23. Promoted
Buffy leaned her head back against the cave wall, turning the flask to and fro in her hands.
Tired. She was so insanely tired, the kind of tired that sleep never cured, the kind that crashed back down on you in the morning. Those first blissful five seconds when all you knew was pillow is yay, and then it hit you: who you were. Who you'd lose next. Who you'd already lost.
Every Slayer has a death wish.
She'd hit her expiration date and stayed in the fridge, getting paler and losing flavor, conviction and fire seeping out of her, leaving the world a fuzzy grey place without boundaries, everything blurring together, days and weeks and people and apocalypses. Time for her to be thrown out and replaced with some nice fresh fifteen-year-old, plump-cheeked and eager for the thrill of the hunt.
She'd been replaced but not thrown out, and the feeling of being used up remained.
She'd filled her time, filled her days, sinking deeper and deeper into her own head, grown comfortable there; people buzzed around her making annoying noises, wanting things from her she no longer knew how to provide. Enthusiasm. Empathy. Passion. To help her, to try to give her what she wanted.
Buffy knew exactly what she wanted.
She wanted to be lying facedown, naked, on the bed in Spike's crypt in Sunnydale, with the fluffier of his two pillows wedged underneath her head and the flatter elevating one leg. She wanted him sitting next to her, propped up against the headboard, barefoot, wearing only his jeans, his hair all rumpled. She wanted a book in his right hand and a beer bottle in his left, curling the beer to his chest the way he did, the ring on his index finger clinking against the glass, his lips worrying absently with the tip as he read. Orally fixated. So with the orally fixated.
And she wanted to watch him read, periodically stretching against the softness of his sheets, wanted to perv over the gorgeousness of his fingers curled around his beer, wanted to contemplate fixing his chipping nail polish, wanted to decide she felt just too damned lazy and comfortable for that right now. Wanted to let out a little sigh of contentment, wanted him to shoot her an amused look over the top of the book.
Wanted him to occasionally let out a derisive snort at his reading, let out a snarky comment she could snark right back to, meeting his eyes for just a moment, a shared smile.
It had never happened. Oh, every part of it had; bed-nakedness, watching him read, watching him chew on a bottle-tip, mutual snark, mutual silence... Lego pieces she'd constructed this fantasy from. It was where she imagined herself at night when she tried to sleep; her happy place, a world that she wove around whatever bed she was actually in.
Spike was a terrible, horrible, catastrophic match for the person she wanted to be: the brave, stalwart Slayer, certain in her righteousness, chooser of the right path and the high road, perfect and noble and together and on top of it and normal and pure. That girl should never be with Spike, should have dusted Spike on sight and rejoiced in ridding the world of evil.
The thing was... Spike was a pretty fantastic match for the person she actually was, confused and prickly and sarcastic and hopelessly undomestic with a secret abhorrance for small children and most people, violent and kinky and possessive and stubborn and vain.
She looked at Spike and she saw herself, and it terrified her that the Scoobies hated him, like he was a canary she'd sent down into their mine shaft that had croaked in five seconds. There but for the fakeness of me go I.
So she'd kicked him away and distanced herself and oh, he's evil evil evil evil and I am not not not. He'd said she belonged in the shadows with him, and it had terrified her because so much of her wanted to go; he'd tried to force himself on her and all she'd been able to see was her own face, her own heart, her own pain shining through his eyes, the feelings, the potential within her that had caused a ghost to choose her four years before...
Then tell me you don't love me! Say it!
Don't walk away from me, bitch!
The gun in her hand, the desperation that had been the ghost's and her own, the words that weren't hers but spoke for her, the way something inside her had rejoiced as the bullet tore through Angelus even as James was keening in sorrow.
She didn't want to be the person who needed Spike, didn't want to be the one who silently laughed at his jokes, who secretly thought he had a point a lot of the time, didn't want to be the kind of girl who loved the way alcohol tasted on his lips and coursed with feminine power when she made his eyes roll back in his head and his back arch and reduced that wiseass, delicious mouth to babbling curse words and her name in a mindless stream.
Didn't want to be the girl who got turned on by killing things, who got turned on watching Spike kill things, the girl who'd really, really wanted to dance, the girl with a secret appetite for mayhem that had been unleashed with an invisibility ray, the girl who felt soul-sick and horrible for the things Righteous Slayer Girl had done, like beat him to a pulp in an alley and blow up his crypt.
She couldn't even blame her half-a-soul for it; the other half of her soul, code-named Dawn, loved Spike too... maybe even more, certainly loved him differently, loved him without reservation, loved him felonious and snarky and creeping into coal-bins, loved him because he told blunt painful truths and didn't see any problem with helping a fourteen-year-old commit breaking and entering.
God. Dawn. Not just her blood; she was her. Right down to the very last
You're not from Bullock's, are you? 'Cause I-I meant to pay for that lipstick...
dirty little detail, minus one overwhelming case of Slayeritis.
Trying to be what Giles wanted, what Willow expected, what Xander demanded.
Trying to be the blank, blonde mirror that Angel could see his redemption in.
What was she to Angel?
What was Angel to her?
For years, she'd had a perverse desire to run to Angel and tell him everything. As much as Righteous Slayer Girl had wanted to hide it, had wanted to be the girl in the white dress, another part of her had wanted to throw it all in his face, every last little dirty bit of it.
Hey, Angel? Guess what? I made Dawn's social worker lose her job so no one would find out how bad Dawn's home life was. Do you love me now? Part of me didn't want to stop Willow from ending the world! Do you love me now? When Xander tries to sneak peeks down my shirt, sometimes I bend over and give him a better look! Do you love me now?
When I dropped burgers on the floor, I'd put them right back on the buns if the customers were assholes! Do you love me now? I'm happy that Willow is cheating on Kennedy, because Kennedy annoys the shit out of me and I want them to break up! Do you love me now? I think about shipping Dawn off to Dad at least once a day! Do you love me now?
I made Spike screw me next to a dumpster at the DoubleMeat Palace and I got off on how sleazy it was! Do you love me now? I used to beg him to bite me and he wouldn't do it! Do you love me now? I used to pretend Riley was Spike in bed! Do you love me now?
Did you ever love me, or did you just love the idea that the Champion of Good could love you?
Would you still love me if you had the slightest idea who I really was?
Would anyone love me?
Anyone besides Spike?
Did Spike even still love her? He'd asked Andrew not to tell her he was alive, he'd come to Rome without seeing her, he'd run off with Goth Stormtrooper Slut instead of even saying hello, he'd made no attempt to join them here, he'd hung up when Angel passed the phone to her, he hadn't contacted anyone since.
"I have not even the tiniest clue what I'm doing," Buffy said out loud, experimentally. It bounced around the cavern a bit, and no one screamed in horror.
Angel was human. That should -- that ought to mean something, right? First love, soulmate, getting the ultimate thing that would let them be together, the dream come true?
So why couldn't she stop thinking about Spike?
So why had Angel run off like someone had cattle-prodded him when Cordelia called?
And why did that bother her more for Faith than it did for herself?
And who the hell was Nina?
And why was it that looking at Angel now filled her with a rush of love... the same way looking at Xander did?
Angel was heroic. Hot. Smart. Funny. God, she'd forgotten how funny he was, those little dry comments, the head-shake, the lip-twitches. It was so good to see him, so great to work with him again, so nice to have him around, so comforting to have laid next to him...
But.
Kissing him? That had been... weird, even weirder than their "hello" from before. Not bad, not at all... it had been comforting, familiar, and he was a good kisser... but it had lacked the desperate sweetness they'd had before, lacked the rush and the desire and the need, and she had really thought she'd heard relief in his voice when she'd pretended to fall asleep.
So... what? Where did that leave her? I mean, technically she was still dating the
(Spike-Bot)
... Immortal, but...
What the hell had Gunn meant when he'd said Spike loved Fred? Loved like puppies? Loved like buddies? Or loved in the kind of way that sent chandeliers crashing to the ground?
And what was that little offhand crack Angel had made about Spike and Harmony?
What was she supposed to do now? Hang around outside his window chain-smoking? Build a little shrine in her basement? Tie Angel to a pole and threaten to stake him?
And what was up with this prophecy thing? She'd never told anyone about the extra-flameys when she'd said goodbye to Spike, and hello -- he definitely had a soul, she'd seen it eat him alive and torture him and round off his edges and make him quiet and give him stupid ideas like have you hugged a cross today? and huh, I think I'll move right on top of the hellmouth and eat me some rats.
Why the hell wasn't he here? Even when she'd hated him, he'd always come back, there wasn't any getting rid of him... until she needed him, until she desperately wanted to talk to him and... other things, until she could barely keep herself in the cave for the wanting to steal the freakin' schoolbus and drive through California until she found him and could give him the swift kick to the groin he so richly deserved for not being here.
He'd known she had half a soul. Had known for years.
I've given you everything that I have, I've given you my heart, my body and soul!
You say that, but I don't feel it. I just don't feel it.
Had he... had he realized that she didn't have enough soul for him? The way Spike loved...
Great love is wild and passionate and dangerous. It burns and consumes...
Maybe the soul had cured him of his whole in-love-with-pain thing. Maybe he'd realized that Buffy didn't, couldn't, love him the way he'd loved her.
Maybe he'd found someone who could, someone with a whole soul. She'd told him he couldn't love without one; did that mean that she could only half-love?
Why did she have to think? Why couldn't things just be simple? Something nasty shows up, Scoobies make with the library books, tell her what to kill, she kills it. Easy. Straightforward. Buffy good, beasties bad, Xander gets the donuts, yay.
Easy, straightforward, and didn't work with anything else, no matter how many times she tried to apply the principle.
She just wanted to be... a force. A weapon. Point her at something, let her slay and quip until the bad thing was dead. Not so much with the decision-making and the philosophy of evil and the hard choices and the sacrifices.
"Buffy?"
She came out of her reverie with a start. "Hey, Xan."
"I can't believe that these words are actually coming from my lips, but Cordelia's called a war meeting. One of her freaky vision-things."
Buffy stood, wiping dust off her thighs. "Another meeting. Led by Cordelia. Wow. My enthusiasm knows all bounds."
"Buffy, I..." Xander took a deep breath. "I thought maybe you'd... want a minute before the meeting. 'Cause something kinda... appeared, and it looks like we've got word on Spike. Well, not so much word as, uh... well... here."
Xander pulled a small white square from his pocket.
"What's this?"
"It's a picture. Special magical delivery, woo-hoo. Part of a greater, um, ransom-demanding package. They weren't gonna show it to you, but... I thought... well. Anyway, I swiped it. Buffy... it's from Drusilla."
"Drusilla," Buffy repeated, something cold and icy travelling up her spine.
Xander held out the photograph, and Buffy raised it to her face.
Oh, God.
Oh, God.
The Mary Magdalenes to your Jesuses...
Buffy made a low, choking sound in her throat.
"Looks like he got promoted," she whispered.