Title: Kajjanu
Author: Athenae
Ratings: PG-13
Spoilers: In order of vignette, "Passion," "The Dark Age," "Flooded," and "Lies My Parents Told Me."
Disclaimer: They aren't mine.
Summary: Four brief post-eps, imagining how Buffy and Giles dealt with the aftermath.
Note: If before I've been on the fence, B/G wise, this is the story wherein I jump off the fence solidly onto the romantic side. If you don't like that, that's okay, I understand. It might not last. It's just something I'm trying.
Acknowledgments: The title comes from the Akkadian word for "constant." Thanks to Shelley B. for language assistance.
All night long I've held your hand / As if you had / A fourth time faced the kingdom of the mad / Its hackneyed speech, its homicidal eye / And dragged me home alive.
— Robert Lowell
1. Everybody has a death wish.
The alley's wet gravel digs into her skin. Her hair smells like burning feathers. He buries his face in her neck; she'll never feel that without a shudder, no matter who it is, or how nice and straight his teeth are.
They kneel there, bound by loss as they could never be by friendship alone. She does the only thing she can imagine will help. She puts her mouth to his.
He's cold and shuddering in the dark.
She intends to comfort, that's all, but it is not an accident.
2. If ifs and ans were pots and pans, there'd be no need of demons.
He has no idea what she sees when she looks at him.
A hero. A man. A pathetic wretch twice her age, with all his mistakes turned black marks, carved into his arm.
Laughable. Yet here she is. Staring at him with nothing in her face, not even disappointment.
They begin, and end, every night.
3. The story was about coming back from the war.
She stood under the scalding water for hours, but still felt the soil in her hair, saw scrapings of the grave beneath her fingernails. And when his arms reach around her she feels imprisoned, ivory silk hiding wood and steel and lead and grass, stone above her, stone inside.
When considering her name, she never thought about how silly it would look on a tombstone.
How easily they fall back into the old pattern. Her foolishness, her confession, her helplessness. His wisdom, his absolution, his capability. Hesitation, need, his mouth on her hair in the living room, she idly thinking she could vaccuum for hours and still never get all the glass out of the carpet. The window has been broken, by her count, at least two dozen times.
She sees in her head all the craven things that have ever come through the walls of this house. His hands clutch at her back. He does not know what she is now, and she does not care.
They do not try to name it. Not everything needs words.
4. She closes the door.
Lessons completed. She calls his bluff. He hates her, briefly, standing two inches from the painted door, from the little girl's room in which she has barricaded herself. Hates her, but then it evaporates.
What have you learned, he wants to ask her. Read it back to me, so that I can remember my life.
I no longer know what I taught you. Did I love you, and succeed? Did I love you, and fail?
You were given to me. What I did afterward is mine alone.
He often tells himself he had no choice, knowing it for the comforting lie it is.
It was never not a choice.