herself_nyc (herself_nyc) wrote in herself_nyc_fic, @ 2008-02-24 12:16:00 |
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"Faith's still stayin' here."
"I wasn't going to throw her out, none of this trouble is her fault. I barely see her. Some weeks I wouldn't know she was here except for the grocery bills."
"Huh." He pictured them all, the so-called Scoobies, going about their dopey teenaged lives as if Buffy had never been, and hatred filled his heart.
But then an idea began to form.
"Tell you who we ought to see."
"Not Mr Giles?"
"No. Our Miss Rosenberg. Rosenberg who doesn't know her own strength. She got us into this mess an' she just may be able to get us out."
Spike listened from the kitchen as Joyce opened the door. Willow entered stammering in her high querying 'what did little old me do?' voice.
Joyce had called her at 5:30 a.m., waking her up, and now it was just past 6:00. On the phone she'd said only that she needed Willow to come by before school, and to leave some time to talk. Spike admired the crispness of her voice, her no-nonsense quality. Little redhead was a complete sucker for anything that sounded like an authority figure, so she didn't even ask questions, just agreed to get dressed and come. Like any good mother, Joyce. could put it on when it was required, even though she'd been sniffling on and off for an hour beforehand.
Now she led Willow into the kitchen.
"So what isoh. Mrs Summers, there's a vampire here!"
"Can't put anything past you," Spike said. "Always knew you were clever."
"What what what is he doing here?"
Joyce nudged her towards one of the counter stools, but Willow didn't want to budge. She was giving Joyce the eye now, like she thought maybe they were both vampires and she'd been called in to play the part of breakfast.
Which Spike wouldn't have minded so much. He was hungry, and his next meal nowhere in sight.
"Buffyremember her? Bitty blond with the strong right hook, used to be your best mate? She's gone missing. You're going to help us find her."
Willow's eyes were so wide they threatened to swallow her face.
Joyce said, "It's all right, Willow. Spike is ... he's ... well, for our purposes at the moment, he's an ally."
"Our purposes? We have purposes? Mrs Summers, what's going on here?"
"Spike tells me that you have certain powers."
"Powers! I don't have any powI'm way good at math, yes, but"
"He said you were a witch. You used your powers to restore Angel's soul. And Spike's too, and all the vampires who were in range. That's got to mean there's very little you can't do."
Now Willow's eyes looked to pop out. "But the spell didn't work. Buffy had to kill Angel."
"It worked. On him. On me. On Drusilla. Slayer had to put Angel down anyway, to keep whole world from getting sucked into the mouth of Acathla. But that's not what we're here to talk about."
"I gave you back your soul?"
"For a bit. But what we need now's a locator spell."
"Honey, I'm home!"
She didn't think she'd ever get tired of saying that. Of trudging through the crusted snowneither of them could be bothered to shovel properlyaround to the kitchen entrance, juggling the bag of groceries and the six pack of beer in one arm as she opened the door, and hearing his answering voice from the front room. She'd throw the stuff into the fridge, kick her shoes into the corner, and go through in time to see him do the last few of his daily reps, his back flexing and rippling, slick with sweat. He'd set the barbell down and straighten up and she'd go into his arms and most times he'd swing her up and carry her into the bedroom but sometimes they'd do it right there on the weight bench with the TV chattering away.
His pulse pounding in her ear when she pressed it to his wet chest. His big heated body surrounding her, covering her.
She'd just keep thinking, it's him it's him it's him he came back to me. It took almost a week for her to notice how quiet he was when they did it, never a word, but then that was his way. It was just his way, and everything was good.
It was so good.
She just couldn't believe it.
She'd been waiting tables in Vermilion Chutes, Alberta, the town where the last of a series of long-haul truckers had dropped her, staying in a little furnished room, hiding. Existing.
Aching with loneliness, furious at herself. Confused.
Going out every night on patrolamazingly, there were vampires, preying on the hunters and fishermen, at least there were at first; by the end of the third week, she seemed to have cleared them all out, or else word had gotten around that the slayer was in town. For another couple of weeks she was just frozen insideas frozen as the landscape all around her, locked down in ice and snow. Except for those late-night hours when she'd rifle despairingly through her things, the few keepsakes of her old life, and cry. All she had of her mother was one photograph. Of Angel, nothing but the ring she would never wear again, and bitter memory, bitterer still because she tried so hard to summon up the sweetness that preceded the end, and couldn't find it.
Of Spike, whom she'd fled, she had nothing at all. Which was how she wanted it, because she'd made an enormous mistake. She didn't love him, she never had, she couldn't.. What went on between them was more like the relationship between the junkie and the junk. Spike was junk, and he'd ruined her life.
When she'd had enough of Vermilion Chutes, she bought a bus ticket. Hauled her bag out to the little wooden shelter in front of the post office in the middle of the night, which was when the one long-haul coach passed through, rode as far as Medicine Hat, where, liking the name, she got off, only to walk into a vampire situation in the skanky bus station washroom. After a multiple slay she looked around to find that someone had swiped her luggage, leaving her with nothing except her wallet and the clothes she had on.
She took another job waiting tables at the truck stop on the edge of town.
Three days into it, he walked in.
Just walked in out of an afternoon when the sun reflecting off the snowbanks in the parking lot made everyone entering the place a little dazzled, and took a booth in her section.
Just walked back into her life.
She couldn't get enough of it, his heartbeat against her cheek, his heat, his pulse, his big stolid quiet thereness.
"Hey baby," Angel said now, hauling them both up, reaching for a towel draped over a nearby straight chair. Two straight chairs, the weight bench, and the TV were all the furniture the front room contained. "How was work?"
"Okay. Fine." She finished unbuttoning her pink polyester waitress dress. Impatient to take her, he'd just unbutton the front, spring the catch on her bra, push up the skirt. She'd begun wearing front-clasping bras, and stockings with a garter belt instead of tights, because he'd tear them to get at her. And she liked that, but she didn't like having to buy new things every week. There wasn't a lot of money. Angel didn't exactly have a job. Not a steady one, not yet, and that was okay because they weren't planning to stay in Medicine Hat. This teensy run-down house was a month-to-month rental, They wouldn't be in it come summer. They talked a lot about where they'd go, and they hadn't made up their minds, but it was an absolute certainty that they wouldn't stay here. On her breaks at the truck-stop Buffy flicked through bridal magazines at the newstand. Angel said he was going to marry her in the spring time. When they arrived in their new town.
Maybe, she thought, he'd take her to Ireland. She pictured herself in Dublin, patrolling through ancient cemetaries where everything was covered in a soft green moss, where it rained lightly all the time, a rain so misty it didn't even make you wet, and she'd be a married girl and live among all those ruddy-cheeked people with that soft lovely accent.
So it was all right to be here for now.
What happened every night was, after she got back from work and errands and they said hello until they couldn't say hello anymore, like they'd just done, they'd shower togetherthere was never really enough hot water for two separate showersand she'd go out on patrol for a couple hoursbetween the truck stop parking lot, the bus depot, and a couple of other spots, there were more vampires than you'd credit in a Canadian town like thiswhile he'd go on lengthier rounds of his own, coming in near dawn to fall into bed with her, smelling like beer and whiskey and tobacco smoke. He'd be sleeping heavily when she rose to get ready for work, and sometimes there would be a lot of money, colorful Canadian bills, heaped on the dresser.
They managed. It wasn't like they had to do without anything. Nothing important.
The dresser itself, the whole set, Angel had won in a card game. She'd come home a couple days after they rented the little bungalow to find them in place of the mattress on the floor she'd had to start with, and him lying on the bed with his hands folded behind his head and that scrumptious smile, and she couldn't have jumped on him any faster than she did.
That was the night he'd asked her where she'd learned to do that stuff.
And it was weird, because until then they hadn't talked about much that wasn't right there in front of them. She didn't ask him how he escaped from hell, or why he wasn't a vampire anymore, or even how he'd found her, and he didn't ask her why she was a truck-stop waitress in Medicine Hat instead of a high school senior in Sunnydale. They'd just been together, and it occurred to her that it was like a dream, where wild crazy things just were.
Anyway, questions were dangerous, questions might ruin things. She was curious, but far more than she was curious, she was happy.
So so so happy.
When he said, "You can't have picked up those moves from some high school boy," she clenched all over, a hot flush of shame and confusion. He smiled when he said it, but the smile didn't quite reach his eyes. She wouldn'tcouldn'ttell him about her lost summer. Not about Spike. Spike wasn't even real anymore, because everywhere Spike had been was filled up now with Angel. She could barely believe she'd ever been with Spike, her memories of him were oddly one-dimensional now, when she thought of him at all, just as, in the cold lock-down of Canadian prairie winter, she couldn't really feel anymore the intense heat of that Manhattan summer.
She laughed and said, "You can learn all kinds of things by reading Cosmo every month!"
His smile didn't waver. He looked in her eyes. She tried not to squirm. "You like it, don't you? I mean, we were only together once, before. You wouldn't want it to just be like that over and over, would you?" She'd barely seen his body that night, had been too shy to burrow under the covers. Thought of going down on him but never remotely got there.
She began to believe it herself, that she'd learned all her techniques out of magazines.
Angel smoothed her hair, and kissed her forehead, and went to sleep without saying anything more about it.