Email: marenfic@yahoo.com
Feedback: Please!!!
*************
When Slayer padded out of the bathroom wrapped in a white towel, he was gone. Wesley never stayed, hadn't spent the night once since he had tracked her down a year earlier.
~~~~~~1 year earlier~~~~~
She had been sitting in a dark corner of one of her regular after-slayage goth clubs, doing a line of coke and trying to lose herself in the pounding music when he had slipped into the booth beside her.
"I'm so glad you're hanging up your stalker hat. It was getting harder and harder to pretend that I didn't see you," she said.
Then she had looked at him, up close, for the first time in over 3 years. What she saw surprised her. This man was not the prissy, ineffectual Watcher who had tried to make her toe the Council's line. In fact, he didn't even stick out too much in this scene, with his all black clothing, his tousled hair, and his three day growth. She raised her eyebrows in appreciation and nodded toward the line that was still on the table.
"Want?" she offered.
"No thank you. I seem to recall a time in the not overly distant past when you weren't so eager to have your body polluted with chemicals, but I suppose death might change things," he'd answered. His voice was deceptively smooth and calm, and she had made an internal note to be ready for whatever had made him finally approach her.
She had laughed, and it sounded more than a little hollow. "Don't worry Wes, I haven't been promoted to head crack-whore yet."
He had been skeptical at first, but soon he found out that even though she drank and did the occasional line, she never lost control. She wasn't a burn-out and she wasn't a drunk. It was almost as though she weren't capable of excess anymore.
"So are you going to clue me in on why you've been following me around, or am I going to have to beat it out of you? If you're here on behalf of your boss, you can get up and walk right on out" she had said. Her voice was chipper and sweat, belying the words that she spoke.
If he thinks I'm going to see . . . well, I won't. I can't.
It was his turn to bark out a bitter laugh. "I don't have a boss, but that's a tale for another day—perhaps I'll share it when you tell me how a dead slayer is walking, talking, and breathing," he had replied.
Slayer waited for him to continue, staring at him mutely with something close to disinterest in her eyes.
"You killed a . . . friend . . . of mine. Several weeks ago. A woman, tall, brown hair, evil to the core. Ring any bells?"
The haunted look that briefly flashed through her eyes was all the answer he needed.
"I had no idea it was you, Buffy. . ." he started to continue, before her sharp retort interrupted him.
"Don't call me that," she said, her voice low and laced with warning of imminent danger to his person.
He gave her a quizzical look. "Fine then. If you don't wish to be called by your name, what do you prefer?"
"Slayer."
He stared at her for several long moments. "As I was saying," he finally continued, "at first I didn't realize it was you. The night you killed Lilah, I saw you leave her building on my way up. I knew you looked familiar, but of course I never presumed that it could be you, as I knew you were dead of course. When I found her. . ." his voice had trailed off for a moment. When it resumed, it was silky smooth and threatening in its calm, cool delivery. "When I found her lying there in a pool of her own blood, I began . . . interviewing . . . my sources. Even though I was quite . . . persuasive, you were a difficult woman to find."
"Silly Wes. You never would have found me if I didn't want to be found," she drawled, tilting her head flirtatiously to one side and giving him a seductive half-smile. Only her eyes betrayed the hard calculating look of a warrior engaged in battle.
His eyes had roamed appraisingly over her body in response, had darkened with a hint of lust as he lingered on the swell of her breasts over the black bustier, had raked slowly down to the exposed flesh of her stomach before briefly settling on the firm thighs that were encased in red leather. When he raised his eyes to meet hers again, she was still smiling at him. This was not the girl he had known in Sunnydale. No, this was a woman, and she gave a little laugh as she tossed back her head, her long mane of dirty-blonde hair falling in sexy, tousled layers onto her shoulders and back, the tips in front just brushing the luminescent swell of her breasts.
"So, Wes, what is it that you want?" she questioned.
It was then that he had moved towards her, his eyes burning into hers, and she had been only slightly surprised to feel the cool feel of the tip of a blade pressed firmly against the skin of her abdomen.
"What I want is the answer to a single question. Precisely when did you begin murdering humans?" he had bitten out, the hand holding the knife steady, his face a hard inscrutable mask.
Slayer had reacted to the threat by running to meet it. She'd pressed herself slowly toward him so that the point of the knife punctured the skin of her belly, pressed forward until she could feel the blood welling up around the blade and run in a trickle down her skin. Her expression never changed—there was no acknowledgement of the imminent threat, or the pain. She stopped moving when the tip was buried just inside her and her lips were mere inches from his.
"Your fuck buddy was my first," she purred. She had watched his eyes flicker in anger and before he had the chance to plunge the knife he was brandishing into the depths of her gut, she had one strong hand wrapped around his scarred throat, applying unrelenting pressure. The slight relaxation of his hand on the knife told her that he knew she could crush his windpipe in an instant. They had stayed that way, frozen in an impasse, for several long moments. It was Slayer who finally broke the silence.
"I'm thinking that maybe the question you should have asked is why." She had dropped her voice in a faux whisper. "Technically I'm not allowed to tell you, but I've never really cared too much about technicalities. Show me a rule, I'll break it—it's like a motto."
He had given her a calculating look before pulling back the blade. She had dropped her hand from his neck and they sat back in the booth, guarded and distrustful. The next hour had been spent with Slayer telling him about her assignment to eliminate a female lawyer who had made a deal to open a dimensional portal for a demon warlord. Lilah's file had been thick, but the last deal was the one that signed her death warrant. Her ambition, her greed, and her willingness to do anything that might give her more power—including damning their world to a long, drawn-out war with highly trained demons intent upon conquering this dimension—had all combined to make her Slayer's first, and thus far, only human target. The Agency had wanted her dead, and Slayer had fulfilled her assignment. She didn't tell him how she had bent over and thrown up as soon as she had reached the relative safety of the alley where she had left her car parked.
Wes had listened quietly, occasionally breaking in to ask a question, but mostly just trying to digest the information. He had known that Lilah worked for the bad guys but he hadn't ever fully considered the extent of her personal culpability. Still, her death had affected him. His anger at Slayer had dissipated as she talked, but his grief over Lilah did not. They parted when the club closed for the night, both still alive, neither feeling the need to eliminate the other any longer.
The next night Wesley wordlessly joined her on patrol. She'd let him. After, they had gone to his apartment to talk. Slayer told him about her banishment from Heaven. He had shared his own fall from grace with her in cold, detached tones. Only his eyes gave his true feelings away. For a moment, before she regained control of herself, she was certain her own eyes must have betrayed her own surprising surge of emotion at hearing that Angel had had a son with Darla. Slayer felt as though she had been sucker punched in the gut at the news, and it had taken her a moment to push it back. She struggled to regain her usual sense of emotional neutrality, and when it hadn't come right away, she'd settled on turning the anguish into anger. She had verbally attacked him for his betrayal of Angel. He had responded with his own healthy dose of anger at her over killing Lilah. In the end, their verbal assaults turned to a physical assault, and then they had been naked and writhing together on the floor amid the ruins of broken pottery that hadn't weathered the fight.
In the end, Wes refused to continue calling her Slayer. He had tried so hard to divorce himself from his history with the Watcher's Council and he couldn't remind himself of their personal history every time he had to call out her name. He insisted that if she didn't want to be called Buffy, she pick a different human name. She had simply glared and refused. It had been two weeks into their renewed acquaintance when he had overheard her part of an assignment call from Harris, his eyes lighting up with sardonic amusement when she had begrudgingly given her code name for verification. When she hung up the phone, he had spoken.
"Artemis, Greek Goddess of the Hunt," he had murmured, thoughtfully. "Quite appropriate. I think I know what I'll call you then—Diana, her Roman goddess counterpart." When she gave him a warning glare, he had simply smiled. After several days of his persistence, she reluctantly gave in. As long as he didn't call her Buffy. . .
So now he called out "Diana" when he was inside her, and she called out nothing.
It wasn't that she didn't care for him—she did. They respected each other and they trusted each other. They felt connected—the outcasts, the unwanted, and the broken. They did not feel love. They weren't even technically exclusive, although neither had ever taken another lover.
No, she said nothing because the one time she had moaned out a name during sex with Wesley it hadn't been his and neither of them had wanted to be reminded of the one whose name it was. He, because of his betrayal of the one whose name was spoken. She, because that name belonged to Buffy, not Slayer.
~~~~~~~~~~~
Slayer pulled herself from her thoughts and finished drying off her body. Throwing on a pair of yoga pants and a tank, she looked longingly at her big comfy bed with its fluffy white down comforter and soothingly cool cotton sheets, before turning toward the padded bench that sat in front of one floor to ceiling window. From that vantage point, she had a relatively unobstructed view of the city skyline. Sometimes, when she knew she wouldn't be able to sleep, she sat there for hours and stared out at the city that had taken in her and made her one of its own after Heaven had dumped her back to earth.
Tonight was going to be one of those nights. She pulled her knees up and rested her head on them as she stared out into the night sky.
Lights pretty. Smog bad.
************************************************************************