Title: Later
Author: Blue Shoe 22
Disclaimer: I do not own anyone of Buffy the vampire slayer or any of its characters. The title and plot of this story belong to Michael Marshall Smith. I merely manipulated and take no credit for what isn't truly mine.
Rating: PG 13, involves themes of death
Summary: When someone dies it's hard to let go. B/S, angst.
Spoilers: non-specific season 5 and 6
Distribution: Please ask
I remember standing in the bedroom before we went out, fiddling with my jacket and fretting mildly about the time. As yet we had plenty, but that was nothing to be smug about. The minutes had a way of disappearing all too quickly when Buffy was getting ready, early starts culminating in a breathless dash for the car and cursing when the old beast didn't start immediately. It was Dawn's birthday party we were going to – her twenty-first – so it didn't really matter what time we left, but I tend to be a little impatient when it comes to waiting. I used to, anyway.
When I finally had my collars in what I thought was some semblance of order, I turned away from the mirror – not that there had been much point in looking into it in the first place – and opened my mouth to call out to Buffy. But then I caught sight of what was on the bed, and closed it again. For a moment I just stood and looked, and then walked over towards the bed.
It wasn't anything spectacular, just a dress made of sheeny white material. Years ago, before we started going out together, Buffy used to wear a lot of shiny clothes. Glitter and sparkles, not because they were fashionable, but because they made her feel alive and beautiful. After we became a couple I trailed her endlessly around clothes shops, browsing tops and dresses, looking for something to put that old sparkle back in her life, while I half-hearted protested and moaned.
On impulse I leaned down to feel the material, and found I could remember touching it for the first time in the shop on Mill Road, could remember surfacing up through the contented boredom to say that yes, I liked this one. On that recommendation she'd bought it, and as a reward for traipsing round after her she'd bought me dinner too. Pigs blood and spicy Buffalo wings, there was a lot of it, and it was good.
The strange thing was, I didn't even really mind the dress shops. You know how sometimes, when you're just walking around, living your un-life, you'll see someone on the street and fall hopelessly in love with them? How something in the way they look, the way they are, makes you stop dead in your tracks and stare? How for that instant you're convinced that if you could just meet them, you'd be able to love them forever?
It wasn't like that our first time, but it was. I was there to kill her, I wanted to, but at the same time I was a little bit in love with her, if obsession passes for love as it did for me at that time. But it's the same sort of feeling, isn't it. Wild schemes and unlikely meetings pass through your head, and yet as they stand on the other side of the street or room, talking to someone else, they haven't the faintest idea of what's going through your mind. Something has clicked, but only inside your head. You know that there's no way on this side of the Hellmouth they'll reciprocate, that it's more likely that Angel will stop using hair-gel than that anything will come of it, but something about them forces you to stay, until you wished they'd leave so you could be free.
The first time I saw Buffy like that, and now she was upstairs in the bath, getting ready for me. I didn't call out for her to hurry along, I decided it didn't really matter.
A few minutes later a swirling gurgle noise announced the letting out of the bath water, and Buffy wafted into the room swaddled in thick towels and glowing in high spirits. Suddenly I lost all interest in going to the party, punctuality or otherwise. She marched up to me, set her head at a silly angle to kiss me on the lips and pulled at must duster and shirt vigorously. When I looked down she had fixed the collars in perfect layers, just as she always did.
Half an hour later we left the house on Revello Drive, still in plenty of time. If anything, I'd held her up.
'Later,' she said, smiling in a way that showed she meant it, 'Later, and for a long time, Spike.'
I remember turning from locking the door to see her standing on the curb outside the house, looking perfect in her white dress, looking happy and looking at me. As I walked smiling down the path towards her she skipped backwards onto the road, laughing for no reason, laughing because she was with me.
'Come on,' she said, holding out her hand like a dancer, and a yellow van came speeding round the corner and smashed into her. She spun backwards as if tugged on a rope, rebounded off a parked car and toppled into the road. As I stood cold at the end of the path she half sat up and looked at me, an expression of wordless surprise on her face, and then she fell back again.
When I reached her blood was already pulsing up into the white of her dress and welling out of her mouth. It ran out over her makeup and I saw she'd been right: she hadn't quite blended the colours above her eyes. I'd told her it didn't matter, that she still looked beautiful. She had.
She tried to move her head again and there was a sticky sound as it almost left the tarmac and then slumped back. Her hair fell back from around her face but not as it usually did there was a faint flicker of her eyelids and then she died.
I knelt there in the road beside her, holding her hand as the blood dried a little. It was as if everything had come to a halt and not started up again. I heard every word the small crowd muttered, but I didn't know what they were muttering about. All I could think of was that there wasn't going to be a later, not to kiss her some more, not for anything. Later was gone.
When I got back from the hospital I phoned her Watcher to tell him what happened. To tell him how they'd revived her, in a way. Her Slayer strength had pulled her through, just, but she was on life support, hooked up to a machine with multitudes of coloured wires. To tell him how the paramedics didn't believe she'd last till morning. It was a bad phone call, very, very bad. It was worse telling her sister.
After I'd done that I sat in our room, looking at the drawers she'd left open, the towels on the floor and the note she'd left out to remind us of the Niblet's birthday bash at the Bronze, feeling my stomach crawl. I was back at the house, as if we'd come back home from the party. I should be making her a coffee while she had a quick shower, coffee she'd drink on the sofa while I had a quick bag of blood in the kitchen. But the shower was of and the sofa was empty. What was I supposed to do?
I sat for an hour feeling as if I'd somehow slipped too far forward in time and left Buffy behind, as if I could turn around and see her desperately running to try and catch up to me. When it felt as if my throat was going to burst I called Angel, the closest thing I had to a parent and he came. He murmured soothingly as we cried and gently made me change my clothes, but didn't wash them. Not till I was asleep anyway. When I came down and saw them clean I hated him, but I knew he was right and the hate went away. There wouldn't have been much point in keeping them in a drawer.
The visit to the hospital was numbing. She was dying, nothing I could do, nothing anyone could do. We sat. And we watched. And we pulled the plug and ended her beautiful, vibrant life. I had some moments with her by myself but looking at her cooling body the words clogged in my throat. I lent down and kissed her chastely on the mouth. Then I bit her. Her slowing blood poured into my mouth from the juncture between her shoulder and neck and it tasted like life and death, hope and despair, betrayal and redemption. I nicked my wrist and allowed my own blood to flow into her mouth. She was dead though.
I covered up the wound; it wasn't hard with the other injuries on her grazed neck, and gazed t her one last time. It had been worth a try. Maybe.
The funeral was short. I guess they all are, really, but there's no point in them being any longer. Nothing more would be said. I was a little better by then, and not crying so much, though I did before we went to the church because I couldn't get the lapels of my suit to sit right.
Buffy was buried next to her mother, which she would have wanted. Dawn gave me her dress afterwards, because I'd asked for it. It had been thoroughly cleaned and large patches had lost their sheen and died, looking as much unlike Buffy's dress as the cloth had on the coat hanger. I'd almost have preferred the bloodstains: at least then I could still believe the cloth sparkled underneath it. But they were right in their way, as my Grandsire was. Some people seem to have pragmatic, accepting souls, that ability to deal with death. I don't have a soul, and I've revelled in death for over one hundred years, but this – I can't understand, can't comprehend.
Afterwards I stood at the gravesite for a while, but not for long because I knew people were waiting for me. As I stood by the mound of earth on top of her I tried to concentrate, to send some final thought to her, some final love, but the world kept pressing on through the lights of cars shining through from the road and the cawing of some predatory nocturnal bird. I couldn't shut it out. I couldn't believe how cold it was, that somewhere lives were being led and televisions were being watched, that when I got there, the inside of the Magic shop would smell the same as it always had. I wanted to feel something, wanted to sense her presence, but I couldn't. All I could feel was the world around me, the same old world. But it wasn't the world that had been there three days ago, and I couldn't understand how it looked so much the same.
It was the same because nothing had changed, and I tuned and walked towards the car. The wake was worse than the funeral, much worse, and I stood there with a sandwich I wouldn't eat, feeling something very cold building up inside of me. Xander and Willow held court with the rest of the Scoobie's, swiftly running through a range of emotions from stoic resilience to trembling incoherence.
'I've just realised, ' Willow sobbed to me, 'Buffy's not going to be at my commitment ceremony with Tara.'
'Yes,' I agreed numbly, 'Well not unless you bring her back like last time.'
And immediately hate myself for it. I went and stood by the staircase, out of harms way. I couldn't react properly. I knew why everyone was standing here, that in some ways it was like Willow and Tara's commitment ceremony. Instead of gathering to bear witness to a bond, they were here to prove she was dead. In the weeks that would come they'd know they'd stood together in a room, and would be able to accept she was gone. I couldn't.
I said goodbye to Buffy's relatives as they left. I looked at them oddly, and shook hands, strangers for all our connection to Buffy. Then I went back and changed into my old clothes, my 'Big Bad' clothes, Buffy used to call them. Then I made up a cup of O negative laced with whisky and stared out the window into the darkened street for a while. I knew damn well what I was going to do and it was a relief to give into it.
I went back to the cemetery and I dug her up. What can I say? It wasn't hard work, but took longer than I'd expected, but in another way it was surprisingly difficult. It was creepy, it was sacrilege. I had too constantly remind myself I was a vampire just to keep putting shovel to earth. There was just me, the damp earth and Buffy underneath. I just wanted to find her.
When I did I layed her down by the side of the grave and filled it back up again, being careful to make it look undisturbed. Then I carried her to the car in my arms and brought her home.
The house seemed very quiet as I layed her on the sofa and the cushion rustled and creaked as it took her weight again. When she was settled I knelt and looked up at her face. It looked much the same as it always had, though the colour of the skin was different, didn't have the glow she always exuded in life. That's where life is you know, not in the heart but in the little things, like the way hair falls around a face. Her nose as the same and her forehead was smooth. It was the same face, exactly the same.
I knew the dress she was wearing was hiding a lot of things I'd rather not see, things that would remind me she was dead. But I took it off anyway. It was her shroud, her going away dress, bought by concerned relatives who didn't want their niece receiving charity from strangers. It didn't mean anything to either of us. The patchers and menders had done a good job, even my bite marks couldn't be seen.
When she was sitting again in her white dress I walked over and turned the light down, and I held my head in my hands, trying not to cry, because she looked so much the same. She might have been asleep, warmed by a non-existent fire and dozy with wine, as if we'd just come back from the party.
I went and had a shower then. What she would have done had we come back in from an evening out, to feel clean and fresh when she slipped beneath the sheets. It wouldn't be like that this evening of course, but I had dirt all over me, and it felt like it weighed me down. I just wanted thing the way they had been.
I stood under the scalding spray for a while, knowing she was in the living room, and slowly washing myself clean. I really wasn't thinking much. It felt nice to know that I wouldn't be alone when I walked back in there. That was better than nothing, was part of what made he alive. I dropped my 'Big Bad' clothes onto the bedroom floor – except for the duster, which I hung carefully from a hook on the inside of my wardrobe – and put on my clothes from the night of the accident. They didn't mean as much as her dress, but at least they were from before.
When I returned to the living room her head had lolled slightly, but it would have done if she'd been asleep. I made us both a drink, hot chocolate with little marshmallows in, although no marshmallows for her, she only bought them for me. Then I sat down next to her on the sofa and was glad the cushions had her dent in them, it always drew me slightly towards her, and didn't leave me perched on the edge.
The first time I saw Buffy was at the Bronze. I saw her across the room and watched her dance, twisting and turning as if that was what she'd been born to do. I didn't speak to her until we were outside and I told her that I'd kill her. It wasn't till two years later that I really fell in love with her, and I kissed, properly, for the first time a year after that. As I sat there on the sofa next to her body I reached out and took her hand, as I had done when we first went out on a date with her friends after we 'came out'. It was cooler than I remembered, but that was to be expected, and I held it, feeling the lines on her palm, lines I knew better than my own.
I let myself feel calm and I held her hand in the half light, not looking at her, as also on that first night as an official couple, when I'd been too happy to push my luck. She's letting you hold her hand in public, I'd thought, don't expect to be able to look at her as well. It's enough: don't look, you'll break the spell. My face creased then, not knowing whether to smile or cry. But it felt right.
I sat there for a long time, staring at nothing, still not thinking, just holding her hand and letting the minutes run. The longer I sat there the more normal it felt and finally I turned slowly to look at her. She looked tired and asleep, so deeply asleep, but still there with me and still mine.
'I'm sorry luv,' I said, and clutched her hand tighter, 'I mourned you once. I can't…I can't do it again.' I was crying and my vision blurred so when her eyelid fluttered I thought it was just a trick of the light. But then it stirred again, and I knew somehow it had worked, somehow that tiny amount of blood trickled down her throat in the antiseptic hospital room had been enough. She was a late riser, but she had risen and that was enough.
It was a few minutes later when she was finally able to turn her head. 'Spike?' she said, voice hoarse and questioning.
'Yeah luv, it's me.'
We had to leave of course. There was no way the Scooby's would accept her as she is now, or at least as she will be when she recovers. She's still stiff, and her voice still cracks. I refuse to believe she won't improve. She gets a little better every day. She drinks the packaged blood I bring her – pig, not human, I could never – and sometimes there's a spark of the old Buffy. And the sparks are becoming more frequent.
I love her, and even if she stayed this way I'd love her still. She mine, and now we can be together. For Eternity.