Title: It's all Cold
Canon: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Disclaimer: Buffy, the scoobies and all others aint mine. Duh.
Characters: Buffy, Joyce, Riley, Giles, Scoobies, Angel, etc…
Timeline: After G2 and into college. Buffy isn't serious with Riley even though everyone likes him.
Pairings: There is some vague Buffy/Riley implied in S4 but really (w/o love cuz B/R is gross), it's obviously Buffy/Angel.
Genre: Angst
Rating: M for Mature reading, but there isn't really any content we all haven't heard already.
Summary: She's been so cold ever since her emotion went away that what's left isn't worth it in the long run.
She take two baths a day with the water hot enough to burn the skin of normal people. And yet, she can't get warm, can't get anything below 0 degrees to penetrate the confines of her skin. The Slayer hardly feels it but the steam and the smell of burning skin let her know that she'll be okay to go to class, or hang with Willow, or just travel outside without people looking at her weird.
A snow blizzard has taken up residence inside her it seems, left her heart blue, her brain a spongy purple, and the person in her barely hanging on. Some days it's just too hard to make herself get up to smile at Willow and she knows she doesn't have much time left.
Or maybe she just hopes not because this metallic tang when she touches anything wants to make her skin stick to faucets or the door handle. The Slayer shivers within her and does no longer care about breaking free. The Slayer has taken up residence in her belly, the only place with warm left within her. Bile rises often when she looks around and cannot see anything. She walks in this life but…
She shivers.
"Buffy, it's time to get up," Willow whispers to her sleeping friend under the blankets. She moves to wake her up and through the clothing, Buffy feels so cold. "Buffy?" she asks loudly. The red head is going to start panicking any minute now. The blonde isn't responding. Buffy Summers is usually a light sleeper-regularly mentions how she can't sleep because the dorms are so loud. "Buffy?" the red head asks again, Please wake up, please wake up, please…
Her eyes flicker open. Dark circles are obvious and she shivers, but Willow is just glad she's awake. "Willow? What's wrong?"
"It's eight o' clock, Buffy. Simmons's class is in an hour."
Willow leaves quickly. She has a date with Oz soon. Buffy is her friend but Willow is preoccupied with someone else already.
But she leaves her best friend along in a small room shivering under a pile of blankets. In her dreams, the Slayer remembers when she was warm.
It's night, winter and snow falls deeply for the first time upon the mouth of hell. The moon is high and the nightlife stops to take in the anomaly. She holds him to her, his bronze skin belongs to the Gods, she thinks, as she slowly scratches her trembling fingers down his back.
He trusts her to do this and she is glad. Buffy retraces the tattoo upon his back with the needle and holy water-dye. It burns. Smoke rises from his skin but he gives no complaint. He doesn't remember the pain of this, but her fingers rising over his skin, goose bumps from a body that isn't really alive, though she can't bring herself to care about that detail.
His skin is so cold.
Her own body burns, burns like a fever trying to swallow his frozen sculpture of a body and she shivers with him. It's a good shiver. For hours she retraces the tattoo burned off in Hell where she had to send him but will never forgive herself for it.
She wears little but a pale shirt and pants from where she's sitting atop the back of his butt tracing the old detail of a Gryphon with an 'A' at the bottom. This time she adds a tiny 'B' within the hole of the 'A' and wonders if he will now.
She burns for him, for the touch of his skin, like fire wanting to consume everything in its path. He thinks it makes her beautiful. She just thinks it makes her a person again and not the wasted shell she is without him.
The dorm room showers go out for two weeks so she visits her mom's house; it's so weird to think that, every day. Her mom is happy. Willow brings Riley over one time to show off to Joyce and Buffy hates Willow for it a little. She feels betrayed.
Buffy's mom loves the normal boy from Iowa. He's tall, and light on his feet. He's cute and goes to school, gets good grades, and likes her.
But the truth is that Riley is light, innocent, only a year older. He' s not in any way dark and there are no secrets or ghosts in his past. He's a little boy. He's not Angel, her mom thinks, not a vampire; and Buffy just gets in the burning hot shower and tries to remember what it was like to be a real girl.
Patrol is boring this night. It seems that everyone must be holed up at Willy's bar because they're certainly not out hunting humanity to extinction. Sometimes when she's bored she'll rope him into games of I Spy or Who-can-find-a-vampire-first. She likes these times. The past seems to float away as if it never happened. As if this is all they've ever known.
And when a particular vamp dressed as Elvis passes by, she cannot help but giggle and pun about how she gets to kill the King of Rock and maybe just get in a few on his personality. Angel smiles for her and she's never seen anything more beautiful save the night they'd made love for hours and killed off their souls.
When she sees him again in his office he doesn't look nearly as bad. He'd comment on her wool sweaters, she knows, but there are others around and he does not show that kind of emotion around any one else. Either does she anymore. It's all for him now. They make a show of fighting over his coming to Sunnydale but neither means it. She wanted a reason to see him and so she came over.
LA was her stomping grounds first, anyway.
Burning in fire they make love over and over again, cookie-dough-fudge-mint-chip spread around the room, and the leftover boxes of the yummy treat are dumped in the kitchen. They laugh, they cry. They don't need to talk. They talk with their eyes, touch, with the laughter and kisses. Words aren't needed between their naked bodies aching for more of the other, more, more, more.
Her skin burns with his while burning into him. She hears his heart beat and the world makes sense for once.
He's as cold as she is this time, colder than ice, colder than the arctic peaks, colder than frozen Hell. She tugs at her sweater in her minute shivers-she learned to train them down around others and yet it hurts to do so around him- and looks at him.
Angel is half-broken like she is this time and she can't remember why but something tugs at her with a massive case of déjà vu. Maybe she can't remember what he took away and she hates herself for it. But he is dead inside too now and maybe she's pleased but she has never wanted him to feel the hurt of anything.
It's all cold now, anyways. Everything burns in blue backwards fire.
She shivers now because living is pointless, hopeless, and she's not sure she wants to do it anymore. She dreams of the fire but cannot touch burning red the flames. They're behind her. She knows they wont come back and she lets herself die.
End