, after all, grew back. "Maybe it's..." She couldn't really say better this way, could she? Or maybe she could. "I mean, when you think about it, she's at peace now, right?" Non-existence counted as peace, didn't it? "She was crazy, Spike. Broken." She nodded at the shattered doll, lying in a heap of crumpled brown lace at their feet. "Some things can't be fixed."

"Don't you think I know that?" His fingers tightened on her arm, hard enough to bruise. "It should have been me," he whispered. "Not you, not fucking Angel, especially not one of Finn's toy soldiers. Was what she made me for. To care for her. If this was the only way, she deserved... I could have made it good for her. Hurt her the way she liked it, instead of - " His eyes scrunched closed beneath swelling ridges of bone, his lips twisted back above sharpening canines, and the dry, savage, wounded-animal noise in the back of his throat was so much worse than a human sob. "She hurt so much, for so long. All I ever wanted was to stop the pain."

Buffy held him tight, stroking his brow ridges, wanting to snap at him, tell him to get over it, Drusilla had never been worth this. But she knew something about monsters, and how hard it was to stop loving them. And all she said was, "You did. You did."


END