Author's Note: Sorry this took so long; I have computer access problems!
Anyway, I'd like to thank David Bowie for writing such a completely
gorgeous album as 'The Man Who Sold The World' and especially the song 'All
The Madmen'. I just thought it touched so aptly on both these characters'
lives. And the reference Buffy makes to 'another sanity' is of course from
the episode where she has to choose between conflicting realities of
'Slayer' or 'Normal'. I can't remember the episode name, so I hope you know
what I'm talking about. So tell me what you think, and feel free to make
plot suggestions. ^_^
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Ethan refused, on pain of self-loathing, to let Buffy see just how much this affected him. In the two weeks since he had become the only human she conversed with, he was starting to feel bits of himself drifting away. And he wasn't prepared for that, had never actively sought to let another living person so close. He hadn't been lying when he'd said he had more masks than she knew; he just hadn't expected her to start gently removing them all with her calloused little hands.
"So we stand on your doorstep all night?" a feminine voice remarked behind him.
Ethan started and shot a quick smile over his shoulder at Buffy before turning back to his front door. He slid the key into the lock and twisted. Taking a last deep breath, he checked the wards on his door and then opened it. "Can't have you freezing to death now, can we?" he chuckled.
"I think you're keeping me warm enough," Buffy teased back, stepping inside. It never failed to surprise her that she was so relaxed in Ethan's company. "And this whole summer thing really isn't letting up either."
"Unforgivable," Ethan declared expansively, switching on the lights as he ushered her into the living room.
Buffy stared around in a fair amount of awe. She'd expected Ethan's place to be tacky and messy, with magic stuff strewn all over the place. And sure the décor was a bit unusual (the black leather sofa set was so terribly dated), but somehow everything fit. And the delicate smell of exotic incense were definitely coming from somewhere in the room. At the best of times, it made her sneeze; here it made her think of wildly exciting adventures about to happen.
Ethan kept his back to her, nervously lighting the small incense burner he normally kept on a side table near the window. The creak of worn leather was enough for him to know that she had settled in. So he turned and leaned against the wall, watching as she wriggled into a comfortable position.
Buffy sniffed at the little smile on his face. "You forgot to ask me to sit down," she reprimanded.
"How terrible of me," the mystic murmured, "Lucky you could find a seat on your own then!"
"Don't tease!"
"Wouldn't dream of it. May I get you a glass of wine?"
Buffy looked a little doubtful, but since alcohol was one of the staples of this peculiar relationship, she was willing to ingest a bit more and pray for her liver. "Okay." She wasn't doing a good job of sounding convincing but then wine wasn't something she was good with. And a comparison with Ethan's knowledge of it was vaguely embarrassing.
"It's a nice place," she called out, getting up to walk around and touch things.
"Why thank you, my dear," Ethan's voice drifted out from the kitchen, "Feel free not to break anything, will you?"
She snorted and shook her head but refused to reply. The thick cream curtains kept the rest of the world out and she wondered suddenly if Ethan was ever relaxed with them open. The look on his face when he'd let *her* in wasn't anything less than manically panicked; what did he do for people he wasn't sleeping with. The answering machine on the table caught her attention after a while.
"Ethan, you've got a message on your machine," she called.
The mystic appeared- his sleeves rolled up for some inexplicable reason- with a worried look on his face. "I wasn't expecting any calls."
"Maybe it's a friend?"
He scoffed at her as if he found the very idea abhorrent let alone implausible. "No," Ethan decided, "Must be a client. And since I haven't made any agreements in a month, a message from a client is not a good sign. Excuse me, my dear; I'd best check it."
He walked to the machine, absently rubbing one hand on his hip before hitting the button. Then he stilled and set his jaw as a well-known voice filtered into the room:
"Ethan? Ripper here. Damn it, man, why are you never home when I call? Have you got that information I asked for? It's been three days and I'm starting to believe you're squelching on our deal. She's still out there and she's lost. She'd kill me if she even knew I was talking to you, but so help me God, if you don't call me as soon as you get this I will be there to ram that sodding statue of Janus down your throat!"
The machine clicked off and allowed Ethan one minute to clear his throat before looking up at blue eyes blazing betrayal.
"What was he talking about?" Buffy ground out.
"Some information, that's all." Ethan took a step forward and tried to keep it neutral. Why *hadn't* he remembered about calling Ripper? It wasn't like it was so regular an occurrence that it didn't provoke surprise and interest. And it might have led to a substantial amount of new business for him. And of all the worst possible times to play it! Buffy would, of course, misinterpret it.
"What information?" The voice was low, dangerous.
"A demon leader loose on London town. She's approached the Council for help in waging war against a rival tribe and Ripper's trying to find a way to diffuse the mess without getting the Council caught up in a potential battle. Will that do?"
"No!"
"Well then, what more do you want? Her name and address too?"
"I want to know why you didn't tell me."
"I didn't think it was any of your business."
Buffy stared at him in incredulous wonder. Apparently either he was stupid or he thought she was. "You're in contact with Giles and you're sleeping with me and you don't think either of those two factors have any relation to each other? How dumb are you?"
"All Ripper wants is some bloody information!" Ethan's nerves were one edge and this was not something he wanted to handle right now.
"Ethan, can you honestly tell me that Giles hasn't asked about me even once?" Buffy snapped, "*Honestly*, Ethan, can you say no?"
Ethan opened his mouth to lie and it would be so easy to do it. But she was staring at him with tears in her eyes and after all, why should he bother to lie about the little truths of life? "No. The man wanted to know if you were all right and I was hardly going to tell him to go fuck himself, was I?"
Buffy stared searchingly at him. Ethan was quite capable of snitching on her to Giles and the rest. The point was- did it make any difference? So it seemed Giles knew they were sort of together, so what? He'd told her clear as daylight to back out of his life, and she had done the same. Ethan was providing some much needed stress release and if she had to sleep with the enemy to get that, she wasn't going to argue about it.
"You'd better get that wine," she sighed, "I'm in no mood to fight about stupid things."
Time ticked by, broken only when Buffy let out a squeal that brought Ethan at a run.
"What? What?" he demanded, grabbing her hand and staring frantically over her to look for blood.
"You have a record player," Buffy gurgled, nodding at it, "Does it work? My Gran used to have one like it when I was a girl. And she used to play all these moldy old records on it that I hated. Do you have any records? I thought these were ancient!"
Ethan dropped her hand and sniffed in mocking chagrin. "Not that ancient," he grumbled defensively, "And for your information, yes; I do have records."
Which meant that Buffy insisted on seeing them. Ethan stalled and tried to change the subject, even introducing wine as a convenient change of topic. It didn't work. Buffy merely swallowed half her glass in one go and demanded to be shown the records again. Ethan was beginning to wish fondly that he could simply toss her on the couch and shove a cushion over her mouth. And then he could think of other ways to stop her mouth and none of them were calculated to allow for dignified posture, so he caved in and led her to his collector's corner.
Buffy trotted up the stairs, a little surprised at being taken to a completely different room, but the minute he opened the door and waved in her in, she knew just why his collection needed an entire room- it was huge! There were boxes everywhere filled with records, all neatly marked in categories or by artists' names; there were shelves of CDs and tapes lining an entire wall; and another cabinet opposite the door that was filled with books, videos and DVDs. Whatever little space was left on the walls was covered with posters. In short, the man had built a shrine to music and there was still hardly enough space for it all.
"Wow," Buffy whispered, staring around with eyes as wide as saucers, "The place even smells like a record store."
"Pardon?" Ethan asked, raising an eyebrow.
"You know," she explained airily, "all dusty and cool."
Ethan let it drop and watched silently as she walked in circles, flicking through boxes of all the collections he'd made over the years. He'd never thrown a record away, even when it got scratched or damaged. He'd kept them all no matter what.
"Oh my God! You have Billy Idol?" Buffy squeaked, "He looks so like Spike!"
Ethan shrugged. "I did hear from a close source that Billy Idol copied the look off an intriguing man he met in a pub one night who tried to pick him up."
Buffy rolled her eyes and thought how like Spike that sounded. Except she hoped sex wasn't precisely what the vampire had had in mind; Spike didn't seem the bisexual type but then you never knew. Willow, after all, was bisexual, and she'd seemed straight as an arrow until Tara.
"Glam Rock, huh? Alice Cooper... Lou Reed... Wayne County? Who's he?" Ethan peeped over her shoulder and pointed to the man with the blonde wig and the bright blue dress. Buffy gagged and put it away. "Cool," she said, "But I don't think that's my type."
"And what is your type?" Ethan teased, leaning in to lick her neck, "Don't tell me you like Country music!"
"No," Buffy protested, "No Country! Mom liked country, though. Do you- do you have the Bay City Rollers?" Something Giles had once said.
And Ethan must have read her mind because he smirked and flipped delicately through one box before selecting a record she might enjoy. "I see Ripper's let out a few embarrassing secrets of his," he grinned, "The Rollers were not something he would have admitted to at all in the old days."
"Why?" Buffy asked.
"Some people thought they were a girly group," Ethan chuckled wickedly, "the Roller Girls, as their female followers were called, were famous for their tartan obsession and... well, just their obsessiveness. Mind you, not that we didn't know any men who liked the Bay City Rollers. And not that the Ziggy clones were much better."
Buffy looked confused so he surmised that he must have gotten too detailed. Ah well, he decided wearily, in such a decade of bad music, what else was to be expected?
"Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars?" he elaborated. Buffy continued to blink at him. "David Bowie in drag and make-up?" he tried. This time he hit home, light began to dawn on Buffy's face before being closely followed by a long drawn out "eew".
"That's not something I think I want to see," she shuddered, "Geez, the guy's over fifty and I don't think I can imagine him in dresses and skirts."
"*I'm* over fifty," Ethan pouted, not quite as mocking as he'd tried to be, "Besides which, I don't think he does so any more. He used to however; it was quite the statement to wear dresses and announce you were gay, especially if you fluttered your eyelashes and ponced around a lot. It took a lot of courage."
"Again, so don't want to know," Buffy grimaced, "I don't even know why everyone thinks he's so great. I mean, it's not like he sings all that well."
"Doesn't sing..." Ethan stared at her in horrified fascination, "My dear girl, what exactly have you heard him sing."
"Well, Mom had this album called 'Young Americans'. It just sounded like really bad disco." Buffy got that closed off look she always wore when talking about her mother. Ethan surmised it was still a tender spot for her and wisely forbore to question her mother's musical tastes. 'Young Americans' indeed! If ever an album had failed to capture an artist's true genius it was that! 'Young Americans' was like Bowie's version of going through the motions- nice, but not overly stimulating. Maybe if he played her 'The Man Who Sold The World'... the need to just give up was something he had the feeling she would appreciate.
Ethan suddenly got a closed off look of his own as he bent over a box devoted solely to Bowie and Marc Bolan and sifted through it until he found the record he was looking for. He handed it almost reluctantly to her- "To understand what made Bowie so great, or even what made the Seventies what they were, you have to listen to music like this. Bring this down with you and I'll play you 'All the Madmen'. It was before Ziggy and it certainly wasn't his most popular as far as commercial success went, but there's something so haunting in it that I think you'll relate."
They went down in silence, Buffy examining the intriguing cover of what appeared to be a young girl in a pretty silk gown lounging on a recliner. A closer look revealed it to be a young Bowie in drag, something that made her rethink her original 'eew' to a more complimentary 'hmmm'.
Ethan still didn't say anything as he put the record on. The first sounds were scratchy, but the rest was marvelously clear. And it was easy to see why! Ethan treated his records like something rare and precious, his fingers so light that Buffy could almost feel the gentle pressure on her skin. She knew the feel of those featherlight fingers intimately by now.
The first song went by, sounding okay but a little kooky. Ethan listened to her comments attentively and then told her to shut up and wait until she heard the song he wanted her to hear. And then it started. And at first all it was, was some British guy with a reedy voice singing about being mad:
"Day after day... They send my friends away... To mansions cold and gray... To the far side of town... Where the thin men stalk the streets... And the sane stay underground..."
Then suddenly, the hypnotic voice flared as the music rose like a barrier around it, shielding it from the ridiculous with a fanfare of guitar and drum. Perhaps it really wasn't as dramatic as all that; perhaps Buffy's imagination was only getting the better of her. But the words were ringing in her head and making her face a reality that she didn't want to see- this man was mad and he accepted it; just like she had once given up another version of 'sanity' as 'normal Buffy' to come back and save the world as the 'The Slayer'. Ethan couldn't possibly have known that! And yet he had insisted on playing it for her:
"Cause I'd rather stay here... With all the madmen... Than perish with the sadmen roaming free... And I'd rather play here... With all the madmen... For I'm quite content they're all as sane as me..."
And then she understood. Ethan's eyes were half closed in drugged attention. He wasn't even aware of her he was so intent on the song. And she suddenly realized how many masks he was leaving behind to do this. This was *his* song! This was the song that let him rationalize the things he did.
For once Buffy wasn't comparing what she was listening to with what she herself had heard; music had never been a big part of her life and she never really gave it much thought. But both Giles and Ethan as young boys must have found something so awe-inspiring in the music of their time to remember it twenty years later. And she didn't doubt that Giles prized his records and CDs as much as Ethan did. And the raw, aching passion for transcendence was so evident in every note pouring from the machine that she could almost see the lashing bonds coiling around the room.
When it was done, Ethan opened his eyes and felt himself rejuvenated. He'd let himself slip in front of her; he'd taken too many of his masks off for comfort. The song had reminded him of what he had given his life to doing- always being that one insanely unpredictable step ahead of the pack. Dark eyes glimmered wickedly at Buffy.
Buffy walked to Ethan, noted the challenge in his eyes and the teasing smile tugging at the corners of his wide mouth and let herself be pulled down onto the couch. After all, she didn't need him to explain everything to her. Some secrets she could figure out for herself, and maybe when the right time came she'd say something to Ethan about the skeletons she was finding in his closet. For now there were hands and tongues and silky soft oriental rugs under steaming skin.
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Ethan refused, on pain of self-loathing, to let Buffy see just how much this affected him. In the two weeks since he had become the only human she conversed with, he was starting to feel bits of himself drifting away. And he wasn't prepared for that, had never actively sought to let another living person so close. He hadn't been lying when he'd said he had more masks than she knew; he just hadn't expected her to start gently removing them all with her calloused little hands.
"So we stand on your doorstep all night?" a feminine voice remarked behind him.
Ethan started and shot a quick smile over his shoulder at Buffy before turning back to his front door. He slid the key into the lock and twisted. Taking a last deep breath, he checked the wards on his door and then opened it. "Can't have you freezing to death now, can we?" he chuckled.
"I think you're keeping me warm enough," Buffy teased back, stepping inside. It never failed to surprise her that she was so relaxed in Ethan's company. "And this whole summer thing really isn't letting up either."
"Unforgivable," Ethan declared expansively, switching on the lights as he ushered her into the living room.
Buffy stared around in a fair amount of awe. She'd expected Ethan's place to be tacky and messy, with magic stuff strewn all over the place. And sure the décor was a bit unusual (the black leather sofa set was so terribly dated), but somehow everything fit. And the delicate smell of exotic incense were definitely coming from somewhere in the room. At the best of times, it made her sneeze; here it made her think of wildly exciting adventures about to happen.
Ethan kept his back to her, nervously lighting the small incense burner he normally kept on a side table near the window. The creak of worn leather was enough for him to know that she had settled in. So he turned and leaned against the wall, watching as she wriggled into a comfortable position.
Buffy sniffed at the little smile on his face. "You forgot to ask me to sit down," she reprimanded.
"How terrible of me," the mystic murmured, "Lucky you could find a seat on your own then!"
"Don't tease!"
"Wouldn't dream of it. May I get you a glass of wine?"
Buffy looked a little doubtful, but since alcohol was one of the staples of this peculiar relationship, she was willing to ingest a bit more and pray for her liver. "Okay." She wasn't doing a good job of sounding convincing but then wine wasn't something she was good with. And a comparison with Ethan's knowledge of it was vaguely embarrassing.
"It's a nice place," she called out, getting up to walk around and touch things.
"Why thank you, my dear," Ethan's voice drifted out from the kitchen, "Feel free not to break anything, will you?"
She snorted and shook her head but refused to reply. The thick cream curtains kept the rest of the world out and she wondered suddenly if Ethan was ever relaxed with them open. The look on his face when he'd let *her* in wasn't anything less than manically panicked; what did he do for people he wasn't sleeping with. The answering machine on the table caught her attention after a while.
"Ethan, you've got a message on your machine," she called.
The mystic appeared- his sleeves rolled up for some inexplicable reason- with a worried look on his face. "I wasn't expecting any calls."
"Maybe it's a friend?"
He scoffed at her as if he found the very idea abhorrent let alone implausible. "No," Ethan decided, "Must be a client. And since I haven't made any agreements in a month, a message from a client is not a good sign. Excuse me, my dear; I'd best check it."
He walked to the machine, absently rubbing one hand on his hip before hitting the button. Then he stilled and set his jaw as a well-known voice filtered into the room:
"Ethan? Ripper here. Damn it, man, why are you never home when I call? Have you got that information I asked for? It's been three days and I'm starting to believe you're squelching on our deal. She's still out there and she's lost. She'd kill me if she even knew I was talking to you, but so help me God, if you don't call me as soon as you get this I will be there to ram that sodding statue of Janus down your throat!"
The machine clicked off and allowed Ethan one minute to clear his throat before looking up at blue eyes blazing betrayal.
"What was he talking about?" Buffy ground out.
"Some information, that's all." Ethan took a step forward and tried to keep it neutral. Why *hadn't* he remembered about calling Ripper? It wasn't like it was so regular an occurrence that it didn't provoke surprise and interest. And it might have led to a substantial amount of new business for him. And of all the worst possible times to play it! Buffy would, of course, misinterpret it.
"What information?" The voice was low, dangerous.
"A demon leader loose on London town. She's approached the Council for help in waging war against a rival tribe and Ripper's trying to find a way to diffuse the mess without getting the Council caught up in a potential battle. Will that do?"
"No!"
"Well then, what more do you want? Her name and address too?"
"I want to know why you didn't tell me."
"I didn't think it was any of your business."
Buffy stared at him in incredulous wonder. Apparently either he was stupid or he thought she was. "You're in contact with Giles and you're sleeping with me and you don't think either of those two factors have any relation to each other? How dumb are you?"
"All Ripper wants is some bloody information!" Ethan's nerves were one edge and this was not something he wanted to handle right now.
"Ethan, can you honestly tell me that Giles hasn't asked about me even once?" Buffy snapped, "*Honestly*, Ethan, can you say no?"
Ethan opened his mouth to lie and it would be so easy to do it. But she was staring at him with tears in her eyes and after all, why should he bother to lie about the little truths of life? "No. The man wanted to know if you were all right and I was hardly going to tell him to go fuck himself, was I?"
Buffy stared searchingly at him. Ethan was quite capable of snitching on her to Giles and the rest. The point was- did it make any difference? So it seemed Giles knew they were sort of together, so what? He'd told her clear as daylight to back out of his life, and she had done the same. Ethan was providing some much needed stress release and if she had to sleep with the enemy to get that, she wasn't going to argue about it.
"You'd better get that wine," she sighed, "I'm in no mood to fight about stupid things."
Time ticked by, broken only when Buffy let out a squeal that brought Ethan at a run.
"What? What?" he demanded, grabbing her hand and staring frantically over her to look for blood.
"You have a record player," Buffy gurgled, nodding at it, "Does it work? My Gran used to have one like it when I was a girl. And she used to play all these moldy old records on it that I hated. Do you have any records? I thought these were ancient!"
Ethan dropped her hand and sniffed in mocking chagrin. "Not that ancient," he grumbled defensively, "And for your information, yes; I do have records."
Which meant that Buffy insisted on seeing them. Ethan stalled and tried to change the subject, even introducing wine as a convenient change of topic. It didn't work. Buffy merely swallowed half her glass in one go and demanded to be shown the records again. Ethan was beginning to wish fondly that he could simply toss her on the couch and shove a cushion over her mouth. And then he could think of other ways to stop her mouth and none of them were calculated to allow for dignified posture, so he caved in and led her to his collector's corner.
Buffy trotted up the stairs, a little surprised at being taken to a completely different room, but the minute he opened the door and waved in her in, she knew just why his collection needed an entire room- it was huge! There were boxes everywhere filled with records, all neatly marked in categories or by artists' names; there were shelves of CDs and tapes lining an entire wall; and another cabinet opposite the door that was filled with books, videos and DVDs. Whatever little space was left on the walls was covered with posters. In short, the man had built a shrine to music and there was still hardly enough space for it all.
"Wow," Buffy whispered, staring around with eyes as wide as saucers, "The place even smells like a record store."
"Pardon?" Ethan asked, raising an eyebrow.
"You know," she explained airily, "all dusty and cool."
Ethan let it drop and watched silently as she walked in circles, flicking through boxes of all the collections he'd made over the years. He'd never thrown a record away, even when it got scratched or damaged. He'd kept them all no matter what.
"Oh my God! You have Billy Idol?" Buffy squeaked, "He looks so like Spike!"
Ethan shrugged. "I did hear from a close source that Billy Idol copied the look off an intriguing man he met in a pub one night who tried to pick him up."
Buffy rolled her eyes and thought how like Spike that sounded. Except she hoped sex wasn't precisely what the vampire had had in mind; Spike didn't seem the bisexual type but then you never knew. Willow, after all, was bisexual, and she'd seemed straight as an arrow until Tara.
"Glam Rock, huh? Alice Cooper... Lou Reed... Wayne County? Who's he?" Ethan peeped over her shoulder and pointed to the man with the blonde wig and the bright blue dress. Buffy gagged and put it away. "Cool," she said, "But I don't think that's my type."
"And what is your type?" Ethan teased, leaning in to lick her neck, "Don't tell me you like Country music!"
"No," Buffy protested, "No Country! Mom liked country, though. Do you- do you have the Bay City Rollers?" Something Giles had once said.
And Ethan must have read her mind because he smirked and flipped delicately through one box before selecting a record she might enjoy. "I see Ripper's let out a few embarrassing secrets of his," he grinned, "The Rollers were not something he would have admitted to at all in the old days."
"Why?" Buffy asked.
"Some people thought they were a girly group," Ethan chuckled wickedly, "the Roller Girls, as their female followers were called, were famous for their tartan obsession and... well, just their obsessiveness. Mind you, not that we didn't know any men who liked the Bay City Rollers. And not that the Ziggy clones were much better."
Buffy looked confused so he surmised that he must have gotten too detailed. Ah well, he decided wearily, in such a decade of bad music, what else was to be expected?
"Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars?" he elaborated. Buffy continued to blink at him. "David Bowie in drag and make-up?" he tried. This time he hit home, light began to dawn on Buffy's face before being closely followed by a long drawn out "eew".
"That's not something I think I want to see," she shuddered, "Geez, the guy's over fifty and I don't think I can imagine him in dresses and skirts."
"*I'm* over fifty," Ethan pouted, not quite as mocking as he'd tried to be, "Besides which, I don't think he does so any more. He used to however; it was quite the statement to wear dresses and announce you were gay, especially if you fluttered your eyelashes and ponced around a lot. It took a lot of courage."
"Again, so don't want to know," Buffy grimaced, "I don't even know why everyone thinks he's so great. I mean, it's not like he sings all that well."
"Doesn't sing..." Ethan stared at her in horrified fascination, "My dear girl, what exactly have you heard him sing."
"Well, Mom had this album called 'Young Americans'. It just sounded like really bad disco." Buffy got that closed off look she always wore when talking about her mother. Ethan surmised it was still a tender spot for her and wisely forbore to question her mother's musical tastes. 'Young Americans' indeed! If ever an album had failed to capture an artist's true genius it was that! 'Young Americans' was like Bowie's version of going through the motions- nice, but not overly stimulating. Maybe if he played her 'The Man Who Sold The World'... the need to just give up was something he had the feeling she would appreciate.
Ethan suddenly got a closed off look of his own as he bent over a box devoted solely to Bowie and Marc Bolan and sifted through it until he found the record he was looking for. He handed it almost reluctantly to her- "To understand what made Bowie so great, or even what made the Seventies what they were, you have to listen to music like this. Bring this down with you and I'll play you 'All the Madmen'. It was before Ziggy and it certainly wasn't his most popular as far as commercial success went, but there's something so haunting in it that I think you'll relate."
They went down in silence, Buffy examining the intriguing cover of what appeared to be a young girl in a pretty silk gown lounging on a recliner. A closer look revealed it to be a young Bowie in drag, something that made her rethink her original 'eew' to a more complimentary 'hmmm'.
Ethan still didn't say anything as he put the record on. The first sounds were scratchy, but the rest was marvelously clear. And it was easy to see why! Ethan treated his records like something rare and precious, his fingers so light that Buffy could almost feel the gentle pressure on her skin. She knew the feel of those featherlight fingers intimately by now.
The first song went by, sounding okay but a little kooky. Ethan listened to her comments attentively and then told her to shut up and wait until she heard the song he wanted her to hear. And then it started. And at first all it was, was some British guy with a reedy voice singing about being mad:
"Day after day... They send my friends away... To mansions cold and gray... To the far side of town... Where the thin men stalk the streets... And the sane stay underground..."
Then suddenly, the hypnotic voice flared as the music rose like a barrier around it, shielding it from the ridiculous with a fanfare of guitar and drum. Perhaps it really wasn't as dramatic as all that; perhaps Buffy's imagination was only getting the better of her. But the words were ringing in her head and making her face a reality that she didn't want to see- this man was mad and he accepted it; just like she had once given up another version of 'sanity' as 'normal Buffy' to come back and save the world as the 'The Slayer'. Ethan couldn't possibly have known that! And yet he had insisted on playing it for her:
"Cause I'd rather stay here... With all the madmen... Than perish with the sadmen roaming free... And I'd rather play here... With all the madmen... For I'm quite content they're all as sane as me..."
And then she understood. Ethan's eyes were half closed in drugged attention. He wasn't even aware of her he was so intent on the song. And she suddenly realized how many masks he was leaving behind to do this. This was *his* song! This was the song that let him rationalize the things he did.
For once Buffy wasn't comparing what she was listening to with what she herself had heard; music had never been a big part of her life and she never really gave it much thought. But both Giles and Ethan as young boys must have found something so awe-inspiring in the music of their time to remember it twenty years later. And she didn't doubt that Giles prized his records and CDs as much as Ethan did. And the raw, aching passion for transcendence was so evident in every note pouring from the machine that she could almost see the lashing bonds coiling around the room.
When it was done, Ethan opened his eyes and felt himself rejuvenated. He'd let himself slip in front of her; he'd taken too many of his masks off for comfort. The song had reminded him of what he had given his life to doing- always being that one insanely unpredictable step ahead of the pack. Dark eyes glimmered wickedly at Buffy.
Buffy walked to Ethan, noted the challenge in his eyes and the teasing smile tugging at the corners of his wide mouth and let herself be pulled down onto the couch. After all, she didn't need him to explain everything to her. Some secrets she could figure out for herself, and maybe when the right time came she'd say something to Ethan about the skeletons she was finding in his closet. For now there were hands and tongues and silky soft oriental rugs under steaming skin.