Breathing Light

The window is open to the night, and the streetlight coming through is harsh, revelling in the scars on Wes's skin, highlighting every crease and imperfection with startling intensity, the fine scrape on one forearm from the dig, the tiny thread-lines of things that happened long ago. The sheets are sunbleached from where Illyria hung them to dry on the line in the garden, and forgot to tell anyone until they had been there for three scorching days, and although the bed is wide, the wooden posts are worn with age.

Spike wonders, sometimes, how many others have been in this room, this bed, inhabited the bare bones of it that still lie under all Wes's careful additions. How many others have been revealed by the hard light, and loved less, or more, for what they see.

But his vision has always been clearer than a human's. He knew about the scars and flaws, the marks of the past, long before a streetlight had the temerity to come in through his window and make it obvious. For a minute, he wants to throw a rock at it, black it out, for making the things obvious that really only he should know about. Except they aren't important, not when held up against the things no other person's ever going to know, not in any light, not at any time.

Things that don't change, even under the liquid sunlight of Cairo that steals Wes away where he can't follow, into a world of stones and dust and papyrus and stupid funeral ships that aren't even cursed.

They're Spike's private list, the one he'd deny he's ever made, even though he checks back to it on the days when Wes's skin seems to have got darker than ever, when he even smells like the sun.

Wes twitches every time Spike kisses his hipbone. He bites his lip when Spike licks the inside of his elbow.

When he's most relaxed, like now, he sleeps with his face in Spike's neck, his hand on Spike's stomach. Spike keeps his hand on Wes's arm, lazily moving his thumb over a faint new bruise on the elbow. When Wesley shivers, and starts to move away, he presses his mouth on the arm beneath his neck, and Wesley becomes still again.

The light doesn't matter. It's fake, electricity, not part of this world. Not part of the moon-and-sun-god glow they're all going to find so hard to leave behind.

He's always seen the scars, anyway. They've never changed a thing.