She likes waffles because they're stackable, because blueberries and cherries and sliced bananas can sit in the little pockets of their grids. There are lots of waffles here, smothered in syrup and butter, spilling off of cheap white plates. As many waffles as she wants.
It's not Heaven where she is. Too many streetlights and midnights and cups of bitter coffee. Headache-inducing yodelling in the background. Always there at the back of her mind, even when she wanders alone through town, where the soundtrack is sharp city blaring.
Sunnydale never blared. It sang softly, a worn and tired lullaby horror. The edges of this town sometimes do too, out in suburbia with milkmen and flowers.
But this isn't Sunnydale. It's further north, with cool, minty breezes and lots of cement. Here, there's another blonde with a silver cross necklace, stylish shoes, and years of baggage. A different man with lines on his face calls the shots. And the wrong seen-everything, whiskey-voiced man touches her because she's the wrong blonde, but at least she lets him touch.
At night, when all souls have been laid to rest, they meet in a small, stained bed or on a couch or in an alley and they both pretend. She tells him to talk, to be Spike, to be right and be wrong and closes her eyes when he does, when he whispers in her ear. And sometimes she tells him to shut up and be Angel, or be Riley, or be no one. She never tells him to just be Mason.
She thought she'd been done; done, done, gone, gone, swimming through light and into the dark. But the dark is brightly lit, and smells like citrus. People live there, long dead, and everything is a flurry of bright yellow Post-it-notes, black Sharpie ink, waffles.
He tastes like waffles, and whiskey, and smoke, and she gets a contact high when she kisses him; when he fucks her; when her tears mingle with her sweat and dampen his shirt, still on, and he pretends not to notice. They're both kite-high and drowning.
At first, she's never Buffy to him. She's what he needs her to be: his unnatainable proper girl, dead in his arms and wild in his mind and so sad for reasons that aren't Buffy reasons, but reasons he makes up for himself, little stories about not being loved and Gone with the Wind and crucifixes. Nothing that's real, or right, or too strong for him to handle (nothing like her).
She is black coffee-strong and addictive. No sugar. No cream. No soft edges that aren't hidden in shadow. But time wears on and he peers into the shadows, finds her softness and her tenderness and the bits of her she hides from the world. He loses his grip on the world he isn't part of and tumbles into her small world of fear, death, syrupy kisses that cut like knives. And as he treads her world, she is Buffy. She is the slayer, she is a lost little girl, she is a demon and she is Death. He is Death.
Death is her gift.
It is a gift that strokes her face with scratchy, wool-covered palms, and kisses her lightly, fucks her roughly because that's what she wants. And when it's over and she's tired, wide-awake on his bed, on the couch, somewhere safe, she lies on her back and tells Death stories. They're Buffy stories. He can handle those now. And he gets her a glass of milk, white as bone, that she gulps down. She is a desert, her thirst never-ending, and he is a river that takes in her stories, lets them float and flow and they all wash over each other.
Sometimes he tells her stories. His stories, where there's blood and mirrors and everyone dies, and she is oddly comforted by it all. She takes the stories and weaves a blanket from them, throws it around her shoulders, nestles in. She weaves into the blanket everything: waffles and stories and sisters and drowning, until it's warm and whole.
She is whole. He is whole. And they are hole-filled together.
She kisses her old life good-bye. It is a life that tastes like ashes and ice and jelly donuts and dying. Like the blood from biting her lip too many times until her skin breaks.
This new life tastes like waffleswhiskeydrowningfloating freedom! It tastes like him.
She can taste herself on his lips when she tries really hard. Watermelon lipgloss and mochas and death. Everything here is all about death. And it's not Heaven, and she's learning that that's okay. Because they're all still dead things together, and sometimes, sometimes she's happy.
But only at night.
Only when drowning.