Silver Cloud, Bitter Lining (14/?)

Author- Midnight Faith

Spoilers- BtVS 'Hell's Bells.' 'Darla' 'Carpe Noctem,' 'Lullaby'

Distribution- FF.net, AOH anyone else just ask :)

Pairing- Lilah/Lindsey, Lilah/Gunn undertones. Dawn/Spike and implied Lindsey/Cordelia and Lilah/Spike.

Rating- R

Summary- Lilah and Lindsey make it up…

Disclaimer- not mine… yadda, yadda

"Lilah?" Lindsey said knocking on the bedroom door early on the morning of the wedding, "Can I come in?"

"Sure…" she said back.

He stepped inside and shut the door behind him.

"Well?" She asked, indicating her dress, "What do you think?"

"I've seen you look worse," he teased. "No, seriously. You look beautiful. Despite everything you must be feeling… you look amazing…"

"So what's going on?" she asked him flustered by his compliments, "Where is everyone?"

"They're at the church… setting up…"

"So it's just you and me then…"

"They'll be back soon. They would've woken you but they didn't know how you'd be feeling this morning…" he told her elusively.

"I feel fine actually…" she told him, "For the first time in eighteen weeks I don't feel sick or tearful or have a pounding headache. Feeling the baby move was amazing… I think it cured something…"

"I know it was amazing…" he said, taking a step closer to her, "I was so lucky to share that with you…"

"Talking of sharing… about money. I need to raise some to get an apartment… so I was going to freelance some escrows on the weekends and at night… so I was wondering… if you'd help me out. If I needed you… you were always the better lawyer of us both…"

"You don't even need to ask," he told her, "Of course I'll help. And I was never the better of us… you were the rational one…"

"And we should start sorting out an arrangement for custody soon… before the baby's born… I mean I didn't know if you wanted to split it fifty/fifty or…" she trailed off seeing the preoccupied look in his eyes.

"I hate this…" he confessed, "I hate… That we were going to get married… I was going to spend the rest of my life with you and now we're talking about shuttling our unborn child between two halves of a broken home like it's a carpet we each paid half for on ebay…"

"It was never a very together home in the first place," she sniped.

"What is it with you?" he finally snapped, "Everything I say, despite trying you turn into a fight or a snarky comment."

"I think you're the one with the problem," she bit back, "You're the one that implies every other sentence that I'm… trailer trash."

"OK miss self absorbed… you want the list of names I've got to sling at you?"

"Necto."

"Look who's talking…"

They just stared at each other for a few moments, both as headstrong as each other, neither refusing to apologise.

Eventually Lindsey turned his back on her by way of breaking the tension.

"So this is it?" he asked her, "From now on its back to square one. We can't even be in the same room as each other without fighting. For the next eighteen or more years it turns into a weekly Jerry Springer."

"Chains of love," she murmured.

"So you're still going to let Darla come between us? Even though she's dead?" Lindsey asked, turning back to face Lilah, "Yes I loved Darla. Loved. Past participle. Connor's a great kid. Not because he's Darla's son because I live in the same place as him and I spend a lot of time with him. And all the time I was busy chasing after Darla, looking back I think all I really wanted was you but I was too blind and stupid to realise it."

Lilah's face visibly softened at his words.

"How are we going to make this work?" she asked him insecurely, "With me being paranoid and you all possessive. I mean we're not together… you're free to date who you want…"

"I'm away from dating for a while…" he told her, "Like I told you yesterday."

"Me too. My dating life is over. Who's going to want me when I'm just another stupid statistic single parent who sits alone in her apartment every night watching Jeopardy followed by Oprah and in bed by ten?"

"Plenty of people will… they do. I mean… who wouldn't want you? You're pretty and smart… and did I say pretty?"

Unconsciously they'd drawn closer together, only just realising they were so near her hand gently rested on his arm.

A sense of time repeating itself flooded their senses as he gently moved his lips towards hers.

The kiss was fleeting but not dispassionate as he moved away from her quickly, turning his back on her again.

"I'm sorry," he said quietly, "I know you don't want this."

"Sometimes… I do," she told him tentatively, moving so she stood in front of him, weaving her arms cautiously around his neck, "Sometimes I want… us. Maybe it would be good… just to sleep together one last time. We'd have closure…"

"I guess closure would be good…" he said, allowing himself to get swept away by her, planting tiny kisses on her cheeks and neck, "It's not like there's anyone in the house…"

*****

"She's right over there," Cordelia said in Lindsey's ear gesturing to Lilah and Spike talking to Dawn at one of the extensive, oak trestles bordering the edges of the reception hallway.

"Like I care," Lindsey said falsely.

Cordelia wasn't misled for a moment.

"You didn’t pass drama 104 did you?" she asked him, unhooking her arm from his, "This whole you and me… dating… isn't exactly going to work out. I mean don't get me wrong… I'm fond, and in some weird parallel universe… maybe. But… you're not my type. And besides… you're all rebound-y and you only really have eyes for one person. Rebound right on back over there."

"Thankyou," he told Cordelia, giving her a quick hug and smile, "You sure you'll be OK?"

"I'm sure… I see people I know. Willow's doing the meet 'n' greet thing over there… so I'll just go help her out… go be with Lilah… but remember don't crowd her. If she's going to come around to the idea of you and her she's going to need a lot of time…"

Cordelia watched as Lindsey followed Lilah over to the buffet table.

"Hungry?" he asked her by way of a conversation opener.

She picked up one of the paper plates on the end of the table shredding the folds at the edge of the plate between her fingernails.

"No, not really. I think Dawn wanted some time alone with Spike. She told me she has a crush on him."

"Really? I thought maybe she had a crush on me…"

"You flatter yourself…"

"Can we talk?" he said, taking the plate from her and replacing it on the pile so she was forced to look at him, rather than pretending to concentrate on tearing the plate into strips.

"Not right now… now really isn’t the time… but I think we should… later."

"I don't… regret anything… but… I don't know if I feel closure."

"I know… talk about opening up old wounds…"

"Wounds?"

"Feeling… used and…" she struggled to find the words.

"How about loved?" he asked her.

She took a step back from him.

"Now's not the right time… to be talking about this…"

*****

"Oh my god!" Cordelia said, pulling the blanket of her camp bed up so it reached her nose, "Xander's such a moron! I can't believe I spent six hours trekking through the streets of Sunnydale in a monsoon looking for him when it's his fault on walking out on his own wedding…"

"Maybe he had his reasons…" Lilah rationalised, "Anya's missing too right? They're probably together now trying to work things out…"

Cordelia gave her a cynical look.

"Or maybe he and Anya have become monster food… this is Sunnydale after all…" Cordelia smiled reclusively at Lilah, "Come on… spill. What's happened between the most hit and miss couple in California now?"

"What makes you think something's happened between me and Lindsey?"

"You're more… optimistic than usual. I guess you and Lindsey haven't had another fight, or issues… or anything else in the past twenty four hours."

"All of the above…"

Cordy's eyes widened.

"I don’t know… it's all so confusing…" Lilah told her, "I mean… we were fighting… then kissing… then…"

"Haven’t we been here a million times before?" Cordy gently reprimanded.

"He just… we both needed some closure…" Lilah tried to justify.

"And old feelings resurfaced? Look do you want to be with him or don't you? Because news flash: he's pretty much in your life forever now."

"I want to be with him…"

"Positive?"

"Yes."

"Well get downstairs and tell him that then…"

*****

"Hey," Lilah whispered when she reached the living room.

From the darkness she saw Lindsey sit up under his duvet.

"Couldn’t you sleep?" he asked her, as she sat on the arm of the sofa.

She saw her shake her head through the half-light.

"Me either…"

"Maybe I'd sleep better…" she began shyly, "If I was down here with you…"

He smiled and pulled back the duvet invitingly.

"It'll be kind of squashed," he told her teasingly.

She didn't reply only crawling under the blanket and wrapping his arms around her waist.

She kissed him gently, her hands caressing his face. The kiss was temperate promising faithfulness, love and healing. But most of all it was a kiss of forgiveness.

She leaned her head carefully against his chest, listening to his heartbeat.

"I missed you…" she confessed.

"You too…"

"That fifteen minutes I was away from you just now… it was way too long."

She instated another kiss, this time filled with more passion and need.

He broke it carefully and looked at her through the darkness.

"This feels wrong," he told her, "Dawn and Cordy are just upstairs… besides Buffy and Willow might return from their Xander hunt any minute… I really think we need to talk first… before this goes any further…"

She struggled free from his grip.

"Fine…" she said coldly, "Let's talk."

"Don’t be like this…" he told her, pinning her in place by putting his arms around her firmly again, "I just want to straighten out a few things that's all… but… you call the shots from now on in all this… I don’t care anymore. I just want to be with you… even if you want to run away to Guatemala…"

She smiled at him.

"I don’t," she reassured him, "But I do want to go home. LA home not Nevada home. I miss lattés."

"OK…"

"And I thought maybe we could get a three bedroom apartment. Start over… make this an actual relationship not just a sex thing…"

"So… you want to live together?"

She nodded.

He held her tightly, not finding the words to say anything that his hold on her couldn't…