[breakage]

I'm just drowning.... just drowning in it. The Spike/Buffy, I mean. Why do I always manage to latch onto the most popular pairing, anyway? It's not as if I -try-. *sigh* My obsessions come and go, with some things. I'm just reeling, there's so much to take in. Partly, I just wanted to say I'm on a sort of... er... sabbatical? Because I've not been reading my friends' list or anything HP-related for more than a week now, and the last time this happened was last winter, when I read insane amounts of Highlander. That took like, a month or something, didn't it? Not sure.

Initially, I took up with fanon!Draco because he was kind of a version of Spike (in my head), and I... I guess I'm just a big-time sucker for that. Then time passed and I realized that really, Draco is pretty much nearly nothing like Spike... and this is a good thing.... But a part of me just misses that meatiness, that ability to dig in and really let the character's canon strength blow me away. With Draco, it's all building up carefully and believing in potential and seeing beneath the surface....

With Spike, though... all that passion, all that energy, all that raw emotion-- it's all right there in every clip of him. *sigh* When I see that part of `Once More With Feeling' where Spike sings the first time to Buffy... it just breaks me. I think Draco first came to me just like that-- raging and needing and frustrated, going nearly insane. That's at the center of it-- the raging love, the seething, fragile emotion that transfigures, blinding with its power. The spot at the center of the storm where love and hate collide, where they're one and the same. And from it, something emerges-- something new and delicate and -real-....

Maybe that's the Ultimate Hero story, I don't know. The hero who comes through by the strength of their heart alone, in the end, and nothing else matters. They save the day. -He- saved the day. Because that's what Spike has, in all its myriad aspects, isn't it? A (burning, sizzling, breaking, screaming) heart. And that can be so ugly and dangerous and not enough-- and it doesn't equate with soul or conscience or any other "finer" aspect of humanity. It is raw and bloody and honest. It is no more and no less-- an existence without apology. A heart can be black-- it can beat with rage and hatred and fear and love with equal ease. But in the end... one hopes... one hopes it's unstoppable. One hopes that's all the redemption anyone needs. I mean, I don't know how to apply this-- but it seems that following one's heart is all one can ever know of "Good"-- or purity, for that matter.

I've always imagined the same sort of desperate purity of emotion in Draco. I always thought they had at least this in common-- this refusal to ever -let go-. To ever give up. This voracious, maddening, arrogant stubbornness that's at the root of survival. And I want them to live. I want their heart to burst within their chest and change things, because this is beyond good & evil, beyond choosing sides. It's just-- living-- breathing-- love.

See you on the other side, all.