Title: Do Blondes Dream in Slow Motion? Chapter 1
Rating: R - language, violence, a bit of the sweaty stuff
Spoilers: Begins just after "Grave"
Author: Dear Cheetoh Breath
Email: earroway@hotmail.com
Disclaimer: These characters belong to the wonderful people at Mutant Enemy and I promise to have them cleaned before I give them back
Notes: A heartfelt massive thanks to my beta readers: Jolie, Libby, Belle, Elly, and Puck
Winter seemed to last so long that the heat took Buffy by surprise when summer finally sputtered to a start. But at the moment all it was doing was making the weight in her lap doubly uncomfortable. When she tried to move Dawn's head a little, her sister grumbled and burrowed down deeper, pinning Buffy down into the corner of the couch. Buffy patted her sweating head absent-mindedly, wondering if it'd be worth it to turn on the air conditioning, thinking that at least maybe the parts of her body that Dawn wasn't currently clinging to could be cool. She gave up on trying to get up when she realized that the teenager had fallen asleep. Dawn hadn't been able to get much rest in days, even though Buffy had taken up residence in a sleeping bag at the foot of her bed. She would just lie awake, talking about any number of topics and grow frightened if Buffy didn't answer her. The slayer had managed to catch the odd the nap now and then, when Anya would come over and sit with the jittery girl. But despite the promise of Anya's demon powers to protect her, she still went into a full-blown tsunami-grade panic if Buffy left her for too long. She'd even taken to following her older sister to the bathroom, sitting with her back to the door and refusing to budge.
Buffy closed her eyes and leaned her head back. She could hear Giles on the phone in the kitchen, doing official kinds of things. He had organized Tara's burial and funeral, leaving Xander free to care for Willow. Buffy had last seen her at the funeral, barely able to stand up on her own, squinting in the abrasive sunlight. She didn't look as if she really got what was going on, more like if she'd wandered off some cemetery field trip. Willow had spent the days since....since everything had happened at once...at Xander's apartment with him at her side almost constantly, until a combination of physical exhaustion and exhaustion of sick and vacation days forced him to inform Buffy that morning that he'd be bringing Willow back that day to what had been her home for nearly a year.
Buffy's hand switched to rubbing the sleeping girl's back. She noticed that Dawn was still getting bigger. It was already a bit alarming that Dawn at fifteen was taller than her, and now she was getting significantly wider. She saw how her body was projecting the kind of curves that were only supposed to be worn by women and skanky teenagers. It was startling to think of her baby sister as possessing that type of body, like seeing a leopard-print bra strap on a nursery school teacher. She wondered how in the hell she was supposed to mother a girl who was bigger than she was.
"Usually when I eat meat, I can at least think that its suffering is long over. But not with this stuff," Dawn said as she wrinkled her face and poked the substance with her fork.
Buffy saw Giles stiffen a little in his chair, and admonished her sister. "Dawn, you don't dis a meal when someone else is nice enough to cook. Just finish your vegetables and leave it to suffer in peace." She smiled wryly. "What is this again? Please don't use the word kidney," she added.
"It's shepherd's pie. I've been making it for years and it's always been well-received," Giles informed her.
"Maybe you could go back to trying to make all that Mexican and Indian food. Those samosas were so spicy that I think I was seeing new colors for a day, but I never worried that they were planning to blob over Cleveland," Dawn chattered, trying to be helpful.
"Really, Giles, thanks for cooking all this time. Dawn's become sick of everything at the DMP twice, and actual food preparation has been sort of beyond me lately," Buffy said brightly, hoping that he wouldn't notice that she'd already used her slayer speed to wrap her offensive meat in a napkin and hide it next to her chair.
"Buffy," Giles began before pausing to sip his tea, "you know that I want to remain in your life, continue to be a source of help for you. But I can't move back to Sunnydale, and I've got to start planning to return to England. Have you given any thought as to how you're going to manage on your own?"
"Well, Willow's coming back tonight. She'll be around during the day for Dawn. And Xander and Anya have both promised baby-sitting services whenever I need them. It looks like I'll be making assistant shift manager soon, and that'll mean slightly better money and more control over my hours," Buffy ticked off the details briskly. Things were extremely precarious, but she'd achieved a sort of balance between all the demands. There was still going to be way too much to do in far too little time. She found herself wishing they could get one of those movie nannies like Mary Poppins or Mrs. Doubtfire to cook and clean and nurture and just make everything seem closer to okay. Actually, at that point she would have settled for the evil nanny in "The Hand that Rocks the Cradle."
Giles sighed. "Yes, you have some of the immediate details worked out. But-" he was interrupted by the sound of the front door opening. Dawn and Buffy dashed over, leaving him to clear the table, grimacing when he stepped on something squelchy next to Buffy's chair.
That evening Xander left the house feeling heavier than physics should have allowed. He sensed Anya striding up the walk before he saw her, the way he had when she'd been human and unable to teleport in directly from work. Over the past few days they'd managed to persuade Anya that transporting herself directly into homes was rude, and she compromised by stopping several feet away from the front door. He tried the safest greeting he could think of, "Hi, Anya."
She nodded, "Xander." She stopped short just before passing him. She leaned in and examined a wet spot on his shirt before sniffing it. She looked up at him quizzically.
"Turns out this is one of those times when chicken soup is not welcome," Xander explained. He smiled crookedly. "I think I've gone through a year's worth of shirts this past week."
Anya looked at him with an expression of pain and pity, as if she'd just been bitten by a dog she'd run over with a car. "You have a good heart, Xander," she said magnanimously. "It's just a shame that it has to be in the same body as your brain."
Xander let her remark go without comment and simply watched her climb the porch stairs as he unlocked his car door. He'd loved to watch her walk, the way she'd practically march in her heels, like a supermodel soldier. It seemed entirely too strange that the demon would be so similar to the human, as if the original transformation had only been a temporary dose of kryptonite.
Willow curled into a ball on the left side of the bed, tensing her muscles until they ached. She could taste a mingling of chicken and bile in her mouth, smell the sweat and odors accumulated over the course of the days. Somehow someone had changed her clothes, putting her into sweatpants and a t-shirt. She wasn't sure if they were hers or Buffy's or even Xander's - figuring that out would require too much thought.
Her nose and eyes burned, even the corners of her mouth were sore. She was trying to see if she could go for an hour without crying. The alarm clock was within view, she just had to last another forty-five minutes. She tried not to remember the way it felt when another person climbed in on the right side, sending a vibration through the springs, making her roll and shift a little. Willow just clenched her fists and tried to remain perched on the edge, focusing on the sound of the clock on the dresser, letting it drown out the memory of the sound of someone undressing, brushing her hair, making her smile with odd comments about the events of the day.
Thirty minutes left. Willow tried breathing deeply. Xander hadn't closed the bedroom door all the way and she could hear the various sounds of downstairs. There were voices mingling and separating, a song on the radio, the clack of high heels on the floors. They were going on with their lives. She could just seem them changing back into their regular clothes, happily sitting down to dinner, talking about the weather and work and average Sunnydale beasties. The hate twisted her stomach and made her glad she hadn't been able to eat anything. How could they expect her to listen to this? They were just going to go on with their lives and leave her upstairs like crazy Mrs. Rochester until she'd finally just pretend to be fine and happy around them so they wouldn't have to see her pain.
The numbers on the clock had gotten blurry. She tried to close her eyes, but they felt too large and hot. Her cheeks were wet again, her nose running. Her breath jerked in her throat. She realized that she was crying again, and tried to keep her chokes silent. The last thing she'd want would be to disturb them as they merrily rejoined the world of the living.
Earlier that day Buffy had felt too fatigued to do much more than eat and whine, but as usual with the fall of night she felt her energy levels increase. She felt that familiar lightness and sense of apprehension, like when she'd been little and snuck out of bed on Christmas eve to listen to her parents doing last minute gift-wrapping in their bedroom. It had taken a promise of an all-day mall-crawl to get Dawn to agree to staying home with Giles and Anya, but as she'd walked out the door, she was heartened a bit to hear the three of them arguing about whether it actually meant something important that all the characters in the game of Clue had colors in their surnames.
As she slowly made her way deeper into the cemetery, she listened for the common sounds of vampires. However she heard screams or gasps, no frantic pawing through dirt, not even any stalky walking. There were a few small sounds of foot steps; maybe a couple out looking for a secluded make-out spot, or some Goths out on their broody equivalent of miniature golf. For some reason the vampire population tended to get downright lazy every summer, as if they didn't consider it worthwhile to wreak havoc if it couldn't interfere with her homework. She decided to do an even circuit and return home before someone tried to kill someone else in the kitchen with a candlestick.
The boredom lulled Buffy enough that she didn't notice the vampire until she was almost walking into him. She quickly appraised his clothing. His suit was an unflattering dark brown, but his scuffed shoes were black and his tie a strange dark red. The pants and sleeves were too short for his limbs, making him look more like a gawky teenager than a young man. She saw a lot of unfortunate fashions among the newly undead, and always wondered whether their families had given any thought as to how the clothes they chose for burial would look if the person ending up walking the earth as another evil immortal.
Buffy was surprised again when he didn't attack her. He just stared at her the way most people did when they saw a young woman prowling around a cemetery at night brandishing a big stick. Without a second thought she had him reduced to a small pile of dust at her feet, only slightly lighter in color than the dirt around it. While she didn't miss the usual struggle, or any of the frequent cuts or bruises, the kill still left her feeling a bit unfinished, like when she'd thought she'd finished a test faster than the rest of the class only to discover that there were questions on the back of the paper as well. She bounced her stake between her hands as she returned home, wondering if maybe there was some explanation for that vampire other than having been incredibly stupid during life.
Giles left for his hotel, and Anya for wherever vengeance demons hung out when she got in. Giles made a few hushed remarks about travel plans and Willow's lack of activity and how he'd only gotten Dawn to go to sleep after letting her choose several weapons from her chest to keep in her bed. He reassured Buffy that the none of them were the type to cause any deadly puncture wounds if she rolled over on them during the night, and finished with a complaint about his rental car being an automatic transmission. Buffy let his words waft past her like a cloud of cigarette smoke, said goodnight, and went upstairs to see how many hours of sleep she'd be granted before Dawn had a nightmare or stubbed her toe on some heavy metal thing.
Buffy awoke to find herself pacing the hallways like a caged tiger. She steadied herself against the wall, trying not to see things in the shadows. She felt hyperaware, every drip of the faucet like a gunshot, Dawn's breathing like a train engine. She listened at the door of what had been her mother's room and heard Willow's fast shallow gasps. She put on what she hoped could pass for a supportive face at 3am and knocked on the door. When Willow didn't answer, she walked right in.
Buffy could see easily enough despite the dimness of the room to tell that her best friend was lying stiffly on her side and staring at the wall. "Trouble sleeping, Will?" she queried as she stood at the foot of the bed.
"Trouble everything," Willow replied hoarsely.
"Wanna talk?" Buffy asked as she sat on the foot of the bed. "It doesn't look like I'm going to be getting any sleep tonight, anyway."
"Talk about what?" Willow remained still, not wanting to have to look up and see Buffy sitting there as if it were just girltalk at a slumber party.
"Willow, I know it hurts now. But we're here for you. And we're going to help you get past this," Buffy said softly.
"Get past it, get past it. There's nothing for me past this. Before, I had something to do. And long as I was..as I was making him hurt, it was like I was still powerful, like I still had a little bit of her with me. I was working for her again." Willow could feel the sobs lurking at the end of each sentence. She pushed forward, wanting to finish before collapsing in a crying heap again. "When I quit, and it was hard, she was what I used to get through. She was every goal, everything I worked for. Always for her. Always toward her. When she left me, I thought that was the worst pain I could suffer. I just sat there and watched her pack up her things and leave and it was like everything good inside me was freezing and shattering. And I kept freezing and shattering until I saw what I had to do to get her back. And I worked and I suffered and I got her back. And then she was taken away." Her voice broke. "She always gets taken away and I can't...."
"Oh, Willow," Buffy breathed as she climbed up beside her friend.
"Stop," Willow commanded. "Don't you fucking touch me. Don't. I'll kill you. You know I'm capable." Willow held up her right hand in a gesture that looked full of potential.
Buffy forced herself to remain calm. "You know that wouldn't help anything. Maybe you'd get to think about something else for a few seconds, but then all these feelings are going to come right back. You can't just poof this away with magic or violence or magical violence." She could see the tendons in Willow's neck and arms straining. She so rarely saw her mad that she had no idea what to expect. Would Willow get up and storm off, or yell and curse, or just go silent if she pressed her further? She gave up and trudged over to the door. As she left the room she remarked, "Look, if you ever do want to talk....well, as you know I don't have a life, so I'm always here."
Buffy still found herself tiptoeing downstairs every morning, even though Dawn and Willow were dead to the world when asleep, and Giles had been happily ensconced at the hotel for more than a week. She straightened her uniform, wishing that her comments about the colors and hats that she placed every day in the suggestion box would actually be fulfilled. Giles had convinced her that it would be okay to leave Willow alone in the house with Dawn during the day. He talked about stages of grief, that she simply needed time to work through everything. As far as Buffy could tell, all of the stages she'd been going through were more like mono than anything else. Willow slept. At least there didn't seem to be any danger in it.
She started the coffee-maker and hoped that her duct tape repairs of the previous morning would hold. She'd become addicted to the dark hot liquid in college, when it had been more available than water. It felt a little odd to now have to be the one making it, figuring out every step from remembering to buy it already ground since the beans messed up the machine to figuring out whether it was better to get the stuff from South America or Africa. She sat at the island in the kitchen and went through the mail from the previous few days. Dawn always raided it first, filching all the actual letters, catalogs, even the more interesting advertisements. It left Buffy with the bills, political flyers, the ads for long-distance plans and boat insurance.
She smiled a little at the sight of her paycheck. When they'd hired her back, her salary had a slight jump. It wasn't enough that she didn't have to panic every month, wondering which bills had to be paid immediately and which could maybe wait until some sort of financial miracle happened, like if the toaster could start coating things in gold instead of just burning them. Her boss probably considered the raise to be hush money, an incentive to keep her from telling anyone the office secrets. As she hunted through the refrigerator for some sort of breakfast food she wondered if maybe there was some way to get a little more each month for her silence.
"You're home early," Dawn remarked lackadaisically between bites of something deep fried and sold in plastic bags.
"Have you been watching TV all day?" Buffy asked exasperatedly as she sunk down into a chair, only to hear something crunching under the cushion.
"Oh, this doesn't count as TV. Giles brought it when he came over in the morning. It's Shakespeare. He said it'd build back some of the brain cells I lost during the Jerry Springer 'Here Come Da Ho's' special." Dawn looked over at her sister. "What happened to you?"
"Some jerk enchanted the cash registers. I had to chase those things for blocks." She sighed. "At least it convinced the manager to close early while they weld those things in place." Buffy put her feet up on the coffee table, not bothering to avoid the piles of junk food and magazines. "So how was everything today? When did Willow get up?"
"You'll know before I do. She hasn't left her room once. Not even for food." After her last sentence Dawn turned the bag upside down over her open mouth and got a faceful of crumbs.
"You're disgusting," Buffy derided. "And I expect you to clean all this up tonight."
"You also expected to marry Angel. You are way too optimistic about some things," Dawn said sarcastically. "Anyway, the exterminators finally got the last of the brain-sucking guppies out of Adrienne's pool, so she's having a party tonight. Can I borrow your red bikini?"
"Yes, you may go to the party. No, you may not borrow my bikini. I haven't even gotten a chance to wear it once yet," Buffy grumbled. She looked down and saw the brand new holes in the knees of her pants, the rip in her shirt sleeve, and there wasn't enough left of her hat to tell what kind of animal it was supposed to be. For a moment she wished Willow was still practicing, then she could have just had her fix all the damage with a wink or a hand gesture.
As the video ended, Dawn departed upstairs, outwardly sulking at being deprived of the desired swimsuit, but mostly excited at the knowledge that she was going to a party where she'd been one of the first ten people invited. When she reached the second floor, she slowed and tried to make as little as noise as possible. She was still nervous about Willow, even though everyone had tried to calm her with promises that she was well beyond skinning people for the fun of it. As long as Willow stayed confined in that one room, she go for hours without being reminded of it all, of finding the one adult who'd spent a year going out of her way to make sure she was all right dead on the floor, of Willow casually offering to end her suffering, of the repeated confirmations that nothing ever really came out okay, or stayed okay. It was as if all the world's hospitals had closed, simply telling everyone that if they were very careful and very lucky, they had a chance of doing well - they'd just better make sure they never fell.
Buffy felt a sharp pang of guilt when she left on patrol. Xander was working over time, and she hadn't been able to contact Anya. She didn't feel right about calling Giles over just to watch Willow sleep, so she'd left her best friend home alone. She was giving Willow the space and time she need to heal, Buffy told herself. It just happened that the space was her mother's bedroom and the time was a fortnight's coma. "Fortnight?" she asked aloud. "I guess I've been spending more time with Giles than I realized," she said to herself. And then there was Dawn. She seemed to be doing a lot better, even though she'd already called the house several times from Adrienne's to make sure that she was still there.
She decided to start at Restfield cemetery, that one seemed to be most popular among the various evils. Maybe they liked the subtle landscaping, or the funky designs on the crypts. It was difficult to walk at a regular pace. She felt like one of those wind-up cars after it was wound, but before the wheels were released to spin at a frantic speed. Until the cash register melee she'd had a similar feeling at work. Everyone else seemed to be moving far too slowly, it was all she could do to keep from snapping and shoving them out of her way. She chalked it up to post-near-apocalypse recovery, or maybe that new coffee she'd been buying had tons more caffeine than she was used to. Either way, she set her hopes on doing some major slayage in the near future to work off all the energy.
When she heard the front door close behind Buffy, Willow let herself fall out of bed onto the floor. She crawled over to the closet and dug out the boxes from under the pile of clothes she'd never bothered to hang up. She pulled out the lighter box and opened it to reveal a random scattering of Joyce's life. She discarded the top layer of papers and accessories and dug through to the bottom. The make-up was rubber banded together, lipsticks to lipsticks, eyeshadow to eyeshadow. There were brushes and combs, a bright plastic jar of anti-wrinkle cream. She cast her hand in deeper to find the happy little brown men in white caps with their happy names written on their name tags. Vicodin. Dilaudid. Percodan. Percoset. Marinol. Diazepam. Hydrocodone. Demerol. There were a few others that she vaguely recognized as cancer drugs. She left those and took the ones that she remembered from anti-drug classes at school, all arranged to look menacing on the pages of her textbooks. She gathered them in her shirt and set them in a row on the bathroom sink. Methodically she emptied the contents of the bottles of her vitamins, her allergy medicines, dug out the old antibiotic bottles from under the sink, and filled each with her discovery.
She downed two bright angels from the One-a-Day bottle, and two from the Allegra with some water. She figured that there had been some demerol in the mix as she saw the light soften, turn yellower like lace curtains at the window antiquing in seconds. Her sleep was slow and thick and luxurious, she felt as if she were being poured from night into afternoon.
Buffy sat down on a bench right in the middle of the new grave section and went to work trying to file her nails down to something a bit less ragged. There wasn't a lot of light, but enough that she easily got through one hand before she noticed two men doing the newly-risen shuffle down the walk. She pulled her stake out of her of her bag and waited for the attack. Even when they were in game face and showing off the funky dental ware, she still felt guilty if she didn't at least wait for them to growl at her before putting them on the rapidest weight loss plan. However her reluctance resulted in the pair strolling right past her as if there were some party they just had to get to.
She followed them until they were within view of the gate. Tailing them had been difficult, since every instinct in her screamed to run, jump, flip, chase – but she just didn't know how to chase something that wouldn't run. It reminded her of all those gym classes when she tried to run as slowly as Willow or Xander so that the teacher wouldn't suspect anything, all the while wondering how her friends could get so exhausted at that total lack of speed. She crept up behind them and staked the taller one. The other did notice that his companion was gone, but aside from something that might have been a shrug, he just kept going. Buffy delivered several high kicks to his back, but he wouldn't turn and face her. Finally, the frustration making her hands sweat and her teeth knock against each other, she dusted him. If anything her heart rate sped up and she started to run, figuring that at least she'd get in some good exercise. But by the time she reached her house, slowing down was almost painful. Her heart bounced in her chest like a superball and she found herself walking right past it, striding down the street with no destination in mind like a stain running across white cloth.
Rating: R - language, violence, a bit of the sweaty stuff
Spoilers: Begins just after "Grave"
Author: Dear Cheetoh Breath
Email: earroway@hotmail.com
Disclaimer: These characters belong to the wonderful people at Mutant Enemy and I promise to have them cleaned before I give them back
Notes: A heartfelt massive thanks to my beta readers: Jolie, Libby, Belle, Elly, and Puck
Winter seemed to last so long that the heat took Buffy by surprise when summer finally sputtered to a start. But at the moment all it was doing was making the weight in her lap doubly uncomfortable. When she tried to move Dawn's head a little, her sister grumbled and burrowed down deeper, pinning Buffy down into the corner of the couch. Buffy patted her sweating head absent-mindedly, wondering if it'd be worth it to turn on the air conditioning, thinking that at least maybe the parts of her body that Dawn wasn't currently clinging to could be cool. She gave up on trying to get up when she realized that the teenager had fallen asleep. Dawn hadn't been able to get much rest in days, even though Buffy had taken up residence in a sleeping bag at the foot of her bed. She would just lie awake, talking about any number of topics and grow frightened if Buffy didn't answer her. The slayer had managed to catch the odd the nap now and then, when Anya would come over and sit with the jittery girl. But despite the promise of Anya's demon powers to protect her, she still went into a full-blown tsunami-grade panic if Buffy left her for too long. She'd even taken to following her older sister to the bathroom, sitting with her back to the door and refusing to budge.
Buffy closed her eyes and leaned her head back. She could hear Giles on the phone in the kitchen, doing official kinds of things. He had organized Tara's burial and funeral, leaving Xander free to care for Willow. Buffy had last seen her at the funeral, barely able to stand up on her own, squinting in the abrasive sunlight. She didn't look as if she really got what was going on, more like if she'd wandered off some cemetery field trip. Willow had spent the days since....since everything had happened at once...at Xander's apartment with him at her side almost constantly, until a combination of physical exhaustion and exhaustion of sick and vacation days forced him to inform Buffy that morning that he'd be bringing Willow back that day to what had been her home for nearly a year.
Buffy's hand switched to rubbing the sleeping girl's back. She noticed that Dawn was still getting bigger. It was already a bit alarming that Dawn at fifteen was taller than her, and now she was getting significantly wider. She saw how her body was projecting the kind of curves that were only supposed to be worn by women and skanky teenagers. It was startling to think of her baby sister as possessing that type of body, like seeing a leopard-print bra strap on a nursery school teacher. She wondered how in the hell she was supposed to mother a girl who was bigger than she was.
"Usually when I eat meat, I can at least think that its suffering is long over. But not with this stuff," Dawn said as she wrinkled her face and poked the substance with her fork.
Buffy saw Giles stiffen a little in his chair, and admonished her sister. "Dawn, you don't dis a meal when someone else is nice enough to cook. Just finish your vegetables and leave it to suffer in peace." She smiled wryly. "What is this again? Please don't use the word kidney," she added.
"It's shepherd's pie. I've been making it for years and it's always been well-received," Giles informed her.
"Maybe you could go back to trying to make all that Mexican and Indian food. Those samosas were so spicy that I think I was seeing new colors for a day, but I never worried that they were planning to blob over Cleveland," Dawn chattered, trying to be helpful.
"Really, Giles, thanks for cooking all this time. Dawn's become sick of everything at the DMP twice, and actual food preparation has been sort of beyond me lately," Buffy said brightly, hoping that he wouldn't notice that she'd already used her slayer speed to wrap her offensive meat in a napkin and hide it next to her chair.
"Buffy," Giles began before pausing to sip his tea, "you know that I want to remain in your life, continue to be a source of help for you. But I can't move back to Sunnydale, and I've got to start planning to return to England. Have you given any thought as to how you're going to manage on your own?"
"Well, Willow's coming back tonight. She'll be around during the day for Dawn. And Xander and Anya have both promised baby-sitting services whenever I need them. It looks like I'll be making assistant shift manager soon, and that'll mean slightly better money and more control over my hours," Buffy ticked off the details briskly. Things were extremely precarious, but she'd achieved a sort of balance between all the demands. There was still going to be way too much to do in far too little time. She found herself wishing they could get one of those movie nannies like Mary Poppins or Mrs. Doubtfire to cook and clean and nurture and just make everything seem closer to okay. Actually, at that point she would have settled for the evil nanny in "The Hand that Rocks the Cradle."
Giles sighed. "Yes, you have some of the immediate details worked out. But-" he was interrupted by the sound of the front door opening. Dawn and Buffy dashed over, leaving him to clear the table, grimacing when he stepped on something squelchy next to Buffy's chair.
That evening Xander left the house feeling heavier than physics should have allowed. He sensed Anya striding up the walk before he saw her, the way he had when she'd been human and unable to teleport in directly from work. Over the past few days they'd managed to persuade Anya that transporting herself directly into homes was rude, and she compromised by stopping several feet away from the front door. He tried the safest greeting he could think of, "Hi, Anya."
She nodded, "Xander." She stopped short just before passing him. She leaned in and examined a wet spot on his shirt before sniffing it. She looked up at him quizzically.
"Turns out this is one of those times when chicken soup is not welcome," Xander explained. He smiled crookedly. "I think I've gone through a year's worth of shirts this past week."
Anya looked at him with an expression of pain and pity, as if she'd just been bitten by a dog she'd run over with a car. "You have a good heart, Xander," she said magnanimously. "It's just a shame that it has to be in the same body as your brain."
Xander let her remark go without comment and simply watched her climb the porch stairs as he unlocked his car door. He'd loved to watch her walk, the way she'd practically march in her heels, like a supermodel soldier. It seemed entirely too strange that the demon would be so similar to the human, as if the original transformation had only been a temporary dose of kryptonite.
Willow curled into a ball on the left side of the bed, tensing her muscles until they ached. She could taste a mingling of chicken and bile in her mouth, smell the sweat and odors accumulated over the course of the days. Somehow someone had changed her clothes, putting her into sweatpants and a t-shirt. She wasn't sure if they were hers or Buffy's or even Xander's - figuring that out would require too much thought.
Her nose and eyes burned, even the corners of her mouth were sore. She was trying to see if she could go for an hour without crying. The alarm clock was within view, she just had to last another forty-five minutes. She tried not to remember the way it felt when another person climbed in on the right side, sending a vibration through the springs, making her roll and shift a little. Willow just clenched her fists and tried to remain perched on the edge, focusing on the sound of the clock on the dresser, letting it drown out the memory of the sound of someone undressing, brushing her hair, making her smile with odd comments about the events of the day.
Thirty minutes left. Willow tried breathing deeply. Xander hadn't closed the bedroom door all the way and she could hear the various sounds of downstairs. There were voices mingling and separating, a song on the radio, the clack of high heels on the floors. They were going on with their lives. She could just seem them changing back into their regular clothes, happily sitting down to dinner, talking about the weather and work and average Sunnydale beasties. The hate twisted her stomach and made her glad she hadn't been able to eat anything. How could they expect her to listen to this? They were just going to go on with their lives and leave her upstairs like crazy Mrs. Rochester until she'd finally just pretend to be fine and happy around them so they wouldn't have to see her pain.
The numbers on the clock had gotten blurry. She tried to close her eyes, but they felt too large and hot. Her cheeks were wet again, her nose running. Her breath jerked in her throat. She realized that she was crying again, and tried to keep her chokes silent. The last thing she'd want would be to disturb them as they merrily rejoined the world of the living.
Earlier that day Buffy had felt too fatigued to do much more than eat and whine, but as usual with the fall of night she felt her energy levels increase. She felt that familiar lightness and sense of apprehension, like when she'd been little and snuck out of bed on Christmas eve to listen to her parents doing last minute gift-wrapping in their bedroom. It had taken a promise of an all-day mall-crawl to get Dawn to agree to staying home with Giles and Anya, but as she'd walked out the door, she was heartened a bit to hear the three of them arguing about whether it actually meant something important that all the characters in the game of Clue had colors in their surnames.
As she slowly made her way deeper into the cemetery, she listened for the common sounds of vampires. However she heard screams or gasps, no frantic pawing through dirt, not even any stalky walking. There were a few small sounds of foot steps; maybe a couple out looking for a secluded make-out spot, or some Goths out on their broody equivalent of miniature golf. For some reason the vampire population tended to get downright lazy every summer, as if they didn't consider it worthwhile to wreak havoc if it couldn't interfere with her homework. She decided to do an even circuit and return home before someone tried to kill someone else in the kitchen with a candlestick.
The boredom lulled Buffy enough that she didn't notice the vampire until she was almost walking into him. She quickly appraised his clothing. His suit was an unflattering dark brown, but his scuffed shoes were black and his tie a strange dark red. The pants and sleeves were too short for his limbs, making him look more like a gawky teenager than a young man. She saw a lot of unfortunate fashions among the newly undead, and always wondered whether their families had given any thought as to how the clothes they chose for burial would look if the person ending up walking the earth as another evil immortal.
Buffy was surprised again when he didn't attack her. He just stared at her the way most people did when they saw a young woman prowling around a cemetery at night brandishing a big stick. Without a second thought she had him reduced to a small pile of dust at her feet, only slightly lighter in color than the dirt around it. While she didn't miss the usual struggle, or any of the frequent cuts or bruises, the kill still left her feeling a bit unfinished, like when she'd thought she'd finished a test faster than the rest of the class only to discover that there were questions on the back of the paper as well. She bounced her stake between her hands as she returned home, wondering if maybe there was some explanation for that vampire other than having been incredibly stupid during life.
Giles left for his hotel, and Anya for wherever vengeance demons hung out when she got in. Giles made a few hushed remarks about travel plans and Willow's lack of activity and how he'd only gotten Dawn to go to sleep after letting her choose several weapons from her chest to keep in her bed. He reassured Buffy that the none of them were the type to cause any deadly puncture wounds if she rolled over on them during the night, and finished with a complaint about his rental car being an automatic transmission. Buffy let his words waft past her like a cloud of cigarette smoke, said goodnight, and went upstairs to see how many hours of sleep she'd be granted before Dawn had a nightmare or stubbed her toe on some heavy metal thing.
Buffy awoke to find herself pacing the hallways like a caged tiger. She steadied herself against the wall, trying not to see things in the shadows. She felt hyperaware, every drip of the faucet like a gunshot, Dawn's breathing like a train engine. She listened at the door of what had been her mother's room and heard Willow's fast shallow gasps. She put on what she hoped could pass for a supportive face at 3am and knocked on the door. When Willow didn't answer, she walked right in.
Buffy could see easily enough despite the dimness of the room to tell that her best friend was lying stiffly on her side and staring at the wall. "Trouble sleeping, Will?" she queried as she stood at the foot of the bed.
"Trouble everything," Willow replied hoarsely.
"Wanna talk?" Buffy asked as she sat on the foot of the bed. "It doesn't look like I'm going to be getting any sleep tonight, anyway."
"Talk about what?" Willow remained still, not wanting to have to look up and see Buffy sitting there as if it were just girltalk at a slumber party.
"Willow, I know it hurts now. But we're here for you. And we're going to help you get past this," Buffy said softly.
"Get past it, get past it. There's nothing for me past this. Before, I had something to do. And long as I was..as I was making him hurt, it was like I was still powerful, like I still had a little bit of her with me. I was working for her again." Willow could feel the sobs lurking at the end of each sentence. She pushed forward, wanting to finish before collapsing in a crying heap again. "When I quit, and it was hard, she was what I used to get through. She was every goal, everything I worked for. Always for her. Always toward her. When she left me, I thought that was the worst pain I could suffer. I just sat there and watched her pack up her things and leave and it was like everything good inside me was freezing and shattering. And I kept freezing and shattering until I saw what I had to do to get her back. And I worked and I suffered and I got her back. And then she was taken away." Her voice broke. "She always gets taken away and I can't...."
"Oh, Willow," Buffy breathed as she climbed up beside her friend.
"Stop," Willow commanded. "Don't you fucking touch me. Don't. I'll kill you. You know I'm capable." Willow held up her right hand in a gesture that looked full of potential.
Buffy forced herself to remain calm. "You know that wouldn't help anything. Maybe you'd get to think about something else for a few seconds, but then all these feelings are going to come right back. You can't just poof this away with magic or violence or magical violence." She could see the tendons in Willow's neck and arms straining. She so rarely saw her mad that she had no idea what to expect. Would Willow get up and storm off, or yell and curse, or just go silent if she pressed her further? She gave up and trudged over to the door. As she left the room she remarked, "Look, if you ever do want to talk....well, as you know I don't have a life, so I'm always here."
Buffy still found herself tiptoeing downstairs every morning, even though Dawn and Willow were dead to the world when asleep, and Giles had been happily ensconced at the hotel for more than a week. She straightened her uniform, wishing that her comments about the colors and hats that she placed every day in the suggestion box would actually be fulfilled. Giles had convinced her that it would be okay to leave Willow alone in the house with Dawn during the day. He talked about stages of grief, that she simply needed time to work through everything. As far as Buffy could tell, all of the stages she'd been going through were more like mono than anything else. Willow slept. At least there didn't seem to be any danger in it.
She started the coffee-maker and hoped that her duct tape repairs of the previous morning would hold. She'd become addicted to the dark hot liquid in college, when it had been more available than water. It felt a little odd to now have to be the one making it, figuring out every step from remembering to buy it already ground since the beans messed up the machine to figuring out whether it was better to get the stuff from South America or Africa. She sat at the island in the kitchen and went through the mail from the previous few days. Dawn always raided it first, filching all the actual letters, catalogs, even the more interesting advertisements. It left Buffy with the bills, political flyers, the ads for long-distance plans and boat insurance.
She smiled a little at the sight of her paycheck. When they'd hired her back, her salary had a slight jump. It wasn't enough that she didn't have to panic every month, wondering which bills had to be paid immediately and which could maybe wait until some sort of financial miracle happened, like if the toaster could start coating things in gold instead of just burning them. Her boss probably considered the raise to be hush money, an incentive to keep her from telling anyone the office secrets. As she hunted through the refrigerator for some sort of breakfast food she wondered if maybe there was some way to get a little more each month for her silence.
"You're home early," Dawn remarked lackadaisically between bites of something deep fried and sold in plastic bags.
"Have you been watching TV all day?" Buffy asked exasperatedly as she sunk down into a chair, only to hear something crunching under the cushion.
"Oh, this doesn't count as TV. Giles brought it when he came over in the morning. It's Shakespeare. He said it'd build back some of the brain cells I lost during the Jerry Springer 'Here Come Da Ho's' special." Dawn looked over at her sister. "What happened to you?"
"Some jerk enchanted the cash registers. I had to chase those things for blocks." She sighed. "At least it convinced the manager to close early while they weld those things in place." Buffy put her feet up on the coffee table, not bothering to avoid the piles of junk food and magazines. "So how was everything today? When did Willow get up?"
"You'll know before I do. She hasn't left her room once. Not even for food." After her last sentence Dawn turned the bag upside down over her open mouth and got a faceful of crumbs.
"You're disgusting," Buffy derided. "And I expect you to clean all this up tonight."
"You also expected to marry Angel. You are way too optimistic about some things," Dawn said sarcastically. "Anyway, the exterminators finally got the last of the brain-sucking guppies out of Adrienne's pool, so she's having a party tonight. Can I borrow your red bikini?"
"Yes, you may go to the party. No, you may not borrow my bikini. I haven't even gotten a chance to wear it once yet," Buffy grumbled. She looked down and saw the brand new holes in the knees of her pants, the rip in her shirt sleeve, and there wasn't enough left of her hat to tell what kind of animal it was supposed to be. For a moment she wished Willow was still practicing, then she could have just had her fix all the damage with a wink or a hand gesture.
As the video ended, Dawn departed upstairs, outwardly sulking at being deprived of the desired swimsuit, but mostly excited at the knowledge that she was going to a party where she'd been one of the first ten people invited. When she reached the second floor, she slowed and tried to make as little as noise as possible. She was still nervous about Willow, even though everyone had tried to calm her with promises that she was well beyond skinning people for the fun of it. As long as Willow stayed confined in that one room, she go for hours without being reminded of it all, of finding the one adult who'd spent a year going out of her way to make sure she was all right dead on the floor, of Willow casually offering to end her suffering, of the repeated confirmations that nothing ever really came out okay, or stayed okay. It was as if all the world's hospitals had closed, simply telling everyone that if they were very careful and very lucky, they had a chance of doing well - they'd just better make sure they never fell.
Buffy felt a sharp pang of guilt when she left on patrol. Xander was working over time, and she hadn't been able to contact Anya. She didn't feel right about calling Giles over just to watch Willow sleep, so she'd left her best friend home alone. She was giving Willow the space and time she need to heal, Buffy told herself. It just happened that the space was her mother's bedroom and the time was a fortnight's coma. "Fortnight?" she asked aloud. "I guess I've been spending more time with Giles than I realized," she said to herself. And then there was Dawn. She seemed to be doing a lot better, even though she'd already called the house several times from Adrienne's to make sure that she was still there.
She decided to start at Restfield cemetery, that one seemed to be most popular among the various evils. Maybe they liked the subtle landscaping, or the funky designs on the crypts. It was difficult to walk at a regular pace. She felt like one of those wind-up cars after it was wound, but before the wheels were released to spin at a frantic speed. Until the cash register melee she'd had a similar feeling at work. Everyone else seemed to be moving far too slowly, it was all she could do to keep from snapping and shoving them out of her way. She chalked it up to post-near-apocalypse recovery, or maybe that new coffee she'd been buying had tons more caffeine than she was used to. Either way, she set her hopes on doing some major slayage in the near future to work off all the energy.
When she heard the front door close behind Buffy, Willow let herself fall out of bed onto the floor. She crawled over to the closet and dug out the boxes from under the pile of clothes she'd never bothered to hang up. She pulled out the lighter box and opened it to reveal a random scattering of Joyce's life. She discarded the top layer of papers and accessories and dug through to the bottom. The make-up was rubber banded together, lipsticks to lipsticks, eyeshadow to eyeshadow. There were brushes and combs, a bright plastic jar of anti-wrinkle cream. She cast her hand in deeper to find the happy little brown men in white caps with their happy names written on their name tags. Vicodin. Dilaudid. Percodan. Percoset. Marinol. Diazepam. Hydrocodone. Demerol. There were a few others that she vaguely recognized as cancer drugs. She left those and took the ones that she remembered from anti-drug classes at school, all arranged to look menacing on the pages of her textbooks. She gathered them in her shirt and set them in a row on the bathroom sink. Methodically she emptied the contents of the bottles of her vitamins, her allergy medicines, dug out the old antibiotic bottles from under the sink, and filled each with her discovery.
She downed two bright angels from the One-a-Day bottle, and two from the Allegra with some water. She figured that there had been some demerol in the mix as she saw the light soften, turn yellower like lace curtains at the window antiquing in seconds. Her sleep was slow and thick and luxurious, she felt as if she were being poured from night into afternoon.
Buffy sat down on a bench right in the middle of the new grave section and went to work trying to file her nails down to something a bit less ragged. There wasn't a lot of light, but enough that she easily got through one hand before she noticed two men doing the newly-risen shuffle down the walk. She pulled her stake out of her of her bag and waited for the attack. Even when they were in game face and showing off the funky dental ware, she still felt guilty if she didn't at least wait for them to growl at her before putting them on the rapidest weight loss plan. However her reluctance resulted in the pair strolling right past her as if there were some party they just had to get to.
She followed them until they were within view of the gate. Tailing them had been difficult, since every instinct in her screamed to run, jump, flip, chase – but she just didn't know how to chase something that wouldn't run. It reminded her of all those gym classes when she tried to run as slowly as Willow or Xander so that the teacher wouldn't suspect anything, all the while wondering how her friends could get so exhausted at that total lack of speed. She crept up behind them and staked the taller one. The other did notice that his companion was gone, but aside from something that might have been a shrug, he just kept going. Buffy delivered several high kicks to his back, but he wouldn't turn and face her. Finally, the frustration making her hands sweat and her teeth knock against each other, she dusted him. If anything her heart rate sped up and she started to run, figuring that at least she'd get in some good exercise. But by the time she reached her house, slowing down was almost painful. Her heart bounced in her chest like a superball and she found herself walking right past it, striding down the street with no destination in mind like a stain running across white cloth.