Author's Note: Hi everyone! I'm back!
So I got sick, recently, and amused myself by rereading all of my old stories. I hadn't read them in years! And I was shocked at how much I honestly enjoyed them all. They were funny, delightful, sometimes deep, sometimes fluffy, and just generally interesting. When I got to the end, I was like, "Aw, but I want to read more!"
So... uh... I wrote some more.
The stories I'm working on, now, are just random interesting little ideas that came to me while rereading the rest of the stories - so they're all over the place in terms of timing and setting. There is also one story, "Paradox", which I am actually rewriting, because Doctor Who screwed me over by changing the cannon on me. I'm still putting final touches on that rewrite.
So, anyways.
This is a really cute little story I wrote. It starts out as just being cute. Then, a little ways in, I start chuckling. By the end, I'm always just cracking up with laughter. I figured that, if there was a good story to start with, it would be this one.
Here's the important thing to read, before you start on this story:
You remember "Boyfriendish" and the Seo's World parts of "the Years that Never Were?" The alternate timeline, inside the Axis, in which Buffy never restores the Doctor's memories after "the Facksisil of Balime"?
This story is set in that universe.
It takes place after "Boyfriendish" but before "Years that Never Were". If you're unclear on what the situation is with the Doctor and Buffy, I recommend reading "Facksisil" and "Boyfriendish" (or at least, the beginning of "Boyfriendish") to get an idea. "Facksisil" you should read all of, just because it's fun to read.
Enjoy!
"Hey! 96%!" Willow said, impressed, examining the results of Buffy's psych final. She flipped through the booklet, then stared at the comment at the end. "Oh, wow, Buffy! That's really impressive."
There was a note from Professor Walsh:
'You show great potential in the social sciences, and I'm not just saying that because you and your boyfriend saved my life. Please see me during office hours. I believe you can go far in this.'
"Yeah — college has been going way better since… you know…" Buffy slurped on her smoothie, with a shrug.
"Boyfriendish?" Willow shot her a knowing look.
Buffy met the look with her own, but didn't confirm or deny this statement. She just kept slurping on her smoothie.
Willow put aside the booklet and poured salad dressing on her salad. "I guess when you have someone wandering around talking math and science all the time, you pick stuff up." She mushed the salad around, to cover it in dressing. "And it's been way quieter, in the demon vampire evil stuff world, with him around, too. Especially in the last two weeks. You've finally got time to study."
"Yeah," Buffy said, her smile dropping. "Lots of study." She blinked. Then tried to make it look like she was fine. "I mean, yeah. Stuff's great. If it weren't for him, Professor Walsh would be dead, Adam would still be around, and Faith…"
Buffy put down her smoothie. She suddenly looked really upset.
Willow grimaced. "Still some trouble in paradise, then?"
Buffy couldn't forget it. The Faith thing.
He'd done stuff with her — like, intimate stuff. And he'd known it was her, when he did it.
"More like trouble in non-committy land," Buffy muttered. She fidgeted with her straw. "I mean — the whole 'ish' thing." She sighed. "You know. Not boyfriend. Just boyfriend-ish."
And other little things. Just a lot of little things.
Willow leaned in. "But Buffy — you know he loves you, right?" she insisted. She speared some salad with her fork. "I've seen what he looks like, when he runs into Giles' house, and you're not there. His face goes kind of…"
Willow tried to imitate his long, sad, lonely, slightly puppy dog face.
Buffy began fidgeting with the smoothie cup, starting to unravel parts of the paper on the outside. "Yeah. Yeah, I know. It doesn't matter about the 'ish'. I still know he loves…" She sighed. "Can I ask you something, Will? Like, one girl to another kind of something?"
Willow shrugged, taking a bite of salad, and gestured at Buffy to go on.
"What does it mean," Buffy asked, "when a guy blows you off, every night, so he can spend more time with his ship?"
Willow shot her a thoroughly puzzled look. "Ship?" she said, through a mouthful of salad.
"I mean, it's not… it's just…" Buffy fidgeted with the smoothie cup, again, looking even more uneasy. "He's been needing, like, a lot of… 'ship time', recently. Every single night. For two weeks. And when I saw him hanging out with Amber, yesterday… I just thought…" She peeled apart more of the cup. "Just… you know… maybe it's not really the TARDIS that he's…"
"He's totally into you, Buffy," Willow said. "If he needs to spend time with the TARDIS, I guess it's just because, without any memories, the TARDIS is kind of all he has that's just his."
Buffy nodded.
She knew he had a connection to his ship that she didn't understand. She just thought he'd give her some Buffy-time, too.
But lately… no Buffy time.
Just TARDIS time.
"Yeah," Buffy decided. She scratched at the peeled cup part. "You're right, Will. I mean, the TARDIS is important to him. I shouldn't think he's sneaking off to… I mean, he'd never…"
She trailed off.
(Except… there were a few times she'd gone into the TARDIS, to check on him, when he had 'TARDIS time' — and he hadn't been in there, at all.)
"Well maybe — he's bored with me," Buffy said. She poked the cup a little too hard, and the cup fractured, making smoothie mess splurt out across the table. "Like, we always used to save the world together. And now that things are so quiet that Giles says I don't even have to do patrol, anymore — maybe the Doctor's realized he doesn't really like me, that much, after all."
"No, Buffy!" Willow said. "He doesn't…!"
"Or maybe he liked Faith better," Buffy muttered.
Willow sighed, and helped Buffy mop up the smoothie mess on the table.
"Look, even if there are no monsters around, why don't you patrol with him, tonight, anyways?" Willow proposed. "You know, like, bonding time."
"Yeah," Buffy said, a smile trickling up her face. "Yeah — that could be fun."
She liked doing patrol with him. Especially when he decided to really distract her so she wouldn't kill things. That was definitely her favorite part.
"Five minutes and he'll be all over you, Buffy," Willow said. "I know he will."
Buffy decided she was going to go with that.
"You're right; I'm melodrama-ing over nothing," Buffy decided. "A little patrol together, a little save the world together, and a couple of beating up goo-monster-alien-things — and we'll be back to normal. What could…?"
Willow kicked Buffy, sharply.
Buffy stopped talking, as she looked around, and realized a man in a pinstripe suit and red trainers was running over to her, his arms filled to bursting with papers and psychology books.
"There you are!" he cried, plonking the books on the table. "Been looking for you, for hours." He shuffled, a little awkwardly. "Well… I say hours. More like one hour. Well, I say an hour, but might have been more like 5 minutes." He grinned. "Got a bit distracted."
Buffy knew he meant distracted with wandering around campus and arguing with professors and finding aliens and other non-make-out-with-other-womenny things.
"What's with the psych-stack?" Buffy asked, trying to put this out of her mind.
The Doctor nudged it towards her. "Just… had a bit of a chat with Maggie Walsh. She wanted me to give you this. Thinks you've got a bright future, ahead of you."
Maggie Walsh had that new grad student — Nina — who was always hanging out around her office. He couldn't have been there for her, right?
Willow set down her fork. "You mean, you were breaking into Professor Walsh's office to make sure you'd completely destroyed any extra copies of her research about Adam, and she caught you at it, and then you lectured her about the morality of building inhuman killing machines?"
The Doctor scratched the back of his neck, awkwardly. "A bit."
Willow shot Buffy a pointed look, as if to say — See? No reason to get worried.
Willow was right. Buffy had to stop being this insecure about their relationship.
(Remember what he did with Faith! Remember what he did with Faith! Remember…)
"Thanks," Buffy told the Doctor, moving the psych books so they were not in the middle of the exploded-smoothie madness. "Like, not just for getting all this stuff for me. But for yelling at Professor Walsh about the whole Adam-thing, too."
Buffy actually hadn't been planning to continue taking psych. For a start, she didn't want to run into Riley Finn, too often — because that was always awkward.
(And… you know… Nina…)
"Hey, I was just thinking — maybe we could go on patrol, together, tonight," Buffy proposed, scrunching up the remains of the broken smoothie cup into a ball. "I mean, we haven't done that in a while."
The Doctor shrugged, leaning back and putting his feet up on the table. "Nah. Not much going on, in the underworld, right now. 'Sides, I thought I'd try fitting a new temporal drive shaft into the TARDIS. See if I can't get the old girl working, again."
Buffy's face fell. More ship time.
Worse, still, the Doctor got that dopey little grin on his face, again — like he always did when he talked about 'ship time'. It was the kind of look that Buffy was pretty sure meant he was looking forward to tonight because he was really smitten with…
No. Bad Buffy. He wasn't using this as an excuse to see other women.
Stop being paranoid.
"Maybe you two should just think about it," Willow proposed, "and check in with each other, later."
"Ooh! Croutons!" The Doctor jumped to his feet, grabbed one out of Willow's salad, and tossed it into his mouth.
Willow yanked her salad away, defensively. "Hey, Mr. Licks-Everything-In-Sight, get your own!"
Buffy buried her face in her hands. Their relationship was fine. Their relationship was fine. Their relationship was fine.
It had to be.
What none of them noticed was that, off to one side, three cloaked figures stood beneath a tree, staring at them, intensely.
"Is that the Time Lord?" one whispered. "The one they call the Doctor?"
A second nodded. "Can't you feel it? His aura drips with time energies. The vortex flows through him."
The third smiled at the other two. "Yes. This is the Doctor. But he is weak. Without memories and, perhaps, soon, without friends." The third fixed interested eyes on Buffy. "I think the end of the world will come soon. Very, very soon."