herself_nyc (herself_nyc) wrote in herself_nyc_fic, @ 2008-02-26 08:50:00 |
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Entry tags: | s/b fic, the proper slayer |
THE PROPER SLAYER (pt 20 of ?)
NOTE: I have redacted the last two updates on this fic. I wasn't happy with my characterizations. The parts are still up, but struck-through and no longer linked directly. The story instead continues from here. Thanks for your patience with my writerly freak-outs! I hope this will mark the resumption of normal service. :)
Since Distance has been sent to its room to think about its sins, The Proper Slayer has come down and is tugging at my skirts instead.
This fic was last updated in early November, so herewith, a brief recap of the story so far:
First of all, it's a follow-on from Let's Get Lost. In that story, Buffy leaves Sunnydale after relegating Angel to hell through the maw of Acathla (season 2 finale). Instead of going to LA, she goes in her despair all the way to New York City. And what she doesn't know is that not only did Willow's spell re-ensoul Angel, it also ensouled all the vampires in range--ie, Spike and Drusilla. When Spike encounters Buffy by chance in Manhattan, he's still reeling from Drusilla's suicide and the effects of having his soul. He believes Buffy is the key to regaining his freedom--that "one night of bliss" with her will unshackle him from his soul, as it apparently unshackled Angelus. The elaborate courtship the pair play out in a posh townhouse leads to outcomes neither of them anticipate, and by time Spike does lose his soul, he's gone a long way from his original intentions. At the end he reunites Buffy with her mother, and disappears; she receives a letter from him telling her that soon he will return to finish her off.
The present story, The Proper Slayer, begins some time later; Buffy is back home, trying miserably to live her old life as student, daughter, friend and slayer. Faith has come to Sunnydale, and Joyce, taking pity on her, has installed her in the guest room. She and Buffy have a brief dalliance, but Buffy mainly feels as if Faith is usurping every part of her life, a life she doesn't fit back into anyway. Then soulless Spike reappears in Sunnydale, vowing to finish the job of killing her, He brags that her death will be sweeter because she had once been his willing mistress. But their clash is disrupted by a resurgence of mutual passion. With their affair resumed and their love acknowledged, Spike longs to take Buffy away from Sunnydale; Buffy is racked with guilt and uneasiness about her longing for Spike. When she leaves town with Spike, he thinks she's acquiescing, but instead she away from him, and disappears. After weeks of fruitless searching, Spike returns to Sunnydale, where he confesses his love to Joyce, who enlists him to help her locate her daughter. (I suck at writing synopses, so you might just want to reread the fic!)
Finally, thanks to anaross who suggested a direction for this fic to go in when I was feeling high and dry.
"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."
Vermilion Chutes, Alberta was the town she ended up in, after four days of hitchhiking with various long-haul truckers. She hadn't meant to cross into Canada, but now she was there, she felt even more disappeared. Safer from whateverwhoevermight be looking for her.
She took a job waiting tables, and a little furnished room. She hid there, while the landscape filled up with snow, a deep-freeze she'd never experienced before, that matched her own inner freeze. When she lay in her narrow cot at night, hearing the ice crack the branches of nearby trees, it reminded her of the aching and cracking inside herself.
She patrolled a couple of evenings a week. Amazingly, there were vampires even this far north, 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.
She stayed another couple of weeks, still patrolling though there was nothing to find, feeling like she was poised on the lip of something big and enormous, a dark gelid lake she was supposed to dive into, that would swallow her up.
One evening she sorted through her things, the few keepsakes she'd taken with her from home. 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, whom she was fleeing right now, fleeing every minute, she had nothing at all. Which was somehow awful, but also how she wanted it, because she'd made an enormous mistake there. Or maybe it was more accurate to say that he'd revealed her for the enormous mistake she was. She was a freak, who couldn't live with her mother, her friends, her watcher, couldn't give herself to anybody but vampires. The one person she longed for, that her body broke open for every morning in her dreams, was a disgusting undead demon.
She didn't love him, she never had, she couldn't.. Could she? What did that make her, if he was all she loved? No, no, no. She told herself over and over: what went on between her and Spike was more like the relationship between the junkie and the junk. Spike was junk, and he'd ruined her life.
She made up her mind then, that she was going to dispose of the past. She gathered up what she hadthe ring, the picture, and to stand in for Spike, since there was nothing else, the pair of panties he'd last taken off her. With the things stuffed in her jacket pocket, she went on patrol, planning afterwards to find someplace quietthe whole little town would be dead quiet at two a.m.to burn them all.
To become someone else. Just the slayer, with no past, and no future. Which was what she suspected the slayer was really supposed to be.
The cold was merciless. She did her usual sweepby the back doors of the bars, behind the Tim Horton's, and then to the all-night laundromat. It was there, under the blearying fly-specked fluorescent tubes, that she found a fight, three big vamps emerging from the back room to surround her.
When she was done with them, her jacket was torn in a big gash made with her own stake, the down floating around her in the heat-saturated air. Her panties were goneone of the vamps had been clutching them when he dusted. Her mom's picture had a wet muddy footprint on it, and the ringshe'd heard it hit the linoleum when her jacket went, but she couldn't find it now. On hands and knees she scrabbled around beneath the machines, the folding table, her heart pounding in her ears, sweat breaking down her back. She looked and looked, but the ring didn't turn up.
In the end she lit her mother's picture up with a match, and let it drop into the deep utility sink, where it curled and dissolved.
She trudged back to her room, clutching the remains of her jacket around herself. Showered and changed into her uniform and got to her morning waitressing shift early.
It was around her quitting time when she overheard two cops talking, about a man they had in the drunk tank at the station.
The laundromat attendent had come out of the back room around lunch time to find a man"big, strapping young fellow"crashed out on the floor by the dryers, fast asleep, "buck-naked". There was no one else around, and as she attested to the police, "I never heard the door jingle, and I was only back there for a minute." Of course she'd called the cops. And though the guy didn't act or smell drunk, he couldn't account for himself, and he was naked, so they'd hauled him in.
This didn't sound very demony. Demony things didn't generally happen in the middle of the afternoon. But she had the laundromat on her mindshe'd been thinking she'd go back there after her shift to look around again for the ring. Maybe someone had found it and turned it in; this was the kind of town where people did turn in lost articles. So when she gave them their check, Buffy asked the cops what the naked guy was like. They smiled lewd smiles at her, chuckling at the question. "Haven't you seen any? Pretty girl like you shouldn't have to wonder."
"What's going to happen to him?"
The cop shrugged. "We run his prints through the system. If he's not wanted for anything, we let him go."
The police station was on the way to the laundromat. She decided to look inthere was no sun that day, so it wasn't impossible that the naked guy was a vampire. He could do a lot of damage if he was still in the drunk tank later, when the real drunks got thrown in. Telling the officer at the desk that she was looking for her boyfriend who'd gone missing, she asked for a glimpse. Following another officer down the corridor towards the back, she waited to feel that tingle in her nape, the vampire tingle.
The man, dressed in grey sweats a couple of sizes too small, was folded onto the bunk, arms curled around him against the deep moist chill of the cells. He was asleep, but as she looked at him, he began to stir.
"That your boyfriend, Miss?"
Buffy stared. The light was bad, but of course she would know him anywhere. Anywhere.
She couldn't get enough air to answer. Her chest was hollow, empty.
He lifted his head then, and looked at her. "Buffy? How did you find me?"
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