Regret It More - August 26th
Twisted Shorts August Fic-a-Day Challenge - Day 26
Title: Regret It More
Author: hermione2be
Rating: PG/FR13/K+
Crossover: BtVS/Star Trek
Disclaimer: I do not own any of BtVS/Angel or Star Trek people, places, or ideas. This fiction is done simply for pleasure and I receive no profit.
Summary: Buffy and McCoy crash.
Notes: Part 21 of “Immortal Kelvin Slayer” - Links Page
Seasons: Post-Series/Post-Into Darkness
Word Count: 2620
Two Years into the Five Year Mission
“Will you stop?” McCoy demanded.
“We need to get to the highest point of the immediate region,” she told him.
“And then what?”
“Hope that I can come up with a plan to make us visible to Enterprise.” She stomped on, a limp from where her knee had bashed into the dash when the shuttle had landed - roughly. She carried a backpack of portable tech and anything she could salvage that could possibly help.
McCoy carried a med kit and a survival pack. “We should have stayed with the shuttle.”
“We landed too deep in the magnetic phenomenon we were trying to get a reading of.”
“My God, woman.”
“What?”
“Landed? We crashed!”
“It’s still in one piece.”
“Anderson and Fuet weren’t.”
“No kidding,” she snapped, catching her foot in on a root and grabbing a tree to stay upright as her knee gave under her.
“Damnit!” He grabbed her hips and adjusted her to relieve the strain. “Sit down.”
“We need to-”
McCoy forcefully pulled the heavy bags off her shoulder and setting them down along with his bag. “We’re stopping for a bit.”
“No.”
He ignored her and kneeled down to take a look at where her foot was caught. He unzipped the boot and was able to get her foot free.
Buffy held her breath as pain radiated from ankle to knee. She became statue-like as she tried to ignore the agony of the damage. McCoy touched her knee and she couldn’t hold back a strained sound that escaped her.
“Sit down,” McCoy ordered.
She didn’t have the will to argue and snorted in pain as she awkwardly sat on the side of the tree.
“Why do you do this to yourself?” he demanded, digging through his bag.
“Do what?” she bit out.
“Suffer instead of asking for help.” He didn’t give her time to answer as he started scanning her leg with the tricorder. “You’re in a great deal of pain and you don’t say anything. You need to stop just soldiering through things.”
Buffy shook her head. “I’ll heal.”
“Until an embolism travels to your brain and you have a stroke and die.”
She couldn’t deny that it hadn’t happened.
He continued to mumble under his breath as he cut her pants from ankle to thigh. Her knee was swollen and a large area above it was mottled by bruises.
Needing a distraction from the pain, Buffy started talking. “I tried to never take supplies,” she hissed out, looking upward to hide the tightening of her jaw.
McCoy paused in his scan. “Supplies?”
“During the War,” she explained with a rough breath. “I always knew I’d heal - or die and come back whole. So I made sure that I never took up a doctor’s time or a medic’s limited supplies.” She clenched her fists and squeezed her eyes shut. “I know that I need to take better care of myself, but I’m working against years of shaking everything off.”
He swallowed. “Oh.”
A scoff escaped her. She looked at him. “Did I make you speechless, Leo?”
He focused on her knee as he spoke. “It makes more sense,” he managed slowly. “That perspective. You are always seeing ahead to the eventuality that you will be fine.”
“I will.”
He manipulated the joint carefully. “But you don’t see what is going on with you. You ignore everything you need, everything you feel.”
“I do not,” she argued.
“How are you doing?”
“I’m fine,” she snapped reflexively.
McCoy looked up at her. “You have a medial collateral ligament injury and a meniscus injury. As well as a few hairline fractures, which is surprising. To anyone else, they would be complete breaks, severe. Debilitating.”
She opened her mouth to interrupt but he was quicker.
“Are you telling me you’re actually fine? Or are you trying to make sure that no one looks at you for too long?”
She kept her mouth closed.
“You are going to let me do what I can for this. Then we’re going to rest for six hours.”
“The ship-” she said.
“You have to stay seated, but you can work on whatever you need to get a signal through for once we get to the highest point we can reach.”
She raised a hand to object but he cut her off.
“Buffy,” he growled out. “Just stay still.”
“I would, but there’s a splinter working its way into my back.” She pointed a little ways away. “If we relocate over there, more shade and I can elevate my leg.”
“Okay.”
88888888
“What do you want to eat?” McCoy asked after he had wrapped and done as much fixing as his available medical technology could.
“It doesn’t matter,” Buffy said as she started pulling apart pieces of her busted communications device and a lifesigns scanner.
“You have to eat,” he pointed out.
She used a finger to pop out a special signal that Scotty had designed for her communicator. He and Chekov had been giving her tips and instruction about how to remake and rebuild her identifier. They understood that she would need to be able to create it later when the technology changed and they could no longer do it for her.
“Food,” McCoy said again.
“It really doesn’t matter,” she said again, distracted. “As long Dawn and I didn’t cook it, it’s probably edible.”
He frowned at her. “Who’s Dawn?”
Buffy’s movements became stilted. “What?”
“You mentioned Dawn.”
She took a shallow breath. “Dawn was my little sister.”
“Did she die in the War?”
She shook her head, setting the device down to hide the shaking of her hands. “No, a couple years after. Lung cancer.”
“From the fallout?”
“That was the general consensus.”
“How old was she?”
“Seventy.”
“Buffy?” McCoy said. “You’re crying.”
She lifted her arm to her face and used her sleeve to erase signs of tears. She tamped down hard on her feelings and messily squashed them into a box, along with the memories. “I need to get this set up.”
“Whatever I make, you’re eating,” he warned her.
“Are you a chef, doctor?” she asked.
“No, but I know how to boil water.”
88888888
Buffy put her ‘meal’ down and returned to work with a quick glance at the sky. She had two more hours, before they could start moving.
“You ate it all,” McCoy said in surprise.
“I’ve had worse,” she told him. “It was bad, but I’m healing and starving.”
“Can I ask you something?”
Worried he would dig up more of her past, she instead asked, “Why does Jim call you Bones?”
McCoy stared at her for a long moment but answered. “The first time we met. My divorce had just become official - I made a joke about only being left with my bones.”
She grinned. “I thought you were going to tell me it was something as mundane as you reminding him of an old sawbones.”
“Jim doesn’t do mundane.”
A laugh burst from her. “Fair enough.”
“Why did you go with Jim to Delta Vega?”
“I was trying to get him out of the escape pod he’d been put in,” she admitted. “But I’m short and I couldn’t reach the straps, so I stepped in and the door shut behind me.”
“Why did you try to stop it?”
“Because I didn’t think Spock was in control of himself. A fact that became obvious to everyone else later.”
“Yet, you didn’t officially lodge an accusation against his mental status.”
“I had drawn enough unintentional attention to myself on the bridge by understanding Spock explaining the relativity of timelines and time travel,” she said. “I wasn’t in a hurry to call him out and be shot down. But Jim had no such compunction.”
“You no longer have that problem.”
“I no longer worry about the wrong kind of attention getting me in trouble.”
“What do you worry about?”
“Losing my communicator,” she replied as she used a soldering tool to connect Scotty’s special piece to a larger antenna piece. “I think this is going to work, if I can just regulate the power so it doesn’t blow the device.”
“A phaser has a modulated regulator,” he suggested. “So does a laser scalpel.” He pulled one out of his med-bag.
“Perfect,” she said in surprise, holding her hand out.
88888888
Buffy set up the makeshift antenna. They had managed the climb with her on a set of rough crutches and McCoy complaining about better protocols. Now, they just had to wait. They just didn’t know how long.
The sky had turned dark and the night was quickly cooling.
“How’s the knee?” McCoy asked.
“Achy,” she said. “But another ten hours and it should be completely stable.”
“We may freeze before that point.”
“That depends on what’s in the survival kits.” She pulled open one of the bags. “Ah!” She pulled out a silvery blanket. “Score!”
McCoy opened his kit and started digging through it. It took him a moment before he came up empty.
“What?” she asked.
“No blanket.”
“Unbelievable,” she complained. “Here.” She held it out to him.
“I’m not taking the blanket from you.”
“You’ll freeze.”
“So will you.”
“Yeah, wouldn’t be the first time.” She dropped it in his lap. She started pacing with the crutch. “I’ll just keep moving.”
“Why are you so stubborn?” he asked.
“I’m not.”
“Then take the damn blanket.”
“No.”
McCoy set it down in front of him. “I won’t use it.”
“Neither will I,” she told him, coming to a stand in front of him. “There is a third option.”
“Sharing it,” he guessed.
“Yeah.”
“Okay.” He grabbed the survival blanket and unfolded it. He wrapped it around himself and sat down on the ground, his back against the least jagged of tree trunks.
Buffy double checked the equipment before returning to him. The blanket was definitely large enough for McCoy, but limited her options for how to sit with him. Next to him wouldn’t work. Which left…
McCoy watched her mind work through the problem before he grabbed her hand and yanked her down, landing her in his lap. He wrapped the blanket all the way around them. “You’re like ice,” he noted.
Buffy froze in place. Because where she had grown cold, he was warm.
He pulled the top of the blanket over their heads, sealing in as much of the heat as he could.
“I don’t think this is going to work,” she choked out.
“Relax,” he said. “We’re covered, neither of us is going to be missing an ear or a toe when Enterprise gets here.”
She nodded.
The silence stretched between them for a long time and though it had been a trying day, neither could relax enough to sleep.
“We should talk about something,” Buffy said suddenly.
“Any suggestions?”
“Not particularly,” she admitted. A part of her, the one that had shared the mind meld with Ambassador Spock, felt as though she knew some things about him, even if they weren’t quite right. “Any kids?”
“Seriously?”
“You mentioned you were divorced,” she said. “It’s a perfectly normal question.”
“No kids.”
Something about it sounded wrong. She chalked it up to things in the other timeline. “Never had any interest?” she said, trying to relax without leaning into his chest.
“Between medical school and my practice, my marriage was complicated enough.”
“Hm,” she considered as she flexed her toes, trying to relieve the pain in her aching knee.
“We got married before we really became the people we were going to be,” he said softly. “I just wanted to be a simple country doctor.”
“Instead you’re here,” she said. Buffy turned to look at him a bit. “Not exactly the life you envisioned.”
“It has its moments,” he told her. McCoy took her hand and looked it over. “You don’t have any scars on your hands.”
“I returned at twenty without any of them,” she replied, staring at her own hand in his. “I used to have a few dozen.”
“All from your fights as the Slayer?”
“Mostly. But I had a couple from ice skating and one from a vicious cousin.” She rubbed her thumb along the side of her middle finger. The skin was unblemished. “I used to have callouses from training.”
She turned her hand over to take his and examine it. She touched a small scar just below his first two fingers.
“Got that when I was thirteen,” he said. “Trying to impress a girl.”
Buffy chuckled. “Earth boys never change.”
“And what about you?”
“What about me?”
“Do you change?”
“Am I the same person I was?” She shook her head. “Not even close. I used to really buck authority of any kind.”
A startled chuckle escaped McCoy. “Yes, because now you’re so quiet and obedient.”
She couldn’t say he was wrong. “It took me most of the War to realize that I hated being in charge almost as much as I hated taking orders. But by then I’d been in a lot of no-win situations, I understood why someone had to be in charge - to make the decision and live with it.”
“Is that why you give Jim so much crap?”
“I give Jim crap because he’s hard on himself,” she replied. “And because he reminds me a lot of myself.”
“That’s a disturbing thought,” he muttered.
Buffy laughed. “It’s hard to imagine, but I do know why it’s easier to have flings with girls you won’t see again.” She leaned her shoulder against his chest, relaxing a bit as she spoke. “I also know that command is starting to get to him.”
“What do you mean?”
She shook her head. “It’s nothing.” She looked up at him. “What do you see when you look at me?”
He frowned.
“Nevermind,” she said. “I didn’t mean that.” She laid her head against his chest. “We should get some sleep.”
McCoy tipped her chin up so he could see her eyes. “I see someone who is incredibly open and just as much closed off. And someone who stopped looking in mirrors because the face was same and it didn’t matter as much as what she saw inside.”
Buffy held her breath in surprise.
“I see someone who knows that there is more to life than what she has but is afraid. And I see someone fearless, who stops at nothing for people she’s never even met. Who gives pieces of herself for those she cares about…” He searched her face. “I see someone that I’ve spent four years falling in love with.”
“All we do is fight.”
“We’re not fighting now.”
“Everything, Leo, we fight about everything,” she whispered.
“I’d rather fight with you every day, than spend a hundred years agreeing with anyone else.” He let her go, dropping his hands and avoiding caging her in. “But I know the terms. And the last thing I’d want is to cause you pain.”
“Pain is only possible where you have felt something important,” she breathed.
She considered the pain Doctor Leonard McCoy would cause her. She cared for him, he wasn’t her best friend, but she would still remember him fondly one day. The pain in the future wasn’t likely to change. If he was wrong about the telomeres and she outlived him by a few decades or millennia…
“Pain isn’t the problem,” she told him. “Regret is.”
“What?”
“The pain fades, never completely, but enough to live on. It’s the regrets that eat at me.” She turned to look up at him more comfortably. “The question is, will I regret it more if I kiss you now or if I don’t?”
“Buffy…”
She leaned up and kissed him.
Title: Regret It More
Author: hermione2be
Rating: PG/FR13/K+
Crossover: BtVS/Star Trek
Disclaimer: I do not own any of BtVS/Angel or Star Trek people, places, or ideas. This fiction is done simply for pleasure and I receive no profit.
Summary: Buffy and McCoy crash.
Notes: Part 21 of “Immortal Kelvin Slayer” - Links Page
Seasons: Post-Series/Post-Into Darkness
Word Count: 2620
Two Years into the Five Year Mission
“Will you stop?” McCoy demanded.
“We need to get to the highest point of the immediate region,” she told him.
“And then what?”
“Hope that I can come up with a plan to make us visible to Enterprise.” She stomped on, a limp from where her knee had bashed into the dash when the shuttle had landed - roughly. She carried a backpack of portable tech and anything she could salvage that could possibly help.
McCoy carried a med kit and a survival pack. “We should have stayed with the shuttle.”
“We landed too deep in the magnetic phenomenon we were trying to get a reading of.”
“My God, woman.”
“What?”
“Landed? We crashed!”
“It’s still in one piece.”
“Anderson and Fuet weren’t.”
“No kidding,” she snapped, catching her foot in on a root and grabbing a tree to stay upright as her knee gave under her.
“Damnit!” He grabbed her hips and adjusted her to relieve the strain. “Sit down.”
“We need to-”
McCoy forcefully pulled the heavy bags off her shoulder and setting them down along with his bag. “We’re stopping for a bit.”
“No.”
He ignored her and kneeled down to take a look at where her foot was caught. He unzipped the boot and was able to get her foot free.
Buffy held her breath as pain radiated from ankle to knee. She became statue-like as she tried to ignore the agony of the damage. McCoy touched her knee and she couldn’t hold back a strained sound that escaped her.
“Sit down,” McCoy ordered.
She didn’t have the will to argue and snorted in pain as she awkwardly sat on the side of the tree.
“Why do you do this to yourself?” he demanded, digging through his bag.
“Do what?” she bit out.
“Suffer instead of asking for help.” He didn’t give her time to answer as he started scanning her leg with the tricorder. “You’re in a great deal of pain and you don’t say anything. You need to stop just soldiering through things.”
Buffy shook her head. “I’ll heal.”
“Until an embolism travels to your brain and you have a stroke and die.”
She couldn’t deny that it hadn’t happened.
He continued to mumble under his breath as he cut her pants from ankle to thigh. Her knee was swollen and a large area above it was mottled by bruises.
Needing a distraction from the pain, Buffy started talking. “I tried to never take supplies,” she hissed out, looking upward to hide the tightening of her jaw.
McCoy paused in his scan. “Supplies?”
“During the War,” she explained with a rough breath. “I always knew I’d heal - or die and come back whole. So I made sure that I never took up a doctor’s time or a medic’s limited supplies.” She clenched her fists and squeezed her eyes shut. “I know that I need to take better care of myself, but I’m working against years of shaking everything off.”
He swallowed. “Oh.”
A scoff escaped her. She looked at him. “Did I make you speechless, Leo?”
He focused on her knee as he spoke. “It makes more sense,” he managed slowly. “That perspective. You are always seeing ahead to the eventuality that you will be fine.”
“I will.”
He manipulated the joint carefully. “But you don’t see what is going on with you. You ignore everything you need, everything you feel.”
“I do not,” she argued.
“How are you doing?”
“I’m fine,” she snapped reflexively.
McCoy looked up at her. “You have a medial collateral ligament injury and a meniscus injury. As well as a few hairline fractures, which is surprising. To anyone else, they would be complete breaks, severe. Debilitating.”
She opened her mouth to interrupt but he was quicker.
“Are you telling me you’re actually fine? Or are you trying to make sure that no one looks at you for too long?”
She kept her mouth closed.
“You are going to let me do what I can for this. Then we’re going to rest for six hours.”
“The ship-” she said.
“You have to stay seated, but you can work on whatever you need to get a signal through for once we get to the highest point we can reach.”
She raised a hand to object but he cut her off.
“Buffy,” he growled out. “Just stay still.”
“I would, but there’s a splinter working its way into my back.” She pointed a little ways away. “If we relocate over there, more shade and I can elevate my leg.”
“Okay.”
88888888
“What do you want to eat?” McCoy asked after he had wrapped and done as much fixing as his available medical technology could.
“It doesn’t matter,” Buffy said as she started pulling apart pieces of her busted communications device and a lifesigns scanner.
“You have to eat,” he pointed out.
She used a finger to pop out a special signal that Scotty had designed for her communicator. He and Chekov had been giving her tips and instruction about how to remake and rebuild her identifier. They understood that she would need to be able to create it later when the technology changed and they could no longer do it for her.
“Food,” McCoy said again.
“It really doesn’t matter,” she said again, distracted. “As long Dawn and I didn’t cook it, it’s probably edible.”
He frowned at her. “Who’s Dawn?”
Buffy’s movements became stilted. “What?”
“You mentioned Dawn.”
She took a shallow breath. “Dawn was my little sister.”
“Did she die in the War?”
She shook her head, setting the device down to hide the shaking of her hands. “No, a couple years after. Lung cancer.”
“From the fallout?”
“That was the general consensus.”
“How old was she?”
“Seventy.”
“Buffy?” McCoy said. “You’re crying.”
She lifted her arm to her face and used her sleeve to erase signs of tears. She tamped down hard on her feelings and messily squashed them into a box, along with the memories. “I need to get this set up.”
“Whatever I make, you’re eating,” he warned her.
“Are you a chef, doctor?” she asked.
“No, but I know how to boil water.”
88888888
Buffy put her ‘meal’ down and returned to work with a quick glance at the sky. She had two more hours, before they could start moving.
“You ate it all,” McCoy said in surprise.
“I’ve had worse,” she told him. “It was bad, but I’m healing and starving.”
“Can I ask you something?”
Worried he would dig up more of her past, she instead asked, “Why does Jim call you Bones?”
McCoy stared at her for a long moment but answered. “The first time we met. My divorce had just become official - I made a joke about only being left with my bones.”
She grinned. “I thought you were going to tell me it was something as mundane as you reminding him of an old sawbones.”
“Jim doesn’t do mundane.”
A laugh burst from her. “Fair enough.”
“Why did you go with Jim to Delta Vega?”
“I was trying to get him out of the escape pod he’d been put in,” she admitted. “But I’m short and I couldn’t reach the straps, so I stepped in and the door shut behind me.”
“Why did you try to stop it?”
“Because I didn’t think Spock was in control of himself. A fact that became obvious to everyone else later.”
“Yet, you didn’t officially lodge an accusation against his mental status.”
“I had drawn enough unintentional attention to myself on the bridge by understanding Spock explaining the relativity of timelines and time travel,” she said. “I wasn’t in a hurry to call him out and be shot down. But Jim had no such compunction.”
“You no longer have that problem.”
“I no longer worry about the wrong kind of attention getting me in trouble.”
“What do you worry about?”
“Losing my communicator,” she replied as she used a soldering tool to connect Scotty’s special piece to a larger antenna piece. “I think this is going to work, if I can just regulate the power so it doesn’t blow the device.”
“A phaser has a modulated regulator,” he suggested. “So does a laser scalpel.” He pulled one out of his med-bag.
“Perfect,” she said in surprise, holding her hand out.
88888888
Buffy set up the makeshift antenna. They had managed the climb with her on a set of rough crutches and McCoy complaining about better protocols. Now, they just had to wait. They just didn’t know how long.
The sky had turned dark and the night was quickly cooling.
“How’s the knee?” McCoy asked.
“Achy,” she said. “But another ten hours and it should be completely stable.”
“We may freeze before that point.”
“That depends on what’s in the survival kits.” She pulled open one of the bags. “Ah!” She pulled out a silvery blanket. “Score!”
McCoy opened his kit and started digging through it. It took him a moment before he came up empty.
“What?” she asked.
“No blanket.”
“Unbelievable,” she complained. “Here.” She held it out to him.
“I’m not taking the blanket from you.”
“You’ll freeze.”
“So will you.”
“Yeah, wouldn’t be the first time.” She dropped it in his lap. She started pacing with the crutch. “I’ll just keep moving.”
“Why are you so stubborn?” he asked.
“I’m not.”
“Then take the damn blanket.”
“No.”
McCoy set it down in front of him. “I won’t use it.”
“Neither will I,” she told him, coming to a stand in front of him. “There is a third option.”
“Sharing it,” he guessed.
“Yeah.”
“Okay.” He grabbed the survival blanket and unfolded it. He wrapped it around himself and sat down on the ground, his back against the least jagged of tree trunks.
Buffy double checked the equipment before returning to him. The blanket was definitely large enough for McCoy, but limited her options for how to sit with him. Next to him wouldn’t work. Which left…
McCoy watched her mind work through the problem before he grabbed her hand and yanked her down, landing her in his lap. He wrapped the blanket all the way around them. “You’re like ice,” he noted.
Buffy froze in place. Because where she had grown cold, he was warm.
He pulled the top of the blanket over their heads, sealing in as much of the heat as he could.
“I don’t think this is going to work,” she choked out.
“Relax,” he said. “We’re covered, neither of us is going to be missing an ear or a toe when Enterprise gets here.”
She nodded.
The silence stretched between them for a long time and though it had been a trying day, neither could relax enough to sleep.
“We should talk about something,” Buffy said suddenly.
“Any suggestions?”
“Not particularly,” she admitted. A part of her, the one that had shared the mind meld with Ambassador Spock, felt as though she knew some things about him, even if they weren’t quite right. “Any kids?”
“Seriously?”
“You mentioned you were divorced,” she said. “It’s a perfectly normal question.”
“No kids.”
Something about it sounded wrong. She chalked it up to things in the other timeline. “Never had any interest?” she said, trying to relax without leaning into his chest.
“Between medical school and my practice, my marriage was complicated enough.”
“Hm,” she considered as she flexed her toes, trying to relieve the pain in her aching knee.
“We got married before we really became the people we were going to be,” he said softly. “I just wanted to be a simple country doctor.”
“Instead you’re here,” she said. Buffy turned to look at him a bit. “Not exactly the life you envisioned.”
“It has its moments,” he told her. McCoy took her hand and looked it over. “You don’t have any scars on your hands.”
“I returned at twenty without any of them,” she replied, staring at her own hand in his. “I used to have a few dozen.”
“All from your fights as the Slayer?”
“Mostly. But I had a couple from ice skating and one from a vicious cousin.” She rubbed her thumb along the side of her middle finger. The skin was unblemished. “I used to have callouses from training.”
She turned her hand over to take his and examine it. She touched a small scar just below his first two fingers.
“Got that when I was thirteen,” he said. “Trying to impress a girl.”
Buffy chuckled. “Earth boys never change.”
“And what about you?”
“What about me?”
“Do you change?”
“Am I the same person I was?” She shook her head. “Not even close. I used to really buck authority of any kind.”
A startled chuckle escaped McCoy. “Yes, because now you’re so quiet and obedient.”
She couldn’t say he was wrong. “It took me most of the War to realize that I hated being in charge almost as much as I hated taking orders. But by then I’d been in a lot of no-win situations, I understood why someone had to be in charge - to make the decision and live with it.”
“Is that why you give Jim so much crap?”
“I give Jim crap because he’s hard on himself,” she replied. “And because he reminds me a lot of myself.”
“That’s a disturbing thought,” he muttered.
Buffy laughed. “It’s hard to imagine, but I do know why it’s easier to have flings with girls you won’t see again.” She leaned her shoulder against his chest, relaxing a bit as she spoke. “I also know that command is starting to get to him.”
“What do you mean?”
She shook her head. “It’s nothing.” She looked up at him. “What do you see when you look at me?”
He frowned.
“Nevermind,” she said. “I didn’t mean that.” She laid her head against his chest. “We should get some sleep.”
McCoy tipped her chin up so he could see her eyes. “I see someone who is incredibly open and just as much closed off. And someone who stopped looking in mirrors because the face was same and it didn’t matter as much as what she saw inside.”
Buffy held her breath in surprise.
“I see someone who knows that there is more to life than what she has but is afraid. And I see someone fearless, who stops at nothing for people she’s never even met. Who gives pieces of herself for those she cares about…” He searched her face. “I see someone that I’ve spent four years falling in love with.”
“All we do is fight.”
“We’re not fighting now.”
“Everything, Leo, we fight about everything,” she whispered.
“I’d rather fight with you every day, than spend a hundred years agreeing with anyone else.” He let her go, dropping his hands and avoiding caging her in. “But I know the terms. And the last thing I’d want is to cause you pain.”
“Pain is only possible where you have felt something important,” she breathed.
She considered the pain Doctor Leonard McCoy would cause her. She cared for him, he wasn’t her best friend, but she would still remember him fondly one day. The pain in the future wasn’t likely to change. If he was wrong about the telomeres and she outlived him by a few decades or millennia…
“Pain isn’t the problem,” she told him. “Regret is.”
“What?”
“The pain fades, never completely, but enough to live on. It’s the regrets that eat at me.” She turned to look up at him more comfortably. “The question is, will I regret it more if I kiss you now or if I don’t?”
“Buffy…”
She leaned up and kissed him.