herself_nyc (herself_nyc) wrote in herself_nyc_fic, @ 2008-05-05 09:50:00 |
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Entry tags: | s/b fic, waiting around |
Fic: WAITING AROUND (pt 4 of ?)
STORY INFO:
The action of this story picks up immediately from the conclusion of Some Scenes From The Later Life of Two Heroes. If you haven't read that one, it was a sequel to a longer pair of Spike/Xander stories, which can be read here. The low-down: since her resurrection, Buffy has never aged, and has grown increasingly distant from her surviving adult children and their families. In this far-future fic, after a long lifetime partnered with Xander, Spike has buried him and is at a loose end. He and Buffy have a series of encounters spread out over months, and after averting an apocalypse together, return to London for what might be the beginning of a long-postponed affair. But the morning after, Buffy's not so sure ....
All previous parts of WAITING AROUND are here (locked) or here (open to all).
Later, Spike said, "We're a pair of strangers really."
Sitting there with his head in her lap, petting it like a cat, her first impulse was to contradict him. But it was true. Most of what she knew about Spike, in the last two-thirds of a century, was at least second-hand. If you added it up, she hadn't spent a lot of face time with him and Xander since the first couple of years they were together, when they were all doing the Aurelian Investigations thing in L.A. That fell apart pretty quickly after they lost Vi.
In a way, she knew him more intimately as an enemy than a friend. Knew him more intimately as a series of memories, of tense sexual flashes and blows traded, than as a person.
Yet it felt right that his head should lie in her lap, that she should comfort him this way. She was grateful that he permitted her this, that he permitted it to himself. Behind them, the radiator clanked.
"We're old friends," she murmured. Since their aborted fight, she felt sleepy. She realized that the time of the evening when she'd want a cocktail or a big glass of wine was upon her, but she didn't want them enough to disturb their arrangement on the sofa. She couldn't think of the last time that anyone, man or child, had lain with his head in her lap.
"Buffy Summers."
"Old friends," she repeated, her tone low and soothing.
Spike was quiet for a while. Then he said, "How many times you done that?"
"Done what?" She didn't feel like talking. She wanted to drowse and go on caressing his feathery hair, enjoying the weight of him in her lap, his feline stillness.
"Iceland."
He would go on thinking of life. She supposed she couldn't stop him. If nothing else had. All this time.
"That wasn't the first time." She mused, added, "I have no regrets."
"S'your choice, yeah. Just makes me sad."
"You think it does because you're sad about other things."
He was quiet again, until his hand came up to lie in front of his face, on her taut belly, pressing softly against her blouse and her skin and her stomach beneath. His hand that gave forth no warmth. "If I had my way I'd marry you an' get us a little house somewhere an' fill you with about a million babies."
She couldn't help her laugh. "Would you really?"
"I'd hang up my fangs an' turn into a bent old man an' die, for thirty yearseven twenty yearsof that with you."
"I thought," she said, teasing lightly, "that we were strangers."
"We'd get to know each other then, wouldn't we? Right well."
She laughed again. "I think you're more maternal than I am, Spike." She swallowed around a sudden knot in her throat. Memories flushing in from all sides, chagrin as she thought of Patrick and Joycey and Bill. Almost anyone would be more maternal than she was.
"We'd do all right. Pretty children an' none of 'em slayers. Could do all right with that."
Buffy bit her tongue. Spike's words filled her with tenderness for him, so she resisted her urge to tease. She didn't really believe what he was saying, not the letter of it. She just heard him saying I'm lonely. And the purpose I thought I had, isn't working for me anymore.
Then he said, "I'm tired of all this night."
"Spike"
"Or else I'm tired of my soul. Would like to be shed of one or t'other."
She stroked his head, wishing it would have some effect.
"Angel ever tell you 'bout a place called Pylea?"
"Yes. He told me stories. It's where he found poor Fred."
"That's the one. Not too pleasant in some ways, I gathered. But could walk in the sunlight there, an' see himself in a mirror."
"He told me it was a place where his demon had nothing human in it at all. When he changed, he was a feral monster."
Spike shrugged. "You've got your details, an' I've got mine."
"You don't want to go to Pylea," Buffy said. "You don't want to be an old man." She leaned in closer to him. "We'll go to Paris tomorrow. Or, what was the other one? St Petersburg? I've never been there. Let's go to Russia. Sleigh rides in the snow, lots of different kinds of vodka, and don't they ice skate there? I like to ice skate."
Spike's silence stretched out. Finally he said, "Do you, pet? Didn't know that."
"Like you said, we need to get to know each other a little more. We should do that, yes? I think it'll be fun."
He sat up then, facing her at eye level. "An' what about the grand-kids?"
"They'll wait."
"Can go see 'em first. On the way."
"It's kind of the opposite direction."
"Earth's round." He cocked his head. She didn't care for how he studied her. "Could meet you in Petersburg, say in a fortnight's time."
Again she was too slow, but this time she caught up to him before too much damage was done. "Of course not. We're traveling together. We'll visit the babies together."
There, she'd been right. Spike's frown relaxed a little. "Your Joe an' his wife won't mind a vampire peerin' at 'em?"
"An old family friend?" Buffy said. "Why should they?"
"Didn't know if I was still that."
"Why, because Xander's gone? You think your all-access pass has been revoked?"
"Lots of things get revoked," Spike muttered.
"You can't be any more fraught for the O'Connors than I am," she said. "Come to think of it, I'll be glad to you with me. For a buffer."
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