As the Snow Subsides

What, exactly, does she mean to you? [SpikexFaye]

[September 27th, 2003]

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The ice is white cold beneath his palms, like a lonely dream. 

I dreamt.

If it is a dream, then he can only hope that he will wake from its endlessness when the time comes, when he wants the time to come, if he wants it to come at all.  As the snow falls now, gentle like a brush of breath, he lifts his face to a never-ending white.  To wake--to open his eyes--to face reality--only, he's been in one and out the other for so long now, caught between a dream and waiting like a helpless child.

Still, there is a time for everything. When that time is, he doesn’t know: maybe, never, ever?

(Now.)

Powdery as the feather of down, of only the softest that nature can bring to its children.  His breath comes out in puffs of mist, warmth dissolving into snow.  Some part of him wants it to stop, the snow (the dull wanting), but it is the nature of this world: cold and beautiful, like shattered glass.

The snow is cold fire.  He tries to hold it between his hands, only to have it swept away in a murmur of gusting apology.  The wind skids sideways through his hair, cold and hot and burning his skin raw.

The voice comes out of nowhere.

“It’s time to go.”

He remains crouching, one knee tucked under and the other an aching splint against the white-cold ground.

“You’re not going to find anything, you know that.”

The snowflakes drift, and his eyes drift.  A world blurs into white before him; sitting out here in a snowstorm, lips a pleasant, aching (empty) numbness, fingertips as unfeeling as the rest of his mind, and all he can think—all he can think—

He can’t .

She curses.  Or he thinks it’s a she, because at this point he can’t really tell, nor does he particularly care.  “When Jet comes at you for tracking slush all over his precious ship, don’t even think about blaming it on me.”

He waits for her to leave.  Only she doesn’t.

“Well?  Are you coming or not?”

“No.” 

“You’ll freeze.” 

“I won’t.” 

“You will.”

“I won’t.”

“You will.  Damnit, do you have to be so stubborn all the time?”

His rasping laughter turns into coughs, unused to such high altitudes where the wind howls and the air is scarce and the world is so high up it’s like being up in endless space without the hindering metal of ship and steel there to block you.  To think that she is telling him that.  God.  What’s this world come to? he muses, but the question slips his mind almost as fast as the wind whirls the snowflakes away from his tinted blue fingertips.

“You idiot!”  She curses some more. 

Still, the sounds of retreating footsteps don’t come.  He doesn’t know what to feel. 

“Go back by yourself.”  A slight pause.  “I’ll be fine.”

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees her making the motions to leave.  “Don’t think I’ll care if you freeze to death down here,” she warns.

And then he is alone.

(Not that I’m not use to it.)

He is.  Solitude is a tolerated companion, neither loved nor hated.  It’s just there, as never-changing as Jet, or Faye, or Ed, or even himself.  No, he hasn’t changed much, if at all.  Still the same old cowboy, he is, in more than one sense of the word.

“Just a humble cowboy at your service, ma’am.”

Bang, at point-blank.  He misses on purpose, and the look on the other man’s face is liquid terror.

“Where is she?  Tell me.”

“I don’t know, I swear—”

“Liar.”

“Don’t—p-please—I’ve got—I’ve got a wife, two k-kids—” Gunfire outside the door, harried shouts of guards echoing down a long hallway.  He mutters a short curse under his breath. 

Bang, at point-blank. 

This time he doesn’t hesitate.

Liar.

I don’t know.

I don’t know.

“I don’t know,” he says, and the wind whirls away his words in the same way it whirls away the snow.  (Because I never did know.)  Fingers scrabble away into cold, cold ground, cracking hardened ice and layers of frost as easily as stamping down pieces of sugar-spun candy.  The further down he goes the harder the ground becomes, until his hands, the snow, is the color of a naked wound—angry purple-red even in the soft twilight of snowfall.  He doesn’t know how long, when, how, how, how—   

It was just a spindle of light, a fragile thread.

“You know this is just a wild goose chase.  One tiny lead doesn’t amount to much you can go on.”

“‘You’?  Oh, so this is only ‘me’ now?”  Mocking, ironic, in jest.

He’s quiet for a short minute, beetle brows drawn together into a jagged line.  “It’s always been that way.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure,” he said, still mocking-bitter-carefree as a half-raw blow to the gut.

(I’m not sure.)

(Anymore.)

He doesn’t even notice when he passes out, so when he dreams it comes as distorted as images flickering across a smashed mirror.  Sometimes he sees her, a passing glimpse of lips, hair, eyes, skin—sometimes it is more than just a glimpse, but the actual feel of her, like chemise warm from sunshine.  Sometimes he thinks that upon waking, she will be there besides him, hair a fine mess and eyes red-rimmed and bottom lip swollen tender-red from an uneasy sleep.

And it would be the most goddamned beautiful thing he ever saw in his life.

“I didn’t expect.  She’s just so—ordinary.”

“You’re an ass, Spiegel.  You must be on those same Bloody Mary’s you’ve been trafficking if you think you can split from them.”

“Have you lost your mind?”

No.  No.  No.

Yes.

“You’re fucked.”

I’m not.

I am—

Spike Spiegel.

of the Black Dragon Syndicate.

“You can call me Spike.”

Spike.

“What’s your name?”

Savior.

“It doesn’t matter.  You’re going to leave soon, aren’t you?”

(I won’t, because I’m dead.  I died.  I died.)

“Spike, look out there.  What do you see?”

Rotting buildings and a homeless man, hair scraggled dirty gray as rag water.  The apartment across from them had crumbled down upon itself like a boy broken in from his desperate game of survival out on the streets—gray and pock-marked and pitted.  Clothes soaking wet hung from a tattered rope, dripping water onto the pavement below.  The homeless man passed underneath it.  He didn’t look up when the water dribbled onto the top of his head.

“Things that don’t matter.”

(I don’t matter.)

(But you do.)

“Spike, you know that’s not...”

Spike.

Spike, you bastard.

Spike.

“Spike, wake up!”  And he does, only it is to warm hands against the side of his face, and pain blossoming across the arch of his feet and the tips of his fingers and the center of his chest, pain that tells him he is still alive.  Look up.  He sees her haloed by the never-ending fall of white.  Snowflakes flutter bitter cold against his tongue.  She is so still she seems a frozen ice goddess. 

(She would kill me for even thinking that.)

“You’re an idiot,” she whispers.

“I know.”

“Get up, then.”

“I will.”  But for now, he rests in her grasp, though he knows not what lets him do so.  There’s no instinctive response to push her away, as he does to anyone who gets too close. 

He thinks that for now, that part of him has been frozen.  When the fire comes and warms him all up again, though, he will be fine, because isn’t he always? 

“You told me you were going to leave me down here.”

“Are you complaining?” she says, a little sharply.

“No.”  Soft, almost as soft as the press of her palm against the small of his back.  “I don’t complain.”

“You don’t.”

“Never,” he says, but it’s with a bare smile born on numbed lips.

“Never,” she repeats after him, words nearly lost in wind.

He is quiet for some time; and she, too, with him.  When she speaks again, it’s small, almost as if she doesn’t want him to hear.  That’s odd, he thinks fuzzily.

Because she always does want to be heard.

“Was she very beautiful?”

“Yes,” he says quietly.  “Yes, she (is) was.”

Was.

The snow still falls like nothing has ever happened.

And maybe nothing ever has.

~fin~

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