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Oct. 25th, 2004 06:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
doyleVarious bits and pieces for the ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
buffyverse1000 that I never got around to posting here:
Amy/Dawn
While she was in the cage, lots of things changed. The school blew up. Willow discovered girls. Buffy gained a little sister.
That one’s the puzzle. Amy knows Buffy was an only child, but there’s this girl - Amy assumes Joyce adopted a kid, until she actually gets talking to her, and then Dawn says that they only met the one time, when Amy and Buffy and Willow all did that Civics project together.
She remembers that day, remembers eating pizza on the floor of the Summers’ living room and teasing Willow about her new guitar-player boyfriend. “You helped me with my history homework, remember?” Dawn says, something desperate in her eyes.
“Sure I do,” she lies, but after that she’s watching Dawn all the time, fascinated at the idea of this girl who isn’t real.
The first time she kisses her, beneath the tree in Buffy’s front yard, it’s part experiment, part loneliness – Willow’s gone goody-two-shoes and Amy hasn’t touched anybody in such a long time. And partly it’s to test if there’s anything there, any feeling of magic underneath gawky teenager and schoolgirl sweetness.
Rack’s going to love this one, she can tell.
Angel/Buffy/Spike
“Mystical scythe. Check. Mysterious amulet of shininess. Check. Teenage army upstairs. Check. Badass Wicca. Quaking in the kitchen, but basically check.” She took a deep breath. “I think we’re good to go.”
Angel glared at Spike. Spike glared back.
Jealous, emotionally stunted vampires? Double check.
She suppressed a sigh. “Was I hallucinating the conversation where you two said you’d try to get along?” Actually, with the First around, maybe she had, kind of. Better not to think too hard about that. Things were confusing enough around here, with Spike seeing her kiss Angel, and then Angel walking in on them in bed together – didn’t anybody knock? And why was it hard for Angel to accept that it was perfectly normal for two very, very platonic friends to share a single bed, curled together like - okay, maybe that wasn’t so platonic.
“Listen,” she said gently, “both of you. After we save the world, I promise, we’ll deal. It’s just…”
“Complicated,” Spike said.
Angel said, “It’s okay. Buffy, you’ve got enough to deal with. Like you said. We’ll talk.”
And it sounded fine, but…
She shook her head. One of them might not walk away from this, and she didn’t have time to waver between the two of them like this. It wasn’t fair, on anyone.
Totally honest at last, she said, “I love you. Both of you. And – I don’t know how this is gonna work out because I can’t be with you both.”
The look that Spike and Angel shared – way too amused – made her frown. “What?”
“Bit slow on the uptake, for a smart girl, isn’t she?”
“What I was thinking.”
And Spike was doing that head-quirky tongue-on-lip thing he did when he was about to kiss her, only he was looking up instead of down, and when Angel kissed him Buffy felt all of the air whoosh from her body.
That nixed the First theory.
“Okay,” she said, centuries later. “We’re saving the world right now. Because later? I want to see that again. Only slower. And with the nakedness.”
She really hoped Andrew still had that camera.
Angel/Doyle
Maybe he’s a little attracted.
And so what? Big hero, saving everybody that needs saving – not to bring up the almost shameful tall, dark and handsome stereotype. He’d defy any man not to fancy Angel a bit. Most wouldn’t cop on to it, probably, but he’s never been one for self-denial. Not about the unimportant stuff.
Cordelia, she’s a lovely girl, and one of these days he’ll wear her down. And if, in the mean time, he’s so-casually leaning to the side to get a better look as Angel strides off to be a hero… well, there’s no shame in looking.
Angel/Hamilton
Post-office-sex high or not, Angel couldn’t pass by the opportunity to snark. If he thought deeply about his own psychology (he didn’t) he might decide it was an alpha male thing. Asserting dominance in the face of the physical evidence to the contrary. It still amazed him how tall Hamilton was.
“Guess your word’s just not worth much,” he said, finding his pants. “You made it, what, two days since you said that couch thing?”
“Oh, no,” Hamilton said pleasantly. “I said we wouldn’t be making love on this couch any time soon.” He was looming, now, his voice gone low. “I didn’t say I wouldn’t take you on it. I didn’t say I wouldn’t bend you over the back and fuck you until you couldn’t articulate a single thought or say anything except to beg for more.”
“…okay,” Angel said. “You know, they can do without me for another couple of hours.”
Angel/Nina/Spike
After three hours of listening to her boyfriend and Spike – her increasingly drunk boyfriend and Spike – talk about their mutual ex, Nina’s feeling just a little bit insecure.
Screw that. She wants to paint something depressing and eat five pounds of chocolate. But she stays and listens to the rest of their Roman Odyssey, along with the side-anecdotes about the million and six times Buffy saved the world.
But there’s something not right, something changed between Spike and Angel; their easy back and forth bitching (“you two are such brothers,” she told Angel once, and he didn’t quite look at her when he said, “not really”) has turned into a confused staccato, sometimes talking over one another, sometimes going silent for whole minutes.
They’re off-balance, she realizes. There’s always been a woman between them, and now there’s not, and they can’t find equilibrium.
When she takes Angel’s hand, leans past him to kiss Spike hard on the mouth, she can feel the world shift, tilt, right itself.
Buffy/Buffybot/Spike
She was never drinking again. She was never playing kitten poker again. And she was never, ever drunkenly offering Spike any sexual favour he wanted in place of the fuzzy little kittens.
“At first, I didn’t want to take part in this sexual adventure, but Spike persuaded me,” the Bot said happily, reaching between Buffy’s legs as casually as if she was going to shake hands – “hey!” Buffy yelped, and tried to back up, but Spike was right behind her, arms coming around her waist.
“Shh, pet. Just go with it.”
He was so enjoying this. Evil undead bastard. She twisted around to see if he was laughing, but he kissed her too quickly to be sure.
When she dared to glance back at the robot, it was kneeling on the floor. Even looking up with that stupid, dizzy smile, she had to admit… the resemblance was scary. Well, if you have to have a vampire order a robo-you, he can at least put in the groundwork.
“How long did you spend watching me?”
Buffybot smiled innocently up at them, waiting to be told what to do, and when Spike finally answered her, he didn’t sound like he was laughing, any more.
“Too long.”
Buffy/Gage
Gage, for those who are wondering, is one of the swim team guys in Go Fish, the one who gets bitten by Angelus and who gets Buffy to walk him home.
He still thinks Buffy Summers is one crazy bitch, but right this second, two long streets and too few streetlights between him and home, she’s the crazy bitch to know. He’s dizzy – he’s been dizzy since the coach started putting stuff in the steam, and that guy, the thing that bit him, he didn’t take much blood but he took some and with a cold chill deep in his stomach Gage thinks about AIDS – but if he has to ask her to hold him up he’s gonna look more of a pussy than he does right now.
All anybody found of Dodd was the empty skin, ripped open and gutted. He takes a swaying step closer to Buffy, hating how she’s twirling that wooden spike in her fingers like she’s going to cheerleading practice, because he’s scared out of his mind, here.
But he’s also a seventeen-year-old guy, so at the same time he’s angling his head for the best view of her boobs and thinking it’d be worth risking a broken nose.
“Here we go,” she says. “Last stop of the lame-guy express. You okay from here?”
He looks from her to his door, maybe six feet, and says, “Yeah, think I can make it. Hey,” he says, when she makes to leave, “that guy. He was saying stuff about you. That you and him used to, y’know.”
Her face closes up faster than steel shutters slamming down. His mom used to get that look whenever his baby brother’d ask where dad was. “Sorry,” he says, holding up his hands. “None of mine.”
“No, it’s… it’s nothing.” She shrugs. “Not anything. Zero. Less than zero.”
Close enough to home to almost touch the door, with the world not spinning so much, he’s forgetting to be scared. “Yeah, well, take care of yourself,” he says. “That guy’s still out there. And you – you’re pretty insane, but you deserve better than that.”
She doesn’t hit him till he’s damn close to kissing her. When he checks it in the mirror later, sees what a lovetap she gave him compared to what she did to Cam, he grins.
Buffy/Harmony
“Well, excuse me,” Harmony sulked. “When I was Angel’s secretary all I ever heard from him and Spike was, ooh, Buffy’s so amazing, ooh, Buffy’s the best girlfriend ever. And I read that bi-curiosity’s really big this year.”
Still reeling from the kiss, Buffy wasn’t sure which was the bigger surprise: that Harmony was here in Rome, that she’d mentioned Spike being at Wolfram & Hart when he was supposed to be dust, or that Harmony could read.
She touched her lips. This last year, she’d forgotten what kissing a vampire was like.
“Anyway,” Harmony said, “that was such a letdown. I bet Blondie Bear was just trying to make me jealous and... mmph!”
That second time, she admitted that it wasn’t so bad, but suggested one more try.
Buffybot/Illyria
The mechanical construct was far more pleasing than many of the humans Illyria had thus far encountered. She spoke plainly and without prevarication, and her only purpose appeared to be to give Illyria pleasure – an aim that, in Illyria’s opinion, was extremely worthy.
“You will move six millimetres down and three to the left,” she ordered. “And increase the frequency of your lapping.”
“Oh, Illyria,” the robot sighed. “You are a god. You’re the god of me. I want to worship at your powerful, sexy altar.”
Yes, she would do very well.
Cassie/Dawn
“I think after we die we go somewhere else,” Cassie says. “Not heaven or hell. Just – away. To another life.”
Dawn has known this girl six hours. Lying beside her on the long grass, their shoulders not quite close enough to touch, she realizes that she loves her, and it’s like a knife sliding across her skin in painful, shallow cuts. She loves Cassie, and Cassie is going to die.
“I think we go to heaven,” she says, trying to remember the little that Buffy ever said about it. “And. And you’re complete. And with everybody you love.”
Cassie rolls on her side, zigzag of pink hair falling over her eyes. Dawn brushes it back. “What if there are people you love who aren’t dead?” she asks, smiling.
“But you’d think they were there. You wouldn’t know it wasn’t real.”
“Then how do you know this isn’t it?” Cassie whispers, kissing her.
Connor/Giles
He’s always had a thing for older women. And somehow, in his new school in England where he’s the only male student, it becomes a thing for older men. One man, at least.
Connor’s memories of Before are cloudy, but he remembers someone like Giles. The accent, the training; the chords they strike in him are so low that it takes weeks for him to hear them. And then he’s making his way through dark hallways, finding the path through the school as easy as if were midday.
Giles answers his door dressed for sleep. The irritation quickly turns to concern and, when Connor surges forward and kisses him, shock.
“Connor, what on earth…”
“Don’t, I’m sorry, father,” he whispers, too lost to hear.
Connor/Wesley
It wasn’t until Connor said his name, said “Wesley” in that soft, familiar voice, that he was sure. If he had stayed away, distracted himself with Illyria and Angel and his own grief, he could have believed that the memories were some long-ago dream, or another one of Vail’s tricks.
“I didn’t remember you,” Connor said. “I mean, I kind of did, but I thought they were dreams…”
Wesley, mourning Lilah and falling in love with Fred, hadn’t dreamed of Connor at all.
They hadn’t touched, yet. The boy brushed tentative fingers against his collar but stopped short of touching skin. “Just – I remember following you. Your place. That girl in the cage. And I don’t know if any of that even happened.”
“Nor do I,” Wes almost confessed, but Connor leaned up into a desperate kiss, and he remembered all of it.
Cordelia/Willow
“Did you ever think about it?” Tara asked her, late one night in the dorm when everything was still so new between them. “I mean – think about other girls?”
And she didn’t know. Aside from the vamp-her thing, she couldn’t point to anything in her life and say “aha! Lesbian!” It was a puzzle, and she’d always been good at puzzles. Being methodical, that was key. She thought about Buffy first. Best friend, teenage slumber parties, rooming together, that should spark a few latent vibes, right? But there was nothing, even when she remembered her in her yummy sushi jammies.
Moving on. Harmony, no way. Ms. Calendar – maybe there’d been stirrings of a girlcrush there, but the memory made her too sad to think about it deeply. Aura, Aphrodesia, Nancy, Amy, no, no, no.
She’d gone through all of the Cordettes before she remembered their leader.
Cordelia rushing into the library, late to a Scooby meeting because cheerleading practice had overrun, still in her uniform and complaining loudly about the research she was expected to do; “What a brat,” Willow remembered thinking, and then she was idly concocting a suitable revenge. And somehow her brain came up with Cordelia bent over the library table, her skirt lifted up and Willow’s hand coming down hard on her…
“Yeah, I guess I thought about it one or two times,” she said, hoping the room was dark enough to hide her blush.
Dawn/Illyria
“An abomination,” Illyria said, tilting Dawn’s head to take a better look at her. “That my Key should be trapped in this form – mortal. Fragile. Dependent on the Slayer.”
“Not so much any more,” she protested. “I’m working in the galleria on weekends. Buffy doesn’t even give me an allowance these days.”
The non-allowance-giver said, “Get your hands off her.” Deathly quiet. Dawn hadn’t heard that tone since Glory.
“She will come with me,” Illyria said. “She is my Key. With her, I will no longer be confined to one world. I will walk the dimensions once again.”
“Dawn doesn’t belong to anybody,” Buffy snapped.
Dawn just looked at the outstretched hand, its long fingers, blue tinged at the tips. “I remember you,” she said. “Before there was even a me to remember.”
Someone was yelling, but it was faint and distant; she tightened her hand around her god’s, puzzled by… something. Maybe she’d remembered a dream, but it was gone now.
“I tire of this world,” Illyria said. “Come. Slough off that shell. We will find another place.”
As the Key gladly faded out of the awkward, forced form, its last conscious thought was of some strange words in one of the humans’ primitive tongues:
listen, there’s a hell of a good universe next door. Let’s go.
Dawn/Willow
The only three acceptable excuses for letting yourself get kissed by your best friend’s little sister are: imminent end of the world (that excuses the first time, alone in the kitchen on Revello Drive two nights before the battle against the First). Temporary insanity (getting swept up in the atmosphere of the Carnaval counts, so that explains what happened in Brazil eight weeks ago). Or extreme drunkenness.
Willow looks at the full-and-still-corked bottle of wine, the only alcohol she has in her hotel room, and knows she’s out of excuses. There’s just one other time when the kissing is forgivable, and that’s if you’re Laurie in Little Women. Willow always thought she was more of a Beth.
Dawn has her arms folded over her chest – Willow quickly looks away from that area – and her lips are pressed in a pout that looks like it’s supposed to be a resolve face. Lips not swollen from kissing, because there wasn’t time before Willow yeeped and skidded backwards. In the rush, she slammed her leg against the coffee table. It’ll bruise.
“But you’re not…” she says, and Dawn says, “shh, I know,” and Willow realizes she thought she was going to say but you’re not Tara. Understanding and gentle blue eyes, and Dawn is so familiar at this moment that she’s letting herself be kissed again, no excuses at all.
Doyle/Xander
“Syphilis, eh? Bet that’s nasty.”
Xander winced as the guy leaned in, looking interested, to check out his disease. “I’ve had better holidays,” he said. “Listen, any friend of Angel’s is… to be treated with deepest suspicion bordering on hostility, but could you back off?”
“No offence intended, man.” He retreated back to his own chair.
As the seconds ticked by, Xander regretted snapping. With Anya and the rest away solving the mystery of the plague-hexing Chumash, Angel’s guy was stuck taking care of him. And the turkey.
“How’s your headache?” he asked.
Doyle massaged his temple. “Comes and goes. S’always bad for a while after a vision. So is that your young lady, then? Girl with the interesting views on how me and you’d look great shagging each other?”
Xander groaned and tried to burrow into the couch.
“You know, there’s cures for syphilis nowadays,” Doyle said.
Fred/Illyria
There’s her cave, real close, she can run if she has to, she’ll probably have to. There’s her tree. There’s her rocks, the ones she piled together to remind herself what face-centred cubic structure looks like. If they were spheres they’d take up seventy-four-point-oh-four percent of the total possible volume, and she keeps repeating that figure to herself, seventy four point oh four, seventy four point oh four. Because standing a couple of feet away from her is herself, and Fred wants her to go away.
“You’re not me,” she says. “You look like me, I’m sure you’re nice, but I’d never have hair that colour. My momma, she’d… she’d… I think there used to be somebody, maybe, that’d be mad if I did that to my hair.”
“You are the shell,” the other her says, staring staring staring out of Fred’s eyes. “You are Winifred Burkle.”
That was her name, before. She remembers today. Maybe that name’s the blue-hair girl’s now, ‘cause she doesn’t think it’s hers any more.
“You have to go,” she says. “You might be antimatter and I’m matter, and if we touched the whole universe would go kaboom. Oppenheimer, he’d be mad.”
“You were stranded here. I remember…” She holds up her hand and, oh, Fred can’t do that, make blue lightning spark from her fingers, but then it’s gone. “Yes. I remember seeing myself in this place. This has happened before. The timeline will be preserved.” And she turns, and starts to go away.
Fred runs after her, grabs her hands, her shoulders, kisses her like she used to do with boys and one time with Lindy Mareno, and she’s all desperation and touches, but whatever she does she can’t make the universe end.
Illyria/Nina/Spike
“A vampire, a werewolf and an ex-god walk into a bar,” Spike said, lifting the pint glass to his lips. “Should be a joke.”
“Wish I could see the punchline.” Morose, Nina dragged her finger along the table, drawing an imaginary circle. She gave it eyes, hair. Fangs. Then she x-ed it out and wished it made her feel better.
“I fail to appreciate this ‘joke’,” Illyria said. “And remember your place, vampire. I am a god still.”
“Ex-god,” Spike insisted. “No superpowers, no service, love. You’re the original Norwegian Blue, off your perch and pushing up the daisies. You,” he cocked a finger at her; she glared at it with disdain, “are an ex-god.”
“And that was all he said?” Nina asked for the tenth time. “He was going to Italy and he’d see me when he got back?”
Spike shrugged. “Don’t take it personally. He was rushing off to see Buffy. Didn’t take time for many fare-thee-wells.” The way he said the girl’s name – it was a stupid name, anyway, Nina decided – was half wistful, half pissed. It was all confusing. She’d come in halfway through this act. Spike was in love with Buffy, or with Angel, or possibly with both, and he was jealous as hell at being left behind, and Illyria’d had a fight with Wesley about something, and she was going to need more alcohol if this was going to make sense.
Many empty glasses later, the room was tilted, perspective skewed, and Illyria was talking about sex.
“This human intimacy,” she was saying. “It revolts me. And yet… it is intriguing. I would know more.”
“Think we can help with that,” Spike told her, leaning over the table, voice dropped so low he was practically purring. Nina tried to roll her eyes and ended up giggling instead. Then Spike’s hand was on her knee and that only made her laugh harder. “How ‘bout you?” he asked. “Up for showing her some of this revolting human intimacy?”
“We’re not human,” Nina said, her laughter trailing off.
“Right,” Spike grinned. “All got a bit of demon in us. So what say we make it a bit more?”
Illyria/Wesley
The shell is as fascinating as it is repugnant; she spends one of the humans’ solar measurements cataloguing responses to sensory input. The tips of her fingers are most sensitive to touch. With practice, she can taste the difference between sweet and bitter.
She tastes the alcohol-poison direct from Wesley’s lips, merely a test of whether the sensation matches Winifred Burkle’s fragmented, faded memory. He pushes her away. When she tries again, he backhands her hard across the mouth and retreats to his room.
Illyria touches the place on her lip where the skin has split in two; her blood is bitter.
She has no-one else. He will worship her, whether he desires it or not.
Kennedy/Nina
Over tequila slammers they trade stories about their exes.
Kennedy says she was dating a girl whose girlfriend had died. She was the rebound, she says, the one who arrived after the One True Love was gone. Convenient, disposable.
Giddy with the booze and the break-up, Nina talks about Angel. She leaves out the minor details – what he is, what she is – but she says she always thought there was someone else. Not physically, maybe: “But like there was a third person between us, you know? And how was I supposed to get rid of her if I couldn’t even see her?”
“The only person I see right now,” Kennedy says, swaying into her, “is you.”
Lindsey/Tara
Sunday morning, the New York Times spread in pieces over the covers, she reads to him from the Bhagavad Gita. "For the soul there is neither birth nor death at any time,” she says. Sheets pushed away, naked against white pillows and newsprint, she reads, "The soul can never be cut to pieces by any weapon, nor burned by fire, nor moistened by water, nor withered by the wind.”
He could spend the rest of his life listening to her speak. “You believe in all that? Past lives, reincarnation?”
She marks her place and sets aside. “I think it’s possible.” When she smiles down at him, head ducked and her hair falling around her face, he thinks she looks like an angel. But that doesn’t sit right, makes him uneasy.
Pulls her down to him, skimming his fingers all along her thigh, hip, side; he kisses the spot above her breasts. She’s not shy any more, not like she was at first, and he always thought it was silly to be so self-conscious of that tiny little wine-stain birthmark over her heart.
Later, she makes pancakes shaped like animals. He plays his guitar, a song coming into his head like a dream he’d forgotten; she asks when he wrote it and he says he doesn’t think he did. Knew it when he was a kid, maybe. His mom calls to ask did they go to church. He says, yeah, he worshipped a higher power this morning, and his girl muffles her giggles against his back.
The afternoon, they go for a walk. It’s summer, sunny, and she’s talking about her students at the community college. Her hand’s loose in his, and he’s already forgotten what she read to him this morning, only how she sounded, how she looked.
This is all the life he could ever want.
Nina/Spike
He goes because somebody has to tell her, and because there’s nobody else left, and because this is as good a dress-rehearsal as any for the day when he’ll have to give this speech to Buffy. Keeps it simple, sticks to the we-fought-we-lost version of events, throws in a couple of platitudes about Angel saving the world, going down the way he wanted. He’s surprised he can sing his praises without the words sticking in his throat or coming out tangled in sarcasm and barbed wire.
He waits with her on her porch as she cries it out, clumsy hand on her back and his attention a world away. Thinking of another night, another girl and her grief.
“The sun’s coming up in an hour,” she finally says, dragging the back of her hand across her eyes. “I got used to finding out the times every day. Sunset and dawn. Guess I don’t have to, now, do I?”
“No,” he says. “Right, then. I should…”
She says, “My sister, my niece, they’re not here. Do you want to…”
Not sure what she’s offering, if she’s offering anything at all, he says, “Yeah. All right.”
Always, these women, they were always Angel’s first – she keeps her eyes closed, doesn’t speak, guides him with her hands and her mouth to where she wants him to go. She’s pretending he’s Angel and it’s so familiar he stumbles over her name.
Riley/Spike
He’s not an idiot. The house, the girls, that’s too risky. Buffy would find out and it…
Wouldn’t break her heart. And he’s not ready to face that, not yet.
Spike’s just desperate enough, just pathetic enough, to take the straight-from-the-source blood and the crumpled bills he tosses on the crypt floor, and just smart enough to know that he’s got as much to lose as Riley if anyone finds out.
So it’s their secret, and eventually Riley stops looking anywhere but at the white-blond head bent over his arm. Spike suggests in a bored, unconvincing voice that they’d be safer downstairs, less likely to be caught.
He has a four poster bed down there. Riley remembers he said something about Harmony leaving town; Buffy mentioned it too, maybe, but these days everything’s white noise. The only voice that cuts through the static is rough and English.
Spike sits on the bed, eyebrows raised, come on, then expression, and Riley enjoys the look of surprise when he unbuckles his belt.
Snyder/Wesley
“Disgusting,” he sneered. “Parading your deviant behaviour around my school like a… parade.”
Wesley sighed. “For the last time, Mr. Snyder, Mr. Giles and myself have a purely professional relationship.”
“Huh. Library inspector my ass. I called the library inspectors’ union, they never heard of a Wesley Wyndham-Pryce.” He narrowed his already somewhat-narrow eyes. “If that is your real name.”
Not entirely sure if there was such a thing as a library inspectors’ union, Wesley decided to bluff it. “I’m simply here to do a job, Mr. Snyder. The school is yours. The children are in your charge. I’m merely a visitor, after all. You're the headmaster.”
“Damn straight I am,” he said, puffing up with pride. “Now. Back on your knees.”
buffyverse1000 that I never got around to posting here:Amy/Dawn
While she was in the cage, lots of things changed. The school blew up. Willow discovered girls. Buffy gained a little sister.
That one’s the puzzle. Amy knows Buffy was an only child, but there’s this girl - Amy assumes Joyce adopted a kid, until she actually gets talking to her, and then Dawn says that they only met the one time, when Amy and Buffy and Willow all did that Civics project together.
She remembers that day, remembers eating pizza on the floor of the Summers’ living room and teasing Willow about her new guitar-player boyfriend. “You helped me with my history homework, remember?” Dawn says, something desperate in her eyes.
“Sure I do,” she lies, but after that she’s watching Dawn all the time, fascinated at the idea of this girl who isn’t real.
The first time she kisses her, beneath the tree in Buffy’s front yard, it’s part experiment, part loneliness – Willow’s gone goody-two-shoes and Amy hasn’t touched anybody in such a long time. And partly it’s to test if there’s anything there, any feeling of magic underneath gawky teenager and schoolgirl sweetness.
Rack’s going to love this one, she can tell.
Angel/Buffy/Spike
“Mystical scythe. Check. Mysterious amulet of shininess. Check. Teenage army upstairs. Check. Badass Wicca. Quaking in the kitchen, but basically check.” She took a deep breath. “I think we’re good to go.”
Angel glared at Spike. Spike glared back.
Jealous, emotionally stunted vampires? Double check.
She suppressed a sigh. “Was I hallucinating the conversation where you two said you’d try to get along?” Actually, with the First around, maybe she had, kind of. Better not to think too hard about that. Things were confusing enough around here, with Spike seeing her kiss Angel, and then Angel walking in on them in bed together – didn’t anybody knock? And why was it hard for Angel to accept that it was perfectly normal for two very, very platonic friends to share a single bed, curled together like - okay, maybe that wasn’t so platonic.
“Listen,” she said gently, “both of you. After we save the world, I promise, we’ll deal. It’s just…”
“Complicated,” Spike said.
Angel said, “It’s okay. Buffy, you’ve got enough to deal with. Like you said. We’ll talk.”
And it sounded fine, but…
She shook her head. One of them might not walk away from this, and she didn’t have time to waver between the two of them like this. It wasn’t fair, on anyone.
Totally honest at last, she said, “I love you. Both of you. And – I don’t know how this is gonna work out because I can’t be with you both.”
The look that Spike and Angel shared – way too amused – made her frown. “What?”
“Bit slow on the uptake, for a smart girl, isn’t she?”
“What I was thinking.”
And Spike was doing that head-quirky tongue-on-lip thing he did when he was about to kiss her, only he was looking up instead of down, and when Angel kissed him Buffy felt all of the air whoosh from her body.
That nixed the First theory.
“Okay,” she said, centuries later. “We’re saving the world right now. Because later? I want to see that again. Only slower. And with the nakedness.”
She really hoped Andrew still had that camera.
Angel/Doyle
Maybe he’s a little attracted.
And so what? Big hero, saving everybody that needs saving – not to bring up the almost shameful tall, dark and handsome stereotype. He’d defy any man not to fancy Angel a bit. Most wouldn’t cop on to it, probably, but he’s never been one for self-denial. Not about the unimportant stuff.
Cordelia, she’s a lovely girl, and one of these days he’ll wear her down. And if, in the mean time, he’s so-casually leaning to the side to get a better look as Angel strides off to be a hero… well, there’s no shame in looking.
Angel/Hamilton
Post-office-sex high or not, Angel couldn’t pass by the opportunity to snark. If he thought deeply about his own psychology (he didn’t) he might decide it was an alpha male thing. Asserting dominance in the face of the physical evidence to the contrary. It still amazed him how tall Hamilton was.
“Guess your word’s just not worth much,” he said, finding his pants. “You made it, what, two days since you said that couch thing?”
“Oh, no,” Hamilton said pleasantly. “I said we wouldn’t be making love on this couch any time soon.” He was looming, now, his voice gone low. “I didn’t say I wouldn’t take you on it. I didn’t say I wouldn’t bend you over the back and fuck you until you couldn’t articulate a single thought or say anything except to beg for more.”
“…okay,” Angel said. “You know, they can do without me for another couple of hours.”
Angel/Nina/Spike
After three hours of listening to her boyfriend and Spike – her increasingly drunk boyfriend and Spike – talk about their mutual ex, Nina’s feeling just a little bit insecure.
Screw that. She wants to paint something depressing and eat five pounds of chocolate. But she stays and listens to the rest of their Roman Odyssey, along with the side-anecdotes about the million and six times Buffy saved the world.
But there’s something not right, something changed between Spike and Angel; their easy back and forth bitching (“you two are such brothers,” she told Angel once, and he didn’t quite look at her when he said, “not really”) has turned into a confused staccato, sometimes talking over one another, sometimes going silent for whole minutes.
They’re off-balance, she realizes. There’s always been a woman between them, and now there’s not, and they can’t find equilibrium.
When she takes Angel’s hand, leans past him to kiss Spike hard on the mouth, she can feel the world shift, tilt, right itself.
Buffy/Buffybot/Spike
She was never drinking again. She was never playing kitten poker again. And she was never, ever drunkenly offering Spike any sexual favour he wanted in place of the fuzzy little kittens.
“At first, I didn’t want to take part in this sexual adventure, but Spike persuaded me,” the Bot said happily, reaching between Buffy’s legs as casually as if she was going to shake hands – “hey!” Buffy yelped, and tried to back up, but Spike was right behind her, arms coming around her waist.
“Shh, pet. Just go with it.”
He was so enjoying this. Evil undead bastard. She twisted around to see if he was laughing, but he kissed her too quickly to be sure.
When she dared to glance back at the robot, it was kneeling on the floor. Even looking up with that stupid, dizzy smile, she had to admit… the resemblance was scary. Well, if you have to have a vampire order a robo-you, he can at least put in the groundwork.
“How long did you spend watching me?”
Buffybot smiled innocently up at them, waiting to be told what to do, and when Spike finally answered her, he didn’t sound like he was laughing, any more.
“Too long.”
Buffy/Gage
Gage, for those who are wondering, is one of the swim team guys in Go Fish, the one who gets bitten by Angelus and who gets Buffy to walk him home.
He still thinks Buffy Summers is one crazy bitch, but right this second, two long streets and too few streetlights between him and home, she’s the crazy bitch to know. He’s dizzy – he’s been dizzy since the coach started putting stuff in the steam, and that guy, the thing that bit him, he didn’t take much blood but he took some and with a cold chill deep in his stomach Gage thinks about AIDS – but if he has to ask her to hold him up he’s gonna look more of a pussy than he does right now.
All anybody found of Dodd was the empty skin, ripped open and gutted. He takes a swaying step closer to Buffy, hating how she’s twirling that wooden spike in her fingers like she’s going to cheerleading practice, because he’s scared out of his mind, here.
But he’s also a seventeen-year-old guy, so at the same time he’s angling his head for the best view of her boobs and thinking it’d be worth risking a broken nose.
“Here we go,” she says. “Last stop of the lame-guy express. You okay from here?”
He looks from her to his door, maybe six feet, and says, “Yeah, think I can make it. Hey,” he says, when she makes to leave, “that guy. He was saying stuff about you. That you and him used to, y’know.”
Her face closes up faster than steel shutters slamming down. His mom used to get that look whenever his baby brother’d ask where dad was. “Sorry,” he says, holding up his hands. “None of mine.”
“No, it’s… it’s nothing.” She shrugs. “Not anything. Zero. Less than zero.”
Close enough to home to almost touch the door, with the world not spinning so much, he’s forgetting to be scared. “Yeah, well, take care of yourself,” he says. “That guy’s still out there. And you – you’re pretty insane, but you deserve better than that.”
She doesn’t hit him till he’s damn close to kissing her. When he checks it in the mirror later, sees what a lovetap she gave him compared to what she did to Cam, he grins.
Buffy/Harmony
“Well, excuse me,” Harmony sulked. “When I was Angel’s secretary all I ever heard from him and Spike was, ooh, Buffy’s so amazing, ooh, Buffy’s the best girlfriend ever. And I read that bi-curiosity’s really big this year.”
Still reeling from the kiss, Buffy wasn’t sure which was the bigger surprise: that Harmony was here in Rome, that she’d mentioned Spike being at Wolfram & Hart when he was supposed to be dust, or that Harmony could read.
She touched her lips. This last year, she’d forgotten what kissing a vampire was like.
“Anyway,” Harmony said, “that was such a letdown. I bet Blondie Bear was just trying to make me jealous and... mmph!”
That second time, she admitted that it wasn’t so bad, but suggested one more try.
Buffybot/Illyria
The mechanical construct was far more pleasing than many of the humans Illyria had thus far encountered. She spoke plainly and without prevarication, and her only purpose appeared to be to give Illyria pleasure – an aim that, in Illyria’s opinion, was extremely worthy.
“You will move six millimetres down and three to the left,” she ordered. “And increase the frequency of your lapping.”
“Oh, Illyria,” the robot sighed. “You are a god. You’re the god of me. I want to worship at your powerful, sexy altar.”
Yes, she would do very well.
Cassie/Dawn
“I think after we die we go somewhere else,” Cassie says. “Not heaven or hell. Just – away. To another life.”
Dawn has known this girl six hours. Lying beside her on the long grass, their shoulders not quite close enough to touch, she realizes that she loves her, and it’s like a knife sliding across her skin in painful, shallow cuts. She loves Cassie, and Cassie is going to die.
“I think we go to heaven,” she says, trying to remember the little that Buffy ever said about it. “And. And you’re complete. And with everybody you love.”
Cassie rolls on her side, zigzag of pink hair falling over her eyes. Dawn brushes it back. “What if there are people you love who aren’t dead?” she asks, smiling.
“But you’d think they were there. You wouldn’t know it wasn’t real.”
“Then how do you know this isn’t it?” Cassie whispers, kissing her.
Connor/Giles
He’s always had a thing for older women. And somehow, in his new school in England where he’s the only male student, it becomes a thing for older men. One man, at least.
Connor’s memories of Before are cloudy, but he remembers someone like Giles. The accent, the training; the chords they strike in him are so low that it takes weeks for him to hear them. And then he’s making his way through dark hallways, finding the path through the school as easy as if were midday.
Giles answers his door dressed for sleep. The irritation quickly turns to concern and, when Connor surges forward and kisses him, shock.
“Connor, what on earth…”
“Don’t, I’m sorry, father,” he whispers, too lost to hear.
Connor/Wesley
It wasn’t until Connor said his name, said “Wesley” in that soft, familiar voice, that he was sure. If he had stayed away, distracted himself with Illyria and Angel and his own grief, he could have believed that the memories were some long-ago dream, or another one of Vail’s tricks.
“I didn’t remember you,” Connor said. “I mean, I kind of did, but I thought they were dreams…”
Wesley, mourning Lilah and falling in love with Fred, hadn’t dreamed of Connor at all.
They hadn’t touched, yet. The boy brushed tentative fingers against his collar but stopped short of touching skin. “Just – I remember following you. Your place. That girl in the cage. And I don’t know if any of that even happened.”
“Nor do I,” Wes almost confessed, but Connor leaned up into a desperate kiss, and he remembered all of it.
Cordelia/Willow
“Did you ever think about it?” Tara asked her, late one night in the dorm when everything was still so new between them. “I mean – think about other girls?”
And she didn’t know. Aside from the vamp-her thing, she couldn’t point to anything in her life and say “aha! Lesbian!” It was a puzzle, and she’d always been good at puzzles. Being methodical, that was key. She thought about Buffy first. Best friend, teenage slumber parties, rooming together, that should spark a few latent vibes, right? But there was nothing, even when she remembered her in her yummy sushi jammies.
Moving on. Harmony, no way. Ms. Calendar – maybe there’d been stirrings of a girlcrush there, but the memory made her too sad to think about it deeply. Aura, Aphrodesia, Nancy, Amy, no, no, no.
She’d gone through all of the Cordettes before she remembered their leader.
Cordelia rushing into the library, late to a Scooby meeting because cheerleading practice had overrun, still in her uniform and complaining loudly about the research she was expected to do; “What a brat,” Willow remembered thinking, and then she was idly concocting a suitable revenge. And somehow her brain came up with Cordelia bent over the library table, her skirt lifted up and Willow’s hand coming down hard on her…
“Yeah, I guess I thought about it one or two times,” she said, hoping the room was dark enough to hide her blush.
Dawn/Illyria
“An abomination,” Illyria said, tilting Dawn’s head to take a better look at her. “That my Key should be trapped in this form – mortal. Fragile. Dependent on the Slayer.”
“Not so much any more,” she protested. “I’m working in the galleria on weekends. Buffy doesn’t even give me an allowance these days.”
The non-allowance-giver said, “Get your hands off her.” Deathly quiet. Dawn hadn’t heard that tone since Glory.
“She will come with me,” Illyria said. “She is my Key. With her, I will no longer be confined to one world. I will walk the dimensions once again.”
“Dawn doesn’t belong to anybody,” Buffy snapped.
Dawn just looked at the outstretched hand, its long fingers, blue tinged at the tips. “I remember you,” she said. “Before there was even a me to remember.”
Someone was yelling, but it was faint and distant; she tightened her hand around her god’s, puzzled by… something. Maybe she’d remembered a dream, but it was gone now.
“I tire of this world,” Illyria said. “Come. Slough off that shell. We will find another place.”
As the Key gladly faded out of the awkward, forced form, its last conscious thought was of some strange words in one of the humans’ primitive tongues:
listen, there’s a hell of a good universe next door. Let’s go.
Dawn/Willow
The only three acceptable excuses for letting yourself get kissed by your best friend’s little sister are: imminent end of the world (that excuses the first time, alone in the kitchen on Revello Drive two nights before the battle against the First). Temporary insanity (getting swept up in the atmosphere of the Carnaval counts, so that explains what happened in Brazil eight weeks ago). Or extreme drunkenness.
Willow looks at the full-and-still-corked bottle of wine, the only alcohol she has in her hotel room, and knows she’s out of excuses. There’s just one other time when the kissing is forgivable, and that’s if you’re Laurie in Little Women. Willow always thought she was more of a Beth.
Dawn has her arms folded over her chest – Willow quickly looks away from that area – and her lips are pressed in a pout that looks like it’s supposed to be a resolve face. Lips not swollen from kissing, because there wasn’t time before Willow yeeped and skidded backwards. In the rush, she slammed her leg against the coffee table. It’ll bruise.
“But you’re not…” she says, and Dawn says, “shh, I know,” and Willow realizes she thought she was going to say but you’re not Tara. Understanding and gentle blue eyes, and Dawn is so familiar at this moment that she’s letting herself be kissed again, no excuses at all.
Doyle/Xander
“Syphilis, eh? Bet that’s nasty.”
Xander winced as the guy leaned in, looking interested, to check out his disease. “I’ve had better holidays,” he said. “Listen, any friend of Angel’s is… to be treated with deepest suspicion bordering on hostility, but could you back off?”
“No offence intended, man.” He retreated back to his own chair.
As the seconds ticked by, Xander regretted snapping. With Anya and the rest away solving the mystery of the plague-hexing Chumash, Angel’s guy was stuck taking care of him. And the turkey.
“How’s your headache?” he asked.
Doyle massaged his temple. “Comes and goes. S’always bad for a while after a vision. So is that your young lady, then? Girl with the interesting views on how me and you’d look great shagging each other?”
Xander groaned and tried to burrow into the couch.
“You know, there’s cures for syphilis nowadays,” Doyle said.
Fred/Illyria
There’s her cave, real close, she can run if she has to, she’ll probably have to. There’s her tree. There’s her rocks, the ones she piled together to remind herself what face-centred cubic structure looks like. If they were spheres they’d take up seventy-four-point-oh-four percent of the total possible volume, and she keeps repeating that figure to herself, seventy four point oh four, seventy four point oh four. Because standing a couple of feet away from her is herself, and Fred wants her to go away.
“You’re not me,” she says. “You look like me, I’m sure you’re nice, but I’d never have hair that colour. My momma, she’d… she’d… I think there used to be somebody, maybe, that’d be mad if I did that to my hair.”
“You are the shell,” the other her says, staring staring staring out of Fred’s eyes. “You are Winifred Burkle.”
That was her name, before. She remembers today. Maybe that name’s the blue-hair girl’s now, ‘cause she doesn’t think it’s hers any more.
“You have to go,” she says. “You might be antimatter and I’m matter, and if we touched the whole universe would go kaboom. Oppenheimer, he’d be mad.”
“You were stranded here. I remember…” She holds up her hand and, oh, Fred can’t do that, make blue lightning spark from her fingers, but then it’s gone. “Yes. I remember seeing myself in this place. This has happened before. The timeline will be preserved.” And she turns, and starts to go away.
Fred runs after her, grabs her hands, her shoulders, kisses her like she used to do with boys and one time with Lindy Mareno, and she’s all desperation and touches, but whatever she does she can’t make the universe end.
Illyria/Nina/Spike
“A vampire, a werewolf and an ex-god walk into a bar,” Spike said, lifting the pint glass to his lips. “Should be a joke.”
“Wish I could see the punchline.” Morose, Nina dragged her finger along the table, drawing an imaginary circle. She gave it eyes, hair. Fangs. Then she x-ed it out and wished it made her feel better.
“I fail to appreciate this ‘joke’,” Illyria said. “And remember your place, vampire. I am a god still.”
“Ex-god,” Spike insisted. “No superpowers, no service, love. You’re the original Norwegian Blue, off your perch and pushing up the daisies. You,” he cocked a finger at her; she glared at it with disdain, “are an ex-god.”
“And that was all he said?” Nina asked for the tenth time. “He was going to Italy and he’d see me when he got back?”
Spike shrugged. “Don’t take it personally. He was rushing off to see Buffy. Didn’t take time for many fare-thee-wells.” The way he said the girl’s name – it was a stupid name, anyway, Nina decided – was half wistful, half pissed. It was all confusing. She’d come in halfway through this act. Spike was in love with Buffy, or with Angel, or possibly with both, and he was jealous as hell at being left behind, and Illyria’d had a fight with Wesley about something, and she was going to need more alcohol if this was going to make sense.
Many empty glasses later, the room was tilted, perspective skewed, and Illyria was talking about sex.
“This human intimacy,” she was saying. “It revolts me. And yet… it is intriguing. I would know more.”
“Think we can help with that,” Spike told her, leaning over the table, voice dropped so low he was practically purring. Nina tried to roll her eyes and ended up giggling instead. Then Spike’s hand was on her knee and that only made her laugh harder. “How ‘bout you?” he asked. “Up for showing her some of this revolting human intimacy?”
“We’re not human,” Nina said, her laughter trailing off.
“Right,” Spike grinned. “All got a bit of demon in us. So what say we make it a bit more?”
Illyria/Wesley
The shell is as fascinating as it is repugnant; she spends one of the humans’ solar measurements cataloguing responses to sensory input. The tips of her fingers are most sensitive to touch. With practice, she can taste the difference between sweet and bitter.
She tastes the alcohol-poison direct from Wesley’s lips, merely a test of whether the sensation matches Winifred Burkle’s fragmented, faded memory. He pushes her away. When she tries again, he backhands her hard across the mouth and retreats to his room.
Illyria touches the place on her lip where the skin has split in two; her blood is bitter.
She has no-one else. He will worship her, whether he desires it or not.
Kennedy/Nina
Over tequila slammers they trade stories about their exes.
Kennedy says she was dating a girl whose girlfriend had died. She was the rebound, she says, the one who arrived after the One True Love was gone. Convenient, disposable.
Giddy with the booze and the break-up, Nina talks about Angel. She leaves out the minor details – what he is, what she is – but she says she always thought there was someone else. Not physically, maybe: “But like there was a third person between us, you know? And how was I supposed to get rid of her if I couldn’t even see her?”
“The only person I see right now,” Kennedy says, swaying into her, “is you.”
Lindsey/Tara
Sunday morning, the New York Times spread in pieces over the covers, she reads to him from the Bhagavad Gita. "For the soul there is neither birth nor death at any time,” she says. Sheets pushed away, naked against white pillows and newsprint, she reads, "The soul can never be cut to pieces by any weapon, nor burned by fire, nor moistened by water, nor withered by the wind.”
He could spend the rest of his life listening to her speak. “You believe in all that? Past lives, reincarnation?”
She marks her place and sets aside. “I think it’s possible.” When she smiles down at him, head ducked and her hair falling around her face, he thinks she looks like an angel. But that doesn’t sit right, makes him uneasy.
Pulls her down to him, skimming his fingers all along her thigh, hip, side; he kisses the spot above her breasts. She’s not shy any more, not like she was at first, and he always thought it was silly to be so self-conscious of that tiny little wine-stain birthmark over her heart.
Later, she makes pancakes shaped like animals. He plays his guitar, a song coming into his head like a dream he’d forgotten; she asks when he wrote it and he says he doesn’t think he did. Knew it when he was a kid, maybe. His mom calls to ask did they go to church. He says, yeah, he worshipped a higher power this morning, and his girl muffles her giggles against his back.
The afternoon, they go for a walk. It’s summer, sunny, and she’s talking about her students at the community college. Her hand’s loose in his, and he’s already forgotten what she read to him this morning, only how she sounded, how she looked.
This is all the life he could ever want.
Nina/Spike
He goes because somebody has to tell her, and because there’s nobody else left, and because this is as good a dress-rehearsal as any for the day when he’ll have to give this speech to Buffy. Keeps it simple, sticks to the we-fought-we-lost version of events, throws in a couple of platitudes about Angel saving the world, going down the way he wanted. He’s surprised he can sing his praises without the words sticking in his throat or coming out tangled in sarcasm and barbed wire.
He waits with her on her porch as she cries it out, clumsy hand on her back and his attention a world away. Thinking of another night, another girl and her grief.
“The sun’s coming up in an hour,” she finally says, dragging the back of her hand across her eyes. “I got used to finding out the times every day. Sunset and dawn. Guess I don’t have to, now, do I?”
“No,” he says. “Right, then. I should…”
She says, “My sister, my niece, they’re not here. Do you want to…”
Not sure what she’s offering, if she’s offering anything at all, he says, “Yeah. All right.”
Always, these women, they were always Angel’s first – she keeps her eyes closed, doesn’t speak, guides him with her hands and her mouth to where she wants him to go. She’s pretending he’s Angel and it’s so familiar he stumbles over her name.
Riley/Spike
He’s not an idiot. The house, the girls, that’s too risky. Buffy would find out and it…
Wouldn’t break her heart. And he’s not ready to face that, not yet.
Spike’s just desperate enough, just pathetic enough, to take the straight-from-the-source blood and the crumpled bills he tosses on the crypt floor, and just smart enough to know that he’s got as much to lose as Riley if anyone finds out.
So it’s their secret, and eventually Riley stops looking anywhere but at the white-blond head bent over his arm. Spike suggests in a bored, unconvincing voice that they’d be safer downstairs, less likely to be caught.
He has a four poster bed down there. Riley remembers he said something about Harmony leaving town; Buffy mentioned it too, maybe, but these days everything’s white noise. The only voice that cuts through the static is rough and English.
Spike sits on the bed, eyebrows raised, come on, then expression, and Riley enjoys the look of surprise when he unbuckles his belt.
Snyder/Wesley
“Disgusting,” he sneered. “Parading your deviant behaviour around my school like a… parade.”
Wesley sighed. “For the last time, Mr. Snyder, Mr. Giles and myself have a purely professional relationship.”
“Huh. Library inspector my ass. I called the library inspectors’ union, they never heard of a Wesley Wyndham-Pryce.” He narrowed his already somewhat-narrow eyes. “If that is your real name.”
Not entirely sure if there was such a thing as a library inspectors’ union, Wesley decided to bluff it. “I’m simply here to do a job, Mr. Snyder. The school is yours. The children are in your charge. I’m merely a visitor, after all. You're the headmaster.”
“Damn straight I am,” he said, puffing up with pride. “Now. Back on your knees.”
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on 2004-10-25 10:46 pm (UTC)Nina/Angel/Spike was also good. They do have problems with a woman to fight over. They're pretty stuck in their ways.
Buffybot/Illyria - fucking hilarious
Tara/Lindsey was so sweet.