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Fated Series -- The Sunlight's in Your Eyes -- by Kismet
Rating: G
Description: Parting is such sweet sorrow.
Disclaimer: This is a work of amateur fiction. All characters etc. are the property of their respective creators and no copyright infringement is intended. The author reserves rights over her work and storyline. Feel free to read and enjoy, though ! (Song lyrics by David Bowie for the movie soundtrack 'The Labyrinth')
The night was cool and dark with the layered darkness of shadows and infinite shades of grey. A full, round moon hung in the sky like a silver lantern. Wolf night, but only out there where the wild things roam. Out there was their place, not in here. Outside was his place, not in here. He had to find his own wilderness, his own concrete jungle where his presence would only be the shivering sense of a knife blade cutting through the dark. Nothing more, nothing less.
The remainder of what had once been a packet of cigarettes lay on the bare floorboards. He had had a merry old bonfire last night. He wanted nothing to remain. Whoever invented the phrase 'burn your bridges behind you' had been a sensible chap.
This though, would be hard to leave.
The wood was like black silk under his fingers, polished lovingly to a high sheen. The keys wer e pure white, made of some wonderful new substance that did not yellow like ivory did. He was against the use of ivory anyway. He would have never admitted to being an animal-lover, but he respected the elephant and the tiger as equals, which in a way they were. To kill for food, to kill for pleasure ? But to kill to make piano keys...now that was barbaric !
The instrument was like a lover whose body he had had a long time to grow familiar with. He knew where to touch it to make it sing for him, he knew how to play it so it came to life. He knew where it would give and how it felt. He knew it the way he would never know her.
He began to play, knowing the melody would draw her out of the shadows where he knew she waited, hesitating, as if she was the one who needed an invitation inside. His was a vampire household, she would have never needed any invitation even if she had been....well, no use wishing for the impossible.
She came, as he knew she would.
Striding up to him with that savage grace like a lioness. That she was, golden like sunlight and just as deadly.
And still he played on. The music was the voice, the medium through which they spoke to each other without barriers and without need for the clumsiness of words. He played, until her hands touched his shoulders lightly and his fingers trembled to a stop.
She bent over him, fingers linking around his neck as she rested against his shoulders, and for a moment he closed his eyes.
"As much as I hate to say this, thank the poof who calls himself Xander for me. If he had not driven up when he did, I would have combusted all over you, love."
"We wouldn't want that to happen, now would we ? " She let go of him and he felt a pang of loss even as he moved over to allow her to share the bench.
She was wearing a dark red halter-neck dress, having come from the Bronze. Strappy sandals with little vines bearing little paper roses wound their ties halfway up her calves. She looked like a nymph out of the Dark Garden, wearing the perfumed wealth of its bounty. Yet in her eyes...
"Don't you miss the sun ?" Buffy asked him to avoid having to speak of the big things that lay between them, heavy as boulders. "Not that its all that hyped now that tans are going out of fashion, but don't you miss seeing things in the light ?" Star-Wars much ! Yet as she looked at him she thought how much a creature of the night he was, literally. Pale and white and hard with cold fire. Palpably dangerous in his black leather and red silk with the anomaly of his almost-white hair. Dangerous in the way that made the women he passed turn and look as if drawn by an irresistible magnet.
He ran his hand over the keys, and it was as if it was her he had caressed. "I see it every now and then. I see it right now, love, when I look into your eyes. Cliched, I know, but I can't be original all the time."
His sunlight. Angel had never called her that. Precious and lovely, but out of reach.
"Where will you go ?" Her voice shook slightly. It was a given fact that they could not be together, and they did not need words to say it. No crap about 'leaving for her good'.
I need you, he wanted to say selfishly. I want you and I don't want to give you up. And he knew that if he stayed with her for a while they might know true happiness. For a while. Before the demon in him rose hungering for her, breaking from his control as it had in that cell, thirsting to draw her into him completely through her blood. To be able to satisfy his hunger by ingesting her essence, for what is Love but a divine hunger ?
"I'm not sure, pet. I think I'll continue the tour that I left off halfway and 'do America'. See what you bloody colonials have managed to do so far." I need to run from you, because in your beauty you can be cruel. Those scriptwriters struck more through to the real you than you'll ever know with their new episodes, he thought. When I'm weakened and at your mercy. In a way, I am now.
He looks so hard and so unforgiving, she thought miserably. He took the choice from my hands to spare me the guilt. He killed Riley because he knew that if I killed him I could never have lived with the guilt. Does he hate me for making him do it in front of me ? She wanted to rile at him, to make him stay, but he was too strong for her to control.
Love is such a pain, he thought. It makes me wonder why we all keep bloody trying.
"The piano," he broke the silence.
"Yes?"
"It's yours now, love. Maybe one day you'll learn to play. I'll hear you from wherever I am. That I promise." He stood up then, his duster brushing her hand as it came down.
They shared a look as he tried to memorise the last dawn he would see in her eyes, and she saw the last rise of the moon in his. The Sun and the Moon were lovers once, now doomed forever to move through the sky on the same path, destined never to meet.
He left.
Silence settled where the song of the piano had once been.
The End
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