Best Souvenir, chapter 11
A/N: Muchas gracias to a2zmom for research and much funnies. I want to bake you cookies! And some day, I will. Watch out.
Chapter 11
For once, she had to sit down and eat out, and for once there wasn’t a (Famous/Original) Ray’s Pizza in sight. Buffy settled for Broadway Jerusalum II, just a couple blocks up from Macy’s, and decided she didn’t want pizza anyway. She ordered the falafel sandwich, brought it to the table, and set the shopping bags with Angel’s old clothes in them down beside her. Angel sat and watched her eat, and she watched him back out of the corner of her eye.
If she hadn’t concluded before that he was uncomfortable with being out in public, this place would have made it obvious. Coming to the restaurant with her might have been weird for a normal vampire, but not nerve-wracking (except for the her-being-a-Slayer part). But the bright lights were driving Angel crazy, and every person that passed by made him stiffen with suspicion. Lucky for him, it was late, and not many people were there to stave off a sudden kosher cravings. She asked him if the Star of David worked as well as a cross for vampire repellent. He frowned at her and didn’t answer.
Now was a good time for him to practice, Jake had said.
He wouldn’t have any trouble if he weren’t so damn jumpy, Buffy thought irritably. He looked like he was straight out of a GQ ad, even if they were last season’s trousers and even if she’d gotten the shoes at a discount. The red silk shirt hung off him in all the right ways-Jake had good taste-and the slacks made him look smart and sophisticated. Not to mention his thighs. She’d never noticed a man’s thighs before, but she noticed his. They were good thighs. The only thing was that he was too pale, far, far too pale; the white sheet she’d made him wear last night had looked dingy next to his skin.
Buffy shredded her bread and munched on it, noting how, despite his intense awareness of his surroundings, his eyes never left her. When she bent down to suck the Coke out of her straw, his head dipped down to follow her eyes. The expression in his own was hungry. Buffy scowled. “Want some?” she asked, misinterpreting the look on his face.
He eyed the food and shook his head.
“But you miss food, huh?”
He shook his head again. “I can’t feel hunger.” Not that kind of hunger, anyway. Until now, he hadn’t missed eating in the least. Not only was his stomach now a useless cavity, food had a bland taste and brought no satisfaction. The small pleasures of eating the sweet things he’d liked as a human were nothing compared to the absolute, all-consuming bliss of feeling new blood surge into him, warm and rippling through his arteries right down to his capillaries, pulsing and sensitive and engorging every part of him. He got a hard on every time.
But watching Buffy eat was another thing again. The way she closed her eyes when she bit into her sandwich, the way her cheeks caved in when she sucked on her straw-it made him remember that feeding didn’t have to be climactic. It could be simple and small, and everyday. For the first time ever, he wanted to eat ice cream, and he wanted to do it with her. He wanted to do it with her beside him, feeding him little bits with her spoon, her tongue-
“Uh, what?” he asked, realizing he had missed what she just said.
“I said, ‘but this stuff used to taste good to you.’”
“I wouldn’t know. They didn’t have . . . that in Galway in the eighteenth century.”
“It’s falafel,” she said. “It’s yummy.” She picked at the bread and stared with a wrinkled lip at her food. “You sure you don’t want any?” she said, plaintively. “You’re watching me like a hawk.”
He was silent for a moment. “You should eat more.”
“What?” she asked, startled, dropping the shredded piece of bread.
“You’re too skinny,” he admonished, looking her over. “Eat more.”
There was a long silence in which she just stared at him. At last, she said, her voice cool, “A bit of advice, Angel. Two, actually. First, people don’t tell me what to do. I know you didn’t mean it that way, but don’t do it. Second-” here she paused, looking down and shredding up her bread some more-“it’s not very nice to tell a girl she’s too skinny. Not as bad as too fat, usually, but skinny’s not nice either.”
Angel opened his mouth. Then he closed it. Then he opened it again. He wondered what she could mean. Did she seriously think he was insulting her appearance? She looked incredible-hot, sexy, edible, fuckable-clean, warm, good, lovable. She didn’t know what she did to him.
She didn’t know either the softness he saw beneath the sharp, brittle lines her thinness produced, the frailty that made him want to protect her. Her thinness didn’t make her look any less alluring, but it made him worry, made him think maybe she was working too hard, giving herself over to the death in the life of a Slayer a little too easily. It made her look like she didn’t enjoy enough moments like this, taking the time to close her eyes when she ate or slurped from her straw, smacking her lips and licking her fingers.
He didn’t know how to say all that, didn’t know how she would take it, either. He wanted to reach across the table to take her hand, but that two feet seemed so many miles away. He settled for saying her name. “Buffy, I . . . I just want you to be healthy.”
“I can take care of myself,” she said irritably, picking up her tray and standing up. Then, so quietly he wasn’t sure she said it, he thought he hear her say, “But thanks.”
* * *
“What are we here for, again?” Angel asked a while later, as they made their way through the hall of an SRO over on 43rd and 8th.
“Keeping a promise,” Buffy said shortly, for the third time. At last, she located 4C. She’d staked a vamp here three days ago-the one who had told her that Angelus had been dust for the better part of the twentieth century. She jiggled the knob on the door.
“But our meeting with EEK-”
“Isn’t for a while yet.” She pushed the door open and stepped inside, flicking on the light as she did so. The fluorescent bulb shuddered, buzzed, and came to life. “Come on in.”
Angel walked in with his brow furrowed. “You don’t have to invite me. This is a vampire’s place. I can smell him.”
“Her,” Buffy corrected. “And was. See? Angela’s ashes.” She pointed to a mess of dust beside a broken table in the kitchenette area. One of the many nice things about vampires turning into dust was that no one smelled a corpse, which meant, if fate allowed, that the absence of a vampires who rented apartments could remain unnoticed until rent day, especially if the place was seedy enough. It was a little something Buffy had learned over years of slaying.
She put the shopping bags on the floor-they could pick up the clothes after the meeting-and then went over to the refrigerator. Few vampires kept stocks of blood, preferring the fresh kill. But then again, few vampires bothered to live in apartments, preferring the underground or large spaces they could share with their own kind. The vampire she had staked here had been ill and slightly wack, which explained a lot of things-not the least of which was the bags hanging in the fridge. She grabbed one and threw it at Angel.
Wonderingly, he caught it. And looked at it dumbly. “What . . . ?” he managed, at last.
“I promised, didn’t I?” Buffy said.
“But this is . . .”
“Human. It does a body good. Drink up.”
He looked like he was about ready to jump out of his skin and dive into the bag in his hands, but instead he glanced from her to the bag, and back again. “Look,” Buffy told him, putting her hands on her hips. “This is a one time deal. This is the only stash I know about and I’m not about to rob a hospital for you, but I don’t want the bank guy to think you’re on a hunger strike, because only guys from the IRA and Gandhi do that. You know, martyr types. Well, and people on T.V. Like Callista Flockhart and Lara Flynn Boyle. Except I don’t think anorexia really counts, do you?” He looked at her blankly and she rolled her eyes. “Just drink it.”
He remained standing there, staring, for several seconds longer. Then he turned around, facing the dark corner of the pantry. Buffy’s lip wrinkled at the sudden lapping and sucking sounds, and she had to repress the urge to vomit. She’d thought it was a stroke of genius, recalling that the vamp in 4C might’ve had a stock pile. She’d told Angel from the beginning she’d get him blood and more importantly, she wanted his color to be healthier for the meeting.
Now, she wasn’t so sure. If she herself was green around the edges, EEK might have a hard time swallowing the idea that she could stomach being a vampire’s lover. Buffy had seen Darla feed from a bag plenty of times. It had been gross, but Darla hadn’t been a noisy eater. At least, Buffy supposed, Angel had the manners to realize how disgusting the suck-sounds he was making must look, and had turned around.
In a matter of moments, she saw his hand come down, the bag empty at his side. If anything, Buffy’s disgust increased. He’d downed it quickly, ferociously, faster than any being, human or demon, should have. Her eyes flicked to his head, expecting him to face her, but he remained turned away. It was only when her eyes moved down to his silk-clad shoulders that she saw that he was trembling.
Eyes widening slightly, she reached for another bag from the fridge. Carefully, but making plenty of noise so he could sense her approach from behind, she moved closer to him, expecting that any moment he would turn around, yellow eyes blazing at her. But he didn’t turn. His body stilled in the wake of its tremors as she reached for the empty bag in his hands. Slowly, not touching him, his back still to her, she took it from him and replaced it with a full one.
She stepped back, and the second bag was gone almost as swiftly as the first. She gave him three more bags that way. He never turned to face her, and her eyes widened each time. He was not slowing down, though the slurping and sucking sounds were diminishing. He no longer trembled, either, but he placed his other hand on the frame of the pantry door, as if he needed to brace himself.
Buffy didn’t know how it happened. One minute she was thoroughly disgusted and feeling rather nauseous, and the next, she felt nothing of the kind.
Vampires were social creatures. They liked power games and took what they wanted. But not Angel. Whether the chip had reduced him to this, or whether it was something else, he really, truly had forgotten how his species survived. She looked at him, obscured mostly by shadow, his shoulder jutting where his arm reached out. The lines of him were taut, as if trying to contain himself-or trying to block her out. He had forgotten the taste of human blood, but he remembered so many human ways-little things, like the way he had turned his back to her in order to feed. Her heart surged with a sudden overflow of warmth and sympathy.
He was trying to be a man. She didn’t know why, but he was trying.
He wasn’t very good at it. He seemed to be worried about all the wrong things: designer clothes, hair gel, non-smelly shampoo. Trying on clothes. Eat more, because she was too skinny. But these things, she realized, were all he had, all he knew in his repertoire of being human. He liked silk. Check. Exchange of goods required money. Check. A girl should finish her falafel. Check. That sort of thing. And through it all, in some twisted way, there was the possibility that he really, truly wanted to help her.
He’d obeyed her orders from the beginning. He had protested her plan to meet with EEK not because he was unwilling to help her but because he was trying to protect her. He seemed willing to keep up his part in this charade, and strangely, she trusted him.
Common sense and everything she knew screamed “no.” Vampires were demons. They didn’t want to help anybody. And yet, in Buffy’s soul at that moment, there was a little war waging between common sense and faith, reality and compassion, and somehow, faith and compassion were winning. She shouldn’t let them, but they were. That was the person Buffy still was, despite the fact that the Slayer had claimed so much of her life.
It was a little victory that didn’t manifest itself in a grandiose way. “Uh,” she said, uncertainly. “That’s all there was. It’s gone.”
Angel’s hand convulsed around the empty blood bag, but still he said nothing, and did not turn.
“Angel?” she asked, the word breathy and high. When he did not answer, she at last gave into the impulse to touch him. Her finger tips brushed the crook of his shoulder. He shuddered away from her, and she took a firmer grip, forcing him to turn toward her.
What she saw only deepened her sympathy. There was pain in his yellow eyes, laced with hatred and loathing. But even she could see that the loathing was not for her. She lifted her hand from his shoulder to touch the ridges of his brow. Angel snarled and jerked away, turning his face from her again. “Hey, I’m not gonna hurt you,” Buffy said, but she retreated, putting her hand back on her hip.
“It’s not that. I . . .”
“What?”
“You shouldn’t have to touch me when I’m like this.”
“Oh.” Oh. He meant with his face all vamped out like that. Her hand dropped down to fidget with her other hand behind her back. Oh. She hadn’t even noticed. What was wrong with her? How could she be so stupid? He was a vampire, and vampires did crazy murder-type stuff with faces like that. They did crazy murder-type stuff when not wearing their true faces, but still. She’d never quite gotten over tensing up, coiled and ready to strike, whenever Darla slipped into her fangs, and she’d been justified. Darla couldn’t be trusted.
And Angel couldn’t be trusted.
He couldn’t be trusted.
He couldn’t be trusted.
“Oh,” she said again, and went for the door.
Go to: Chapter 12
Chapter 11
For once, she had to sit down and eat out, and for once there wasn’t a (Famous/Original) Ray’s Pizza in sight. Buffy settled for Broadway Jerusalum II, just a couple blocks up from Macy’s, and decided she didn’t want pizza anyway. She ordered the falafel sandwich, brought it to the table, and set the shopping bags with Angel’s old clothes in them down beside her. Angel sat and watched her eat, and she watched him back out of the corner of her eye.
If she hadn’t concluded before that he was uncomfortable with being out in public, this place would have made it obvious. Coming to the restaurant with her might have been weird for a normal vampire, but not nerve-wracking (except for the her-being-a-Slayer part). But the bright lights were driving Angel crazy, and every person that passed by made him stiffen with suspicion. Lucky for him, it was late, and not many people were there to stave off a sudden kosher cravings. She asked him if the Star of David worked as well as a cross for vampire repellent. He frowned at her and didn’t answer.
Now was a good time for him to practice, Jake had said.
He wouldn’t have any trouble if he weren’t so damn jumpy, Buffy thought irritably. He looked like he was straight out of a GQ ad, even if they were last season’s trousers and even if she’d gotten the shoes at a discount. The red silk shirt hung off him in all the right ways-Jake had good taste-and the slacks made him look smart and sophisticated. Not to mention his thighs. She’d never noticed a man’s thighs before, but she noticed his. They were good thighs. The only thing was that he was too pale, far, far too pale; the white sheet she’d made him wear last night had looked dingy next to his skin.
Buffy shredded her bread and munched on it, noting how, despite his intense awareness of his surroundings, his eyes never left her. When she bent down to suck the Coke out of her straw, his head dipped down to follow her eyes. The expression in his own was hungry. Buffy scowled. “Want some?” she asked, misinterpreting the look on his face.
He eyed the food and shook his head.
“But you miss food, huh?”
He shook his head again. “I can’t feel hunger.” Not that kind of hunger, anyway. Until now, he hadn’t missed eating in the least. Not only was his stomach now a useless cavity, food had a bland taste and brought no satisfaction. The small pleasures of eating the sweet things he’d liked as a human were nothing compared to the absolute, all-consuming bliss of feeling new blood surge into him, warm and rippling through his arteries right down to his capillaries, pulsing and sensitive and engorging every part of him. He got a hard on every time.
But watching Buffy eat was another thing again. The way she closed her eyes when she bit into her sandwich, the way her cheeks caved in when she sucked on her straw-it made him remember that feeding didn’t have to be climactic. It could be simple and small, and everyday. For the first time ever, he wanted to eat ice cream, and he wanted to do it with her. He wanted to do it with her beside him, feeding him little bits with her spoon, her tongue-
“Uh, what?” he asked, realizing he had missed what she just said.
“I said, ‘but this stuff used to taste good to you.’”
“I wouldn’t know. They didn’t have . . . that in Galway in the eighteenth century.”
“It’s falafel,” she said. “It’s yummy.” She picked at the bread and stared with a wrinkled lip at her food. “You sure you don’t want any?” she said, plaintively. “You’re watching me like a hawk.”
He was silent for a moment. “You should eat more.”
“What?” she asked, startled, dropping the shredded piece of bread.
“You’re too skinny,” he admonished, looking her over. “Eat more.”
There was a long silence in which she just stared at him. At last, she said, her voice cool, “A bit of advice, Angel. Two, actually. First, people don’t tell me what to do. I know you didn’t mean it that way, but don’t do it. Second-” here she paused, looking down and shredding up her bread some more-“it’s not very nice to tell a girl she’s too skinny. Not as bad as too fat, usually, but skinny’s not nice either.”
Angel opened his mouth. Then he closed it. Then he opened it again. He wondered what she could mean. Did she seriously think he was insulting her appearance? She looked incredible-hot, sexy, edible, fuckable-clean, warm, good, lovable. She didn’t know what she did to him.
She didn’t know either the softness he saw beneath the sharp, brittle lines her thinness produced, the frailty that made him want to protect her. Her thinness didn’t make her look any less alluring, but it made him worry, made him think maybe she was working too hard, giving herself over to the death in the life of a Slayer a little too easily. It made her look like she didn’t enjoy enough moments like this, taking the time to close her eyes when she ate or slurped from her straw, smacking her lips and licking her fingers.
He didn’t know how to say all that, didn’t know how she would take it, either. He wanted to reach across the table to take her hand, but that two feet seemed so many miles away. He settled for saying her name. “Buffy, I . . . I just want you to be healthy.”
“I can take care of myself,” she said irritably, picking up her tray and standing up. Then, so quietly he wasn’t sure she said it, he thought he hear her say, “But thanks.”
* * *
“What are we here for, again?” Angel asked a while later, as they made their way through the hall of an SRO over on 43rd and 8th.
“Keeping a promise,” Buffy said shortly, for the third time. At last, she located 4C. She’d staked a vamp here three days ago-the one who had told her that Angelus had been dust for the better part of the twentieth century. She jiggled the knob on the door.
“But our meeting with EEK-”
“Isn’t for a while yet.” She pushed the door open and stepped inside, flicking on the light as she did so. The fluorescent bulb shuddered, buzzed, and came to life. “Come on in.”
Angel walked in with his brow furrowed. “You don’t have to invite me. This is a vampire’s place. I can smell him.”
“Her,” Buffy corrected. “And was. See? Angela’s ashes.” She pointed to a mess of dust beside a broken table in the kitchenette area. One of the many nice things about vampires turning into dust was that no one smelled a corpse, which meant, if fate allowed, that the absence of a vampires who rented apartments could remain unnoticed until rent day, especially if the place was seedy enough. It was a little something Buffy had learned over years of slaying.
She put the shopping bags on the floor-they could pick up the clothes after the meeting-and then went over to the refrigerator. Few vampires kept stocks of blood, preferring the fresh kill. But then again, few vampires bothered to live in apartments, preferring the underground or large spaces they could share with their own kind. The vampire she had staked here had been ill and slightly wack, which explained a lot of things-not the least of which was the bags hanging in the fridge. She grabbed one and threw it at Angel.
Wonderingly, he caught it. And looked at it dumbly. “What . . . ?” he managed, at last.
“I promised, didn’t I?” Buffy said.
“But this is . . .”
“Human. It does a body good. Drink up.”
He looked like he was about ready to jump out of his skin and dive into the bag in his hands, but instead he glanced from her to the bag, and back again. “Look,” Buffy told him, putting her hands on her hips. “This is a one time deal. This is the only stash I know about and I’m not about to rob a hospital for you, but I don’t want the bank guy to think you’re on a hunger strike, because only guys from the IRA and Gandhi do that. You know, martyr types. Well, and people on T.V. Like Callista Flockhart and Lara Flynn Boyle. Except I don’t think anorexia really counts, do you?” He looked at her blankly and she rolled her eyes. “Just drink it.”
He remained standing there, staring, for several seconds longer. Then he turned around, facing the dark corner of the pantry. Buffy’s lip wrinkled at the sudden lapping and sucking sounds, and she had to repress the urge to vomit. She’d thought it was a stroke of genius, recalling that the vamp in 4C might’ve had a stock pile. She’d told Angel from the beginning she’d get him blood and more importantly, she wanted his color to be healthier for the meeting.
Now, she wasn’t so sure. If she herself was green around the edges, EEK might have a hard time swallowing the idea that she could stomach being a vampire’s lover. Buffy had seen Darla feed from a bag plenty of times. It had been gross, but Darla hadn’t been a noisy eater. At least, Buffy supposed, Angel had the manners to realize how disgusting the suck-sounds he was making must look, and had turned around.
In a matter of moments, she saw his hand come down, the bag empty at his side. If anything, Buffy’s disgust increased. He’d downed it quickly, ferociously, faster than any being, human or demon, should have. Her eyes flicked to his head, expecting him to face her, but he remained turned away. It was only when her eyes moved down to his silk-clad shoulders that she saw that he was trembling.
Eyes widening slightly, she reached for another bag from the fridge. Carefully, but making plenty of noise so he could sense her approach from behind, she moved closer to him, expecting that any moment he would turn around, yellow eyes blazing at her. But he didn’t turn. His body stilled in the wake of its tremors as she reached for the empty bag in his hands. Slowly, not touching him, his back still to her, she took it from him and replaced it with a full one.
She stepped back, and the second bag was gone almost as swiftly as the first. She gave him three more bags that way. He never turned to face her, and her eyes widened each time. He was not slowing down, though the slurping and sucking sounds were diminishing. He no longer trembled, either, but he placed his other hand on the frame of the pantry door, as if he needed to brace himself.
Buffy didn’t know how it happened. One minute she was thoroughly disgusted and feeling rather nauseous, and the next, she felt nothing of the kind.
Vampires were social creatures. They liked power games and took what they wanted. But not Angel. Whether the chip had reduced him to this, or whether it was something else, he really, truly had forgotten how his species survived. She looked at him, obscured mostly by shadow, his shoulder jutting where his arm reached out. The lines of him were taut, as if trying to contain himself-or trying to block her out. He had forgotten the taste of human blood, but he remembered so many human ways-little things, like the way he had turned his back to her in order to feed. Her heart surged with a sudden overflow of warmth and sympathy.
He was trying to be a man. She didn’t know why, but he was trying.
He wasn’t very good at it. He seemed to be worried about all the wrong things: designer clothes, hair gel, non-smelly shampoo. Trying on clothes. Eat more, because she was too skinny. But these things, she realized, were all he had, all he knew in his repertoire of being human. He liked silk. Check. Exchange of goods required money. Check. A girl should finish her falafel. Check. That sort of thing. And through it all, in some twisted way, there was the possibility that he really, truly wanted to help her.
He’d obeyed her orders from the beginning. He had protested her plan to meet with EEK not because he was unwilling to help her but because he was trying to protect her. He seemed willing to keep up his part in this charade, and strangely, she trusted him.
Common sense and everything she knew screamed “no.” Vampires were demons. They didn’t want to help anybody. And yet, in Buffy’s soul at that moment, there was a little war waging between common sense and faith, reality and compassion, and somehow, faith and compassion were winning. She shouldn’t let them, but they were. That was the person Buffy still was, despite the fact that the Slayer had claimed so much of her life.
It was a little victory that didn’t manifest itself in a grandiose way. “Uh,” she said, uncertainly. “That’s all there was. It’s gone.”
Angel’s hand convulsed around the empty blood bag, but still he said nothing, and did not turn.
“Angel?” she asked, the word breathy and high. When he did not answer, she at last gave into the impulse to touch him. Her finger tips brushed the crook of his shoulder. He shuddered away from her, and she took a firmer grip, forcing him to turn toward her.
What she saw only deepened her sympathy. There was pain in his yellow eyes, laced with hatred and loathing. But even she could see that the loathing was not for her. She lifted her hand from his shoulder to touch the ridges of his brow. Angel snarled and jerked away, turning his face from her again. “Hey, I’m not gonna hurt you,” Buffy said, but she retreated, putting her hand back on her hip.
“It’s not that. I . . .”
“What?”
“You shouldn’t have to touch me when I’m like this.”
“Oh.” Oh. He meant with his face all vamped out like that. Her hand dropped down to fidget with her other hand behind her back. Oh. She hadn’t even noticed. What was wrong with her? How could she be so stupid? He was a vampire, and vampires did crazy murder-type stuff with faces like that. They did crazy murder-type stuff when not wearing their true faces, but still. She’d never quite gotten over tensing up, coiled and ready to strike, whenever Darla slipped into her fangs, and she’d been justified. Darla couldn’t be trusted.
And Angel couldn’t be trusted.
He couldn’t be trusted.
He couldn’t be trusted.
“Oh,” she said again, and went for the door.
Go to: Chapter 12