Welcome to my hard-drive

Jul 14, 2009 18:36

Our local Budgens now does takeaway curry - for £3.99 you can have a 'meal deal for one', including tasty curry (something mild, tomato-based with lamb in), tasty rice (mmm, pilau), two samosas (yay, chicken) and, randomly, a banana. I think my suspicion is correct that it's actually the ready meal curry they do in larger amounts dished out into smaller amounts, but the one key difference is that it's fresh. Seriously, even after being microwaved the rice was a fluffy yellow dream and the curry was all light and bouncy flavours. Very good lunch.

That meme's going round where you post bits of WIPs, and I've been wanting to do that for ages, so I thought I would. The thing is, there's rather a lot of stuff on my hard-drive, so I'm going to have to split it into sections...

Actual WIPs (/fic I intend to finish at some point).

A sequel to Brand New Day, in which Spike finally finds out what happened to him and everything goes a bit wrong:

The images kept coming, quicker and quicker: his memories distorted through a zoetrope. Or, at least, he thought they were his memories. Everything was slightly different; him a bit more defensive, Buffy a bit more distant. They kept coming and coming, back through Africa, back through his nightmares, back to that summer with Dawn - when the scene paused, stuck on something inconsequential. A girl cynically looked up into the eyes of a wasted, scrawny vampire, leant forward on that sofa (which Spike remembered for a fact had smelt too much of Joyce and her), put down her last card and said, “That's rummy.”

Then the mirror shattered, fragmenting into glass and metal as it burst in his hands. That was the moment, so it seemed, that he'd become a different person.

Another fic in my futureverse (consisting of WaWtMaL/ ENaT/YGtPtK) about Illyria. I think Ethan Rayne turns up and makes her go on a magical mystery tour through the last few years; we learn how she and Giles become friends and possibly what she's going to feel like when he dies:

“I grow tired of this.” She fixed her eyes on Rupert Giles. “Who are you that would destroy me, and from where do you draw your power?”

The man looked back at her, his eyes filled with a malice untainted by hate. It was admirable.

“My power comes from the natural order, which you so flagrantly deny.”

“How can one man presume to know the natural order with so linear a conception of time as you possess?” She tilted her head, attempting to better perceive his state. “What is natural but what falls before our might? What fate is ours but that which we create?”

He shook his head. “Heaven forfend I attempt to explain the concept higher purpose to an Old One...”

“I ruled this dimension as a god!” The ignorance of these lower beings so often enraged her. “No purpose was higher than my own desires. No purpose could be. To prostrate yourself before another is to declare subservience and admit your own failure.”

The Dollhouse fic I'm working on for
queerlygen where near the end of Omega Echo tries to hassle Claire into reading her file:

“She had the feeling it was me you wanted to be talking to.”

Leaning against the counter, Claire swallowed back a sigh and finished her question, “Who are you?”

“Catie Arnold. But I got a certain group of friends who call me Lady Hades.” She smirked at Claire's raised eyebrow. “What? So I read a little Greek myth on the weekend. I got a life outside my dungeon, you know.”

“Well...” She didn't, not really. It was slightly upsetting.

The pout grew more pronounced; it would have been funny if it didn't suit her. “Hey, hey, we ain't having no crying here.” Catie popped back on the bench, slinging one leg over the other with the sort of oozing sexuality Claire was sure she could never emulate. “The other girls, they're throwing up their hands at you, wanna know how anyone can sign away their soul.” She leaned forward, rolling her hair back leisurely across her shoulders. “But that's ultimately what bugs you, am I right? What if you want your soul signed away? What if you wanna free-fall for a while in someone else's hands?”

She was talking to a dominatrix about souls. This week... Well, actually it was looking up.

A random little romp after The Killer in Me in which Buffy and Spike go to buy the new microwave. I wanted it to be an extra for plot_wout_porn, but it's missing something I can't put my finger on:

“And you sold your car?” She wondered how much he'd got for the old thing.

“Tuned her up, gave her polish and tracked down a collector.” When he glanced at her again he seemed older than usual. It was more than a little bit odd. “Know I can be a bit dense, but I'm not completely useless. Even took half the money and tripled it at the tracks.”

“Huh?” OK, so that wasn't something she'd been expecting. It completely knocked Dawn out of her mind. “I thought you played poker?”

He rolled his eyes. “You know I'm bollocks at poker. Can actually make money on dogs. Horses too.” Then he grinned. “Always used to piss Angelus off that I was better than him.”

Buffy decided to let that hang, partly because she didn't want to talk about Angelus, but mostly because she knew there was no point asking why Spike spent time pursuing the thing he was worse at. She was pretty sure she could guess the answer.

A bit from Spikeid II - Buffy's telling the story about what's happened to her, and is currently talking about the time she prayed to Osiris.

Osiris was
The one I thought would know me, who I am.
I stuttered out, 'Oh, hi, your holiness.
Your godliness, I mean. I mean, uh, what
Am I supposed to call you? Never met
A god who didn’t want me dead before.'
It felt as though he laughed, the liquid rich
And deep inside me, molten gold that whipped
Down to my toes. Then , 'I would say that our
Acquaintance means that such formality
Is never necessary.' 'Wow,' I said.
'I’m honoured, sir. Confused, though, kinda, ‘cause
I thought that you’d be angry, me escaped
From the net and all.' He laughed again; I thought
I felt protectiveness and maybe love.
The warmth was wrapped around me, all the chill
Of winter in my fingers gone. He said,
'Dear child, my son informs me you possess
One of the lightest hearts that he has had
The opportunity to weigh.' 'That’s good?'
I asked, not really prepped on all the myths.
I should have read more books, or thought at least
A little longer when I dreamt this up.
I can think after all, and yet I don’t.

In response to the 'everyone hates Slayers' and 'Angel and Spike are celebs now' ideas from the comics I wanted to do an AU-made-canon fic about Spike the A-List celebrity and Buffy the tabloid trash, where their respective agents get them to stage a relationship and it's all kinds of awkward. It's a bit stalled, but not abandoned yet:

Dawn frowned as he lit up, worse as he raised his eyebrows. At last she shook her head. “She's gonna leave you.”

He coughed; he didn't mean to. “What?”

“She's gonna dump you.” Her voice got more righteous with every word; it made his heart sink further. “She's gonna trade on your reputation and flip positions, femme fatale your ass and leave you in the dust with the Immortal. Way they're planning it, you'll be left more unpopular than she ever was and she'll be riding high with the A Crowd.”

“What?” he asked again. “That's not... That wouldn't work.”

At that Dawn stood up again, clenched her fists and let them go. “Stop being so damn naive, Spike. Buffy's in a sitch; she'll use whatever she can to get her out of that. You saved the city, you have power; you love her, she has power over you. You're crazy if you don't think she's gonna use that in some way.”

He couldn't resist standing up as well, clutching his cigarette between his fingers unfinished. “D'you know what it was, Dawn, the nicest thing your sis ever said to me? 'I believe in you.' One or two sweeter-sounding things have passed her lips, but that was the most God's honest pleasant. No one else did right then, you see. Not even me. You think I'm gonna turn my back on that, not repay it in kind? You think I can?”

Abandoned Fic (/all the longfics I'm too lazy to write).

This is a post-Chosen fic where the Scoobies go to LA and Buffy decides she can't hack staying with them so makes a go of it on her own in LA; she catches sight of Spike one day and it merges into a sort of AU-A5. With gratuitous Anne. It never got very far:

“Well, yeah.” Faith bounced again, and Buffy wondered if she’d ever sat still in her life. “They’re so damn fragile, breaking all the time. Can see why you started shacking up with vampires.” It wasn’t so much the words, but the wince Faith made the moment she’d said them. As if that sort of sentence was taboo, and they weren’t allowed to talk about Buffy and vampires ever again. As if she might have forgotten until Faith brought it up. “Sorry, B.”

“It’s OK.” And it had to be, because what else could you do?

“No, it’s not. I’ve been trying to be better at the whole tact thing. Part of my redemption shtick.” Her nose crinkled slightly in distaste and it made Buffy laugh, irrationally.

“Is that what you’re calling it these days?”

“Well, I figure if Andrew gets to be on the wagon...”

“Somebody owes you a ticket.” Buffy nodded.

This one's set in a pseudo-comics-verse, where the First Slayer decides she's not very happy with the spell and so takes all the power back from the former-potentials. Buffy goes on a vision quest and finds out that picking the Slayer was the one last choice Sineya had, while Willow (with Kennedy's backing) tries to take the power back by force. Satsu, Faith and Dawn are the only ones trying to stop her, but they manage to steal the scythe and make a break for it. Faith goes to LA (to find Angel, but he's all shanshued and apathetic, so brings Spike back instead) while Satsu and Dawn meet up with Buffy in Spain. Then there's some sort of showdown. I got bored with writing the middle...

The woman, familiar, dressed in pink, finished the task of cutting the First Slayer free. She brushed sand lovingly from dreads and let the Slayer hunch down to the ground. She turned, and it was her.

“Tara?” Buffy’s heart clenched a little. “Are you real? Am I still asleep?”

The Tara figure smiled, endearingly expectant. “You should know that there is more to this life than the waking world and dreams, Buffy.”

“I know, I know.” Buffy racked her brains, refusing to believe, refusing to hope. “You were ‘borrowed’ before, I remember you saying. Is that what you are? Is that what this is?”

“Death holds me. But in death I am part of the earth, and so I am here.”

“That doesn’t really answer my question.”

“No. But I am not here to speak for myself.”

Tara turned away from her and walked towards one of the posts, pulling it from the ground to place it at one side. The Slayer cowered, mute. For a moment Buffy forgot the situation, her upset for the Slayer, and let weariness lance through her. “You know, I thought we were over this ‘I can’t speak for myself’ crap. What the hell happened?”

The First Slayer shook her head, looking to the ground as she crouched. Tara removed the other post, then spoke, standing firm at the Slayer’s side, “I cannot have a voice if you do not allow me one.”

My personal Giles fanwank is that, on dropping out of Oxford, he later had to reapply to uni and (being from the Watchers) went to Cambridge. When Dawn has interviews there (for she too applies to this far better university) we go through a fic where Buffy tries to find out about Spike's past, there's a demon on the loose and we learn how Giles went from regretful!Ripper to Tweed Man Extraordinaire (with added feminist rhetoric). Despite knowing exactly what happens I can't really work out what happens, if you know what I mean:

He took a drag on his cigarette, undoctored - not that his father would be any more lenient on him for that fact. Good thing his father wasn’t there, wasn’t it? “Nah. Storytime’s over.” He passed the fag over. “Haven’t you got an essay to write?”

“Haven’t you?” she replied, quirking an eyebrow. She was young, Janet, just nineteen, but she wasn’t bad. She was in the third year of girls (or ‘women’, as they insisted on being called) to come to their college, but unlike the rest of them she was almost agenda-free. Got in a snit when he was ‘patronising’ but otherwise a bit of all right. Had a great arse.

“Oh!” she said, suddenly leaning forward to her bag, the ciggie thrust back his way. “I went by your pigeon-hole.” She pulled out a worryingly-embossed piece of card. The smirk on her face didn’t help. “Rupert Giles, I didn’t know you’d joined a society.”

He snatched the card from her fingers, tossing the fag-end over his shoulder. The gold calligraphy mocked him; he should have bloody known.

“The Cambridge Watchers Annual Dinner. Sounds posh, dunnit? Think Simon signed you up for the larks?”

And apparently I thought I should write a Doctor Who crossover (with Ten and Rose), set in the future when the Slayers have banished demons from Earth and got rather lax about the whole 'fighting for good' thing. So they have to work with a very cynical Spike instead. I couldn't really be bothered to write the main part of this either:

She hared around a corner, and promptly tripped up on an uneven paving slab. She grazed her right hand, but the Doctor grabbed it before she could complain, shouting, “Come on!”

Just as she got to her feet there was a breathy scream, followed by some sort of whoosh. The Doctor stopped, and she almost fell over again.

“Oh, this is excellent!” he said, once more all smiles. She was too out of breath to say anything. He led them back around the corner, practically bouncing on his toes. “I always wanted to meet a Slayer.”

They stopped short as another man appeared. He was in all black as well, but had dark hair and nice, normal, rather attractive features. Sneering at them he said, “You’ll be bloody lucky,” and stalked off between them, slipping down another side street.

The Doctor looked confused. “Rose, could you pass me that magazine.” He pointed down by her feet. She looked down, but couldn’t see any magazine. His finger was pointed at an A5 sheet of dark grey plastic, which looked a lot like the shop signs. She picked it up gingerly and handed it over.

He swiped a finger around the thing’s edges, and she was only mildly surprised to see garish writing appear on the front. ‘Keira the Slayer:’ it said over a picture of a smiling woman, ‘I’m happy to be married!’

“Ah,” the Doctor said, looking at some small print Rose assumed to be the date. “I think we might’ve got the wrong century again.”

Before the whole 'celebs' angle in the comics I had an idea for a near-futureverse, where Buffy (who was in Rome) is living off her break-up with the Immortal and playing, in her words, the Wicked Bitch of the Tabloids. (It's good PR for the Immortal, so he's supplementing her pay with shiny things still.) Spike's living underground (semi-literally) with a particularly miserable Angel and a generally absent Illyria. I never really worked out what happened (sorry this one's long, but I do like these two scenes together):

When it was over, Buffy came down from the wall, planting a foot firm into a foul puddle. Spike retreated, until she could barely see him in the gloom of the alley. He lit a cigarette; the yellow light sailed up his nose and coasted his frown lines, circling eyes that were looking nowhere near her.

She could still feel the brick on her back, and was sure she was bleeding from at least one scrape if not several. “I forgot how much that hurt,” she said, smiling slightly to hide her insecurity. He didn’t reply and she blushed.

After a moment she moved a hand behind her and gingerly up her back. Her silk top, bought new this afternoon, hung from her raw shoulder blades as a limp, lacerated rag and she could feel the warmth of her skin. “Oh my God, Spike,” she said, clutching at the remnants, “you ruined my shirt!”

He sighed, peering distractedly down the alleyway. “I’m sure the Immortal’ll buy you another one.”

It was his indifference that stung her. She stopped, staring at him. He stood so far away, zipped-up, belted and remote while she stood in filth like a whore, the slit in her skirt, she realised, now ripped high enough to show her suspenders and hint at her lack of underwear.

Her hand fell from her back to the slit, trying to make it decent. As she stepped forward, though, the flap of her skirt fell between her legs and nothing hid the ladder that ran straight up her inner thigh, its rungs a slick and glistening trail of coarse fingers. She felt disgusting.

“I’ve got to get home,” she said, and was horrified by the emotion in her voice.

He snorted, still not looking at her. “Yeah, all right then.”

Her eyes started to burn and her breath hitched, a thousand memories of their raised voices dirtying her mind. She ran as fast as she could.

A couple of seconds and Spike called after her. His eyes had to be on her now. She kept running.

Spike slammed open the door of the apartment, ripped a bottle of Jack from the sideboard and hurled himself into his chair. He took the first gulp and sneered at Angel opposite him, still reading his poncy poetry.

“Bad night, Spike? Yeah, actually, thanks for asking.”

A page turned, and Spike gulped more burning water.

His eyes fell to the side of his chair, to the pile of magazines, thumbed and curling. Buffy’s face glowered imperiously back at him behind shades. Buffy: “He begged for sex.” howled at him in bold white lettering, blurring his eyes. Jack went down.

It was bollocks, all of it, bollocks. He knocked the pile to the floor, slithering and thudding, lurid to the last. His eyes did not clear, but he knew the images: not all of them Buffy, but many. And all of them mentioned her, all of them spread shit about her, and all of them he had lapped up, hungry for empty substance.

She was the Slayer - sex and life was part of death and the kill. She was his dark red warrior, cutting swathes through the tabloid world just as surely as she had cemeteries.

Bollocks, it was such bollocks.

“And they say I react badly if I sleep with Buffy.”

Then there's the prerequisite AU-A5 where Buffy comes along and she and Spike have to deal with him being a ghost. I wrote all the scenes I wanted to and then got bored, as is something of a pattern:

She wondered if this was what it had been like, trying to get through to her. “I missed you.” If this was what it came to: laying her heart on the line in the hope of some connection, some spark.

“Missed you too,” he replied, with something akin to sarcasm.

“I remember what I said. On the Hellmouth.” The rhythm of it all was familiar. Why did it feel so familiar? “I wonder sometimes... If you’d believed me. Or if I’d done something, I dunno, better. You might not’ve...” A small sob rose in her throat, and she stared into the carpet. “Oh God, Spike,” she whispered. “Every night I...”

She covered her face with her hands, hiding the tears of shock that were finally starting to come.

And then, as light as a whisper, a cold hand brushed against the back of hers. She raised her head, watching his concentration as she held out her hands for him to take.

“Sometimes I can...” he said.

Oh, yeah, and there's the one where Spike gets out of the Hellmouth but his soul gets burned up. (Don't look at me like that, you know you've written one too...) It was all going to be fine in the end, because according to Willow you can't burn up a soul, only disperse it into fragments, which then act like gas to refill any container (say a vampire). But it was angsty in the meantime. I only ever wrote the first bit - post-escaping, Buffy and Spike are on the bus:

She awoke at night, chin on her chest and her neck complaining violently. Her legs lay over Spike’s, centimetres’ space between them as her shins were wedged under the other seat. Her side, at least, was bandaged now, though she didn’t enjoy the cropped look of her shirt. Of course, she only had herself to blame, letting the bottom half of it get stuck to the wound.

She liked to think that Spike looked more brown than before, but the poor light meant that she was probably wrong. Willow’s boost to his healing powers wasn’t going to kick in that quickly.

As she watched him, his eyes opened, regarding her curiously.

“I think we must be in the outskirts,” she said, glancing up to the streetlights passing outside the window.

“Goody.” His moodiness seemed to be coming back again.

“Is this about Angel?” she asked. “Because,” dropping to a whisper, “because I meant what I said.” And she had meant it. She didn’t know if she could say it again at this exact moment, because it wasn’t something that she knew yet, it was just something that she felt from time to time. At least she thought she did. It was hard to remember sometimes, like the exact feeling of pain.

“Buffy,” he said, whispering like she was. He sounded pained. “Don’t get into that now. Please.”

Probably the oldest fic I have on this laptop (it's made the journey through two other computers) is from an AU-S7, in which Ethan Rayne escapes from the Initiative Experimental Facility (they're researching the possibility of magical aptitude being genetic/hormonal) and comes to Buffy for asylum (with a file on Willow for leverage; the Initiative are very interested in bringing her in post-Warren...). There's a whole thing about Janus not being the god of chaos and Ethan's prayers in the past actually giving power to a lesser god trying to manifest itself (people have read some high fantasy, right?). It's getting annoyed about the inactivity and so punishing Ethan with headaches, which eventually drives Ethan to trying to contact the real Janus, but this just lets the demon actually manifest itself. And then there's a denouement I never figured out. Oh, and Xander's self-medicating. At the same time Jonathan and Andrew have had to flee Mexico (after it turns out the magic bone was from the angry skeleton of an Aztec priestess) and find an insane Spike apologising to the Welcome to Sunnydale sign. They try to take him hostage, but then something he says implies that he's not that valuable, so they 'have' to dump him:

Leading Spike to the sarcophagus, they guided him on top of it, before pushing him down to a lying position. Andrew covered him with the quilt, making sure his feet were covered, even though he was wearing boots.

“I don’t much care for the dark, mother,” Spike said, startling them. And then his face changed. “You can’t be scared of the dark, Dru. We are the dark. It wouldn’t make any sense.”

He began to laugh.

“We can’t leave him like this, Jonathan.” Andrew felt almost sick.

“We can,” Jonathan replied, looking kind of sad. “We have to.”

“But…”

Jonathan shook his head, and the pair of them left.

Just as they went out of the door, Spike’s laughs turned into whimpers, and he started to cry behind them.

“You know, it might be good,” Jonathan said slowly, stopping, “having a vampire around. He could defend us. If, if the Aztecs turn up here.”

“Yeah,” Andrew agreed eagerly, “Useful.”

They stood for a moment, looking at each other. Then, simultaneously, they turned and rescued Spike from the dark.

Last but not least in the longfics-I-never-wrote section there's a sequel to Samsara, in which Buffy and Spike go back to LA and find out what's going on: Illyria supernova'd and left a black hole for demonic essence. Because of his soul Spike was left as the weird still-undead-but-empty thing he is and Angel was turned human. They shut down the black hole, but while that fixes Spike it draws energy from Buffy, making her feel very S6 until she can recover, and turns Angel back into a vampire, which he is pissed about. I'm not sure how it ends:

“How…” She sounded weak. She wasn’t weak though, just really confused. “How can you be like this?” His eyes were fixed on hers, and she didn’t drop her gaze, didn’t move even as the wind started to screw up her recently-fixed hair. “Spike thinks you’re dead, he thinks all of you are dead and you just act like he doesn’t even matter!” There, conviction, she’d found it. She knew she had it somewhere. “What the hell, Angel?”

He looked like he was about to say something, but he had barely opened his mouth when he ducked his head down to the pavement. Buffy took the opportunity to fix her hair behind her ears, apologising to the woman she almost elbowed in the face.

When his head rose again he looked at her with slanted eyes. “Don’t make me remember it all, Buffy. Please.” His voice was softer, more like that of the Angel she remembered. Her feet relaxed, no longer tensed to run, and she realised that it didn’t matter if she couldn’t sense him. He was never going to be the same as he had been seven years ago anyway.

“You’re gonna remember, Angel, and you’re gonna help me.”

He began to shake his head, slowly and minutely. “No. No I’m not. I have… I’m starting over.” He looked at her again. “I’m done.”

It was only then that she realised he was moving away from her. He pulled his sunglasses back on, and she took a step, readjusting her hold on her bags. With her step he turned, spiralling away from her like a mirage. She called after him, ignoring the looks of the people walking by. “You might want to change your name then, if you’re never gonna help!”

His words floated back to her on a breeze. “Angels don’t help, Buffy. They’re just messengers. And that’s all I ever should’ve been.”

She watched him go, staring, listless, at his white shirt radiating white.

And then, in a moment, she decided to follow him.

Random Snippets (/scenes that could end up anywhere at any time or vanish into the aether).

Futureverse post-argument schmoop:

... “And then we can go back to making hypothetical prophecy babies.”

“I’m too old for prophecy babies, Spike,” she moaned, still shaking a little. “The other prophecy moms would laugh at me.”

“Never,” he said seriously. “You could get preggers at sixty and still be the hippest mum in the playground.”

She groaned. “Oh God, don’t say that. You know it’s going to happen now, don’t you? And then they’ll all be like, but you can’t have an abortion, Buffy, it’s a prophecy baby, never mind that you need a Caesarean because your whole system’s too wrinkled anyway...”

“Hey.” He pulled back to look at her. “Who said she was going to stop this nonsense about wrinkles?”

“Sorry.” She grinned lopsidedly. “And you know I wouldn’t abort our prophecy baby, right? Not if you didn’t want me to.”

He was touched, and warm with love. “Don’t get all fundie-housewife on me now, love. I got the memo in ’19 that my role was only advisory.”

“Well, what with the prophecy potential, I’ve decided to promote you.” She smiled at last, and he slung an arm around her shoulders, directing them back to the car.

“I reckon the Powers still watch, you know, trying to figure out whether we’re worth it.”

“Pervs.”

He barked a laugh. “Well, you can’t blame them.”

“True, I guess.” She snuggled closer. “We do put on a good show.”

Random Dollhouse (Echo dreaming):

When Echo dreams she sits in a room. The room goes on forever, expands on all sides of her, light filling the floor and the walls and the ceiling so bright it almost blinds her.

There are others in the room. They look like her, she can see them out of the corner of her eye. Some of them have glasses; some of them wish their hair was shorter, longer, red, blonde, black, blue. One of them wants a tattoo, reckons she’ll get it tomorrow, maybe. Always tomorrow. Like that piercing, that surgery to fix her nose.

She knows them like she knows herself. Not well.

Weird Slayer-spell consequences have left Buffy immortal and all the other Slayers dying out. Having hooked up with Spike again Buffy is trying to renew contact with the Scoobies after years of running away, because of some sort of apocalypse. Two mini-Slayers have cornered them:

“Yeah, and… hey, if we knew where you guys were we wouldn’t be asking about you, would we?”

Kennedy 2.0 didn’t reply. Score.

Their silent stand-off continued and after a moment or two Buffy heard Spike begin to fidget. It was almost inaudible, but she knew the sound well enough. Things were either about to get a lot better or a lot worse; she thought she should maybe try and stop him, but that really wouldn’t achieve anything but giving him away.

She sighed. He moved, with a yell.

The girl behind her was kicked away and she dropped to the ground, hurling herself at the girl who had been behind Spike. The scuffle lasted mere moments, after which she and Spike had pinned their swapped partners to the ground.

She looked at Spike, who grinned back at her. An ugly tear ran across the back of his coat, oozing blood, and the crossbow bolt itself was embedded deep in his shoulder.

“You’re an idiot, Spike,” she said, ignoring the body beneath her for the moment.

“Worked though, didn’t it?”

Buffy and Dawn are on a road trip post-Chosen:

When Spike had grieved it had been like he was crumbling inwards, eroded by loss that had left him a shivering wreck at the centre of it all, small and exposed, vulnerable to any sort of attack. Dawn had dealt with it by poking gently, trying to build up a shell, toughen his skin. She’d played the petulance card, given him something to look after.

Buffy was in so many ways his opposite. Spike had broken down at the sight of Buffy’s body, but Buffy, at the sight of the crater, had smiled, and seemed to become more herself than she had been in months. It was only now that Dawn had worked out why. Buffy, unlike Spike, didn’t crumble from the outside; she crumbled from within. The mirage of ‘Buffy’ was still there, smiling serenely and calmly sorting out their new lives, but on the inside something was missing - and Dawn was pretty sure it was getting worse.

Sometimes I think I could ship Dawn/Satsu (and hey, this one's actually a drabble!), but all my Satsu characterisation has been getting destroyed month by month...

“You want Buffy but you'll settle for me? Wow, flattering. And hey, I was mystically created from her blood so it's almost like getting her. Bonus, huh?”

“Give me some credit!”

“For what?”

“Look, Dawn. The Buffy I fell in love with, she wasn't... But you! I...”

“Let me get this straight. I'm not a replacement for Buffy, but you're telling me your type robs banks? How is that better?”

“Just come for coffee. Once. Hell, as friends. If you don't swing you don't swing, but give me a chance. Please?”

“OK. Fine. But, for the record? I hate cinnamon.”

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