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This is the fic that ate my brain and killed me. The result is less than what I wanted, but way more than it was the day that I missed my IWRY deadline. Sorry again, Chris.
It was also a learning process. What I learned?
1. The creative process is a bitch. (like I didn't already know that, but I like to be reminded from time to time)
2. Google Maps is beautiful thing.
3. So is Google Docs.
4. SeeqPod is made of Awesome!!
Okay, so. Here we go. For better or worse.
Title: The Light Before We Land
Author: seraphcelene
Email: seraphcelene at yahoo dot com
Rating: G
A/N: A meandering, confused prequel to Thine is, Life is: Permalink and on LJ. Fic and section titles from The Light Before We Land by The Delgados. Many, many thanks to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
tkp for helping me work through some ideas at five in the morning on her first night in L.A.
Summary: The slayers came when they were called, and as they rose, Buffy fell.
i. things that once were beautiful, Los Angeles, Armageddon
The Sunnydale Quake of '03 was a blip on the map next to the sight of dragons over the steel and concrete L.A jungle. People scattered like rats or ants or cockroaches, hiding under beds and in closets, beneath desks, as if the shudder of the city was an earthquake and not the dragons settling on the skyscrapers perforating the skyline. Hiding didn't do any good, the dragons belching fire in great balls and angry gusts burned down the hideaways with the people still in them.
There wasn't much that a man or a vampire with a sword, double-edge and sharp though it may have been, could do in the face of such monstrousness. Although, later, the zoologists and the animal rights activists would declare the dragon’s animals and not monsters at all. They could not help their nature, and Our Lady of Angels was as good a place for them to roost as any other, despite those who knew better going on record about the presence of a Hellmouth beneath Downtown Los Angeles. Words were thrown around like harbingers and sentries to which they received responses like endangered and habitats. What everyone noticed, and felt better prepared to deal with, was their territoriality for which they all were grateful.
There wasn't much that a diminished god king could do either, besides slay hundreds, perhaps thousands, of its enemies. After the National Guard arrived and the other Armed Forces after that, after Special Forces and secret government organizations evacuated most of the civilian population and helped to stem the demon tide, Illyria disappeared. Armageddon was a human concern and the initial storm of grief for Wesley eventually passed.
The world did not end, not really.
The stubborn and the poor were mostly left behind.
Only a very small contingent of slayers arrived within the first forty-eight hours.
Martial Law and State of Emergency were mostly business as usual; Los Angeles has had its share of riots and natural disasters. It was the demon hordes that threw everyone for a loop and turned the town of migrants and dreamers into a permanent no-fly zone. Creeping four miles outward in all directions from what had once been the Financial District, was the worse demon infestation in recent history.
Angel is the same as ever, lonelier without Spike and Gunn, Wesley and Cordelia, but still fighting the good fight, and there are sections of the city, from La Cienega to the ocean, where the demons do not go.
ii. if we can hold on we can fix what is wrong, October 2005
"Mr. Angel. Sir."
Angel continues to study the sheaf of papers in his hand, reviewing the patrols scheduled to depart in two hours time. A map of the city is spread out over a heavy oak table covered with a sheet of clear plastic that has been shaded with colored pencil and black marker to designate the ever shifting territories and boundaries of the brave new world that Southern California has become. Occasionally, he checks the map against whatever is written on the papers and makes a note or two.
“Mr. Angel. Um, sir." The girl at the head of the table is no more than eighteen, if she's a day. Her smooth baby skin and wide pale eyes remind Angel of Dawn at fifteen. He can't see her hair tucked as it is beneath a cap against the rain. The brim drips water steadily. "My name is April Solomon. I've been sent by the W-W-Watcher's Council. I have—I have a letter from Willow Rosenberg.”
“I’m not interested,” he growls, glances at April briefly from the corner of his eye and then continues to mostly ignore her and the puddle of water spreading at her feet.
“It’s important,” she says, dragging the soaked cap from her head. Her hair is bright red and Angel wonders if she is eighteen after all. Based on looks alone, she could be anywhere from thirteen to sixteen, although he can't imagine Willow recruiting anyone so very young. “I was instructed to give –“
“Fuck your instructions. Fuck the Council. Fuck Willow Rosenberg.” Angel finally looks directly at April Solomon and the flustered young woman drops her gaze. She’s young, too young, he thinks, to have traveled this deep into The Hell alone. There’d been a recent resurgence of activity in the safety zone between La Cienega and Crenshaw as the Tor'a Dashe Clan tried to push its way into the airport and from there into the marina. They'd run into the solid wall of Angel, but the activity in the area coming up from LAX was still heavier than he liked.
He couldn't imagine how she had even gotten this far. Land travel from the East was too dangerous without an envoy and the only flights into LAX were forced to come in over the Pacific with a mandatory layover in Hawaii. Between the dragons and the Tor'a Dashe, all flights for the last month had been cancelled.
“I can’t spare an escort until after dawn," he says, finally turning away.
"But what about-- I can't just leave. I have to rendezvous with the slayers in the area and there's the letter—communication between The Hell and the rest of the world is almost nonexistent--" Foolishly, she says this as if he doesn’t know and her voice dies away as Angel turns his gaze back to her.
"The slayers are mostly dead. The ones left are out there, in the city," he says nodding towards the door behind her. "They aren't ... right ... anymore," he pauses, his thoughts turned inward and a muscle in his jaw jumps rhythmically. "You’re leaving in the morning. I'll take you down to the marina where it's safer. You'll stay there until you can get a flight out. You're not welcome in my city." He turns to the young man who has been standing at his side, holding his own sheaf of papers, checking the map and making notes. "Find her a place to sleep," Angel says, and the young man leads her from the room.
*
Later the young man with his red, red lips and cornflower blue eyes brings Angel the letter he coaxed from the hands of April Solomon. She's young and mostly inexperienced and very concerned with completing her very first really important mission. Maybe it isn't so important how it's accomplished so long as Angel gets the letter in the end.
“It’s important,” Connor says, handing Angel the letter.
Angel shrugs into his familiar black coat and stares at the letter, but does not take it. "It's open," he says.
Connor doesn't have the grace to blush or look uneasy. "Yeah," he says instead, the letter still extended. He takes a step closer to Angel. “You should read it. “
Angel stares at Connor and at the letter in his hand. He doesn't really want to know what it says. Whatever it is will be something inconvenient or tragic or both and he's not really interested in watching the world end any more than it already has. But his mind is full up with memories of Willow as he takes a sword from his personal weapons case. He takes a crossbow, as well, and thinks of how much Buffy loved the contraption. And then he thinks of Willow again and pushing the doors to the Hyperion open with Gunn and Fred and Wesley and Cordelia behind him.
He takes the letter from Connor and stuffs it into the inner pocket of his coat. It burns a whole into his chest where it rests just over his heart.
*
Angel is supervising the relocation of a refugee camp near Sawtelle and Jefferson further west across the 405 freeway and away from the Holy Cross Cemetery when he finally removes the letter from the torn envelope. The light isn't very good, the sun well into setting. They've got to get the people out before full dark and Angel really doesn't have the time but he steps away from the bustle of the camp and reads the letter anyway.
It's brief and to the point, the brevity lending it somberness reminiscent of the day he returned from Pylea to find Willow waiting in the lobby of the hotel.
Angel--
Buffy is missing. I think she's headed in your direction. If she is, the other slayers will follow. She's deteriorating somehow. The spell to activate the Potentials has had unforeseen repercussions. The slayers are unstable. Dawn and Faith may be with her. Contact me if you find them.
Angel, be careful of them.
Willow
iii. in truth there is no better place to be than falling out of darkness still to see, December
The Slayers came when they were called, and as they rose, Buffy fell.
She fought while she could, when she had to, while she cared – sliding between light and shadow, the scythe's silvered blade flashing in the blue wash of moonglow. She danced with demons because that was what she was made to do. Ignored the ash that covered everything because if he were dead, she would know.
*
Buffy tries to hold the world together with her shaking hands, but it falls apart. There is nothing new about that. It’s always been her gentle, brittle bones propped between the world and the end, a fragile barrier when she had time to think of it, a terrifying weight when she had time to worry about it. Now she has the time, but not the worry because to worry requires that she care, and that part of her has been scattered to the four winds.
In the time between the world's imagined end and the reality of it, some eighteen months and one hundred miles later, Buffy has lost herself. Forgotten the contours of her face and the details of her reflection. She is broken and so is the Slayer line, the power disrupted. The truth of who she is bleeds out and flows back corrupted with other people’s truths.
They were separate once, but now they're not and neither is anyone else. Willow changed everything, damaged the spell that kept them apart, broke the binds that made Buffy who she was and Dawn and Kennedy and Faith and Rona. No one saw it coming. No one would have imagined it; key magic fucking everything up. Or maybe not, they didn't know enough about what they were doing in the first place--key magic, slayer magic, primordial demon magic. Stuff you don't mess with because there's always a price and the price is usually more than you would ever want to pay.
*
The City of Angels is in ruins, the Hyperion a shambles of mortar and ash. They are not quite in the heart of the storm, six miles northeast of what used to be Downtown, they are on its rim -- although once upon a time the end of the world happened here, too. Claw marks scour one side of the hotel and part of the roof has collapsed. The alley just behind the Hyperion is a mess of detritus, collapsed buildings and old cars half-melted together.
Buffy moves easily, but gingerly, presses her palm against the window and sighs at the sharp coolness of the glass. The world outside is bright with the fires the Slayers lit, but none of the heat reaches the hotel that now marks the most forbidding edge of the city. They brought magic when they came and now the area reeks of too much power. It’s a rolling, itchy, under-the-skin feeling that keeps most things out.
The new slayers never come this far, too busy living it up in the heart of the Hellmouth, killing and being killed.
It's the older slayers who creep close. They follow the siren song in the back of their minds to Buffy, in search of some missing, unrecognizable part of themselves. They push past the gates into the Jasmine heavy air only to die in the courtyard.
"Okay?" Buffy asks as Faith slinks back into the room they share.
"Five by five," Faith laughs, almost like her old self. "Baby sister in the lion's den. Lamb to the slaughter." She strips down to her panties, tossing her torn and bloodied dress into an empty corner before collapsing onto the bed.
Staring out the window, Buffy whispers to the Night-blooming Jasmine and the weeds in the courtyard. "Maybe not so five by five."
"Cestrum Nocternum," Dawn says absently from the chair beside the bed. Her feet rest on the pillow beside Faith's head as she lazily turns the pages of the book balanced on her knees.
Buffy blows gently on the glass and draws a heart in the fog of breath she leaves behind.
iv. can you tell me where we stand, March 2006
She is still standing at the window; it's her favorite place. She stares out at the remnants of the city glowing hazy red in the distance. The slayers find her easily; trail after her like ants to sugar, destroying everything in their path. It's in their genes, now, to fight and they scour the city raging and slaughtering.
Buffy waits at her window, watching the city's fever dream burn out the infection from a distance. The demon population at Ground Zero has been severely diminished, and one day someone will have to deal with the slayers, as well.
When Angel finally comes, she says to him, “I jumped, didn't I? I died.”
“Yes,” he tells her, easily, simply and Buffy can hear all the other words he does not say: Where have you been? Why are you here? Are you okay? Are you crazy?
Behind her, his presence is as familiar and steady as the heartbeat behind her breastbone. It's always been like this and it's why she's here, now, in this devastated city by the sea. In Angel's ruined and crumbling home.
"Buffy," he says and stops as if trying not to ask all the things he wants to all at once. "What's going on? I got a letter from Willow about six months ago and --"
Buffy turns, her hair flowing dark and long around her shoulders. It's the longest and darkest it's ever been while she still lived. "Whatever Willow says ... I wouldn't necessarily believe it." She drops her eyes. "Willow doesn't really know what she's doing."
He doesn't move, stands there waiting and Buffy wonders what Willow wrote in that letter. Not that it necessarily mattered. Sixth months is a long time and she’s been hiding in the sweet scented ruins of the Hyperion for four months.
The other slayers arrived a month after that. Angel couldn't have missed the carnage and the destruction they brought with them.
Buffy doesn't want to admit that they are her fault as much as they are Willow's. She hadn't known what she was doing, either. To be honest, she never had. Flew by the seat of her pants and did whatever she could to hold back the night. Angel had been part of the armor she wore, a promise she made to herself for being a good little girl and saving the world.
Of course it didn't take long for her to realize that slaying didn't work on a points system and she did not get to have what thought she deserved. Angel was at the top of the ever growing list of things she could not have followed by being voted Homecoming Queen, getting a college degree, and having her mother at the wedding she probably wouldn't ever have.
While she did have him, though, she wore him like a talisman, wrapped him around her like a coat, cuddled against his chest, his arms around her back, and her head on his shoulder. She wore his cross and his ring, and she doesn't always know if the memories are hers.
When she looks in the mirror, Buffy loses her face. She sees places that she's never been, falls in love, her heart swelling and breaking for people's she's never met. She dreams her death and the color of her hair is never the same. Looks down at her hands, sometimes armed, but most times completely unprepared, and they're never the same hands. She floats through faces and memories that are not her own, what she remembers of her life tangled with what she remembers of other lives she's never lived. But when Buffy closes her eyes and thinks of Angel everything narrows and focuses.
My people -- before I was changed -- they exchanged this as a sign of devotion. It's a claddagh ring. The hands represent friendship, the crown represents loyalty... and the heart...Well, you know... Wear it with the heart pointing towards you. It means you belong to somebody.
“A silver ring,” Buffy stares at his hand. The memory is clear and sharp. “A ring. Hands and a heart.”
“I gave you a claddagh ring,” Angel says, stepping closer to gently touch her face. “You gave it back.”
Buffy just barely feels the brush of his fingers against her cheek. What is more real is the rank of old blood and the rip of claws tearing suddenly through her back. Somewhere in the city, a slayer is dying. In Room 217 of the Hyperion Hotel, Buffy cries out at the pain, her knees buckle from the force of the phantom blow.
Angel slides in close against her, swallows her up with his arms and gently lowers her to the floor.
“We were married?” Buffy asks.
“No,” he says and tugs her closer; she still fits easily in the cradle of his body. "Buffy. Tell me what's happening."
Buffy shakes her head, her hair sliding over the leather sleeve of his coat. “I remember. I remember. There were bangles and I wore red.”
*
“Baldev says that there’s a law now.”
Dhara continued to break the bangles that had once adorned her daughter's wrists. Asha flinched at the sound, sharp and irrevocable.
“New Delhi is a long way away. Let them make their laws and keep them. We will make our own way,” Dhara said.
“But this is no one’s way,” Asha cried. “Sati is an archaic custom. No one does this.”
“We do,” her mother said. “The pyre is waiting. Do you go willingly?”
“Mother, I beg you. I do not wish to die.”
“Did you love your husband?”
“Yes, but – “
“Then do your duty.”
Asha shifted away from the hand her mother laid on her shoulder, it felt claustrophobic. “I will leave," she finally said. "I will go with the American."
Her mother’s eyes grew wide. “You will bring shame to your family."
“I will be a great warrior, Mother. I will dedicate myself to Durga. I will bring you honor. Mr. Harris says that I have been chosen. I loved my husband, but I am young. I do not wish to die with him.”
*
Buffy screams as a face with teeth and ridges and yellow mad dog eyes lunges towards her. She stares at Angel and through him, jerks against his arms curved around her back.
“Oh, God. You died,” she cries. “I was supposed to lie on the pyre, too, but I was so young.”
“Buffy, I don’t understand.” He smoothes her hair back from her forehead, rocks her gently against his chest.
She touches his face. “I broke my bangles,” she whispers. “I broke them the day that you died.”
*
Asha prays to the Mahadevi.
Her prayers are peppered with curses because this is not fair. She exchanged one pyre for another and has been unraveling ever since. Now she is being sacrificed on the altar of someone else’s mistake.
Asha screams and falls face down into a rancid, milky puddle in a dirty alley. She doesn’t feel anything, not anymore, but she can hear the crack of her spine and the wet, meaty sounds of the demon beginning to feed.
*
“That wasn’t me. It wasn’t us.” Angel’s hands on Buffy's face recall her, force her to remember who she is, who she was, that this is the world that they live in. She is not dying alone in an alley.
His hands also recall the world as it once was. The scent of him on her skin after hours cuddled in the dark, graveyard dirt clinging to her pants and the back of her jacket.
Buffy cannot recall the before without the after. She can’t remember the feel of his palms, calloused and over large against her face without remembering the solidness of his back beneath her boot heels and the shimmer of heat that snaked its way between her thighs as she stood over him.
The end is difficult to see from the beginning. The shape of it is a tease of possibility that seldom matches the tragic maze of reality. The ending of the world was never a given. It galloped to a point just this side of breaking and, inevitably, stopped. She stopped it.
What no one ever figured out was that the world was never meant to end, not really. What Buffy realizes now is that she is the thing that ended instead. She can feel the other girls ending, too.
They chase each other, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and everyone who came after. They are all searching for a way to save themselves, to recover what's been lost or preserve what’s left. They are broken, degraded. All things have a source, and the slayer well is nearly tapped dry. In desperation, Buffy clings to Angel, the way that she loves him, the only constant in her life since the bottom fell out of it.
Angel cradles her, kisses her forehead and whispers well-meaning lies into her hair. "Everything'll be fine," he says. "I'll take care of you."
v. without a premonition, could you tell me where to stand, October
Buffy tries to hold the world together in her head, with her mind. She pictures it as it should be, as it used to be -- sunlight and bright colors, night washed in the blue of moonglow. Staring into the mirror, at the reflection gazing back, she can see now how she's been thinking about this in all the wrong ways. That isn't the past and this isn't the present. Her memories of then and now fall like layers, one on top of the other and intertwined with memories of other people and other lives. If she could figure out a way to thread it all together, make it all make sense, perhaps the remembering wouldn’t drive her so very mad.
"One of these things is not like the other," Faith sings, her voice echoing against the icy bathroom tiles. There's no water in the tub, but she's naked anyway.
Buffy doesn't respond, doesn't blink, and doesn’t turn. She stares at the girl in the mirror, the girl with her eyes and her mouth, and she sees where the picture diverges. She sees where the world cracked and has been mended. She can see the alterations, the shortened hem, the extra seam along the waist. She presses her hand against the glass, feels the shiny smoothness and is surprised that it holds. Somehow, it would make more sense if it flowed and parted.
"Through the looking glass," she mutters and pulls her hand away. "I am so not Alice." She stares at the bruises beneath her eyes and the hollows in her cheeks. Her sunless hair is dark as the grave. "This definitely isn't Wonderland," she says and pinches her cheeks. She's a long way away from the girl she used to be, there is a world more of care in her haunted eyes. She's never been this broken before.
Faith, in the tub, pushes her big toe into the spigot that no longer runs water. Angel has arranged for what they needed to be hauled in from the Silver Lake Reservoir. "Who's that girl," she mutters dreamily.
"Yeah," Buffy says and reaches out to touch the mirror again. The surface of the mirror darkens, the room falls away and suddenly everything is heat and light and the stink of sulphur burns her throat and nose. She jerks and screams. Blinded by the clouds of thick black smoke curling upwards, she stumbles and falls. The crack of her ribs against the bath tub snatch Buffy back out of the nightmare of another dying Slayer. Cold, she thinks as pain lances up her side.
Faith places a hand against the back of Buffy's neck. "God, B," she says. "Gotta watch your step."
*
"My dead mother hits harder than that,” she said and fought like she never fought her mother.
Fist to face, knee to groin, stake in hand.
She wants to be golden-delicious, ripe like fruit. Never admits it, but she wants to be taken, bitten into, made vulnerable.
He sees that. Sees her achy girl parts. Maybe he can smell how needy she is. How she wants to be the one that everyone wants --petite, blonde, good, and clean like laundry washed in Dreft or Snuggle. She wants to be that sweet, cuddle me scent that people love to breathe in. She wants to be innocent. But no matter how much she tries she doesn't lay like that, doesn't fit like that, doesn't wear that face well.
Faith remembers touching the body, that body ... her body. Shaving the golden legs, soaping small, perky breasts. It's tangled up with how she remembers Riley's sweet, fresh peppermint kisses. She slept for hours in his golden arms, remembers waking up and seeing her hands -- tiny, golden, perfect -- and wanting to be someone she wasn't. Someone different, better, more beautiful.
What she only ever got for herself was Angel's demon face, his faux lover's face and still Buffy was there first. But he isn't as sweet or as fresh or as perfect as Riley. She will think that in the future as she contemplates the terrain of her life and the valley that Angel claims.
Riley is a far away mountain peak.
Angel is like her, like she was, dark. The flavor of their kisses was tangy with the blood on his shirt. It made her mad, bad and dangerous. It made her all of those things that Buffy wasn't because if she couldn't be Buffy then she would be the baddest Faith there ever was.
Until Joe Normal tangled everything up with his soft eyes and gentle hands and suddenly she knew what Buffy had with Angel because she could see it in Riley's eyes. Knew that B didn't deserve this GI-Joe-Captain-America with his ooey-gooey center. Knew that Buffy didn't love him back because in his eyes she saw what Buffy had only ever given to Angel.
The thought of that, the truth of it, makes Faith want to weep.
*
Crumpled against the tub, Buffy cries for them both.
*
“Don't bother,” Buffy brushes away Dawn's fussing, fluttering hands and cooing voice. She'd much rather get up off the cold, hard bathroom floor, but Dawn won't let her move.
“We really should bind them or I can do a healing spell,” Dawn says and presses against the purple blossoming beautifully across Buffy's rib cage.
“They'll heal soon enough,” Buffy pushes air between her teeth, hisses around the pain. She shivers in the cold. Her nipples are taut and at attention. Dawn flicks one gently as she presses once more against Buffy's bruised side.
“Dawn,” Buffy slaps the girl’s hands away.
Faith whimpers from her place in the bath tub. She keeps her head down and resting on her arms, crossed and covered with gooseflesh on the edge of the tub.
Dawn sighs, slides in close to Buffy to steal a little of her warmth. Buffy stares into Dawn's dark, starlit eyes.
“Your eyes have gotten so dark,” she says and reaches out.
Dawn presses in against Buffy's ribcage, licks across Buffy's lower lip and scoots closer.
Buffy lets her head fall back.
*
She'll heal fast enough -- always has, always will -- or at least until the spell that Willow cast leaches her of everything that makes her who she is -- key, girl, slayer-by-proxy.
Mystical, magical, crackerjack surprise all wrapped up in girlhood.
Only now the girly, cutie-honey, sweetie pie of her is fractured and broken, slipped and slipping more every day. Blue eyes gone black and they look in the mirror and Willow is reflected there. Willow as she once was, demon goddess, jacked up on dark magicks and the slightest wish of a thought would have sent Dawn back into the ether. Only Willow hadn't really meant to, hadn’t really wanted to, until they needed all the girls who could be, to be.
Soldiers. Potentials. Slayers.
But that had been the most tragic of mistakes.
Dawn remembers when she was thirteen and her silly, little girl brain was filled with thoughts of Xander. In her mind he was tall, dark, handsome and not as intimidating as Angel. Attainable, that's what Janice had said. Angel was just the opposite and how clichéd would it be to moon over her sister's slightly creepy older boyfriend. But at night, in the dark, under the covers, her hands on the rosebuds of her breasts as she breathed into her pillow and dreamed of broader shoulders and the slash of his mouth, it was okay.
Later, now, with the barrier between her and Buffy thin and opaque, Dawn can admit that it makes sense. She loves him because she has to love him. Because Buffy loves him and because he is the one thing that Buffy's heart cannot forget. The memory of him is deep in the marrow, loving him is in the rhythm of her heart beat and missing him is like breathing.
iv. remind us how we used to feel, before when life was real
Fresh out of the bath, Buffy stands in front of the mirror, naked and flushed. The bruised that curled across her rib cage has mostly faded except for a few swipes of yellow and green just beneath her breast.
She wipes her hand across the glass to remove the condensation and wishes that she could wipe away the fog in her head as easily. She stares at the reflection in the mirror, the bathroom is claustrophobic with steam and for a moment everything spins and she thinks that she might fall. She steadies herself with a hand against the sink. For a moment another girl stares out at her from the mirror. The girl has coffee colored skin and eyes the sweet, pale shade as almonds.
Buffy's face comes back to her and she can see it, touch it, raise her hand and watch the girl in the mirror do the same. She blinks again and another familiar unknown stares back at her with hard, jealous eyes so dark they're almost black.
The bathroom door slams hard against the wall and Buffy jumps at the sound, whirls around and shivers as the room loses all of its steam heat and suddenly she feels very foolish standing there without any clothes on and trying to catch a glimpse of her real face.
Connor stands in the doorway uneasily. He comes, when he can, when Angel is away.
“I called,” he says, a blush in his voice as he snatches up the towel draped across the edge of the tub and thrust it at her. He turns half away, her grasp on reality is tenuous at best and he knows better than to turn his back on her completely. “I called your name three times, but you didn't answer.”
Buffy knots the worn, knobby towel around herself. “Where's Angel?”
“Negotiating passage rights from Hancock Park to what's left of Santa Monica Blvd. Not that the other guy has much to bargain with. The demon population has been severely reduced since the slayers arrived.”
Buffy pushes past him into the chill of the bedroom. He follows her out. "It's more like a formality."
She doesn't see the room as Connor sees it. Doesn't see the dust on the furniture or the stains on the sheets. She doesn't see Dawn curled in the center of the bed or Faith in the corner by the night stand.
Buffy blinks and instead she sees Angel hunkered over her. Stares into his eyes as she tugs his shirt over his head. She remembers the thrust of his hips and the press of his belly against hers.
She blinks again and sees a crib and the room gutted by fire. Cordelia sits in a chair near the bed; her hair is cut short against her neck.
*
The contractions weren't as bad as she thought they would be, weren't as bad as they might have been, at least that much is true. Ruby isn’t sure if she believes everything else that they told her, but she has a baby on the way and no place else to go.
She is given a room of her own with a small bathroom. They tell her about how she was called and how the other girls in the house have been called as well. They are special, chosen. Slayers. They are stronger, better, faster than they were before.
Her baby would come quickly and easy, they said. Dr. Morgan tells her that her baby will be a boy and that he will be extraordinarily healthy.
Ruby hopes that he looks like his father and names him Owen Kristoffer, Jr.
The contractions, when they start, are a nagging ache in Ruby’s lower back. She doesn’t think much of them until her water breaks as she is climbing into bed. For a moment she is afraid they'll be angry about the bedspread. She calls out with the next contraction tightening around her back and across her belly.
The bedroom door creaks open and Julia, the perpetually smiling, laughing house mother and a slayer herself, she was already too old to do much good when she was called, stuck her graying head into the room. “Are you in labor,” her laughing face asks. “Is it time?”
Ruby nods her head and smiles back.
*
Connor is calling her name, shaking her with one hand and trying to keep the towel over her breasts with the other.
Buffy touches his face gently with the tips of her fingers. “Connor," she says. “You look so much like Dawn. It's like they knew.”
Connor tucks the edges of the towel tightly beneath her breast. He steers her towards the chair against the wall and forces her to sit. “Like who knew what?” he asks. She's grown cold in the chill of the room and he chafes her hands gently.
“The monks. How they knew about genes. You know, DNA and stuff like that.” She watches him closely, threads her hands through the hair falling across his forehead when he lets her go.
Connor brushes aside the caress as he reaches for a blanket lying discarded at the foot of the bed. He wraps the blanket around as much of her as he can, taking special care to cover her tiny feet.
“Oh, yeah? DNA, Biology was, like, tenth grade, I think.”
“Tenth grade?” She frowns down at him. “I don't remember that.” The crease on her brow deepens. “I should remember that. A good mother would remember that.”
Connor sits back on his heels to look up at her, his hands resting on his thighs. “Buffy – Buffy, you're not my mother.”
“Of course I am,” she says. “Angel was human once for a whole day.” She looks around the room, examines the walls and the carpet. “It wasn’t here. It was somewhere else – I can’t remember.”
*
“This is a dream. You're human for like a minute and already there's Cookie-dough-fudge-mint-chip in the fridge."
She licks ice cream off his chest and they make love for hours.
Later she tells him, “I want to stay awake so this day can keep happening."
He kisses her on the forehead tells her to go to sleep. He also tells her, “We'll make another one like it tomorrow.”
"Angel?” Her body is heavy with warmth and sleep. “This is the first time I ever really felt this way."
"What way?"
"Just like I've always wanted to. Like a normal girl, falling asleep in the arms of her normal boyfriend. It's perfect." She sighs into sleep, contented at last.
*
“I remember,” Buffy says, the look in her eyes incredibly soft. “After you were born, this is where we brought you.”
“He isn't your son.” Angel kneels beside her. He is holding her hand, running his thumb gently across her knuckles. “Buffy, he isn't yours. Darla ...” He doesn't say how once he fucked Darla like an animal in the bed across the room. She might already know and if she doesn't, then perhaps it's something better left unsaid.
Her smile widens and then crumples. She nods her head frantically. “He is. He is. He is. I remember. He's ours, Angel. From that day. I promised I wouldn’t forget.”
Angel sighs heavily. “Buffy,” he says.
Buffy curls forward, sobbing against the heaviness in her chest and the memory lodged behind her eyes. “I felt your heart beat.”
Angel scoops her up, taking her place in the chair and gently settling her onto his lap. He rocks her gently, pulls the blanket higher over her shoulder. Buffy inhales the familiar scent of him, relaxes into the memory of his body and how he was made just for her.
There are too many faces and too many memories and she doesn't recognize which ones belong to her. The sweetest ones, it would seem, are echoes of other people's lives. They are as anchored to him as they are to her because Buffy has named him True North. He is her referent and she thought if she could find him, she could find herself.
*
So, here she is, adding her sanity to the list of things she cannot have. In a time full of slayers propped between the world and the end, when happily ever after should be just within reach of her fingers, Buffy worries that one day not even Angel will be enough to call her back to herself. And there is only so much that a man, or a vampire, can do.
It was also a learning process. What I learned?
1. The creative process is a bitch. (like I didn't already know that, but I like to be reminded from time to time)
2. Google Maps is beautiful thing.
3. So is Google Docs.
4. SeeqPod is made of Awesome!!
Okay, so. Here we go. For better or worse.
Title: The Light Before We Land
Author: seraphcelene
Email: seraphcelene at yahoo dot com
Rating: G
A/N: A meandering, confused prequel to Thine is, Life is: Permalink and on LJ. Fic and section titles from The Light Before We Land by The Delgados. Many, many thanks to
tkp for helping me work through some ideas at five in the morning on her first night in L.A. Summary: The slayers came when they were called, and as they rose, Buffy fell.
i. things that once were beautiful, Los Angeles, Armageddon
The Sunnydale Quake of '03 was a blip on the map next to the sight of dragons over the steel and concrete L.A jungle. People scattered like rats or ants or cockroaches, hiding under beds and in closets, beneath desks, as if the shudder of the city was an earthquake and not the dragons settling on the skyscrapers perforating the skyline. Hiding didn't do any good, the dragons belching fire in great balls and angry gusts burned down the hideaways with the people still in them.
There wasn't much that a man or a vampire with a sword, double-edge and sharp though it may have been, could do in the face of such monstrousness. Although, later, the zoologists and the animal rights activists would declare the dragon’s animals and not monsters at all. They could not help their nature, and Our Lady of Angels was as good a place for them to roost as any other, despite those who knew better going on record about the presence of a Hellmouth beneath Downtown Los Angeles. Words were thrown around like harbingers and sentries to which they received responses like endangered and habitats. What everyone noticed, and felt better prepared to deal with, was their territoriality for which they all were grateful.
There wasn't much that a diminished god king could do either, besides slay hundreds, perhaps thousands, of its enemies. After the National Guard arrived and the other Armed Forces after that, after Special Forces and secret government organizations evacuated most of the civilian population and helped to stem the demon tide, Illyria disappeared. Armageddon was a human concern and the initial storm of grief for Wesley eventually passed.
The world did not end, not really.
The stubborn and the poor were mostly left behind.
Only a very small contingent of slayers arrived within the first forty-eight hours.
Martial Law and State of Emergency were mostly business as usual; Los Angeles has had its share of riots and natural disasters. It was the demon hordes that threw everyone for a loop and turned the town of migrants and dreamers into a permanent no-fly zone. Creeping four miles outward in all directions from what had once been the Financial District, was the worse demon infestation in recent history.
Angel is the same as ever, lonelier without Spike and Gunn, Wesley and Cordelia, but still fighting the good fight, and there are sections of the city, from La Cienega to the ocean, where the demons do not go.
ii. if we can hold on we can fix what is wrong, October 2005
"Mr. Angel. Sir."
Angel continues to study the sheaf of papers in his hand, reviewing the patrols scheduled to depart in two hours time. A map of the city is spread out over a heavy oak table covered with a sheet of clear plastic that has been shaded with colored pencil and black marker to designate the ever shifting territories and boundaries of the brave new world that Southern California has become. Occasionally, he checks the map against whatever is written on the papers and makes a note or two.
“Mr. Angel. Um, sir." The girl at the head of the table is no more than eighteen, if she's a day. Her smooth baby skin and wide pale eyes remind Angel of Dawn at fifteen. He can't see her hair tucked as it is beneath a cap against the rain. The brim drips water steadily. "My name is April Solomon. I've been sent by the W-W-Watcher's Council. I have—I have a letter from Willow Rosenberg.”
“I’m not interested,” he growls, glances at April briefly from the corner of his eye and then continues to mostly ignore her and the puddle of water spreading at her feet.
“It’s important,” she says, dragging the soaked cap from her head. Her hair is bright red and Angel wonders if she is eighteen after all. Based on looks alone, she could be anywhere from thirteen to sixteen, although he can't imagine Willow recruiting anyone so very young. “I was instructed to give –“
“Fuck your instructions. Fuck the Council. Fuck Willow Rosenberg.” Angel finally looks directly at April Solomon and the flustered young woman drops her gaze. She’s young, too young, he thinks, to have traveled this deep into The Hell alone. There’d been a recent resurgence of activity in the safety zone between La Cienega and Crenshaw as the Tor'a Dashe Clan tried to push its way into the airport and from there into the marina. They'd run into the solid wall of Angel, but the activity in the area coming up from LAX was still heavier than he liked.
He couldn't imagine how she had even gotten this far. Land travel from the East was too dangerous without an envoy and the only flights into LAX were forced to come in over the Pacific with a mandatory layover in Hawaii. Between the dragons and the Tor'a Dashe, all flights for the last month had been cancelled.
“I can’t spare an escort until after dawn," he says, finally turning away.
"But what about-- I can't just leave. I have to rendezvous with the slayers in the area and there's the letter—communication between The Hell and the rest of the world is almost nonexistent--" Foolishly, she says this as if he doesn’t know and her voice dies away as Angel turns his gaze back to her.
"The slayers are mostly dead. The ones left are out there, in the city," he says nodding towards the door behind her. "They aren't ... right ... anymore," he pauses, his thoughts turned inward and a muscle in his jaw jumps rhythmically. "You’re leaving in the morning. I'll take you down to the marina where it's safer. You'll stay there until you can get a flight out. You're not welcome in my city." He turns to the young man who has been standing at his side, holding his own sheaf of papers, checking the map and making notes. "Find her a place to sleep," Angel says, and the young man leads her from the room.
*
Later the young man with his red, red lips and cornflower blue eyes brings Angel the letter he coaxed from the hands of April Solomon. She's young and mostly inexperienced and very concerned with completing her very first really important mission. Maybe it isn't so important how it's accomplished so long as Angel gets the letter in the end.
“It’s important,” Connor says, handing Angel the letter.
Angel shrugs into his familiar black coat and stares at the letter, but does not take it. "It's open," he says.
Connor doesn't have the grace to blush or look uneasy. "Yeah," he says instead, the letter still extended. He takes a step closer to Angel. “You should read it. “
Angel stares at Connor and at the letter in his hand. He doesn't really want to know what it says. Whatever it is will be something inconvenient or tragic or both and he's not really interested in watching the world end any more than it already has. But his mind is full up with memories of Willow as he takes a sword from his personal weapons case. He takes a crossbow, as well, and thinks of how much Buffy loved the contraption. And then he thinks of Willow again and pushing the doors to the Hyperion open with Gunn and Fred and Wesley and Cordelia behind him.
He takes the letter from Connor and stuffs it into the inner pocket of his coat. It burns a whole into his chest where it rests just over his heart.
*
Angel is supervising the relocation of a refugee camp near Sawtelle and Jefferson further west across the 405 freeway and away from the Holy Cross Cemetery when he finally removes the letter from the torn envelope. The light isn't very good, the sun well into setting. They've got to get the people out before full dark and Angel really doesn't have the time but he steps away from the bustle of the camp and reads the letter anyway.
It's brief and to the point, the brevity lending it somberness reminiscent of the day he returned from Pylea to find Willow waiting in the lobby of the hotel.
Angel--
Buffy is missing. I think she's headed in your direction. If she is, the other slayers will follow. She's deteriorating somehow. The spell to activate the Potentials has had unforeseen repercussions. The slayers are unstable. Dawn and Faith may be with her. Contact me if you find them.
Angel, be careful of them.
Willow
iii. in truth there is no better place to be than falling out of darkness still to see, December
The Slayers came when they were called, and as they rose, Buffy fell.
She fought while she could, when she had to, while she cared – sliding between light and shadow, the scythe's silvered blade flashing in the blue wash of moonglow. She danced with demons because that was what she was made to do. Ignored the ash that covered everything because if he were dead, she would know.
*
Buffy tries to hold the world together with her shaking hands, but it falls apart. There is nothing new about that. It’s always been her gentle, brittle bones propped between the world and the end, a fragile barrier when she had time to think of it, a terrifying weight when she had time to worry about it. Now she has the time, but not the worry because to worry requires that she care, and that part of her has been scattered to the four winds.
In the time between the world's imagined end and the reality of it, some eighteen months and one hundred miles later, Buffy has lost herself. Forgotten the contours of her face and the details of her reflection. She is broken and so is the Slayer line, the power disrupted. The truth of who she is bleeds out and flows back corrupted with other people’s truths.
They were separate once, but now they're not and neither is anyone else. Willow changed everything, damaged the spell that kept them apart, broke the binds that made Buffy who she was and Dawn and Kennedy and Faith and Rona. No one saw it coming. No one would have imagined it; key magic fucking everything up. Or maybe not, they didn't know enough about what they were doing in the first place--key magic, slayer magic, primordial demon magic. Stuff you don't mess with because there's always a price and the price is usually more than you would ever want to pay.
*
The City of Angels is in ruins, the Hyperion a shambles of mortar and ash. They are not quite in the heart of the storm, six miles northeast of what used to be Downtown, they are on its rim -- although once upon a time the end of the world happened here, too. Claw marks scour one side of the hotel and part of the roof has collapsed. The alley just behind the Hyperion is a mess of detritus, collapsed buildings and old cars half-melted together.
Buffy moves easily, but gingerly, presses her palm against the window and sighs at the sharp coolness of the glass. The world outside is bright with the fires the Slayers lit, but none of the heat reaches the hotel that now marks the most forbidding edge of the city. They brought magic when they came and now the area reeks of too much power. It’s a rolling, itchy, under-the-skin feeling that keeps most things out.
The new slayers never come this far, too busy living it up in the heart of the Hellmouth, killing and being killed.
It's the older slayers who creep close. They follow the siren song in the back of their minds to Buffy, in search of some missing, unrecognizable part of themselves. They push past the gates into the Jasmine heavy air only to die in the courtyard.
"Okay?" Buffy asks as Faith slinks back into the room they share.
"Five by five," Faith laughs, almost like her old self. "Baby sister in the lion's den. Lamb to the slaughter." She strips down to her panties, tossing her torn and bloodied dress into an empty corner before collapsing onto the bed.
Staring out the window, Buffy whispers to the Night-blooming Jasmine and the weeds in the courtyard. "Maybe not so five by five."
"Cestrum Nocternum," Dawn says absently from the chair beside the bed. Her feet rest on the pillow beside Faith's head as she lazily turns the pages of the book balanced on her knees.
Buffy blows gently on the glass and draws a heart in the fog of breath she leaves behind.
iv. can you tell me where we stand, March 2006
She is still standing at the window; it's her favorite place. She stares out at the remnants of the city glowing hazy red in the distance. The slayers find her easily; trail after her like ants to sugar, destroying everything in their path. It's in their genes, now, to fight and they scour the city raging and slaughtering.
Buffy waits at her window, watching the city's fever dream burn out the infection from a distance. The demon population at Ground Zero has been severely diminished, and one day someone will have to deal with the slayers, as well.
When Angel finally comes, she says to him, “I jumped, didn't I? I died.”
“Yes,” he tells her, easily, simply and Buffy can hear all the other words he does not say: Where have you been? Why are you here? Are you okay? Are you crazy?
Behind her, his presence is as familiar and steady as the heartbeat behind her breastbone. It's always been like this and it's why she's here, now, in this devastated city by the sea. In Angel's ruined and crumbling home.
"Buffy," he says and stops as if trying not to ask all the things he wants to all at once. "What's going on? I got a letter from Willow about six months ago and --"
Buffy turns, her hair flowing dark and long around her shoulders. It's the longest and darkest it's ever been while she still lived. "Whatever Willow says ... I wouldn't necessarily believe it." She drops her eyes. "Willow doesn't really know what she's doing."
He doesn't move, stands there waiting and Buffy wonders what Willow wrote in that letter. Not that it necessarily mattered. Sixth months is a long time and she’s been hiding in the sweet scented ruins of the Hyperion for four months.
The other slayers arrived a month after that. Angel couldn't have missed the carnage and the destruction they brought with them.
Buffy doesn't want to admit that they are her fault as much as they are Willow's. She hadn't known what she was doing, either. To be honest, she never had. Flew by the seat of her pants and did whatever she could to hold back the night. Angel had been part of the armor she wore, a promise she made to herself for being a good little girl and saving the world.
Of course it didn't take long for her to realize that slaying didn't work on a points system and she did not get to have what thought she deserved. Angel was at the top of the ever growing list of things she could not have followed by being voted Homecoming Queen, getting a college degree, and having her mother at the wedding she probably wouldn't ever have.
While she did have him, though, she wore him like a talisman, wrapped him around her like a coat, cuddled against his chest, his arms around her back, and her head on his shoulder. She wore his cross and his ring, and she doesn't always know if the memories are hers.
When she looks in the mirror, Buffy loses her face. She sees places that she's never been, falls in love, her heart swelling and breaking for people's she's never met. She dreams her death and the color of her hair is never the same. Looks down at her hands, sometimes armed, but most times completely unprepared, and they're never the same hands. She floats through faces and memories that are not her own, what she remembers of her life tangled with what she remembers of other lives she's never lived. But when Buffy closes her eyes and thinks of Angel everything narrows and focuses.
My people -- before I was changed -- they exchanged this as a sign of devotion. It's a claddagh ring. The hands represent friendship, the crown represents loyalty... and the heart...Well, you know... Wear it with the heart pointing towards you. It means you belong to somebody.
“A silver ring,” Buffy stares at his hand. The memory is clear and sharp. “A ring. Hands and a heart.”
“I gave you a claddagh ring,” Angel says, stepping closer to gently touch her face. “You gave it back.”
Buffy just barely feels the brush of his fingers against her cheek. What is more real is the rank of old blood and the rip of claws tearing suddenly through her back. Somewhere in the city, a slayer is dying. In Room 217 of the Hyperion Hotel, Buffy cries out at the pain, her knees buckle from the force of the phantom blow.
Angel slides in close against her, swallows her up with his arms and gently lowers her to the floor.
“We were married?” Buffy asks.
“No,” he says and tugs her closer; she still fits easily in the cradle of his body. "Buffy. Tell me what's happening."
Buffy shakes her head, her hair sliding over the leather sleeve of his coat. “I remember. I remember. There were bangles and I wore red.”
*
“Baldev says that there’s a law now.”
Dhara continued to break the bangles that had once adorned her daughter's wrists. Asha flinched at the sound, sharp and irrevocable.
“New Delhi is a long way away. Let them make their laws and keep them. We will make our own way,” Dhara said.
“But this is no one’s way,” Asha cried. “Sati is an archaic custom. No one does this.”
“We do,” her mother said. “The pyre is waiting. Do you go willingly?”
“Mother, I beg you. I do not wish to die.”
“Did you love your husband?”
“Yes, but – “
“Then do your duty.”
Asha shifted away from the hand her mother laid on her shoulder, it felt claustrophobic. “I will leave," she finally said. "I will go with the American."
Her mother’s eyes grew wide. “You will bring shame to your family."
“I will be a great warrior, Mother. I will dedicate myself to Durga. I will bring you honor. Mr. Harris says that I have been chosen. I loved my husband, but I am young. I do not wish to die with him.”
*
Buffy screams as a face with teeth and ridges and yellow mad dog eyes lunges towards her. She stares at Angel and through him, jerks against his arms curved around her back.
“Oh, God. You died,” she cries. “I was supposed to lie on the pyre, too, but I was so young.”
“Buffy, I don’t understand.” He smoothes her hair back from her forehead, rocks her gently against his chest.
She touches his face. “I broke my bangles,” she whispers. “I broke them the day that you died.”
*
Asha prays to the Mahadevi.
Her prayers are peppered with curses because this is not fair. She exchanged one pyre for another and has been unraveling ever since. Now she is being sacrificed on the altar of someone else’s mistake.
Asha screams and falls face down into a rancid, milky puddle in a dirty alley. She doesn’t feel anything, not anymore, but she can hear the crack of her spine and the wet, meaty sounds of the demon beginning to feed.
*
“That wasn’t me. It wasn’t us.” Angel’s hands on Buffy's face recall her, force her to remember who she is, who she was, that this is the world that they live in. She is not dying alone in an alley.
His hands also recall the world as it once was. The scent of him on her skin after hours cuddled in the dark, graveyard dirt clinging to her pants and the back of her jacket.
Buffy cannot recall the before without the after. She can’t remember the feel of his palms, calloused and over large against her face without remembering the solidness of his back beneath her boot heels and the shimmer of heat that snaked its way between her thighs as she stood over him.
The end is difficult to see from the beginning. The shape of it is a tease of possibility that seldom matches the tragic maze of reality. The ending of the world was never a given. It galloped to a point just this side of breaking and, inevitably, stopped. She stopped it.
What no one ever figured out was that the world was never meant to end, not really. What Buffy realizes now is that she is the thing that ended instead. She can feel the other girls ending, too.
They chase each other, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and everyone who came after. They are all searching for a way to save themselves, to recover what's been lost or preserve what’s left. They are broken, degraded. All things have a source, and the slayer well is nearly tapped dry. In desperation, Buffy clings to Angel, the way that she loves him, the only constant in her life since the bottom fell out of it.
Angel cradles her, kisses her forehead and whispers well-meaning lies into her hair. "Everything'll be fine," he says. "I'll take care of you."
v. without a premonition, could you tell me where to stand, October
Buffy tries to hold the world together in her head, with her mind. She pictures it as it should be, as it used to be -- sunlight and bright colors, night washed in the blue of moonglow. Staring into the mirror, at the reflection gazing back, she can see now how she's been thinking about this in all the wrong ways. That isn't the past and this isn't the present. Her memories of then and now fall like layers, one on top of the other and intertwined with memories of other people and other lives. If she could figure out a way to thread it all together, make it all make sense, perhaps the remembering wouldn’t drive her so very mad.
"One of these things is not like the other," Faith sings, her voice echoing against the icy bathroom tiles. There's no water in the tub, but she's naked anyway.
Buffy doesn't respond, doesn't blink, and doesn’t turn. She stares at the girl in the mirror, the girl with her eyes and her mouth, and she sees where the picture diverges. She sees where the world cracked and has been mended. She can see the alterations, the shortened hem, the extra seam along the waist. She presses her hand against the glass, feels the shiny smoothness and is surprised that it holds. Somehow, it would make more sense if it flowed and parted.
"Through the looking glass," she mutters and pulls her hand away. "I am so not Alice." She stares at the bruises beneath her eyes and the hollows in her cheeks. Her sunless hair is dark as the grave. "This definitely isn't Wonderland," she says and pinches her cheeks. She's a long way away from the girl she used to be, there is a world more of care in her haunted eyes. She's never been this broken before.
Faith, in the tub, pushes her big toe into the spigot that no longer runs water. Angel has arranged for what they needed to be hauled in from the Silver Lake Reservoir. "Who's that girl," she mutters dreamily.
"Yeah," Buffy says and reaches out to touch the mirror again. The surface of the mirror darkens, the room falls away and suddenly everything is heat and light and the stink of sulphur burns her throat and nose. She jerks and screams. Blinded by the clouds of thick black smoke curling upwards, she stumbles and falls. The crack of her ribs against the bath tub snatch Buffy back out of the nightmare of another dying Slayer. Cold, she thinks as pain lances up her side.
Faith places a hand against the back of Buffy's neck. "God, B," she says. "Gotta watch your step."
*
"My dead mother hits harder than that,” she said and fought like she never fought her mother.
Fist to face, knee to groin, stake in hand.
She wants to be golden-delicious, ripe like fruit. Never admits it, but she wants to be taken, bitten into, made vulnerable.
He sees that. Sees her achy girl parts. Maybe he can smell how needy she is. How she wants to be the one that everyone wants --petite, blonde, good, and clean like laundry washed in Dreft or Snuggle. She wants to be that sweet, cuddle me scent that people love to breathe in. She wants to be innocent. But no matter how much she tries she doesn't lay like that, doesn't fit like that, doesn't wear that face well.
Faith remembers touching the body, that body ... her body. Shaving the golden legs, soaping small, perky breasts. It's tangled up with how she remembers Riley's sweet, fresh peppermint kisses. She slept for hours in his golden arms, remembers waking up and seeing her hands -- tiny, golden, perfect -- and wanting to be someone she wasn't. Someone different, better, more beautiful.
What she only ever got for herself was Angel's demon face, his faux lover's face and still Buffy was there first. But he isn't as sweet or as fresh or as perfect as Riley. She will think that in the future as she contemplates the terrain of her life and the valley that Angel claims.
Riley is a far away mountain peak.
Angel is like her, like she was, dark. The flavor of their kisses was tangy with the blood on his shirt. It made her mad, bad and dangerous. It made her all of those things that Buffy wasn't because if she couldn't be Buffy then she would be the baddest Faith there ever was.
Until Joe Normal tangled everything up with his soft eyes and gentle hands and suddenly she knew what Buffy had with Angel because she could see it in Riley's eyes. Knew that B didn't deserve this GI-Joe-Captain-America with his ooey-gooey center. Knew that Buffy didn't love him back because in his eyes she saw what Buffy had only ever given to Angel.
The thought of that, the truth of it, makes Faith want to weep.
*
Crumpled against the tub, Buffy cries for them both.
*
“Don't bother,” Buffy brushes away Dawn's fussing, fluttering hands and cooing voice. She'd much rather get up off the cold, hard bathroom floor, but Dawn won't let her move.
“We really should bind them or I can do a healing spell,” Dawn says and presses against the purple blossoming beautifully across Buffy's rib cage.
“They'll heal soon enough,” Buffy pushes air between her teeth, hisses around the pain. She shivers in the cold. Her nipples are taut and at attention. Dawn flicks one gently as she presses once more against Buffy's bruised side.
“Dawn,” Buffy slaps the girl’s hands away.
Faith whimpers from her place in the bath tub. She keeps her head down and resting on her arms, crossed and covered with gooseflesh on the edge of the tub.
Dawn sighs, slides in close to Buffy to steal a little of her warmth. Buffy stares into Dawn's dark, starlit eyes.
“Your eyes have gotten so dark,” she says and reaches out.
Dawn presses in against Buffy's ribcage, licks across Buffy's lower lip and scoots closer.
Buffy lets her head fall back.
*
She'll heal fast enough -- always has, always will -- or at least until the spell that Willow cast leaches her of everything that makes her who she is -- key, girl, slayer-by-proxy.
Mystical, magical, crackerjack surprise all wrapped up in girlhood.
Only now the girly, cutie-honey, sweetie pie of her is fractured and broken, slipped and slipping more every day. Blue eyes gone black and they look in the mirror and Willow is reflected there. Willow as she once was, demon goddess, jacked up on dark magicks and the slightest wish of a thought would have sent Dawn back into the ether. Only Willow hadn't really meant to, hadn’t really wanted to, until they needed all the girls who could be, to be.
Soldiers. Potentials. Slayers.
But that had been the most tragic of mistakes.
Dawn remembers when she was thirteen and her silly, little girl brain was filled with thoughts of Xander. In her mind he was tall, dark, handsome and not as intimidating as Angel. Attainable, that's what Janice had said. Angel was just the opposite and how clichéd would it be to moon over her sister's slightly creepy older boyfriend. But at night, in the dark, under the covers, her hands on the rosebuds of her breasts as she breathed into her pillow and dreamed of broader shoulders and the slash of his mouth, it was okay.
Later, now, with the barrier between her and Buffy thin and opaque, Dawn can admit that it makes sense. She loves him because she has to love him. Because Buffy loves him and because he is the one thing that Buffy's heart cannot forget. The memory of him is deep in the marrow, loving him is in the rhythm of her heart beat and missing him is like breathing.
iv. remind us how we used to feel, before when life was real
Fresh out of the bath, Buffy stands in front of the mirror, naked and flushed. The bruised that curled across her rib cage has mostly faded except for a few swipes of yellow and green just beneath her breast.
She wipes her hand across the glass to remove the condensation and wishes that she could wipe away the fog in her head as easily. She stares at the reflection in the mirror, the bathroom is claustrophobic with steam and for a moment everything spins and she thinks that she might fall. She steadies herself with a hand against the sink. For a moment another girl stares out at her from the mirror. The girl has coffee colored skin and eyes the sweet, pale shade as almonds.
Buffy's face comes back to her and she can see it, touch it, raise her hand and watch the girl in the mirror do the same. She blinks again and another familiar unknown stares back at her with hard, jealous eyes so dark they're almost black.
The bathroom door slams hard against the wall and Buffy jumps at the sound, whirls around and shivers as the room loses all of its steam heat and suddenly she feels very foolish standing there without any clothes on and trying to catch a glimpse of her real face.
Connor stands in the doorway uneasily. He comes, when he can, when Angel is away.
“I called,” he says, a blush in his voice as he snatches up the towel draped across the edge of the tub and thrust it at her. He turns half away, her grasp on reality is tenuous at best and he knows better than to turn his back on her completely. “I called your name three times, but you didn't answer.”
Buffy knots the worn, knobby towel around herself. “Where's Angel?”
“Negotiating passage rights from Hancock Park to what's left of Santa Monica Blvd. Not that the other guy has much to bargain with. The demon population has been severely reduced since the slayers arrived.”
Buffy pushes past him into the chill of the bedroom. He follows her out. "It's more like a formality."
She doesn't see the room as Connor sees it. Doesn't see the dust on the furniture or the stains on the sheets. She doesn't see Dawn curled in the center of the bed or Faith in the corner by the night stand.
Buffy blinks and instead she sees Angel hunkered over her. Stares into his eyes as she tugs his shirt over his head. She remembers the thrust of his hips and the press of his belly against hers.
She blinks again and sees a crib and the room gutted by fire. Cordelia sits in a chair near the bed; her hair is cut short against her neck.
*
The contractions weren't as bad as she thought they would be, weren't as bad as they might have been, at least that much is true. Ruby isn’t sure if she believes everything else that they told her, but she has a baby on the way and no place else to go.
She is given a room of her own with a small bathroom. They tell her about how she was called and how the other girls in the house have been called as well. They are special, chosen. Slayers. They are stronger, better, faster than they were before.
Her baby would come quickly and easy, they said. Dr. Morgan tells her that her baby will be a boy and that he will be extraordinarily healthy.
Ruby hopes that he looks like his father and names him Owen Kristoffer, Jr.
The contractions, when they start, are a nagging ache in Ruby’s lower back. She doesn’t think much of them until her water breaks as she is climbing into bed. For a moment she is afraid they'll be angry about the bedspread. She calls out with the next contraction tightening around her back and across her belly.
The bedroom door creaks open and Julia, the perpetually smiling, laughing house mother and a slayer herself, she was already too old to do much good when she was called, stuck her graying head into the room. “Are you in labor,” her laughing face asks. “Is it time?”
Ruby nods her head and smiles back.
*
Connor is calling her name, shaking her with one hand and trying to keep the towel over her breasts with the other.
Buffy touches his face gently with the tips of her fingers. “Connor," she says. “You look so much like Dawn. It's like they knew.”
Connor tucks the edges of the towel tightly beneath her breast. He steers her towards the chair against the wall and forces her to sit. “Like who knew what?” he asks. She's grown cold in the chill of the room and he chafes her hands gently.
“The monks. How they knew about genes. You know, DNA and stuff like that.” She watches him closely, threads her hands through the hair falling across his forehead when he lets her go.
Connor brushes aside the caress as he reaches for a blanket lying discarded at the foot of the bed. He wraps the blanket around as much of her as he can, taking special care to cover her tiny feet.
“Oh, yeah? DNA, Biology was, like, tenth grade, I think.”
“Tenth grade?” She frowns down at him. “I don't remember that.” The crease on her brow deepens. “I should remember that. A good mother would remember that.”
Connor sits back on his heels to look up at her, his hands resting on his thighs. “Buffy – Buffy, you're not my mother.”
“Of course I am,” she says. “Angel was human once for a whole day.” She looks around the room, examines the walls and the carpet. “It wasn’t here. It was somewhere else – I can’t remember.”
*
“This is a dream. You're human for like a minute and already there's Cookie-dough-fudge-mint-chip in the fridge."
She licks ice cream off his chest and they make love for hours.
Later she tells him, “I want to stay awake so this day can keep happening."
He kisses her on the forehead tells her to go to sleep. He also tells her, “We'll make another one like it tomorrow.”
"Angel?” Her body is heavy with warmth and sleep. “This is the first time I ever really felt this way."
"What way?"
"Just like I've always wanted to. Like a normal girl, falling asleep in the arms of her normal boyfriend. It's perfect." She sighs into sleep, contented at last.
*
“I remember,” Buffy says, the look in her eyes incredibly soft. “After you were born, this is where we brought you.”
“He isn't your son.” Angel kneels beside her. He is holding her hand, running his thumb gently across her knuckles. “Buffy, he isn't yours. Darla ...” He doesn't say how once he fucked Darla like an animal in the bed across the room. She might already know and if she doesn't, then perhaps it's something better left unsaid.
Her smile widens and then crumples. She nods her head frantically. “He is. He is. He is. I remember. He's ours, Angel. From that day. I promised I wouldn’t forget.”
Angel sighs heavily. “Buffy,” he says.
Buffy curls forward, sobbing against the heaviness in her chest and the memory lodged behind her eyes. “I felt your heart beat.”
Angel scoops her up, taking her place in the chair and gently settling her onto his lap. He rocks her gently, pulls the blanket higher over her shoulder. Buffy inhales the familiar scent of him, relaxes into the memory of his body and how he was made just for her.
There are too many faces and too many memories and she doesn't recognize which ones belong to her. The sweetest ones, it would seem, are echoes of other people's lives. They are as anchored to him as they are to her because Buffy has named him True North. He is her referent and she thought if she could find him, she could find herself.
*
So, here she is, adding her sanity to the list of things she cannot have. In a time full of slayers propped between the world and the end, when happily ever after should be just within reach of her fingers, Buffy worries that one day not even Angel will be enough to call her back to herself. And there is only so much that a man, or a vampire, can do.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2007-12-02 04:18 pm (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2007-12-02 11:20 pm (UTC)From:The Light Before we Land is an awesome song, as well, if you ever get a chance to hear it.
no subject
Date: 2007-12-03 11:48 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2007-12-04 01:57 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2007-12-07 06:25 pm (UTC)From:There is so much to love here - Buffy seeing Angel as her anchor although in the end, he can't save either of them. The lives of all the slayers bleeding together and driving Buffy mad. Faith thinking about Buffy and Angel and Riley and finally understanding Buffy's feeling fir Angel via Riley.
What no one ever figured out was that the world was never meant to end, not really. What Buffy realizes now is that she is the thing that ended instead. She can feel the other girls ending, too.
Just amazing.
no subject
Date: 2007-12-10 05:54 am (UTC)From:But really, thanks for commenting and for reading it! It was so late! OMG!