Time Travel for Pedestrians
By kalima
She was probably sitting in an uncomfortable plastic chair, drinking horrible coffee this very moment.
Anya couldn't have left the Magic Box, anyway. Not on a Saturday. And though he looked like a perfectly nice old man, she felt it her duty to assure all those potential customers who hadn't come into the shop because of the ambulance parked outside, that his collapse was in no way the result of any goods and services available at her establishment. Besides, Dawn was supposed to meet Buffy before closing, so there was another perfectly good reason not to go to the hospital.
Still, she couldn't help thinking about hospitals. About the last time she'd been in one. The night Buffy died. Everything that night had been huge and tragic. Tragic, but resolved somehow. Finished. Or so she'd thought at the time. The hospital was a comforting place to be. People bustling around, their entire purpose to tend to her injuries and make her better. Doctors talking in quiet voices full of reassuring authority. Nurses wearing cheerful kitten-print scrubs saying, "sshh, sshh, honey you're gonna be okay." She'd spent two nights in a bed with her feet tucked into hospital corners. She liked it. She'd felt safe for the first time in so long that she didn't even recognize the feeling at first. She'd just cried and cried, clutching her engagement ring so hard it left an imprint in her palm that didn't go away for almost a week.
Xander hated hospital corners. Especially not on his – no – their bed. He squirmed and kicked and growled in frustration until he'd freed the sheets from their moorings. He said hospital corners were a form of torture.
"If you weren't gay now," Anya asked, the moment Willow entered the shop, "and you had a boyfriend or husband who betrayed you or abused you in some horrible way, and I was still a vengeance demon righting the wrongs done to women, would you consider having your husband or boyfriend forced to sleep in a bed with hospital corners sufficient torture for whatever abuses you'd suffered at his hand?"
Willow blinked at her like Cindy-Lou Who at a Grinchy Santa. "No? Um. Wait. What now?"
"Xander doesn't see the need to make the bed every morning when we'll just be messing it up again at night."
"So … what? You think this is a sign of abusive behavior?"
"No. Merely annoying. I like to keep a tidy house."
"Of course you do."
"You're being condescending, aren't you? Dismissive."
Willow's cheeks reddened, but she didn't look contrite at all.
"Why is it that any behavior I exhibit, no matter how ordinary, is held up as an example of how far I am from being a suitably socialized human being?"
"Sorry?"
"I say I like to keep a tidy house. Plenty of people do. Who aren't demons. In fact, most demons prefer a certain amount of filth. Even vampires. Except Spike lately, but I don't hear anyone saying, oh Spike has decorated his crypt all House Beautiful, he must surely be up to something evil. Okay – Xander says that. And a lot of other things about closets and latent homosexuality. But, I'm not Spike! I'm not a soulless vampire. I'm human. So why does my lack of interest in filth make you comment on it in that particular tone of voice? Like 'of course you do. You were a vengeance demon for a thousand years.' It makes me mad. And it hurts my feelings."
Willow's mouth opened and closed a couple of times, her lower lip wobbling even as her chin thrust out in stubborn denial. She looked down at her hands, twitching and twisting together, and Anya could see the shudders ripple through her body beneath the ugly vintage poncho. She looked up again, and seemed stunned by whatever she was feeling. "Anya…I – you're right. I'm sorry. It's not – "
She shivered again. Oddly, so did Anya. It was the kind of shiver that felt good though, like muscles finally letting go of tension under the hands of a skilled massage therapist. Suddenly, she could see millions of tiny dust motes dancing in a wash of cool afternoon sunlight. Which is when they both realized the door was open. They hadn't heard the jangle.
"Tara," Willow said. Anya could hear the shout of jubilation in the witch's voice even though her voice was barely above a breathy whisper.
"Hi," Tara said. She looked… well, she looked beautiful. Her hair was windblown and her cheeks were rosy. And she was dressed really nice, not frumpy at all like she had been since she'd left Willow. Victorian style jacket in deep red, with a pink silk corsage pinned over her breast. Her skirt was midnight blue velvet with a deep flounce below her knees. And she was wearing boots in a buttery suede color. She wasn't smiling with her mouth, but with her entire body.
"Wow," Willow stammered, "you look – "
Anya would have said radiant, or fantastic, or transformed, or so like her true self that the guise she'd worn previously would be completely unrecognizable now.
"—great," Willow finished lamely.
"Thanks." No stutter, no hair falling over a shy averted gaze. No obligatory reciprocation either.
"What are you doing here? I mean, I didn't expect to, you know—"
"Oh!" Anya squeaked. "Oh, I forgot. Sorry. There was an old man who had a heart attack earlier. I haven't set up the table yet."
To Willow's querulous, anxious expression, Tara explained, "I still do readings on Saturdays. Is he all right? The old man?"
"Buffy's at the hospital with him right now. He was coming to see her, I think. She met him a few days ago. Used to be a Watcher. I'm sure she'll fill us in when she gets back."
"How are you?" Tara asked.
"Well, I can't get the legs of this table to fold out – oh. You were asking Willow."
"Wait, Anya, I'll come help you in a minute."
"That's okay." Willow's voice was way too chirpy, almost brittle. "I was just on my way out. I have this meeting. and I've scheduled lab time at school and – oh gosh, look at the time. Late. Gotta go."
Anya came out as the shop door was closing. She watched Willow hurrying across the street, poncho flapping like bat's wings. She looked at Tara. "Your aura is very pretty today. Should be good for business."
"Well, my palm itched like crazy this morning."
Anya clapped her hands in joy. "Goody! I'll light some incense."
In a dank, dark lair in the bowels of the city, the evil vampire lay in the unnatural repose of his kind. His sheets were Egyptian cotton the color of old blood ("garnet" in the catalogue,) and his duvet was stuffed with the fluffy sacrificial down of a thousand innocent goslings.
He dreamt of herding humans into a pen. Whilst on a bicycle. To the tune of Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head. It was not his favorite song – far from it. In fact, the part of his dreaming mind in charge of things like props and soundtracks was cringing in mortification. The humans were milling about, completely ignoring his efforts to impose his will upon them, laughing and talking, taking their own sweet time about getting into the pen. The sharp trill from his whistle garnered no more than annoyed glances. He circled them, tires slipping in the gravel. They saw his genuine ferocity as bombastic façade, a mask behind which there was nothing at all. It wasn't true, but he had no way to prove it, and he felt this frantic despair tight in his throat, his chest. The closer he tried to close in on them, the farther away he seemed to be. He blew high and shrill on the whistle over and over again, until finally the only sound that came out was a low muffled creaking. A creaking that seemed to come from a great distance, far away and high above his head --
Eyelids shuttered over a fading, really lame nightmare, Spike stuck his nose out of the nest of bedding, and gave a sniff. "Bloody hell," he moaned and pulled the covers over his head again. Bad enough Buffy felt she could burst in on him anytime she liked, but this was beyond the pale.
He maintained this pretense of death-like slumber, ignoring the monster galumphing down the ladder who kept repeating his name, softly at first, then louder and louder. I'm dead, you wanker, not deaf. But it wasn't until the idiot had the gall to poke him in the ribs that he lost it.
Spike surged up, roaring – a threat marred by the tangle of sheets impeding his forward momentum. Seconds passed before he'd freed his arms and legs enough to launch himself from the bed, hands targeting Xander's throat.
Xander spared Spike one hellish headache by neatly dodging the attack.. Okay. Good. Still amongst the living dead, but – "Holy Schmoley! You're buck naked!"
A flash of actual embarrassment before the return of Spike's trademark in-your-face nonchalance about things like evil and full frontal nudity. "Yeah. 'Cause that's how I sleep. In my own bed, in my own fucking home!"
"Technically? You're a squatter in someone else's eternal resting place," Xander said. He was carefully looking at anything that didn't happen to be Spike's dangling man parts. Peripherally he saw Spike snatch his jeans from the floor, heard the jangle of belt buckle, and the snakeskin rasp of denim jerked angrily over flesh.
"Hardly seems fitting," Spike was saying, his voice tense and raspy as his denim, "you lot walking into my home anytime you like, and me having to be invited into yours."
"Nature balancing the scales, pal. This way us weak, puny mortals have a chance to catch you in your death-like slumber and do the whole staking beheading thing. Which – gotta say - I prefer to catching you … exercising. In that special way."
"How many times I have to tell you? Wasn't having a toss."
"Whatever, dude."
"Might as well have been," Spike muttered.
"Huh?"
"Nothing." He crawled back into bed with his pants on and drew the wad of bedding over his head.
The guy was acting the kind of weird of late that was harder and harder to ignore. He was either going to explode in a frenzy of deadly violence like some disgruntled employee, or start sporting a soul patch. Spike definitely needed a girlfriend. A nice evil girl who shared his values. Spike and girl X in front of a roaring fire, waxing poetic about the joys of concealed weapons over goblets of blood—
A pale muscular arm ventured out and reached unerringly for cigarette pack and lighter on the bedside table. Apparently oblivious to the dangerous combination of hair product, goose down and fire, Spike lit a cigarette from inside his cave of comforter and proceeded to send out smoke signals in the form of genie clouds and perfectly formed rings. Xander watched, fascinated and a tad envious, until Spike's muffled voice asked, "What do you want?"
Good question. In reply, he pulled out his brand new blue Funny Fun ball and lobbed it at a pillar. Flashing lights went pop, pow, and kablooey. Yes, he thought, with mean satisfaction, the blue ones are way cooler than green. A fact he was certain of, now that Spike had uncovered his head, and was sitting up, scowling at it. Very nearly a pout, in fact.
"Mum says I can't come out and play. It's my nap time."
"You're just jealous. Anyway, not why I'm here."
"Why the hell are you here?"
It was hard to stop playing with the ball once you got started. "Wanted to find out how it went last night. With the thing."
"Thing."
"You know. The thing. And the possible more things. Last night."
"Said I'd take care of it, didn't I?"
"Yup. Give you any trouble then?"
Spike's hesitation was enough to draw Xander's attention away from the ball. He had to scramble to catch it before it went under a chair.
"What d'you care? Mostly dead anyway. On account of you hitting it with a ton of car."
Xander slammed the ball onto the floor to see how wild and high it would go. "I care because — Hoo, yeah! Nice catch, me. Damn. I love this thing! It's like I'm a god playing with a tiny blue galaxy."
"Yeah. All hail Xander, god of funny fun. Take it outside."
"In a sec. What about that empty lot? Did you get a chance to check it out?"
Spike took a long pull on the cigarette, in a way that only a vampire or an aging truck stop waitress could. "I didn't. See anything. Now, will there be anything else or can I return to wallowing in the empty wasteland that is my immortal existence?"
"Man. You have got to lay off the Ingmar Bergman flicks."
"Fuck off," Spike replied, listlessly.
"Okay. Fine. Didn't want to have to do this, but—" Xander extracted the crumpled, slightly grimy, slightly lint-covered envelope from the depths of his jacket, and spun it, Frisbee-like, at the bed.
Spike stared at it, lying there neatly in his lap, perhaps noticing the smudged shoe print from the throwing it on the sidewalk and stomping on it that might have occurred at some point. "What's this?"
"It's a bomb, cleverly disguised as a wedding invitation. Couldn't mail it." Xander gestured sweepingly at the surroundings. "Obviously." Spike's wary scowl was making him regret the magnanimous gesture that prompted him to forgo his original plan of not taking it out of his pocket until long after the wedding was over.
"You- you're inviting me?"
"Yeah. Uh, Anya said we had to. Invite you. Because of all the-the stuff. Last summer. Helping out with Dawn. Patrolling. When Buffy was … gone, you know." Spike ducked his head suddenly, fingers raking through his messy hair, arm partially obscuring his face. "Also, she said we needed a better demon to human ratio at the reception."
Fingers inched towards the envelope as if it was indeed, a bomb. Xander had a sudden desperate need to get the hell out in case it was. He pocketed his ultra-cool blue Funny Fun ball, and started scrambling up the ladder. Paused at the top and cast a glance over his shoulder. Spike was turning the envelope over in his hands. Still scowling. "Look. You don't have to come or anything if you don't want to. No obligation." Then he had to grin. "But if you do, she'll be expecting a gift."
Spike gave a dry chuckle. "Will cash suffice?"
"Well, in the words of my betrothed, we sure as hell don't need another blender."
It was after four by the time Dawn finished her chores. She might have been done sooner but she'd taken a little break to bake a frozen pizza and watch Pretty in Pink on AMC. She was feeling happy, looking forward to the promised shopping spree. Buffy'd made it clear it wouldn't be a huge spree, but any spree after such a long drought was a reason to feel happy. No mention had been made about her patrolling proposal, so she figured Spike hadn't had the chance to broach it yet. Which was okay, because shopping was way better than patrolling. Even Buffy agreed with that.
She was a block from Spring Court, when she heard someone call, "Hey Gorgeous."
She turned, because she had to, even though the likelihood of her being the Hey Gorgeous was fairly slim. But, oh God. Hottie alert! Asian skater boy with pretty mouth. Guh. Oh crap, he was coming over. Oh my god, she was Hey Gorgeous.
"Wanna come to a party?"
Closer, she could see the little patch of hair beneath his lip. It both repulsed and fascinated her. He had the longest eyelashes on any one in the history of the entire world. Her knees started to buckle, and she compensated by flipping her hair over her shoulder, and jutting out one hip. ""Maybe. Who's gonna be there?"
"Well. Me of course," he said. "I'm Alex. I'll be working the door." He pushed a flyer into her hands. Her eyes refused to focus on it, but she got a vague impression of lots of cartoon clip art and a long list of bands with names like Betsey Bliss and Kangaranga and Dumbfist.
"Cool," she said. Then came to her senses. There was no way she'd be able to go to a rave. Especially in the warehouse district. Or … anywhere really. The whole underage thing sucked.
"It's all ages," he said, apparently reading her mind. Or the see-thru plastic mini-backpack with the Barbie colored butterflies plastered all over it. Lame. "No alcohol. Just energy drinks and herbal supplements. Old-fashioned mosh pit. It's gonna rock."
"Cool," she said again and could have kicked herself. "Maybe I'll check it out."
"You do that," he said. "Nothing really gets rolling until ten, but if you wanna come hang out before then, that'd be cool too." She managed to smile and say yeah or something equally lame, managed to turn and make it all the way to the Magic Box without tripping or looking back to see if he was watching. But she had to find out. Hand on the door, she pretended to peer into the window, then shot a quick glance across the street. He was there. Grubby messenger bag over his shoulder. Stapling a poster to a telephone pole. Her mind raced to a not-so-distant future where she and Alex were oblivious to anything but their locked lips kissing in a sea of wildly gyrating bodies. A movement reeled her back and she realized he was waving at her. She returned the gesture and hurried into the shop.
As soon as Little Miss Jailbait went into the store that sold candles, Alex headed for the alley behind the Espresso Pump. He had totally banging bitch waiting for him. Long hair, hot body, eyes like big ole hunks of amber. She smelled like amber too. Not like some natural-deodorant-hippy-chick either. It was like her scent, man. She probably smelled like that everywhere. Chick was from Brazil, man. Chicks in Brazil walked around the beaches naked and shit. Oh yeah, he'd do her in a fucking heartbeat. But first he needed to collect the Mocha Grande and twenty bucks she'd promised.
Not bad just to hand a kid a flyer.