you're too young & eager to love

I don't know if this will make much sense. It's pretty abstract.

The last thing I was expecting to write when I sat down was Buffy, so I'm still unsure of where this came from.

7th season setting. Woo!

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Dawn wears an expression she’d last seen on her mother’s face. “You really aren’t going to go?” It’s a woman’s firm question coming from an adolescent’s mouth.

Buffy rubs her shoulder. There’s a bruise so large under the cotton of her sweater that another woman, a regular woman, would be unable to move it. She’s tired, but she’s been tired for years now so gathering enough perseverance in order to fulfill yet another obligation is as normal as fighting Xander for a bowl of cereal in the mornings.

She’s far too used to these circumstances, the ones that damage her.

Dawn was never called to be a Slayer. She’s not even a Potential. She’s just longhaired and high school fresh, but she has the type of stare that all the Summers women inherit. Withering with disappointment, fixated pointedly, topped off by folding her arms over her chest.

“I’m really not going.”

“He would go, if it were you.”

Buffy takes her jacket with her and closes the door too loudly. Fair is fair.


-


Seven years has allowed her a long time to accumulate wounds. Her skin heals but her insides don’t. She’s been battered and bruised and broken. Buffy has all of it fester, keeps the injuries as reminders, hidden in some small corner of her body, some unspoken of place that is truly private. The new girls, the ones she’s supposed to be training, they sit around in her living room and take up space on her furniture, all the while staring at her like they know. Like they’re aware of her dirtiness and how, now, she isn’t sure she’d like to be clean anymore.

It doesn’t make her less of a savior, she thinks.

Besides, she reminds them each time she drives a stake into a vampire’s heart, she never asked for this, she’s just good at it.


-


Angel is staying in his old home. A smell of the gutter around the place, thick walls and too much dust. Curtains that once were thick and red but have turned threadbare. It’s small. He must feel confined, she thinks, after being used to a mansion in Los Angeles.

He holds out his fingers when he opens the door, and Buffy gives him her jacket. She isn’t sure if they were supposed to shake hands, because she isn’t used to formalities between them. Angel smiles; hers falters a little.

He looks the same. She doesn’t. Her hair is longer, blonde as butter, and she looks more of a woman at twenty-one than she ever did in high school. She looks too old though – the deep ageless core inside of her is showing itself in her eyes. “Too many wounds.” Buffy tells him and his questioning glance, even though it angers her that he still thinks he can search so openly. “No more giraffe-print pants though.”

That gets a laugh.


-


If she’s really honest with herself, Buffy knows she isn’t that girl anymore. Can’t even really remember being that girl. Maybe it’s because of dying twice, or still feeling guilty for murdering her first love (she’s getting a little tired of choosing the safety of the world, since we’re being honest), or Spike, or all of the above and then some. Being vulnerable is her own fault, she knows that too.

“What’s wrong?”

This is supposed to be about a battle. An apocalypse. A Big-Bad and some convenient relic that she’s giving him. It is, and then it isn’t. It’s her and him and their relentless tug of war. She shoves her hands into her pockets and shakes her head.

Angel has his home; Buffy has her family. It’s Fate’s version of fairness, and it’s good.



-


“How’s the great poof?” Spike is smoking outside when Buffy comes up the back porch.

She sits without responding, her shoulders hunched, fingers near her temple. Spike has the good sense not to say anything else, but she can feel him simmering behind her, all leather and sharp white angles. Slowly, she stretches and pulls her knees in close to her chest, watching the shadows in her yard. The animal shapes she can’t make out.

“I don’t think we ever found each other again.”

Spike flicks his cigarette to the ground. “Yeah, pet. I know what you mean.”


-


That night, she dreams she’s in a sewer, crying, with too much blood on her hands.

There are a lot of fangs and shattered bones. Angelus has a hole in his stomach and absent eyes.


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