She stood and waited for the answering blow. His hand lifted, but instead of connecting with her face, it tangled in her hair, tugging until there wasn't any space left between their bodies, and very little between their mouths.
"Is this what you want?" Her voice was harsh, foreign to her own ears. Her mouth covered his before he could say a word, teeth digging into his lower lip as she sought to punish them both for everything and nothing at once.
He answered with hands as brutal as her voice, yanking down the sweats she was wearing and pushing her onto the bed, not bothering with the nicety of foreplay before taking what she offered. She felt dry and bruised and nowhere near used enough, nowhere near hurt enough. Frantic and frenzied with need and self-loathing, she drew him closer, meeting violent thrusts with quick jerks of her hips as he slammed into her, little whimpers escaping her lips at the feel of his fingernails digging into her thighs while his hands pushed them up and further apart. Her hands worked their way under his shirt, pulling it off before returning to claw at his back, slicing into the skin like tiny razors. She was trembling, vacillating between pain and pleasure as she came. Her teeth clenched around his shoulder until she tasted the copper and iron of his blood mixed with the salt of his sweat and felt him shudder, felt the warm-wet familiarity of his release inside her and the warm-wet familiarity of tears across her face.
"You should have left when I told you to do so." The words came out of his mouth without infliction as he rolled off of her, but the hard, haunted look on his face gave lie to the even tones.
Too shocked by what they'd done to say anything, she just stared at him, dumbly taking in the marks she'd left on his skin. There were more than she remembered making, neat imprints of teeth and nails mixed with long scratches welling over with blood.
She looked at her hands and back at the wounds she'd left. "I'm sorry." She was shaking, oh Christ, what had she done? "I'm sorry," she repeated, voice breaking.
"Are you all right?" The question was a mix of weariness and concern, and she had no answer for it. Something between a laugh and a groan escaped him when it became obvious she wasn't going to respond. "G-d, we're a mess, aren't we?"
"That would be one way of putting it. I didn't mean to..." she trailed off, one hand reaching out to touch the worst of the bites.
"Neither did I, but it's not something one could tell from looking at you."
She glanced at her body, startled by the scratches and bruises just starting to blossom. "Oh." Feeling self-conscious, she tugged her shirt down to cover the evidence. "I hadn't noticed." She winced as she shifted her weight; she may have been told it was fine to have sex again, but she somehow doubted that this was exactly what the midwife had intended.
"I didn't entirely mean physically," he added. "When I referred to us as a mess."
"Yeah, I know. I'm starting to think my coping mechanisms leave a little something to be desired. Also? I'm getting the feeling that learning from my mistakes? Not my strong suit."
"Nor mine. Buffy, I'm sorry I took Tara out today. It was presumptuous of me."
"You were also right, much as it pains me to admit it. I'm not sure how I'm going to get through leaving her. I've had to do so many things that seem like they should have been harder than this; some of them have even killed me. But this? It's different. It's not the end of the world, so how come it feels so much worse?"
"I don't know. She'll be well taken care of, if it helps at all." He pulled the blanket up to cover them both.
"It does, a little. And I know she will, but sometimes I get so sick of sacrificing anything that might possibly resemble a normal life for the sake of my calling."
"If it wasn't for your calling, Tara wouldn't exist in the first place. Presuming the best-case scenario, that being a lack of success for any of the apocalyptic events that have taken place during the last half-decade or so, you'd most likely be in your final year at university, still an only child, and Sunnydale would, if it entered into your thoughts at all, merely be a small town with an obscenely high death rate and obscenely low housing prices. However, the best-case scenarios very rarely occur outside of theory, so we'd probably all be dead."
"Thank you, I think. Wow, you sounded like Giles."