A little stale but still edible.

[stungunbilly]

Wandering old files, I found this little snippet of Spike/Xander floating around, and I'm still feeling posty.

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There are days in the heat of passion when Xander wants to take it all back, walk backwards into a past with different choices and an empty today. He imagines a calm life of quiet despair, failed attempts at satisfaction, half-hearted loves who leave. When the uncomfortable immediacy of living with so much feeling becomes impossible, as itchy as a woolen suit on bare skin, he reads Spike’s dog-eared Kafka and wonders what he might have been.

Spike will never allow quiet space to grow, simple patterns that bore and comfort. He is predictably disruptive, and keeps Xander awake too much of the time. He is obsessive, possessive, romantic, and deranged. They fight constantly. They fuck constantly. The forms vary, tender to traumatic. Xander wants to want to stray, to try other people, but there is no room, and no possibility of making any. Other people have so much to compete with that there is no chance of anything threatening them. Spike obviously doesn’t even want to stray, can look at exes and beauties without a flicker.

Meanwhile, Xander is embarrassed by their mutual fidelity. They never mention it in conversation, don’t overtly celebrate anniversaries. He hates the sense of competition that he feels when other gay couples state their longevity like some strange resume. They aren’t getting married, if Xander can help it. He isn’t sure he can.

They don’t drink wine. Or decorate, match clothes, work out, have dinner parties, or accessorize.

The thing is, Xander doesn’t really want to be gay, or in love, or even happy. There was a time when he would have fought these things, but secretly enjoyed them. Now, there is no way he can accept any of them. Anya’s body is unrecovered in a pit somewhere, and he can’t mourn her the way he should. Because he can’t really want anything but what he has.

Mornings, he never knows what he will find; maybe Spike awake and making breakfast in silk pajama bottoms, face aglow with creation as he makes pancakes shaped like Rorschachian nightmares. Or a tangle of blankets at the foot of the bed, encasing a tousled vampire who hums happily when uncovered. A raging badass leather god who tells him off for his unwashed dishes and fucks him halfway through the headboard. It’s always different, and invariably good.

The guilt crawls beneath his skin like an insect infestation, and every moment of joy is a heartbreak of pre-emptive nostalgia. There is no way Xander has earned this, any of it, and when it goes, as it must, any holes in the happiness would be something to hold on to. Cosmic balance is a myth, but he knows in his bones that there is somewhere a collection agency of bad karma, and he is certainly on its calling list. So he adds bad sci-fi plots to Spike’s developing number of modern novels, and keeps the roof from falling on them, and gives backrubs and blowjobs and arguments whenever they are called for, and tries to forget he is on borrowed time.

Meanwhile, in a city near you, Stargate: Atlantis features the inimitable Rodney McKay, who could potentially be having sex with Ronon Dex.
Just telling it like it is.
ETA: And, oh, oh, he is! Go to eliade's guh-inducing story.