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The man who laughed last was not meant to be Ethan Rayne.
(and it choked him and he did not stand at that bastard's grave but he knelt and he did not laugh but he could not weep and then- and then-)
He'd always known how it would end; he would cross one last line and Rupert's patience would finally snap like the tenuous thing he had always known it to be, and his one last pyrrhic victory would be the weight of him afterwards. It would be the tremble of those wonderful, terrible hands and the hot, bitter tears of shame; he would fucking grieve, damn him, Ethan would make himself one of those cosseted sins and damn him he would feel it the rest of his miserable, cocksucking life-
-it was not meant to be like this, and so it wasn't. He always knew.
"I knew it," he said, a hysterical laugh threading through his roughened voice, his throat arched bare as he tilted like one without a care in the world, "I fucking knew it, I fucking knew it-" and jesus he was drunk on it, that or the blood loss and the fact somebody seemed to have forgotten that soft filthy humans had soft filthy human needs like 'food'-
"You're bait," and the voice was cold and wrong and so were the hands, forcing his laughing mouth shut, but it was telling him what he wanted to hear, "you're bait and nothing more, Ethan. You were never more than a means to an end."
Well. Perhaps that wasn't as welcome, but he'd learned (he knew it he knew it he fucking knew it) to take what he could get, over the years. (And it was always more than was offered; he'd learned his lessons well.)
"It's no good," he said, the urge to push his luck as irresistible as his luck was fading, "you can't just trade one for the other, you know-"
"Shut up, Ethan." The words were negligent, but Ripper chained him with just a hand on the bruise in its shape and if Ethan closed his eyes it was the last days before destiny all over again; if he closed his eyes he could hear her coming, because he was good bait, because their cracked reflection meant a binding, too, and there was nothing chivalrous or courtly about the way he tied Faith to him with the bloody strings of his heart.
When she arrived (no armour, the bike was his even if he hadn't touched the tricksy bitch in years because the brakes did that, which was they didn't do sweet dick and she really had just- he should have just had the brakes fixed, she never would've got the idea, there was no way he could get it back from taking out the wall of a church) what she said was the same as what she'd said in a delirious hallucination earlier (or was that just deja vu?) so he didn't think it was entirely fair how she felt the need to slap sensibility into him.
This wasn't how it was meant to go, either; certainly there was something satisfying about the moment of chagrined realization as Ripper realized she'd come for the bait after all, and the crunch of vampiric bone under slayer fist would stay with him for the rest of his life, but he wasn't sure there was supposed to be quite as much of that as he could suddenly see from his admittedly interesting position slung over Faith's shoulder.
"Your arse," he said, watching Ripper in the process of freeing himself from the bike's second wreck of the day, "looks magnificent from this angle. Oh, I think he wants to play tag. Perhaps hide and go seek. This is what comes of spending too much time around Drusilla-"
(This was not the end.)