"The Waiting Season (2/3)"

By: Annie Sewell-Jennings (anniesj@comcast.net)

Disclaimer and notes in chapter one

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Chapter Two: All the Pretty Maids

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"There is no design for life

There's no devil's haircut in my mind

There is not a wonderwall to climb or step around

But there is a slide show and it's so slow

Flashing through my mind



Today is the day, but only for the first time"

--Travis, "Slide Show"

*****

The dress hangs patiently in the closet, untouched, unused, just a swirl of white satin and intricate beading. It smells like uncorked champagne and unheard wishes, lost dreams embroidered into the bodice with the sequins and the gathers, the careful tucks and so many fittings until it was Just Right. All gauzy and filmy, dreamy and delicate, and as she looks at it, it seems to represent everything that she is not.

"It's ugly," Anya says with surprise, blinking her eyelashes as she looks at her wedding dress. "Oh, my God. This dress... It's so *ugly*."

It never struck her before that this dress is not right for her, too frothy and starry-eyed. She is none of those things. She's the frank one, the one who has the smarts and the wits, matter-of-fact and delightfully insensitive. Foamy, bubbly mermaid dresses are not made for a girl like her when she likes everything starched and neat, clean and tidy.

Then why did she choose it? Why did she pick this fairy-tale monstrosity out instead of something sensible, something straightforward and no- nonsense, like her? A pantsuit, maybe, or a nice, conservative dress with a pencil skirt? Anya is not a woman who stares off into space, all giggles and dumb smiles and princess dreams, and nowadays, she's not even a woman at all.

Craning her neck around to see what Anya has spied, Buffy swallows her comment and struggles to come up with something complimentary. "But the... The sequins," she says, nodding her head like this will be helpful. Yes, the sequins. They will solve everything, because Buffy does not know how to tell Anya that she has never understood the selection of the gown. She tries again. "The bridesmaid dresses were worse."

Sadly, Anya pulls the dress out of the closet and lays it on the bed, amidst a sea of half-packed cardboard boxes carrying her most prized possessions. Sequins and beaded baubles are stitched over the bodice of the dress with loving care, and it looks like a cloud, something unstable and soft, like it could fly away if she were to just open the window. Is that what love is? Tenuous and fragile, uncertain and wispy? If she opens up her bedroom window, will her heart fly from her chest and ascend towards the sun?

//She stands in front of the full-length mirror in the bridal shop, looking at herself in the mirror with this feeling of absolute light and awe. The smiling, gushing clerk carefully places the gauzy veil atop her head of tight lemony curls, and Anya sighs at the reflection. She looks like something out of a story, like something human and happy, and her heart is swelling as she gazes at her reflection, spellbound by her own glory.

When she spins to smile at Xander, she sees that he is on the verge of tears and she frowns. "What?" she asks, irritated. Can't he see how beautiful she is? Asshole. "You think I look fat in this, don't you? You think my ass looks big. Well, I'd like to know how you're going to fit in your tux if you keep cramming--"

But he is shaking his head, his mouth smiling so wide that she realizes without listening to his words that she was mistaken. "No, An," he says softly, his breath caught in his throat. "You look stunning."//

Love flies away so fast.

Everything is packed away in her neat little apartment, not as nice as Xander's or even the small loft she occupied before him, but adequate for a single vengeance demon with no direction whatsoever. But now, with the Magic Box out of business and her apartment turning into a co-op, Anya simply cannot afford it anymore. Since Buffy has an extra bedroom and the need for cash, fast, Anya will live with her for the time being, until she figures out what to do next.

And so the two girls stand amidst a sea of cardboard boxes, staring at a beaded wedding dress sewn with all the hopes and dreams of little girls.

Tentatively, Buffy reaches out her hand and touches the fine chiffon train, her fingertip caressing the piped lining, and she shakes her head a little. "I always wanted to get married," she says a little regretfully, and Anya frowns at her.

"You're not an old maid yet," she says helpfully, and Buffy rolls her eyes a bit, not meanly, just in amusement.

"No," she agrees, "but I'm not bridal material, either. No pretty white dresses for Buffy."

No, Slayers do not get married in churches with everyone throwing rice and catching good luck bouquets. Warriors are not meant to walk down velvety aisles with lacy trains trailing behind them, blushing brides behind demure veils. All that she gets is blood, sweat and tears. Slayers are too dark to wear white, too tainted and stained, and she knows this from experience.

//Furiously, hatefully, she thrusts her mouth against his and forces her tongue inside, not waiting for permission because she doesn't give a fuck what he wants. Want. Take. Have. Faith is right, and she'll do what she pleases with him. Spike moans as she bites her blunt teeth into the lush peach of his lower lip, and she digs her fingernails deep enough into his back to make him bleed. That's all she wants, anyway. To bleed him to death.//

"Do you want to take it?" she asks Anya gently, and the girl stands there, looking down at her ill-fated wedding dress, not touching it or even breathing on it. "You don't have to if you don't want to."

But Anya is not listening; she is moving away from the wedding dress and towards the closet, rummaging through boxes of trendy shoes until she finds what she is looking for. A shoebox, just a shoebox, tucked away in the back where no one else can see. She is not a sentimental woman, and she is known for her callous speech and thoughtless words. If they know that even she cannot banish things from her heart, then they will be disappointed.

Hesitantly, she holds the box in her hand for a moment and looks over nervously at Buffy, who still stands caressing the bodice of the bridal gown. There is a distinct sadness in her posture, like she is regretting something as she stands there. The others think that she is so happy now, overcome with the joy of living, and while Buffy has rediscovered the rapture of existence, she has not forgotten that sometimes, all life can bring is pain.

//The look on his face, the regret and the sorrow, the fear and uncertainty. The way that he drops her hand, the way that he staggers a little dazedly out of the chapel, leaving her alone in her magic gown, the gown that she looks so stunning in. Is the music playing? Oh, God, it is, and now she will walk down the aisle without anybody to love her, without anybody to cherish her, and for the first time in her life Anya knows what it is like to be fucked. It hurts worse than anything.//

When Anya places the box on the mattress, Buffy is startled and recoils from the dress, blinking her eyes. Bluntly, Anya opens up the box and dumps its contents onto the bed, spilling them out in a shower of lost love's memorabilia. "This is what I kept," she says in a dull, sorrowful tone. "Isn't it pretty?"

It is not as pretty as it is sad, all of these wishes Anya made only to watch them crumble. A dried vanilla-colored rose with a sprig of fragile baby's breath. Blue satin garter belt trimmed with lace. The champagne flute embossed with "Mr. and Mrs. Xander Harris" and their wedding date. The miniature bride and groom that was placed atop their uneaten, three- tiered cake. All these pointless items, but Anya had staked her heart on them. They remind Buffy of pennies children throw into mall fountains, only to watch bullies fish for their dreams an hour later, greedy arms swimming in dirty water.

Lovingly, Anya strokes the garter belt, a smile too old for her youthful face resting on her lips. "Willow said I had to have something borrowed, and Tara said I had to have something blue," she explains, and a mischievous look seizes her face as she pulls out a lacy white strapless bra from the pile. "So Tara made the garter, and Willow gave me her bra."

A sharp bark of laughter makes its way out of Buffy's throat, and she shakes her head as she looks down at the scrap of filmy lace dangling from Anya's manicured fingertips. "That's terrible," she says, but she doesn't mean it and Anya knows it. It's actually very wonderful that she has these mementos, these objects to hold onto, and Buffy is envious of the fact that the girl has a shoebox full of memories and she has nothing to hold onto of her own torrid love affair with Spike. Nothing but one thing...

//It rests in the closet, where the others cannot see it, because all good skeletons like to hang out in bureaus and wardrobes and other out-of-the- way places. She doesn't do anything dumb or high-school like sleep with it (even though she's tempted), and she won't ever wear it out (because she tried it on and it doesn't fit), but it's still there nonetheless. Just an embrace of leather, a snatched scent of spent tobacco and spilled semen, and that good, undetectable Spike smell that promises chaos and undying love.//

"I'll never get married, you know," Anya says in a quiet, sad sort of voice, like there's something breaking inside of her chest. It might be her heart. She sits on the bed, the bra replaced with the champagne glass, reading the words over and over again to herself like a mantra. Mr. and Mrs. Xander Harris. "Vengeance demons don't get married. We're lone ducks."

"Wolves," Buffy corrects absently, but she knows what Anya means. It's the same for her, destined to never wear a band on her finger or have a first dance underneath the starlight. Giles will never escort her down the aisle and give her away to her beloved, and Dawn will never get dressed up in lace and baby's breath to be her flower teenager. It used to make her sad, and she's a little down right now as she looks at all of what she can never have. What she never should have wanted. "I know. Me either."

Anya understands, and she places a hand on top of Buffy's, commiserating with the warrior doomed to die before she turns thirty. What must that be like, to know that there would only be a limited amount of time, much less than the others, and to know that with such certainty because it had already happened twice before? The third time, she knows that it will be final. Permanent. No hope for the future...

//"I want to have a baby," Anya announces with pride, and Xander drops his jaw and coffee, the latter shattering into irreparable porcelain pieces stained with dark caffeine.

"What?" he asks in a shrill, brittle voice. "You want to have a... What?"

Rolling her eyes in exasperation, she crosses her trim legs and thumbs through the newspaper until she finds the stock section. Even though she's not currently investing, it never hurts to know what she will invest in when she becomes a millionaire. "A baby," she repeats in a slower voice, in case he can't understand her. Suddenly, his look of abject terror makes sense and she huffs a little sigh. "Oh, for God's sake, Xander, not tomorrow. Just... One day. We should have children one day. And we can name them and feed them and teach them how to be capitalists and to love America and love us, and they'll be these little mini-Xanders and mini-Anyas and..."

But then he's kissing her and she just wants him.//

"I'll never have a baby," Anya says in a sudden, shocked voice, blinking her eyes as she stares at her hands. "I never... I didn't even think about it. I can't ever have children, and I can't ever have children with Xander."

Buffy frowns, confused. "What do you mean?" she asks. "You can't have little half-vengeance, half-construction worker babies?"

Numbly, Anya shakes her head, and she thinks that her hands are shaking a little, too. Her fingers are tightly clutching the stem of the champagne flute, and she knows that if she grips it much tighter it will snap, but that doesn't matter. Not in the face of this. "Vengeance doesn't breed anything but discontent," she says. "It's a barren field. I gave up... I gave up my life."

//Nineteen years old now, big girl in college, with the big guy boyfriend who's large and strong and normal, and she's looking at herself in the mirror in just her bra and panties, her cheeks streaked with drying tears. Trembling hands cover her flat stomach, and she thinks about creation and conception and the miracle of life, and then she knows that a Slayer is just a killer after all.//

"I can't have children, either," Buffy whispers, and it's the first time she's told anybody. Only to Anya, because she understands. Because they both know what it is like to walk down the street and see a pregnant woman ripe with vitality and heavy with child, so beautiful and proud, glowing radiantly because she's so lucky. So fucking lucky. "Giles told me. It was after I started seeing Riley, and we were training one day. I knocked my purse off the table and a condom fell out. It was so embarrassing, and then he sat me down and said..."

//"Buffy, I know that this might come as a... You can't have children. Slayers. They can't have children. Every Slayer is sterile. It's genetic and mystic all at once, to keep the girls from getting pregnant in the line of duty. It's cruel, and it's inhuman, but there's nothing that can be done about it. I can't tell you differently. And Buffy... I'm so terribly sorry."//

"I'm sorry," Anya murmurs, and her hand is cool and tight around hers, palms so dry because demons don't sweat. No sweaty palms for Anya, not ever, and there's this overwhelming sadness that washes over her and drags her underneath, back to the dark place where the waves drown out her joys and she can just lay there, dying.

//Cool cubes of ice press softly at the nape of her neck, and she sighs, relaxing against his lukewarm body, so nice and non-invasive, always easy to lean against while he smoothes sweaty tendrils of hair away from her face. In the afterglow, she's often mean and bitter, calling him names, taunting his sexuality, calling him a thing, but he's always so... Tender. Delicate. Gentle. "You're the most incredible person I've ever met," he breathes into her ear, and the ice is melting against her too-hot skin and she's content.//

The wedding dress is still on the bed, its sequins and beads glittering underneath the bright afternoon sunshine and its stiff train trailing on the cheap shag carpeting. The veil is just a fog of froth, and Buffy touches it briefly. Suddenly, she looks at this silly fairy tale concoction and sees that Anya is right. It's not Anya at all. It's too sugary and saccharine, too ethereal and dreamy for a girl who prefers severe pencil skirts and matching sets of underwear.

This is somebody else's dream, spread out across the bed for every little girl to twirl around in and giggle in, like something Cinderella or Snow White would wear to the enchanted ball or inside the glass coffin. Starlight and dew drops are not the end-all be-all of femininity, and she realizes with a shocking revelation that the time she felt most like a woman was in Spike's bed, when he looked at her with wide, worshipful eyes and told her that she was incredible.

She was *happy* with him.

"We don't need this," Buffy says all of a sudden, shaking her head in amazement at the dress. "Really. We don't. We *so* don't have to have the stupid white dress, and the cheesy first song, and the big honeymoon in Paris."

"We were going to Vegas," Anya says moodily, morosely staring at the white confection of cloth sprawled across her bed.

"But it doesn't *matter*," she says, and she takes Anya's hands tightly within hers, body and blood racing with the joy of her revelation. "Get it? None of it. Because you're wonderful, Anya; you really *are*, and we're such stupid, stupid people for getting all suckered into that fantasy of happily ever after. There's no light at the end of the tunnel unless you make it yourself, right? Right?"

And Buffy is *right*, so damn right, and Anya parts her lips as she looks at the Slayer. "You think I'm wonderful?" she asks in her small, uncertain voice that's so rare because she is articulate and confident. "Really?"

Smiling, Buffy wraps her arms around the demon and hugs her tightly. "Of course you are," she whispers. "It doesn't matter what you are. It's the who. The who is the wonderful thing. The vengeance demon thing is just... Well, it's actually kind of cool. The teleporting? Way awesome."

Anya beams happily at Buffy. "And it's cheaper than buying gas."

Feeling an incredible lightness, this ease of being that is better than any sunny day, Anya picks the dress up from the bed and holds it up against her body, looking at herself in the mirror. As she looks at herself, she remembers the way that Xander saw her in his eyes, and how silly she was to think that it was just the dress. He loves her for who she is, not what she wears or what she is. Just the essence of Anya, and the rest of it is all icing on the proverbial cake.

//After they lower her body into the ground, the plain, stolen casket covered with violet hydrangea (her favorite), it becomes too much to take and Anya starts crying. She doesn't even know the Slayer that well, doesn't know what her hopes and dreams are, but she knows something about death now. She knows that it's permanent and damning, that her life is over and she'll never have fruit punch again, and those are things that she'll one day have to give up, too.

That night, Xander makes love to her while he cries, and when it's over, he breathes the words into her ear while sliding the ring on her finger. "I promise you it's forever," he whispers, his voice shaky and weak. "I love you so much. I want to be with you until I die."

They make love four more times that night.//

Laughing, she runs over to the window and thrusts it open, and then lets the wedding dress flutter from the fifth story down to the pond below, and it floats for a moment before the heavy train and satin drags it to the bottom. As it disappears into the murky waters, Anya feels remarkably satisfied, like this is exactly what she needed to do. She is who she is, and Xander loves her for that. Marriage is not necessary. She doesn't need the ring or the papers or the American dream.

She has her own dreams now.

*****

After Anya's life is packed up into boxes, Buffy walks home to the little house on Revello Drive and smiles to herself the entire way. There is a skip in her step again, a song in her heart, and a sudden eye for beauty that makes her incredibly light to the touch. The stars brightening the sky are brilliant, promising far-off galaxies and other wonders of the universe, and she thinks that she might be getting all existential in her old age because she never really contemplated the stars before. Not really, not before. Everything is captivating, fascinating, and there's a burning in her heart that is making her overjoyed.

//One brief glimpse of sweetness through the tarnish. Wrapped up in the tumbled sheets of his rarely used bed, tethered to the bedposts with silk scarves so delicate that she thinks she might weep, and Spike's making love to her. Not just fucking her, not growling and smirking and rolling her over into new and bendy positions, but making love. Tender, fragile, wispy. He makes it wispy. Eyelashes dance across her areole, and she arches her back and sighs his name, and then she starts laughing because he's tickling her belly with his tongue. "Spike!" she giggles, and he looks up at her with so much love that it does make her cry. Just this once. Just this once, she'll cry for him.//

"I'm in love with him," she whispers to herself, and the idea is so startling and new that she starts to laugh again. It's true, though. She *is* in love with him, has been for months, for maybe years. She doesn't know and she doesn't care. What matters is that she's in love with him consciously for the first time, and she wants to run to his crypt and leap into his arms. Ravish me, you beast of a lover. Ravish me and make me cry again, because you make it hurt so pretty.

It will be hard to love him, and she knows that. But she's not afraid of the hard anymore because she doesn't know any other way to live. Life is difficult, twisting and turning, throwing disasters like the cold, wet bathroom tiles and the bright morning when Willow lost her mind. Yet sometimes, there are these moments of absolute grace, when there is nothing but this invigorating feeling that's so much larger than she is. It fills her and stretches her skin until she can't take it anymore.

So Buffy sits down on the front steps of her house and laughs, lets it all fall out of her as she thinks of what he can be when she lets him be nice. When she allows him his moments of intimacy, of tenderness, instead of pushing him to the violence. They pull and claw at each other, but when they allow it, there's bliss there. Between the lines, there is rapture.

//"You seem to... glow," he says, tilting his head to the side with a look of warmth and intimacy that she rarely sees in him nowadays. Like this is how it's going to be between them for the rest of their lives, soft acknowledgments of what failed between them. In that moment, Buffy almost wishes that she could be his again. Just to hear him tell her that she glows.

But all that she says is, "The dress is radioactive."//

The message Willow left for them is taped up on the refrigerator, and every morning when she wakes up, Buffy reads it over again. Tonight, she stands in front of it and reads the neat, calm handwriting, registering its message and knowing its full meaning.

She'll wait.

*****

"There is no design for life

There's no devil's haircut in your mind

There is not a wonderwall to climb or step around

But there is a slide show, and it's so slow

Flashing through your mind

Today is the day

But only for the first time



I hope it's not the last time"

--Travis, "Slide Show"

*****

(end)

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