In Memory of Flowers

They'll call it chance, or luck, or call it fate
The cards and stars that tumble as they will
Tomorrow manifests and brings the bill,
For every kiss and kill, the small and great
You want to know the future, love? Then wait:
I'll answer your impatient questions. Still--
They'll call it chance, or luck, or call it fate
The cards and stars that tumble as they will

- 'entrails, a rondel'
neil gaiman


She was half-sitting on the edge of the dresser when he walked in, holding a daisy, delicate yellow petals somehow uncreased in her careless grasp. He didn't know where she had gotten the flower from--wrong season, wrong climate, wrong /country/, really, and Drusilla, for all she liked playing with dirt, didn't have a green thumb on her. She never liked it when he brought cut blossoms home, either, so after a while, he'd just stopped trying.

She wasn't fussing now, just holding it next to her ear, a smile on her face, eyes half-lidded and lazy.

If it kept her happy, he wasn't about to argue.

"Where did you get that from, pet?" he asked, curious, crossing the room to stop by her side. And he /was/ curious, a little, but he knew that what he wanted was really just some of her fleeting attention for himself.

A character flaw of his, he supposed, or perhaps something very normal--humans needed food and air; he needed blood and attention and pain, the things that would have seemed so wrong to the person he had once been just second nature now.

Drusilla looked up, licking the side of her mouth with a dry tongue.

"The rainbow," she murmured, holding the flower up for inspection. "The rainbow gave me the sun. Isn't it pretty?"

He couldn't understand her. Never could, really, when she was in one of these moods, cloaking her words in mystery and madness--so he just nodded, and pressed a kiss to the top of her head. Like a blessing.

Strange, though. She seemed as though she'd been playing with the flower for a while (and when had she gone out? dusk had only just falling, sunlight creeping, furtive, into shadow), but it showed no signs of wilting.

Then again, flowers like this were just a short step up from weeds, and those were always hardier than one expected.

There was a moral in there somewhere, he was sure. But he didn't care much for those things anymore.

Echoing his movements, Drusilla brought the flower to her mouth and brushed the petals across those full, tinted lips, leaving light crimson stains upon yellow.

Then she opened her hand and let it fall.

"It isn't for us, is it, Spike?" she murmured, guileless and innocent and deceptively childlike. She wasn't, of course. Childlike. But she liked pretending, so he never said anything, just let her act as she wanted.

The flower hit the ground without fanfare or any hint of noise, even to his heightened senses, although Drusilla cocked her head to the side and regarded it gravely, nodding agreement to nothing.

"What, pet?"

"The sun. It's not for us."

Obligingly, he shook his head, taking her hand in his to run his tongue over the soft skin at the back.

"No, love. It's not."

"You could give it to Miss Edith," he offered after a moment of silence, turning his attention to her fingers. She drew her hand back sharply, nails gouging into his palm as they went, coming away with thin strips of flesh and skin coloured in blood.

"No," she whispered harshly, a half-glare in her eyes.

"The sun isn't for her, either."

Hopping off her perch, she retrieved the flower.

It was true that the colours didn't suit her--yellow and green, too bright, too alive, too vibrant against her skin and tinted nails, making her look pale and washed out and dead.


/'Black is the colour, Spike.'/

(she'd told him that one night, when the stars and moon were out, throwing silver-gray shadows over her face. they were alone together, and had been for nearly half a century, and, it seemed, /would/ be for eternity, and there was such dark wisdom in her eyes that he fell in love with her all over again--)

/'It has to be. Black and blood. It's us. Or else we're just lying.'/

(she was always the cleverest of all of them. he took to wearing her nail polish after that.)


But he didn't say anything, just watched as she fell backwards, bonelessly, full-length onto the table, heedless of all the bottles of perfume arranged there in odd, regular patterns.

(he was sure they said something, if only he knew how to read them. he was fluent in fourteen languages, but drusilla knew several dozen more, most of her own devising, born from a prophet's ability to see the future in stars and tealeaves and artless crossing lines--)

Some broke open against her back, other smashed at his feet, and the scent of blood and lavender filled the air.

He knew better than to try and help her up.

The table wasn't large, and her head dangled, unsupported, off the other end. Her arms were thrown back too, her throat tilted and exposed, looking for all the world like a centerpiece of ritual sacrifice, spine arched up to offer her heart.

"I don't /want/ the sun, anyway," she said without moving, voice muffled and dreamy, earlier hardness forgotten.

"She'll only come out during the day, so I can't touch her. And it stings so terribly when I try..."

There was another soft crunch of glass as she relaxed, allowing the hard wood to bear her weight. Gracefully, she reached a hand towards him--he caught it and pulled her to an upright position, stepping close and turning so she was cradled in a half-embrace. His free hand ran down her back, neatly picking glass from her skin, tracing careless loops as it went, as though following the path of some swirling, archaic dance, steady even through layers of blood-slick cloth.


/'Spike?'/ (she was so close to him then that he could almost feel heat from her body. but there wasn't any to be had.)

/'Yes, Princess?'/

(she said nothing in reply, just placed one of his hands on her waist and took the other in hers--there was no music, but there didn't need to be. and so they'd waltzed, then, by candlelight and silence, and at the end she'd allowed him to drink from her, as she tilted burning wax onto his neck and down, drawing patterns in red that only she could see)


"If we don't belong to the sun, Spike, would the moon want us?" Drusilla asked, suddenly, pushing his hand away.

"Of course she would, love," he answered, nuzzling briefly at her ear. "She'd cast away the sky and come down, just for you."

Unconsciously, she began to tug at the petals on the daisy, but they wouldn't come loose. She settled for twirling the stem around her finger, instead, twining it in a spiral then letting go, watching in fascination as the thin stalk uncoiled.

"Spike?"

"Yes, love?"

"Will you bring me the moon?" murmuring the question as she rocked in a slow, almost imperceptible rhythm against his arms.

Pause.

"The moon, love?"

"The moon," she said decisively, reaching out a hand to flip off the single, flickering lamp that illuminated the room.

Lithely, she untangled herself from his arms to cross the room in a graceful sweep of hair and skirt and possessing, possessive insanity. The blinds across the window were pulled with a single yank, ethereal silver flooding the darkness--

Moonlight, he mused absently, was really her element--brightness washed her out, but the soft glow of the moon lent her a glow of her own, painting subtle purple shadows in her hair and moving pictures on her skin.

She was so beautiful, it almost hurt that she wasn't in his arms--but she belonged to madness first, to the night second, and to Angelus third, and he knew that if anything, /he/ was the one that belonged to /her/.

So he just watched.

The full moon was tomorrow, and what hung in the sky was the slightest step from perfection--marred by the telling flat edge of one side. It reminded him of them, in some strange, symbolic, and incredibly pretentious way--something about how they were both once removed from perfection, perhaps. Similarly marked in different ways. But the real tragedy was that they'd never be truly perfect (or, at least, any less than dysfunctional), whether tomorrow came or not.

Drusilla sank to the floor slowly, skirts spreading around her in a heavy red-black puddle.


(she'd been wearing that same dress one night so many years ago, lace rough against his skin as he whispered a lullaby into her ears)

/'Spike?'/ (she'd asked, interrupting him mid-verse)

/'Yes, love?'/

/'We are forever, aren't we?'/

/'Of course, love.'/

/'Good.'/

(they'd slept in the way of lovers that night, spooned against each other, breathing unnecessarily and in synchronicity. and for the first time in a decade, they did not dream)


"But even if the moon wants us, Spike, she's too loyal to the sky to ever come down. She sends her children to paint the fields purple for her, instead..."

"Paint the..." he blinked. "Purple? Violets, Dru?"

She smiled up at him, sudden and brilliant, and on impulse, he crossed the room to lay a kiss on her silver-touched hair, then her lips. Her mouth was cool and tasted, as it always did, of blood and graveyard dust. Perhaps it should have put him off, but to him, it was family.

"You always were the clever one, Spike," she said, something deep stirring in her midnight eyes. "Violets. For me?"

There weren't any to be found, of course, not at this hour. There wasn't a florist within miles, and in this country of dry air and dust, he wouldn't find any growing wild. But he grabbed his duster and keys--

"Anything for you, Princess."

--and walked out alone into the night, anyway.

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