Disclaimer: as ever, not mine. I'm not cool enough to own the Buffyverse, as is, nor am I clever enough to have created it.
Our relationship, it wasn't all peaches and gin. There were problems, to say the least.
First off, every other date was interrupted by a catastrophe; these ranged from any given apocalypse (and there were many, trust me on this) to Buffy's broken nails (could i please sneak into her room for a file? she'd lost hers in the scramble to get a stake from her purse).
We both humoured her; she was only a girl.
Then, there was the Secret. Buffy got angry afterwards.
If the all-too-frequent apocalypses had only been stumbling blocks, what was this?
For one, it was a seventeen year-old girl's anger at being left out of the fold, of not being given all the information.
(though i hadn't known, either)
For another, it was the power of the Slayer. Of my Slayer.
(i couldn't just defy her when she'd finally taken command, harnessing her powers)
(she took command so rarely that i always listened on those occasions)
Her wrath, the sullen rejection of a high school junior became a police detour in my love life. Our love lives.
(buffy's, too, but that's another story and hers to tell)
We were patching things up, and he ruined it. Really, it was Buffy's fault, but I couldn't bring myself to blame her: she hadn't, after all, known. It infuriated me—as nothing had in years—that she'd kept secrets from me.
(i kept secrets from her, too)
Her secret hurt me. And my charge.
(that's what i couldn't forgive)
I started, slowly, to relent and to let her back into my life. She did the same, having cut me off (less dramatically, though) after the incident with my old schoolmates.
Then he killed her.
No, our relationship never got to the peaches and gin. Hell, we couldn't make it through (what was it again? am i forgetting so soon?) an inane exercise in the control of excessively large, excessively powerful trucks without interruption.
We never got to go any of the places we talked about, we read about.
he killed her.
he killed her.
he killed her.
And Buffy had to kill him. Now she's gone, too, but in a different way. I've not seen her in months, though I'm fairly certain she's still alive.
(somewhere, in this land of opportunity, a still-seventeen-year-old girl is living, alone)
No, I never got the peaches and gin, but I could have lived without them.
But I don't have my Slayer, and what am I now, without her?