FIC: Other People (Buffy, Kennedy/Caridad, NC-17)
Title: Other People
Author: lolaraincoat
Fandom: Buffy
Pairings/Characters: Caridad/Kennedy
Archive: choc_fic; all others please ask.
Rating: NC-17
Length: ~4,000 words
Summary: There are a lot of slayers in the world, now, and most of them seem to be underfoot all the time.
Spoilers: Through "Chosen" in BtVS, through "Not Fade Away" in AtS, and through "The Chain" in the comics.
Disclaimer: Joss Whedon owns the Buffyverse. Duh.
A/N: Written from this prompt: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Kennedy/Caridad: pornography - Hell is other people. Thanks and more thanks to my wonderful betas fabularasa and idlerat; if only I could write half as well as they read.
Caridad never could concentrate for shit after a big fight, when they were all supposed to be sitting down in a room talking about what happened, what the guys loved to call "debriefing" because they deep down wished this was all military and not just a mystical girl-power thing. Making everything into nuts and bolts, nailing down the details, all "best practices" and "lessons learned" while Cari was ready to jump out of her skin from all the killing monsters and the not being dead yet, herself.
It was just like (and there was her mind wandering again) when they moved to Los Angeles, her dad and brother and sister. Trini and her, they'd figured it out by just getting in there and doing it, right? There had been some epic junior-high battles too, until they got the clothes right, and the walk, and learned how the busses worked and all that. Juan and her dad, though, they kept hoping there would be some big explanation, some set of instructions that would tell them exactly how LA was not Manila. They spent hours and hours in front of the TV, staring at the news and the infomercials. Then they'd phone Mom on the weekend to boast about how great everything was going.
After a while her brother discovered men's magazines and that was worse, 'cause those magazines really were kind of like a debriefing, except the point wasn't killing vamps, it was love and sex and shit. Which even when she was thirteen, fourteen, Cari knew you couldn't get that from books. The girls in the magazine were kind of interesting, though, she'd always -
Oh thank you Jesus, everyone was standing up and stretching, the briefing must be over. Finally. And, yeah, there went Kennedy scrambling out the door already, ahead of everyone else, same as always.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Kennedy would have bet Will had gotten used to it already, being all old-school Scooby. But no. One teensy death that didn't even hardly last two weeks and wasn't even real exactly - mystical death was not the same thing at all, no matter what Buffy said - and Willow flipped out.
Kennedy was too dead to know exactly how the worst of it went, not that she wanted to. But once the apocalypse-of-the-week had been averted and Kennedy was breathing and conscious again, Xander said "let's take a walk" in that avuncular way that he'd adopted lately, perfect for his role as Den Mother to five hundred teenage hotties any one of whom could snap him like a dry twig if she felt like it. Not that the thought had ever crossed Kennedy's mind.
When they got far enough from HQ for privacy, but not so far that nobody would come to his aid if she got upset in a physical way, he laid it out: Willow had gotten all black-eyed and veiny at the sight of Kennedy's corpse, Willow was back in witch rehab, Willow had to stop dating people who put themselves in harm's way, because otherwise, hey, extra apocalypse. No more Slayers for Willow. So Xander was asking if Kennedy would maybe consider suggesting to Will, gently and supportively obviously, that they might possibly take a little break from each other, give each other some space, that kind of thing.
Kennedy could say yeah, whatever in English, Spanish, Portuguese and Nahuatl, which was just about enough whatever to cover the situation. Really it was no big. Except that it kind of turned out to be, because now she wasn't going to be traveling all around the world anymore, just her and Will. Instead she was back in the regular Slayer pool with her 499 sisters, slaying all night and getting under each other's feet all day.
There was just no privacy at all in Slayer Central. Everyone said the Rome branch was worse, and rightly so - no privacy plus, holy Mother of God, Andrew in charge - but the Scottish place was bad enough, thanks. Especially now that the whole main dorm had been gutted so that Dawn The Supersized Girl had a roof that would fit over her head. It was okay, most of the time. Being a member of the Sunnydale crew, not just your standard new slayer, meant she had seniority, and that meant she had a real bedroom that she shared with only four other girls, instead of being stuck in the big tents behind the castle, in what used to be a sheep pasture, and still kind of smelled that way. And unless there were some kind of apocalypse brewing, she could always just go find some other hellmouth to play on, freelance - although they did seem to be mid-apocalypse except when cleaning up after one, so no chance of that so far.
But Faith had warned them, way back in Sunnydale before they all got chosen, that slaying makes you horny. (At the time it had sounded more like she was boasting, but then Faith always sounded like she was boasting.) Which, back when she could just grab Will and run off to their shared room with the door that locked and the stone walls, was not even close to being a problem. Slay the monster, get the girl, right? Fun while it lasted.
Now her best post-slayage celebration option was her own nimble, well-trained and much-loved right hand. Which would have been okay, but Kennedy was an old-fashioned girl: she just couldn't get her cookies while surrounded by four other supposedly sleeping girls in that bedroom that never quite got fully dark at midsummer. And forget the showers. Kennedy had walked in on girls who hadn't forgotten the showers twice in the last six weeks, which was way less fun that it would have been in the kind of porn she used to download the last time she was single. But then the last time she was single she had a computer of her own with her very own DSL line in a bedroom she shared with precisely nobody, plus she hadn't become a superhero yet.
Once, her biggest worry had been that the vibrator attachment for an iPod was only an internet rumor. Then, boom, she was a potential slayer with no Watcher to call her own and a dozen roommates in beautiful, demony Sunnydale. And then, boom, she was a slayer with two hundred roommates in Scotland and a witch for a girlfriend - scratch that, ex-girlfriend. Now she would never see her collection of vintage 1980s On Our Backs ever again.
At least it was summertime. She could sneak off from debriefing into a warm night, pick her way carefully between the big tents, skirt the bonfire that somebody always had going on battle nights - note to Faith: some chicks got horny after battle, some got hungry, some got weepy, some liked to burn shit up - scramble through a smallish patch of bracken, wade across the summer-dry creek and there she was in the woods, all alone. She liked this one little clearing which had a bit of grass or moss or something she could sit on, and a nice big rock for a backrest. It was quiet, it smelled flowery, she could jam her hand into her pants at just the right angle for just the right slow-motion pressure, breathe deep and let her mind wander. If she kept her eyes open she could look up at the stars ...
Or, oh crap, look up at Caridad.
~~~
Cari didn't know exactly why she'd followed Kennedy out of the debrief, but she had. It was a feeling, right? Aren't slayers supposed to trust their guts? Even if that meant fifteen minutes pussyfooting through the castle, the encampment, and the moonlit Scottish wilderness - fucking Scotland, man, it was all thorns and pebbles - following Kennedy's trail of rustling branches and muffled curses. The girl had some mouth on her, and the same Scottish-landscape issues that Caridad did, it turned out. Plus she wasn't so smart about counter-surveillance techniques when she was in a hurry. Caridad stood right there in front of her for what seemed like a year - a very interesting year too - before Kennedy opened her eyes and saw her.
Then she jumped to her feet before she even got her hand out of her pants. "What'd you follow me for?" she hissed.
"Nobody's around," Cari said. "Only me."
"What?"
"You don't have to whisper."
"Well, great," Kennedy said, less quietly. "But: why were you following me?"
Caridad shrugged, then thought maybe Kennedy couldn't see her well enough. "I dunno. Curious maybe? You're always running off after meetings."
"No I'm not."
"Yeah, you are. Like after that thing with the vamps last month in - where were we, Sweden? With the mountains? You stuck around for the meeting, and after that we went for beer, and I was gonna try to sit near you, but then you weren't there. So I started to wonder. But now I think I get it."
"Get what?"
"Either you like meetings a whole lot, or it's like Faith talks about, you know. You like slaying. I mean, you like slaying a lot."
"We all like slaying," Kennedy said, and she sounded kind of pissed off about it.
"Not that way, not all of us."
"Well, great, yes, okay, I'm busted. Thank you Nancy Drew for clearing up that big mystery. Shit."
"Okay, sorry, I was worried about you, all right?"
"And now you know, and you don't have to worry, so let's go back to the castle, all right? Maybe there's some marshmallows left at the bonfire," she grumbled, reaching for the zipper of her jeans.
Then Caridad understood. She got why she had followed Kennedy into the woods. She almost paused, while they stood there looking at each other, but she heard Buffy in her head saying something about instinct and Faith laughing about how too much thinking will get you killed, so instead she stepped forward, pushing Kennedy back against the rock, and shoved her hand into Kennedy's jeans. She was still wet, right through her panties.
"Yeah," Caridad said, "but you went all this way and didn't get what you came for."
She felt Kennedy's torso all along hers, tensed suddenly and then a deliberate relaxation. She pushed a little harder until Kennedy was leaning back against the boulder with Cari shoved up against her, right hand trapped between them. She used her left to unzip Kennedy's pants and push them down a little, which she thought was pretty smooth, under the circumstances.
"And is this what you came for?" Kennedy was asking. "What about you? What do you want?"
Cari worked the heel of her hand in slow circles over Kennedy's clit. Kennedy was trying to work a knee between Cari's legs, and Cari let her, riding her quad a little, and then harder, rougher, Kennedy's denim scraping at her skin. Fuck yeah that was what she wanted, wrestling like this, her breasts jammed up against Kennedy's, smelling her, Kennedy's mouth at her ear, Kennedy's hands at Cari's ass, pulling them closer and closer, yeah.
Kennedy's words buzzed and hummed in her head: "Oh yes, baby, you gonna give me what I want? More of this, more, oh - Yeah, make me come, I'm gonna get my mouth on you after, I swear, I'm gonna - but make me come now, I gotta, oh fuck that's good, just like that, fuck, fuck yes -" and after that no words at all, just a high sustained note she muffled in Cari's shoulder while she ground against Cari's hand and shook and shook and shook.
Then she was pulling Cari's hand out of her pants and pushing her back a short step. Kennedy pulled Cari's wrist up to her face and started licking at her hand, making little appreciative noises. It felt good, but it wasn't nearly enough, not nearly, and Cari missed that good strong thigh between her own. She'd gotten pretty close just from the rubbing anyway. It felt - she couldn't have said how it felt.
Kennedy was good, though; Kennedy understood. She knelt right down in front of her and spoke soft and quiet, like you do with an animal or a kid: "Okay, I'm gonna take your shorts off now, all right? You just step right out of them. Yeah, that's good. Panties too. I'm just using them for a little padding, see, so I have something for my knees, okay? I can be right here just as long as you need."
Kennedy's hands were moving her around, and she felt dazed, almost drugged, suddenly. Like moving underwater, cool and wet like that too, she could feel moisture trickling down the inside of her thighs, and the boulder behind her was damp with dew or moss or something. But Kennedy was still talking, "Yeah, that's right, spread your legs for me, real wide, you're good, such a good girl -" until Cari felt Kennedy's mouth right up on her cunt, moving still, lips and tongue, and then her fingers, all of them bunched together stretching her out until she was hollow and boneless and balanced somehow over Kennedy's mouth as if she were a balloon Kennedy was blowing up, and Cari wanted to tell her that, because it was funny, but all she could do was laugh, and on a big sucking inhale between gusts of laughter she came, grabbing at Kennedy's head to keep her right where she needed her.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
They lay there on the moss or heather or whatever it was, after, and they laughed and pulled their clothes together and strolled on back to the castle. Kennedy figured, well, that was interesting, but just one of those things, right? Just another thing a Slayer could do with her body, a kind of experiment. So now Caridad could go back to being a sweet-voiced girly-girl, flirting with Xander or whatever, and Kennedy could go back to her occasional late nights in the woods with her own butch self, no harm no foul.
But two nights later, after a no-big-deal evening in some grotty suburb of Glasgow dusting a not especially well organized crew of bank-robbing vamps, the same thing happened all over again. Just like the first time, except maybe better: Caridad liked to use her mouth as well as her hands, it turned out, and neither of them was in any hurry. This had to be trouble, Kennedy figured. But she lay back and let it happen, just once more.
And then, of course, it happened another time, and another, and again after that.
The thing was, back in junior high, back before everything happened, Kennedy played softball in a summer league. And one time she'd met up with one of the league's umpires running along the beach one day. She'd slowed to down to match her pace, and they'd talked some. Kennedy had just begun figuring it out, how she maybe liked girls and all. The old lady - well, that was how she'd seemed to Kennedy then, maybe as old as her own mother - she told Kennedy about the bar scene, and how things used to be, and how things were. And she'd explained about butch and femme, which meant Kennedy had to ask, well, what am I? The umpire started laughing so hard she was wheezing, and she had to stop jogging too. All she could say was, "you'll figure it out, honey."
Of course it wasn't long before Kennedy did figure it out: she was more butch than her high school's entire football team combined. Duh. That was why it freaked her shit out, now, to have Caridad hitting on her, instead of the other way around. It wasn't like she'd failed to notice Caridad - Caridad was hard to miss, even in a crowd of slayers. But letting Caridad pursue her, allowing herself to just be pursued: that was the strangest thing that had happened to her since she found out she was a potential slayer, herself. She hadn't had to ask herself "what am I?" in years. Now she did.
But the sex was amazing, and Caridad was so much less annoying than most of the new slayers, and so, although Kennedy knew she would have to figure the whole thing out eventually, she figured there was no harm in putting it off for a while.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Time passed: weeks, months, a year or two. Apocalypses came and went. People got killed, but not Kennedy and not Caridad, so Caridad went on following Kennedy into the woods once in a while. The accommodations at the castle improved after Vi threatened to organize a union, though the food never got much better. Dawn shrank, and belatedly went off to college, and came back again all book-smart, but still mouthy. Andrew started dating a green-skinned demon with horns and all, who made him dress up nice at least even though he was still irritating as hell. A couple of the newest Slayers went bad; Faith hunted them down and started a twelve-step group with them. Caridad thought of it as Violent Assholes Anonymous, but that wasn't the kind of thing you could say out loud. Then the First reappeared, but they beat her - why did Cari believe it was a her? not that it mattered - without losing anyone this time. It was almost easy. After that Mr. Giles started talking about retiring, not that anyone believed him.
After a while people just began to expect Kennedy and Caridad to room together on road trips, stuff like that. One time Caridad met Kennedy's old boarding school roommate - she described herself as "just getting over her experimental-film-making phase" and Kennedy described her as "another trust-fund brat" - at a party in Paris. One time they took a vacation together and stayed in Kennedy's parents' beach house near New York, but none of her family were there and a nest of vamps were, as it turned out, so it wasn't all that relaxing, as vacations go.
One time Cari took Kennedy to stop in at her sister's place when they were both in LA. It was no big deal, not like they'd planned it or anything. Cari told Trini that Kennedy was a friend from work, and Trini just nodded, extra-polite. After that Cari's mom asked after "your friend Kennedy" during every Saturday morning phone call, which were often Friday night or Saturday afternoon to Cari because her mom, after all these years, never had quite got her head around the concept of time zones, and even just Manila to LA for her calls with Trini was a big stretch for her. Cari would have loved to know exactly what Trini had said about Kennedy, and how she had said it, but she never had the nerve to ask. Half of being a slayer - a slayer who survived, anyway - was having a good sense of what dangers were best avoided. Getting into it with Trini? Definitely on that list.
And then one day - or, night, really - Dawn invited Cari to come along on body-guard duty through a portal into another dimension where an all-seeing creature called the Eye of Something-or-other was supposed to advise them on how to kill the latest Big Bad. The Eye turned out to be, well, an eye - or an eyeshaped thing made up of smaller eyes that were, if you looked close, made up of even smaller eyes, and probably so on and so on but Cari didn't want to look any more closely than that. It spoke in a deep, booming voice with a faint Louisiana accent, and it turned out to have some kind of an other-dimensional crush on Dawn. It wasn't so much that Dawn used to be a giant, or that before that Dawn started out as a glowing green key; the Eye liked Dawn, it explained, because she phrased her questions really, really well.
"Usually," it went on, "people from your dimension ask the same thing over and over. Oh, the words are different, and the topics are different, but it's just Why me? Why me all the damn time, when you get right down to it, and I get sick of it." He made his voice high and squeaky when he said Why me? and for the first time since coming through the portal, Caridad began to get a little nervous.
"Uh-huh," Dawn said, backing away almost imperceptibly. The Eye didn't notice. Its attention had turned to Cari - though how she knew it was paying attention to her, she couldn't say.
"Take your friend there," it boomed. "She's just dying to ask me a question. Same old same old, something about romance, and she thinks it's terribly complex and interesting, but it's really just more Why me?, you know? It's just - It's tiresome, that's what it is. Most of the time the best answer is, don't ask."
"I see what you mean," Dawn said, still shuffling backwards, nudging Cari along with her.
"I only wanted to -" Cari began, but Dawn kicked her hard in the ankle and she shut up.
But the Great Eye of Whatever had more to say. "Oh, I could tell you why she picked you, if she picked you, but you know what?" The Eye was bobbing around on its hideous stem; it looked as worked up as an all-seeing, all-knowing being could get. Was that stem attached to anything? It seemed to just vanish into the distance, in a gooey, disturbing way.
Plus, for something that had neither lungs nor mouth, the Eye could be awfully loud. It roared, "It's just another version of the same dumb question! WHY ME? You don't want to know that! Nobody ever likes the answers to that question anyway! The last thing they want to know is why them! It doesn't help to know! It never helps! But they keep on asking all the same."
Dawn was tugging at Cari's left wrist while she addressed the Great Eye. "Yes, well, we really should be -"
It howled at Dawn, "You come back any time now, you hear? But don't bring her with you! You tell her the answer is DON'T ASK! You just come alone next time! I like you! I like you a -"
But before the Eye could finish its sentence they had backed all the way out of the portal again. They fell on their asses onto the cold stone floor of HQ as the portal winked out.
By the time they could sit up again a crowd had gathered around, looking down at them. Dawn was already talking a mile a minute. Buffy was frowning, Xander was nodding, Olivia was tapping something into her Blackberry, and Willow was interrupting about every third word. Caridad kept her mouth shut, waiting for the dizziness to pass. Sometimes she hated this mystical shit.
Kennedy knelt down beside her, touching the back of her neck with one cool hand. "You all right?" she asked softly.
"Yeah, I guess," Cari said. "Yeah."
Kennedy said, "You were gone a long time."
Caridad murmured into Kennedy's ear, "Did you miss me?" and Kennedy pulled them both up off the floor. They stood there in the little circle of Slayers and Watchers and friends, Caridad leaning into Kennedy a little, listening to Dawn - still on the floor - as she went on explaining.
Cari told Kennedy, "The Eye said some things to me too."
Kennedy was holding her hand, in front of everybody. This was new. How long had they been gone for? Did Cari look that bad?
Dawn went on talking. Nobody was looking at them. After a while, Kennedy asked, "So what did the Eye tell you?"
Cari thought about it for a second. Kennedy kept hold of her hand. "Don't ask," Caridad said.
"Okay, but -"
"No really," and if this debriefing lasted one more minute Caridad was going to kiss her right there. "Don't ask."
Author: lolaraincoat
Fandom: Buffy
Pairings/Characters: Caridad/Kennedy
Archive: choc_fic; all others please ask.
Rating: NC-17
Length: ~4,000 words
Summary: There are a lot of slayers in the world, now, and most of them seem to be underfoot all the time.
Spoilers: Through "Chosen" in BtVS, through "Not Fade Away" in AtS, and through "The Chain" in the comics.
Disclaimer: Joss Whedon owns the Buffyverse. Duh.
A/N: Written from this prompt: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Kennedy/Caridad: pornography - Hell is other people. Thanks and more thanks to my wonderful betas fabularasa and idlerat; if only I could write half as well as they read.
Caridad never could concentrate for shit after a big fight, when they were all supposed to be sitting down in a room talking about what happened, what the guys loved to call "debriefing" because they deep down wished this was all military and not just a mystical girl-power thing. Making everything into nuts and bolts, nailing down the details, all "best practices" and "lessons learned" while Cari was ready to jump out of her skin from all the killing monsters and the not being dead yet, herself.
It was just like (and there was her mind wandering again) when they moved to Los Angeles, her dad and brother and sister. Trini and her, they'd figured it out by just getting in there and doing it, right? There had been some epic junior-high battles too, until they got the clothes right, and the walk, and learned how the busses worked and all that. Juan and her dad, though, they kept hoping there would be some big explanation, some set of instructions that would tell them exactly how LA was not Manila. They spent hours and hours in front of the TV, staring at the news and the infomercials. Then they'd phone Mom on the weekend to boast about how great everything was going.
After a while her brother discovered men's magazines and that was worse, 'cause those magazines really were kind of like a debriefing, except the point wasn't killing vamps, it was love and sex and shit. Which even when she was thirteen, fourteen, Cari knew you couldn't get that from books. The girls in the magazine were kind of interesting, though, she'd always -
Oh thank you Jesus, everyone was standing up and stretching, the briefing must be over. Finally. And, yeah, there went Kennedy scrambling out the door already, ahead of everyone else, same as always.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Kennedy would have bet Will had gotten used to it already, being all old-school Scooby. But no. One teensy death that didn't even hardly last two weeks and wasn't even real exactly - mystical death was not the same thing at all, no matter what Buffy said - and Willow flipped out.
Kennedy was too dead to know exactly how the worst of it went, not that she wanted to. But once the apocalypse-of-the-week had been averted and Kennedy was breathing and conscious again, Xander said "let's take a walk" in that avuncular way that he'd adopted lately, perfect for his role as Den Mother to five hundred teenage hotties any one of whom could snap him like a dry twig if she felt like it. Not that the thought had ever crossed Kennedy's mind.
When they got far enough from HQ for privacy, but not so far that nobody would come to his aid if she got upset in a physical way, he laid it out: Willow had gotten all black-eyed and veiny at the sight of Kennedy's corpse, Willow was back in witch rehab, Willow had to stop dating people who put themselves in harm's way, because otherwise, hey, extra apocalypse. No more Slayers for Willow. So Xander was asking if Kennedy would maybe consider suggesting to Will, gently and supportively obviously, that they might possibly take a little break from each other, give each other some space, that kind of thing.
Kennedy could say yeah, whatever in English, Spanish, Portuguese and Nahuatl, which was just about enough whatever to cover the situation. Really it was no big. Except that it kind of turned out to be, because now she wasn't going to be traveling all around the world anymore, just her and Will. Instead she was back in the regular Slayer pool with her 499 sisters, slaying all night and getting under each other's feet all day.
There was just no privacy at all in Slayer Central. Everyone said the Rome branch was worse, and rightly so - no privacy plus, holy Mother of God, Andrew in charge - but the Scottish place was bad enough, thanks. Especially now that the whole main dorm had been gutted so that Dawn The Supersized Girl had a roof that would fit over her head. It was okay, most of the time. Being a member of the Sunnydale crew, not just your standard new slayer, meant she had seniority, and that meant she had a real bedroom that she shared with only four other girls, instead of being stuck in the big tents behind the castle, in what used to be a sheep pasture, and still kind of smelled that way. And unless there were some kind of apocalypse brewing, she could always just go find some other hellmouth to play on, freelance - although they did seem to be mid-apocalypse except when cleaning up after one, so no chance of that so far.
But Faith had warned them, way back in Sunnydale before they all got chosen, that slaying makes you horny. (At the time it had sounded more like she was boasting, but then Faith always sounded like she was boasting.) Which, back when she could just grab Will and run off to their shared room with the door that locked and the stone walls, was not even close to being a problem. Slay the monster, get the girl, right? Fun while it lasted.
Now her best post-slayage celebration option was her own nimble, well-trained and much-loved right hand. Which would have been okay, but Kennedy was an old-fashioned girl: she just couldn't get her cookies while surrounded by four other supposedly sleeping girls in that bedroom that never quite got fully dark at midsummer. And forget the showers. Kennedy had walked in on girls who hadn't forgotten the showers twice in the last six weeks, which was way less fun that it would have been in the kind of porn she used to download the last time she was single. But then the last time she was single she had a computer of her own with her very own DSL line in a bedroom she shared with precisely nobody, plus she hadn't become a superhero yet.
Once, her biggest worry had been that the vibrator attachment for an iPod was only an internet rumor. Then, boom, she was a potential slayer with no Watcher to call her own and a dozen roommates in beautiful, demony Sunnydale. And then, boom, she was a slayer with two hundred roommates in Scotland and a witch for a girlfriend - scratch that, ex-girlfriend. Now she would never see her collection of vintage 1980s On Our Backs ever again.
At least it was summertime. She could sneak off from debriefing into a warm night, pick her way carefully between the big tents, skirt the bonfire that somebody always had going on battle nights - note to Faith: some chicks got horny after battle, some got hungry, some got weepy, some liked to burn shit up - scramble through a smallish patch of bracken, wade across the summer-dry creek and there she was in the woods, all alone. She liked this one little clearing which had a bit of grass or moss or something she could sit on, and a nice big rock for a backrest. It was quiet, it smelled flowery, she could jam her hand into her pants at just the right angle for just the right slow-motion pressure, breathe deep and let her mind wander. If she kept her eyes open she could look up at the stars ...
Or, oh crap, look up at Caridad.
~~~
Cari didn't know exactly why she'd followed Kennedy out of the debrief, but she had. It was a feeling, right? Aren't slayers supposed to trust their guts? Even if that meant fifteen minutes pussyfooting through the castle, the encampment, and the moonlit Scottish wilderness - fucking Scotland, man, it was all thorns and pebbles - following Kennedy's trail of rustling branches and muffled curses. The girl had some mouth on her, and the same Scottish-landscape issues that Caridad did, it turned out. Plus she wasn't so smart about counter-surveillance techniques when she was in a hurry. Caridad stood right there in front of her for what seemed like a year - a very interesting year too - before Kennedy opened her eyes and saw her.
Then she jumped to her feet before she even got her hand out of her pants. "What'd you follow me for?" she hissed.
"Nobody's around," Cari said. "Only me."
"What?"
"You don't have to whisper."
"Well, great," Kennedy said, less quietly. "But: why were you following me?"
Caridad shrugged, then thought maybe Kennedy couldn't see her well enough. "I dunno. Curious maybe? You're always running off after meetings."
"No I'm not."
"Yeah, you are. Like after that thing with the vamps last month in - where were we, Sweden? With the mountains? You stuck around for the meeting, and after that we went for beer, and I was gonna try to sit near you, but then you weren't there. So I started to wonder. But now I think I get it."
"Get what?"
"Either you like meetings a whole lot, or it's like Faith talks about, you know. You like slaying. I mean, you like slaying a lot."
"We all like slaying," Kennedy said, and she sounded kind of pissed off about it.
"Not that way, not all of us."
"Well, great, yes, okay, I'm busted. Thank you Nancy Drew for clearing up that big mystery. Shit."
"Okay, sorry, I was worried about you, all right?"
"And now you know, and you don't have to worry, so let's go back to the castle, all right? Maybe there's some marshmallows left at the bonfire," she grumbled, reaching for the zipper of her jeans.
Then Caridad understood. She got why she had followed Kennedy into the woods. She almost paused, while they stood there looking at each other, but she heard Buffy in her head saying something about instinct and Faith laughing about how too much thinking will get you killed, so instead she stepped forward, pushing Kennedy back against the rock, and shoved her hand into Kennedy's jeans. She was still wet, right through her panties.
"Yeah," Caridad said, "but you went all this way and didn't get what you came for."
She felt Kennedy's torso all along hers, tensed suddenly and then a deliberate relaxation. She pushed a little harder until Kennedy was leaning back against the boulder with Cari shoved up against her, right hand trapped between them. She used her left to unzip Kennedy's pants and push them down a little, which she thought was pretty smooth, under the circumstances.
"And is this what you came for?" Kennedy was asking. "What about you? What do you want?"
Cari worked the heel of her hand in slow circles over Kennedy's clit. Kennedy was trying to work a knee between Cari's legs, and Cari let her, riding her quad a little, and then harder, rougher, Kennedy's denim scraping at her skin. Fuck yeah that was what she wanted, wrestling like this, her breasts jammed up against Kennedy's, smelling her, Kennedy's mouth at her ear, Kennedy's hands at Cari's ass, pulling them closer and closer, yeah.
Kennedy's words buzzed and hummed in her head: "Oh yes, baby, you gonna give me what I want? More of this, more, oh - Yeah, make me come, I'm gonna get my mouth on you after, I swear, I'm gonna - but make me come now, I gotta, oh fuck that's good, just like that, fuck, fuck yes -" and after that no words at all, just a high sustained note she muffled in Cari's shoulder while she ground against Cari's hand and shook and shook and shook.
Then she was pulling Cari's hand out of her pants and pushing her back a short step. Kennedy pulled Cari's wrist up to her face and started licking at her hand, making little appreciative noises. It felt good, but it wasn't nearly enough, not nearly, and Cari missed that good strong thigh between her own. She'd gotten pretty close just from the rubbing anyway. It felt - she couldn't have said how it felt.
Kennedy was good, though; Kennedy understood. She knelt right down in front of her and spoke soft and quiet, like you do with an animal or a kid: "Okay, I'm gonna take your shorts off now, all right? You just step right out of them. Yeah, that's good. Panties too. I'm just using them for a little padding, see, so I have something for my knees, okay? I can be right here just as long as you need."
Kennedy's hands were moving her around, and she felt dazed, almost drugged, suddenly. Like moving underwater, cool and wet like that too, she could feel moisture trickling down the inside of her thighs, and the boulder behind her was damp with dew or moss or something. But Kennedy was still talking, "Yeah, that's right, spread your legs for me, real wide, you're good, such a good girl -" until Cari felt Kennedy's mouth right up on her cunt, moving still, lips and tongue, and then her fingers, all of them bunched together stretching her out until she was hollow and boneless and balanced somehow over Kennedy's mouth as if she were a balloon Kennedy was blowing up, and Cari wanted to tell her that, because it was funny, but all she could do was laugh, and on a big sucking inhale between gusts of laughter she came, grabbing at Kennedy's head to keep her right where she needed her.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
They lay there on the moss or heather or whatever it was, after, and they laughed and pulled their clothes together and strolled on back to the castle. Kennedy figured, well, that was interesting, but just one of those things, right? Just another thing a Slayer could do with her body, a kind of experiment. So now Caridad could go back to being a sweet-voiced girly-girl, flirting with Xander or whatever, and Kennedy could go back to her occasional late nights in the woods with her own butch self, no harm no foul.
But two nights later, after a no-big-deal evening in some grotty suburb of Glasgow dusting a not especially well organized crew of bank-robbing vamps, the same thing happened all over again. Just like the first time, except maybe better: Caridad liked to use her mouth as well as her hands, it turned out, and neither of them was in any hurry. This had to be trouble, Kennedy figured. But she lay back and let it happen, just once more.
And then, of course, it happened another time, and another, and again after that.
The thing was, back in junior high, back before everything happened, Kennedy played softball in a summer league. And one time she'd met up with one of the league's umpires running along the beach one day. She'd slowed to down to match her pace, and they'd talked some. Kennedy had just begun figuring it out, how she maybe liked girls and all. The old lady - well, that was how she'd seemed to Kennedy then, maybe as old as her own mother - she told Kennedy about the bar scene, and how things used to be, and how things were. And she'd explained about butch and femme, which meant Kennedy had to ask, well, what am I? The umpire started laughing so hard she was wheezing, and she had to stop jogging too. All she could say was, "you'll figure it out, honey."
Of course it wasn't long before Kennedy did figure it out: she was more butch than her high school's entire football team combined. Duh. That was why it freaked her shit out, now, to have Caridad hitting on her, instead of the other way around. It wasn't like she'd failed to notice Caridad - Caridad was hard to miss, even in a crowd of slayers. But letting Caridad pursue her, allowing herself to just be pursued: that was the strangest thing that had happened to her since she found out she was a potential slayer, herself. She hadn't had to ask herself "what am I?" in years. Now she did.
But the sex was amazing, and Caridad was so much less annoying than most of the new slayers, and so, although Kennedy knew she would have to figure the whole thing out eventually, she figured there was no harm in putting it off for a while.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Time passed: weeks, months, a year or two. Apocalypses came and went. People got killed, but not Kennedy and not Caridad, so Caridad went on following Kennedy into the woods once in a while. The accommodations at the castle improved after Vi threatened to organize a union, though the food never got much better. Dawn shrank, and belatedly went off to college, and came back again all book-smart, but still mouthy. Andrew started dating a green-skinned demon with horns and all, who made him dress up nice at least even though he was still irritating as hell. A couple of the newest Slayers went bad; Faith hunted them down and started a twelve-step group with them. Caridad thought of it as Violent Assholes Anonymous, but that wasn't the kind of thing you could say out loud. Then the First reappeared, but they beat her - why did Cari believe it was a her? not that it mattered - without losing anyone this time. It was almost easy. After that Mr. Giles started talking about retiring, not that anyone believed him.
After a while people just began to expect Kennedy and Caridad to room together on road trips, stuff like that. One time Caridad met Kennedy's old boarding school roommate - she described herself as "just getting over her experimental-film-making phase" and Kennedy described her as "another trust-fund brat" - at a party in Paris. One time they took a vacation together and stayed in Kennedy's parents' beach house near New York, but none of her family were there and a nest of vamps were, as it turned out, so it wasn't all that relaxing, as vacations go.
One time Cari took Kennedy to stop in at her sister's place when they were both in LA. It was no big deal, not like they'd planned it or anything. Cari told Trini that Kennedy was a friend from work, and Trini just nodded, extra-polite. After that Cari's mom asked after "your friend Kennedy" during every Saturday morning phone call, which were often Friday night or Saturday afternoon to Cari because her mom, after all these years, never had quite got her head around the concept of time zones, and even just Manila to LA for her calls with Trini was a big stretch for her. Cari would have loved to know exactly what Trini had said about Kennedy, and how she had said it, but she never had the nerve to ask. Half of being a slayer - a slayer who survived, anyway - was having a good sense of what dangers were best avoided. Getting into it with Trini? Definitely on that list.
And then one day - or, night, really - Dawn invited Cari to come along on body-guard duty through a portal into another dimension where an all-seeing creature called the Eye of Something-or-other was supposed to advise them on how to kill the latest Big Bad. The Eye turned out to be, well, an eye - or an eyeshaped thing made up of smaller eyes that were, if you looked close, made up of even smaller eyes, and probably so on and so on but Cari didn't want to look any more closely than that. It spoke in a deep, booming voice with a faint Louisiana accent, and it turned out to have some kind of an other-dimensional crush on Dawn. It wasn't so much that Dawn used to be a giant, or that before that Dawn started out as a glowing green key; the Eye liked Dawn, it explained, because she phrased her questions really, really well.
"Usually," it went on, "people from your dimension ask the same thing over and over. Oh, the words are different, and the topics are different, but it's just Why me? Why me all the damn time, when you get right down to it, and I get sick of it." He made his voice high and squeaky when he said Why me? and for the first time since coming through the portal, Caridad began to get a little nervous.
"Uh-huh," Dawn said, backing away almost imperceptibly. The Eye didn't notice. Its attention had turned to Cari - though how she knew it was paying attention to her, she couldn't say.
"Take your friend there," it boomed. "She's just dying to ask me a question. Same old same old, something about romance, and she thinks it's terribly complex and interesting, but it's really just more Why me?, you know? It's just - It's tiresome, that's what it is. Most of the time the best answer is, don't ask."
"I see what you mean," Dawn said, still shuffling backwards, nudging Cari along with her.
"I only wanted to -" Cari began, but Dawn kicked her hard in the ankle and she shut up.
But the Great Eye of Whatever had more to say. "Oh, I could tell you why she picked you, if she picked you, but you know what?" The Eye was bobbing around on its hideous stem; it looked as worked up as an all-seeing, all-knowing being could get. Was that stem attached to anything? It seemed to just vanish into the distance, in a gooey, disturbing way.
Plus, for something that had neither lungs nor mouth, the Eye could be awfully loud. It roared, "It's just another version of the same dumb question! WHY ME? You don't want to know that! Nobody ever likes the answers to that question anyway! The last thing they want to know is why them! It doesn't help to know! It never helps! But they keep on asking all the same."
Dawn was tugging at Cari's left wrist while she addressed the Great Eye. "Yes, well, we really should be -"
It howled at Dawn, "You come back any time now, you hear? But don't bring her with you! You tell her the answer is DON'T ASK! You just come alone next time! I like you! I like you a -"
But before the Eye could finish its sentence they had backed all the way out of the portal again. They fell on their asses onto the cold stone floor of HQ as the portal winked out.
By the time they could sit up again a crowd had gathered around, looking down at them. Dawn was already talking a mile a minute. Buffy was frowning, Xander was nodding, Olivia was tapping something into her Blackberry, and Willow was interrupting about every third word. Caridad kept her mouth shut, waiting for the dizziness to pass. Sometimes she hated this mystical shit.
Kennedy knelt down beside her, touching the back of her neck with one cool hand. "You all right?" she asked softly.
"Yeah, I guess," Cari said. "Yeah."
Kennedy said, "You were gone a long time."
Caridad murmured into Kennedy's ear, "Did you miss me?" and Kennedy pulled them both up off the floor. They stood there in the little circle of Slayers and Watchers and friends, Caridad leaning into Kennedy a little, listening to Dawn - still on the floor - as she went on explaining.
Cari told Kennedy, "The Eye said some things to me too."
Kennedy was holding her hand, in front of everybody. This was new. How long had they been gone for? Did Cari look that bad?
Dawn went on talking. Nobody was looking at them. After a while, Kennedy asked, "So what did the Eye tell you?"
Cari thought about it for a second. Kennedy kept hold of her hand. "Don't ask," Caridad said.
"Okay, but -"
"No really," and if this debriefing lasted one more minute Caridad was going to kiss her right there. "Don't ask."