TITLE: Hurt, Much

AUTHOR: 1stRab-id

RATING: R

SUBJECT: S/B

SPOILERS: Post Smashed S6

SYNOPSIS: This is just a little interpretive dance of mine...everyone seems to be doing them these days.

DISCLAIMER: Joss, Mutant Enemy, Fox...they own it all baby!

He hadn't planned to hurt her...much. Just enough to reach her. Just enough to break through. Just enough to wake her up, to open her eyes and hold her attention. He wanted her to see him, to truly see.

He wanted her to know they were the same.

But Buffy was not the sort to let a little hurt persuade her. A world of pain had never changed her mind.

Spike should have remembered that. He should have realized that it would take more than a slap or a sneer to break her. It would take a war. And so they had fought like dark, territorial armies. They held each other at bay with callous disregard and the bare knuckled punch of lover's insight.

Spike hit hard but he didn't come close to hurting her. Because his swing was weak and his heart played him traitor. And because Buffy Summers kept her secrets buried deep. Her vulnerable center cowered behind foot thick stone blocks and bars of cold iron. Spike could bruise her body but he was incapable

of wounding her on the inside. Not the way she wounded him with her cutting glances and her well placed jabs.

But now he had a weapon close to hand. Spike had armed himself with brutal honesty and he was not afraid to use it.

"You afraid to let me try? Afraid that I will..."

(Make you my own, love you too well, leave you too soon, break your heart and your spirit...)

And Buffy silenced him with kisses. She had taken his meaning at long last but was far too craven to hear him out. She retreated behind her most unbreachable defense. Like a general falling on the sword, she fell on him. Spike struggled for the will to fight on, to keep bombarding her until she collapsed beneath

him. But she broke through his line. She confounded him with her no man's land of dead ends and dark passages.

The Slayer's lips were searing, her body lithe and powerful. Spike was completely undone by her charge. With swift precision, she removed the civilized barriers that separated their forces. She wrapped herself around him, out flanking his resistance. She maneuvered him into a weakened position. Her

yielding barrage brought him down. Pressing her advantage, she shackled him in moist velvet and held him captive in her eyes.

Defeated, backed against the wall, Spike sheathed his weapon. Shell-shocked, he counted himself well beaten and well broken. And he swore never to rebel again if this was what his conqueror would allow him, this wet, warm, wild subjugation. He held fast to Buffy and she claimed him as her own. Without

objection or objective, Spike let his lover set the terms of their surrender.

Closing her eyes and opening her mouth around soft moans, Buffy demanded what was already hers. She took it by right of conquest rather than by truce or trade. She plundered her foe. Spike bowed his head in supplication. He laid his cheek upon her breast and paid her homage with the soft growl of his

pleasure. He gave himself into her service, filling her coffers, delighting her with the bounty of his province.

"How could he have forgotten who she was?" He wondered, as she toppled him, "How could he have imagined himself anything but her willing slave?"

She was his sovereign and his shroud. She draped him in her colors and he laid himself to rest within the confines of her newly drawn boundaries.

He hadn't planned to hurt her...much! But only at the last, when he had consigned his demon warrior to the grave, unmarked and unlamented, did Spike think to ask how much she planned on hurting him.

THE END