Buffy & Spike. You remember them. :)
This has been a very rare free weekend: my last one, I think, this side of Christmas. And it has been lovely.

Here's another rarity: I've had a reasonably productive few weeks catching up at home and work, which left me enough space this weekend to make some kind of progress with my great heaps of unfinished fandom things. So far I only have one thing that has made it to the point of shareable, but who knows? There may yet be more.

Last winter all the grass verges near us were dug up for some kind of cable work, and the paths alongside them re-laid. What we didn't discover until the spring was that the replanted verges had all been filled with daffodil bulbs. Between that, and the determined weeds that found their way through the tarmac, this little ficlet-essay hybrid came about.

Before I begin, the happiest of birthdays and the best of wishes to (belatedly) monanotlisa and ascian3, two of the dearest people in my LJ world.

By the way, did I mention it's Buffy/Spike?


Forget-me-not


At the dawn of time, love was. It could not be boxed or contained; could not be wrapped, or sent; could not be held, or exchanged. It was beyond, between, within: the very fabric of the universe; and if there were stars in the heavens no-one knew, because it was love that lit up the sky.

Those are the words, and it isn't enough, not for this weight of love that smothers breath and saturates soul. His heart expands, and still it isn't enough.

The afternoon light filters through curtains faded and heavy with dust, translucent like the camellia petals that drop from his fingers even as he waits. A bouquet of lace and wire stems, love that curls at the edges and collects, hopelessly, on the floor of his heart.

Life does not begin in sunlight. It begins underground, undercover.

He's reminded of that, one fateful night in a London back street.

His love is like a red, red rose: heady and sweet, crushed velvet nestling a dark heart, thorns that tear more than flesh.

Life, underneath. Hidden from the world, it fights for existence, every second hard-won, stumbling blindly towards a light it can neither feel nor see.

Nothing blooms, but tendrils reach out in the darkness and wrap him in something like eternity.

And then it happens.

Love hits him like a shaft of sunlight. It isn't a caress; sun-kissed isn't a word that belongs in his world. Sunlight scorches; leaves its mark on smouldering skin and stirs the borrowed blood in his heart until it burns.

Love takes shape; her shape. He boxes his love up, moulds it, takes her outline and pretends it is enough.

Love beyond, between, within seems so far away.

But then he stands before a god to fight for what he loves, lifts his broken head to find his lips, swollen and stung, softened by the warmth of hers. And he understands then what it means to be kissed by the California sun.

Somewhere inside of him, life begins again. A soul. Something that finds the hollows he's filled with love and bores them out. Something that sometimes feels so cold he can do nothing but cling to her. Something that, in spite of everything, dares to hope.

The surface of the earth stands rock hard, sun-baked, a barrier between darkness and light. Beneath, a shoot not yet green pushes upwards. It must call on everything it knows about living to fight its way through, and yet. Until it breaks out into the light, life itself is something it cannot begin to comprehend.

There's light running through him, sunlight that carves its path down from heaven to his heart; but she stands in front of him, golden and glowing, and everything else might as well be shadow.

"I love you," she says, holding onto him as if she might never let go.

And he understands, then, that she loves harder at that moment than she will ever have to love in her life. That she can hold the world together in her two hands in the face of hell, and still find it in her to love him with every breath in her body. That this great, soaring love will push against the earth until it will break through. And as he stands there in the flood of light, he understands what she can only begin to know.

Because if he asks one last thing of her, it's this: Don't give your heart away underground. Don't take this for your definition of love; a goodbye, a silent hope wrenched out too soon, light casting shadow on the walls of a cave. Not here. Not now. Not yet.

Because there is more.

Daffodils, blazing, gold upon gold upon gold. Bluebells, symphonious and abundant. Heartsease, quiet and tender. Jasmine, mimosa, gentian. Forget-me-nots, blue and endless, tiny and irrepressible.

A sea of colour in a world filled with light.

He turns to her, his eyes shining in surety, exultant.

"No, you don't," he says.