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Apr. 2nd, 2004 11:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
doyleA dramatization of the events leading up to this...
Me: Lalala, writing Buffy/Gwen, 1000 word PWP... :watches the three Gwen episodes: Dude, I love this girl. And she's perfect for Buffy!
2200 words later, when they're still in the restaurant and plot has crept in...
Me: Okay, maybe I'll post this in installments.
So, posting this as a WIP. Sorry :p
Title: The Freaks’ Guide to Rome (1/?)
Author: Doyle
Pairing: Buffy/Gwen
Rating: PG-13 in this part. NC-17 eventually, if all goes to plan.
Notes: Post Chosen. For the Buffyficathon for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
_elektra
“Buffy.” Giles’s tinny, disembodied voice in her ear made her jump. The breadstick she’d been toying with snapped neatly in two, one half dropping onto the pine table in front of her, the other arcing off into someone’s dessert. She sank lower in her chair and tried to look un-bread-throwy.
“Giles, don’t do that!” She said it with a hand over her mouth, pretending to discreetly cover a cough.
“I’m terribly sorry,” Giles said, the sarcasm loud and clear, “I’ll clear my throat before I speak next time. Or perhaps make a noise like an owl.”
“Snippy, much?” she muttered, picking up another breadstick.
She thought she heard Giles sigh. “I’m sorry, Buffy,” he said, this time sincere. “Andrew’s being… trying.”
Giles was all the way in England. She was allowed one teensy little told-you-so grin at his expense.
“And you can stop that this instant,” Giles said sternly, though it was unclear whether he was presciently referring to her expression or talking to someone on his end – most likely Andrew, again.
“Hang on.” Buffy made another quick scan of the restaurant and snagged a passing waiter for directions to the ladies’ room. “If a Ms Raiden arrives can you show her to this table and tell her I’ll just be a few minutes? Grazie.”
There was no bathroom attendant, and she made a show of touching up her lipstick in the mirror as two Italian women dried their hands and exited into the restaurant, talking loudly to each other all the while. Buffy made a face at her reflection. The hidden transmitter was a good idea, even if she did feel way too Sydney Bristow, but the earring it was concealed inside was a giant, gaudy monstrosity that made her look like she had Mickey Mouse ears. And she had another one on the other side, just to balance the look. Why did Giles hate her?
She turned on one of the faucets and ran her hands under the warm water. “She’s not here yet,” she said, keeping her voice low just in case someone was in one of the cubicles. “Unless she is here and she’s watching me, or she didn’t see me, or she thinks I’m somebody else and she’s sitting down at the wrong table right now to ask some random woman why she wants to steal a pile of old books.”
“Buffy, the Pariacci collection is an arcane library of immense knowledge and power,” Giles said, sounding as offended as he had the time Willow had dared to suggest that paper books were less efficient than their e-equivalents. “Needless to say, the security surrounding them is practically impenetrable.”
“Too bad the old council didn’t think of that or they wouldn’t have been stolen in the first place.”
“Yes, well.” Maybe Giles didn’t want to speak ill of the dead, or he just wanted to hurry her back to the table in case she really did meet her possible new colleague. “Miss Raiden is – notorious for getting into places where others can’t.”
The rushed phone-briefing earlier in the day had contained the briefest of brief guides to the woman she was supposed to meet. Buffy knew that she was American, that she charged a lot for her services, that she wasn’t a demon but had some kind of superhuman power that gave her an edge over all the other, normal thieves, and that she’d turned the New Council down once already. Other than that, Giles didn’t have a lot for her to go on. She hadn’t even realized she was meeting another woman till she jokingly suggested seducing ‘him’ in exchange for the arcane library of immense knowledge and power. She’d mistaken Giles’s strangled silence for the phone going dead.
“What else can you tell me about her?”
“Very little. I spoke with her over the telephone, but she was unwilling to consider our proposal for anything less than one million dollars.”
One meeeellion dollars, Buffy mouthed at the mirror. Xander would have made the Austin Powers joke.
She suddenly missed her friends.
“What do I offer her?”
“Fifty thousand’s as high as we’re prepared to go. Dollars, not euros.”
Mirror Buffy looked as surprised as the real thing felt. Fifty thousand dollars would make up for a lot of ugly earrings. Nice work if a criminal mastermind could get it. All these years she’d been using her superpowers for the wrong side.
“I don’t like this, Giles.” She’d already said this several times, but it bore repeating. “You said she works with demons, bad guys, anybody with the cash to hire her. We can’t trust her.”
“No, we can’t. But we need those books, Buffy. It’s far too dangerous for anyone else to think of attempting.”
“I could do it. I have stealth-robbery experience.”
“A teenage shoplifting career hardly qualifies you as a professional thief.”
She frowned at the reminder of her youthful indiscretions, and hoped he never shared that story with Dawn. “Tubes of mascara, volumes of magic, it’s all the same principle. Get out before the security guy sees you. Plus, I’ve seen Entrapment and The Thomas Crown Affair.” Both versions, because she and Willow had inflicted the Pierce Brosnan remake on Giles one of the rare movie nights at his place and he’d declared it a travesty on a classic.
The door swung open and a gaggle of women flocked into the small room. “Have to go,” she whispered, hoping the receiver was sensitive enough for Giles to hear.
She hoped Raiden would be at the table waiting when she got back, but no luck. Giles had gone silent. She spent another ten minutes fending off waiters and pretending to look at the menu for the thousandth time. Thankfully, there was an English translation. She’d used up a good third of her Italian knowledge just thanking the waiter.
The clock on the far wall struck the hour. The thief was an hour late. A woman at a nearby table took time away from staring googly-eyed at her hunk of a boyfriend to give Buffy a small, sympathetic smile.
Buffy fidgeted with the top button on her peasant blouse – not her favourite outfit and Dawn had given it the thumbs down, but what did you wear to a hip but casual bar/restaurant to meet a million-dollar-charging thief who you wanted to employ while also trying to match any item of clothing to a ridiculous pair of spy-earrings? Even if she had the time to read style magazines, she didn’t think they had a section for her. Not even to cover the basic ‘looking breezily single and not stood up in public.’
She sneaked a glance at the sympathetic woman over the top of the menu. Her boyfriend was caressing her hand, staring deep into her eyes –
Or he had been. Now he was looking at something past her, his mouth dropping open. Buffy was six feet away, but she could have sworn his eyes had glazed over. She quickly closed the menu and looked to the door.
A woman had walked in, if walked was the right word. She sauntered through the bar as if it was her own apartment, not meeting any of the stunned, appreciative stares that most of the men and a few of the women were sending her way. She was wearing red leather pants that gave Buffy a bad case of fashion envy and gloves of the same material that covered her arms nearly to the shoulder. Her top, also leather – Buffy wondered if that was a fetish thing, at the same time plotting to drop her fork to get a closer look at those fuck-me-or-fuck-off boots – was black, and left her stomach bare. Even from the sitting down perspective, she was obviously taller than Buffy by a few inches. Her hair fell in waves to just past her shoulders, dark brown streaked with a vivid red that matched her lipstick.
Buffy felt severely underdressed.
The woman took a seat at Buffy’s table, three steps ahead of the two waiters conspicuously jostling each other to pull out her chair.
“Buffy Summers.” A bald statement of fact rather than a question.
“At last,” Giles said. Buffy had almost forgotten he was listening in.
Gwen rested her hands on the table. She hadn’t taken off her gloves. “You work for Rupert Giles?”
She bristled. “I work with Giles, yes.”
“Tell her our offer has increased by ten thousand dollars,” Giles prompted.
Before she had the chance, Gwen said, “Nice earrings. Who’s listening in?”
Giles said, “Lie to her.”
Buffy struggled for an off the cuff fib. “What, these? Oh, I know they’re tacky, but nothing else goes with this blouse…” From the raised eyebrows and the slight smile, Gwen wasn’t buying it. She couldn’t blame her.
“Word of advice, sugarpie, don’t try to con a con artist. Lose the wire.”
“Do as she says.”
“Way ahead of you,” she said, relieved to be able to slip the horrendous things into her purse. She didn’t anticipate how naked she felt without them. At least she’d just been a mouthpiece for Giles’s negotiation. Now she was flying solo.
Story of this whole year.
“I know the council offered you forty thousand,” she said, hoping that she came across as an old hand at this. “We’re prepared to go up to fifty.”
Gwen shook her head, lips pressed together in a humourless smile. “Already went over this with your boss. These days, I don’t get out of bed for less than a cool mill. Only told him I’d do it for that little ‘cuz I liked his accent.”
She skimmed past the ‘boss’ part. “We don’t have that kind of money. And I think you knew that when you said you’d meet with me, so you must be willing to compromise on your fee.”
“Maybe I just didn’t have anything else to do tonight.”
“Fifty-two thousand,” she offered. Giles would kill her, but he really wanted those books.
Gwen laughed. “Cutie,” she said, “my last big job pulled in thirty-three million dollars.
“…” Buffy said, and realized there was no sound coming from her mouth.
Thirty. Three. Million.
She looked down at her purse, wondering if the transmitter was still on, if Giles could hear through the material. She toed it further underneath the table, just in case.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll tell my colleague,” she stressed the word, “that you’re not interested. We’ll get somebody else to steal… return the books.”
“Sure. Just like walking into a library. Listen, if my job was that easy I wouldn’t get paid so much for it.”
My job’s not easy, Buffy thought, and till this year I didn’t get paid at all. “We’ve got one of the most powerful witches in the world on our team,” she said, slightly amazed, as always, that she wasn’t exaggerating. “She can take down any mystical barrier. I’ll go in myself.” The transmitter couldn’t still be working. She’d hear Giles’s protests.
Gwen was leaning across the table now, her voice taking on a more professional tone. “Even assuming the witch stuff’s not crap, you’re ignoring the lasers, and the cameras, and the security guards. I know the layout of that place. I know how to get in, get your books, and get out without getting dead. Don’t try to do my job and I won’t try to shove pointy sticks into vampires, okay? We’ve all got our areas of expertise.”
“You know what I am.” Of course she did. She dealt with demons, she had to know about vampires and the Slayer. Slayers, plural.
“Heard stories. Girls with superpowers. Fast, strong. Freaks.” There was a strange, almost wistful look in her eyes as she said it, but it was gone so fast Buffy couldn’t be sure.
“Is that why you came tonight?” she asked. “A freakshow?”
Gwen turned in her seat, not answering. One of the waiters had been hovering anxiously at an empty table, clearing it at tortoise speed while pretending he wasn’t staring at them – at Gwen. She gestured him over and reeled off a stream of fluent Italian. Buffy caught ‘chicken’ and ‘wine’. “I ordered for you. Hope you like seafood.”
Oh, so she’d been wrong about the chicken.
“Call it curiosity,” Gwen said, when they were alone again. “I only heard of Slayers a couple of months ago. Did some digging when Giles said you could meet me, found out you were one of them.”
One of five hundred and eighty-six. These days, one girl in all the world just didn’t cut it.
“Get us the books and I’ll tell you anything you want to know about Slayers.” It was a lie. At best a half-truth. She’d give her a demonstration, some background information, but nothing that Gwen could sell to the highest demon bidder, or anything that might put the Council in danger.
“Quid pro quo, Clarice?” But Gwen looked interested, her superior façade shifting, so she was thinking about it.
Buffy remembered Giles’s sketchy information about what exactly made Gwen such a great thief. Not demon, but not a normal human…
“I’ll show you mine,” she said, “if you show me yours.”
TBC
Me: Lalala, writing Buffy/Gwen, 1000 word PWP... :watches the three Gwen episodes: Dude, I love this girl. And she's perfect for Buffy!
2200 words later, when they're still in the restaurant and plot has crept in...
Me: Okay, maybe I'll post this in installments.
So, posting this as a WIP. Sorry :p
Title: The Freaks’ Guide to Rome (1/?)
Author: Doyle
Pairing: Buffy/Gwen
Rating: PG-13 in this part. NC-17 eventually, if all goes to plan.
Notes: Post Chosen. For the Buffyficathon for
_elektra“Buffy.” Giles’s tinny, disembodied voice in her ear made her jump. The breadstick she’d been toying with snapped neatly in two, one half dropping onto the pine table in front of her, the other arcing off into someone’s dessert. She sank lower in her chair and tried to look un-bread-throwy.
“Giles, don’t do that!” She said it with a hand over her mouth, pretending to discreetly cover a cough.
“I’m terribly sorry,” Giles said, the sarcasm loud and clear, “I’ll clear my throat before I speak next time. Or perhaps make a noise like an owl.”
“Snippy, much?” she muttered, picking up another breadstick.
She thought she heard Giles sigh. “I’m sorry, Buffy,” he said, this time sincere. “Andrew’s being… trying.”
Giles was all the way in England. She was allowed one teensy little told-you-so grin at his expense.
“And you can stop that this instant,” Giles said sternly, though it was unclear whether he was presciently referring to her expression or talking to someone on his end – most likely Andrew, again.
“Hang on.” Buffy made another quick scan of the restaurant and snagged a passing waiter for directions to the ladies’ room. “If a Ms Raiden arrives can you show her to this table and tell her I’ll just be a few minutes? Grazie.”
There was no bathroom attendant, and she made a show of touching up her lipstick in the mirror as two Italian women dried their hands and exited into the restaurant, talking loudly to each other all the while. Buffy made a face at her reflection. The hidden transmitter was a good idea, even if she did feel way too Sydney Bristow, but the earring it was concealed inside was a giant, gaudy monstrosity that made her look like she had Mickey Mouse ears. And she had another one on the other side, just to balance the look. Why did Giles hate her?
She turned on one of the faucets and ran her hands under the warm water. “She’s not here yet,” she said, keeping her voice low just in case someone was in one of the cubicles. “Unless she is here and she’s watching me, or she didn’t see me, or she thinks I’m somebody else and she’s sitting down at the wrong table right now to ask some random woman why she wants to steal a pile of old books.”
“Buffy, the Pariacci collection is an arcane library of immense knowledge and power,” Giles said, sounding as offended as he had the time Willow had dared to suggest that paper books were less efficient than their e-equivalents. “Needless to say, the security surrounding them is practically impenetrable.”
“Too bad the old council didn’t think of that or they wouldn’t have been stolen in the first place.”
“Yes, well.” Maybe Giles didn’t want to speak ill of the dead, or he just wanted to hurry her back to the table in case she really did meet her possible new colleague. “Miss Raiden is – notorious for getting into places where others can’t.”
The rushed phone-briefing earlier in the day had contained the briefest of brief guides to the woman she was supposed to meet. Buffy knew that she was American, that she charged a lot for her services, that she wasn’t a demon but had some kind of superhuman power that gave her an edge over all the other, normal thieves, and that she’d turned the New Council down once already. Other than that, Giles didn’t have a lot for her to go on. She hadn’t even realized she was meeting another woman till she jokingly suggested seducing ‘him’ in exchange for the arcane library of immense knowledge and power. She’d mistaken Giles’s strangled silence for the phone going dead.
“What else can you tell me about her?”
“Very little. I spoke with her over the telephone, but she was unwilling to consider our proposal for anything less than one million dollars.”
One meeeellion dollars, Buffy mouthed at the mirror. Xander would have made the Austin Powers joke.
She suddenly missed her friends.
“What do I offer her?”
“Fifty thousand’s as high as we’re prepared to go. Dollars, not euros.”
Mirror Buffy looked as surprised as the real thing felt. Fifty thousand dollars would make up for a lot of ugly earrings. Nice work if a criminal mastermind could get it. All these years she’d been using her superpowers for the wrong side.
“I don’t like this, Giles.” She’d already said this several times, but it bore repeating. “You said she works with demons, bad guys, anybody with the cash to hire her. We can’t trust her.”
“No, we can’t. But we need those books, Buffy. It’s far too dangerous for anyone else to think of attempting.”
“I could do it. I have stealth-robbery experience.”
“A teenage shoplifting career hardly qualifies you as a professional thief.”
She frowned at the reminder of her youthful indiscretions, and hoped he never shared that story with Dawn. “Tubes of mascara, volumes of magic, it’s all the same principle. Get out before the security guy sees you. Plus, I’ve seen Entrapment and The Thomas Crown Affair.” Both versions, because she and Willow had inflicted the Pierce Brosnan remake on Giles one of the rare movie nights at his place and he’d declared it a travesty on a classic.
The door swung open and a gaggle of women flocked into the small room. “Have to go,” she whispered, hoping the receiver was sensitive enough for Giles to hear.
She hoped Raiden would be at the table waiting when she got back, but no luck. Giles had gone silent. She spent another ten minutes fending off waiters and pretending to look at the menu for the thousandth time. Thankfully, there was an English translation. She’d used up a good third of her Italian knowledge just thanking the waiter.
The clock on the far wall struck the hour. The thief was an hour late. A woman at a nearby table took time away from staring googly-eyed at her hunk of a boyfriend to give Buffy a small, sympathetic smile.
Buffy fidgeted with the top button on her peasant blouse – not her favourite outfit and Dawn had given it the thumbs down, but what did you wear to a hip but casual bar/restaurant to meet a million-dollar-charging thief who you wanted to employ while also trying to match any item of clothing to a ridiculous pair of spy-earrings? Even if she had the time to read style magazines, she didn’t think they had a section for her. Not even to cover the basic ‘looking breezily single and not stood up in public.’
She sneaked a glance at the sympathetic woman over the top of the menu. Her boyfriend was caressing her hand, staring deep into her eyes –
Or he had been. Now he was looking at something past her, his mouth dropping open. Buffy was six feet away, but she could have sworn his eyes had glazed over. She quickly closed the menu and looked to the door.
A woman had walked in, if walked was the right word. She sauntered through the bar as if it was her own apartment, not meeting any of the stunned, appreciative stares that most of the men and a few of the women were sending her way. She was wearing red leather pants that gave Buffy a bad case of fashion envy and gloves of the same material that covered her arms nearly to the shoulder. Her top, also leather – Buffy wondered if that was a fetish thing, at the same time plotting to drop her fork to get a closer look at those fuck-me-or-fuck-off boots – was black, and left her stomach bare. Even from the sitting down perspective, she was obviously taller than Buffy by a few inches. Her hair fell in waves to just past her shoulders, dark brown streaked with a vivid red that matched her lipstick.
Buffy felt severely underdressed.
The woman took a seat at Buffy’s table, three steps ahead of the two waiters conspicuously jostling each other to pull out her chair.
“Buffy Summers.” A bald statement of fact rather than a question.
“At last,” Giles said. Buffy had almost forgotten he was listening in.
Gwen rested her hands on the table. She hadn’t taken off her gloves. “You work for Rupert Giles?”
She bristled. “I work with Giles, yes.”
“Tell her our offer has increased by ten thousand dollars,” Giles prompted.
Before she had the chance, Gwen said, “Nice earrings. Who’s listening in?”
Giles said, “Lie to her.”
Buffy struggled for an off the cuff fib. “What, these? Oh, I know they’re tacky, but nothing else goes with this blouse…” From the raised eyebrows and the slight smile, Gwen wasn’t buying it. She couldn’t blame her.
“Word of advice, sugarpie, don’t try to con a con artist. Lose the wire.”
“Do as she says.”
“Way ahead of you,” she said, relieved to be able to slip the horrendous things into her purse. She didn’t anticipate how naked she felt without them. At least she’d just been a mouthpiece for Giles’s negotiation. Now she was flying solo.
Story of this whole year.
“I know the council offered you forty thousand,” she said, hoping that she came across as an old hand at this. “We’re prepared to go up to fifty.”
Gwen shook her head, lips pressed together in a humourless smile. “Already went over this with your boss. These days, I don’t get out of bed for less than a cool mill. Only told him I’d do it for that little ‘cuz I liked his accent.”
She skimmed past the ‘boss’ part. “We don’t have that kind of money. And I think you knew that when you said you’d meet with me, so you must be willing to compromise on your fee.”
“Maybe I just didn’t have anything else to do tonight.”
“Fifty-two thousand,” she offered. Giles would kill her, but he really wanted those books.
Gwen laughed. “Cutie,” she said, “my last big job pulled in thirty-three million dollars.
“…” Buffy said, and realized there was no sound coming from her mouth.
Thirty. Three. Million.
She looked down at her purse, wondering if the transmitter was still on, if Giles could hear through the material. She toed it further underneath the table, just in case.
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll tell my colleague,” she stressed the word, “that you’re not interested. We’ll get somebody else to steal… return the books.”
“Sure. Just like walking into a library. Listen, if my job was that easy I wouldn’t get paid so much for it.”
My job’s not easy, Buffy thought, and till this year I didn’t get paid at all. “We’ve got one of the most powerful witches in the world on our team,” she said, slightly amazed, as always, that she wasn’t exaggerating. “She can take down any mystical barrier. I’ll go in myself.” The transmitter couldn’t still be working. She’d hear Giles’s protests.
Gwen was leaning across the table now, her voice taking on a more professional tone. “Even assuming the witch stuff’s not crap, you’re ignoring the lasers, and the cameras, and the security guards. I know the layout of that place. I know how to get in, get your books, and get out without getting dead. Don’t try to do my job and I won’t try to shove pointy sticks into vampires, okay? We’ve all got our areas of expertise.”
“You know what I am.” Of course she did. She dealt with demons, she had to know about vampires and the Slayer. Slayers, plural.
“Heard stories. Girls with superpowers. Fast, strong. Freaks.” There was a strange, almost wistful look in her eyes as she said it, but it was gone so fast Buffy couldn’t be sure.
“Is that why you came tonight?” she asked. “A freakshow?”
Gwen turned in her seat, not answering. One of the waiters had been hovering anxiously at an empty table, clearing it at tortoise speed while pretending he wasn’t staring at them – at Gwen. She gestured him over and reeled off a stream of fluent Italian. Buffy caught ‘chicken’ and ‘wine’. “I ordered for you. Hope you like seafood.”
Oh, so she’d been wrong about the chicken.
“Call it curiosity,” Gwen said, when they were alone again. “I only heard of Slayers a couple of months ago. Did some digging when Giles said you could meet me, found out you were one of them.”
One of five hundred and eighty-six. These days, one girl in all the world just didn’t cut it.
“Get us the books and I’ll tell you anything you want to know about Slayers.” It was a lie. At best a half-truth. She’d give her a demonstration, some background information, but nothing that Gwen could sell to the highest demon bidder, or anything that might put the Council in danger.
“Quid pro quo, Clarice?” But Gwen looked interested, her superior façade shifting, so she was thinking about it.
Buffy remembered Giles’s sketchy information about what exactly made Gwen such a great thief. Not demon, but not a normal human…
“I’ll show you mine,” she said, “if you show me yours.”
TBC
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
on 2004-04-03 04:48 pm (UTC)