Commentary - Not Thinking About It
So, I asked for fic commentary requests. (I’m still happy to do more, if anyone has one they’d like.)
This was written for louise39, who requested a commentary for Not Thinking About It. You should probably read that before looking at this commentary.
The original fic still looks like it did, and my notes are the bits in blockquotes.
Not Thinking About It
This was written for “Love Bites” month at still_grrr. The idea was to write about not-fluffy-and-romantic love stories, with the prompts all being break-up songs.
The prompt for this one was The Jeep Song, by the Dresden Dolls. It’s a song about a woman who keeps seeing cars that look exactly like her ex-boyfriend’s - so everywhere she goes, she gets reminded of him…
She tells Xander that she’s over it, that she hasn’t really thought about him lately, that she doesn’t care where he’s disappeared to.
(This fic is set in the summer between seasons 6 and 7. So, Spike’s off getting a soul, Willow’s in England, and Anya is still very annoyed at Xander.)
And Xander believes her (or pretends to, anyway).
And the thing is, she means it. She really is trying to move on and be all well-adjusted.
Please note: there’s a big difference between being over someone, and trying to move on. And even though Buffy’s saying that she’s over him…
“I’m not really looking for a guy right now. I just want to focus on Dawn,” she says, and feels very mature and sensible.
But right then the breeze starts up again, rustling the leaves of the big tree near the fence, and her mind pulls out a conversation from weeks ago, and drops a sentence right in front of her: “Let yourself live, already.”
(Windy days are very useful, for story purposes.)
The quote - like every other quote in this fic - is something Spike said. In this case, it’s from Normal Again.
She amends what she was saying: “…and on slaying, and maybe getting a new job, so I can stop all the burger flipping.”
“No more burgers for the Buffster?”
“Nope. No more.”
Xander looks indignant, and points out that no more crappy burger job means no more stupid cow hat, and how’s he going to be able to make fun of her then?
She just grins.
It’s funny, though, because she does want to leave the Doublemeat Palace, but every time she turns the lights on at the start of a shift she hears a voice saying “Damn fluorescent lights. Makes me look dead.” and a smile flashes over her face for a moment.
She’ll miss that.
That’s from Doublemeat Palace, rather unsurprisingly.
I wanted Buffy to be getting constant Spike reminders - but not to be getting upsetting reminders. So, yes, it’s upsetting her, because it’s an absolute pain not being able to get someone off your mind, especially when you’re trying not to think about them… but, at the same time, quite a lot of the reminders she’s getting are things she thought were cute, or funny, or sweet. Things that make her smile.
Xander asks what kind of job she’s after, and they start thinking up the most ridiculous ideas they can come up with, like rodeo cowgirl or lumberjack or astronaut. She points out that being on the International Space Station wouldn’t really give her much time for patrolling, but Xander just raises an eyebrow and points out that maybe there are vampires in space.
“After all, they don’t need to breathe.”
“Maybe that’s what happened to the Challenger.”
“Definitely. Rocket-attacking vampires from space.”
I love writing Buffy and Xander being silly together. They’re just so much fun!
Then he turns serious, and asks if she wants to try construction again. “Not that I’d trust you to build anything… but we’ve got a fair bit of demolition to get done. From what I remember, you were pretty good at that.”
He’s talking about her one disastrous day on a building site… but her memory smugly bypasses that one and skips on to the house they- she destroyed.
(She changes from “they” to “she” because she’s trying not to think about Spike…)
Bricks shaking loose, bits of wall crashing down, and it’s all just background noise because he’s there making her FEEL SO…
The only non-quotation. Referencing the scene from Smashed - I wanted to get that in there, but couldn’t think of a quote from that scene that would work.
“No thanks. Not feeling very demolitiony right now.”
Xander nods, and starts telling her all about the movie he saw last week, and how many explosions there were, and about the big car chase scene with the whole bridge collapsing right behind them, and how he didn’t really buy the time paradox thing but it was pretty cool when the villain had to keep rescuing the little girl to keep the day repeating until he’d finished his master plan - and right then she remembers a crypt and a vampire saying softly “Every night I save you.” and she completely misses everything else Xander is saying until he reaches the end bit with the fight on the Empire State Building.
Weird, weird movie. The sort of geeky action movie that there really should be more of. Why on earth there’s a time paradox and a fight on the Empire State Building, I have no idea, but I’m sure it could be done.
The quote is from Afterlife.
He frowns. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, Xan. I’m fine.”
He shifts in his chair and looks at her seriously. “Buff… are you sure that… I mean, I know you said you were over him, but maybe…”
Xander’s a reasonably perceptive guy - sometimes.
She could tell him that yesterday a guy wearing a black duster walked past her and she couldn’t stop watching him until he’d gone round the corner, or that she keeps expecting there to be someone hiding behind the tree when she walks out the front door, or that she still hasn’t been up on the balcony at the Bronze since he left… but it sounds so silly, and really she’s completely over him - not that she was ever anything else - and she’s moving on.
So she just smiles and says, “I’m sure. No maybes. Enough with the maybe-ing.”
“Yes, ma’am. No more maybes. Gotcha.”
And Xander’s now asked her about this twice in one conversation, which is completely against the whole unwritten rule thing they have, so it means she’s totally justified in her next question.
“Seen much of Anya lately?”
He grimaces. “Not really. She’s still pretty angry about… everything.”
A sympathetic nod.
“I’ve seen her at the Bronze a few times.”
She has too. Every time she’s gone to the Bronze lately, there Anya is, talking to a girl who’s in tears - a different one every night.
(Vengeance is a full time job.)
And every time she walks past and sees Anya hard at work, she hears him saying it again: “You always hurt the one you love, pet.”
This is from Dead Things.
She changes the subject.
They discuss patrolling, and cell phones, and more movies, and weapons, and the beach, and it’s all normal and friendly and not-subtexty… and then Xander suggests ordering pizza.
Actually, he says he’s got “pizza cravings” - and instantly she’s six months earlier, being told authoritatively: “I’m in your system now. You’re gonna crave me, like I crave blood.”
(From Wrecked.)
Why’d he have to go and be right?
(And yes, I think he kinda was…)
And suddenly it’s all flooding through her once again.
Xander tells the guy on the phone “Yeah, we want a meatlovers, a small vegetarian, extra olives…” and an impassioned voice tries to explain “I wanted something. Anything to make these feelings stop.”
(Seeing Red.)
He suggests getting the Boyzenberri With Bite! dessert combo, and she nods, while someone puzzled asks “So how come I don’t want to bite you?”
(Tabula Rasa.)
They go inside because it’s nearly nighttime, and a whisper follows her: “You belong in the shadows, with me.”
(Dead Things.)
Xander flops down on the couch and starts a rambling list of reasons he likes pizza, and summer, and eating pizza in summer, and she tries to grin, but she’s barely listening to a word he’s saying - her mind is years ago, hearing another list: “…dog racing, Manchester United…”
This is Spike’s list of reasons to save the world, from Becoming.
She’s getting a headache.
And she doesn’t want to hurt Xander’s feelings (“I don’t hurt you.”), but, really, he’s not who she wants to be hanging out with right now (“Girl just needs a little monster in her man.”). No! That’s not what she means - she just doesn’t want to be around anyone right now (“Tend to go a bit wonky if you cram them too close.”).
And it’s nothing, really, but even though there’s absolutely nothing (“You came back wrong.”) …amiss, she’s not sure she trusts Xander to handle this very well if she actually tells him what’s bugging her (“Trust is for old marrieds, Buffy. Great love is…”), so she just says she’s feeling a bit (“…wild, and passionate, and dangerous…”) edgy and (“…it burns and consumes…”) wants to have a bath.
Oh, boy…
Here’s a list:
1) Entropy (re the garden gnome camera)
2) As You Were (said very smugly to Riley)
3) All The Way (mandrake roots in The Magic Box’s basement)
4) Smashed (right before the Awesome Fight Of Smexiness)
5) Seeing Red (in the bathroom)
(Notice the groovy way in which that final sentence splits the quote up to answer Buffy’s thoughts. I was rather proud of that.)
Xander grins. “Sure, but you might want to hurry. If that pizza gets here, I’m not waiting for you to come back downstairs.”
She grins back - and then heads up the staircase.
A bath sounds like just what she needs. She’ll have lots of bubbles, and all the tension inside her will just waft away, and she’ll stop thinking so many insane thoughts about evil vampires…
Buffy tends to insist that Spike is EVIL much more when she’s trying not to find him attractive. (In fact, in Dead Things, it got all the way up to “Evil bloodsucking fiend”, because she was trying not end up having sex in his crypt yet again.)
As she gets to the landing, an annoyed voice says pointedly, “And I was insane to think - no, wait. You were right. You’re insane.” and she bites back a smile.
That’s from Older and Far Away - and is my favourite of all these Spike quotes. (Although if I'd been able to work “147 days” in there, that would have won by a mile.)
And, like I said, a lot of these things reminding Buffy of Spike are things that make her smile. I think she’d find the idea of Spike interrupting her “evil vampires” thought kinda fun…
This was written for louise39, who requested a commentary for Not Thinking About It. You should probably read that before looking at this commentary.
The original fic still looks like it did, and my notes are the bits in blockquotes.
Not Thinking About It
This was written for “Love Bites” month at still_grrr. The idea was to write about not-fluffy-and-romantic love stories, with the prompts all being break-up songs.
The prompt for this one was The Jeep Song, by the Dresden Dolls. It’s a song about a woman who keeps seeing cars that look exactly like her ex-boyfriend’s - so everywhere she goes, she gets reminded of him…
She tells Xander that she’s over it, that she hasn’t really thought about him lately, that she doesn’t care where he’s disappeared to.
(This fic is set in the summer between seasons 6 and 7. So, Spike’s off getting a soul, Willow’s in England, and Anya is still very annoyed at Xander.)
And Xander believes her (or pretends to, anyway).
And the thing is, she means it. She really is trying to move on and be all well-adjusted.
Please note: there’s a big difference between being over someone, and trying to move on. And even though Buffy’s saying that she’s over him…
“I’m not really looking for a guy right now. I just want to focus on Dawn,” she says, and feels very mature and sensible.
But right then the breeze starts up again, rustling the leaves of the big tree near the fence, and her mind pulls out a conversation from weeks ago, and drops a sentence right in front of her: “Let yourself live, already.”
(Windy days are very useful, for story purposes.)
The quote - like every other quote in this fic - is something Spike said. In this case, it’s from Normal Again.
She amends what she was saying: “…and on slaying, and maybe getting a new job, so I can stop all the burger flipping.”
“No more burgers for the Buffster?”
“Nope. No more.”
Xander looks indignant, and points out that no more crappy burger job means no more stupid cow hat, and how’s he going to be able to make fun of her then?
She just grins.
It’s funny, though, because she does want to leave the Doublemeat Palace, but every time she turns the lights on at the start of a shift she hears a voice saying “Damn fluorescent lights. Makes me look dead.” and a smile flashes over her face for a moment.
She’ll miss that.
That’s from Doublemeat Palace, rather unsurprisingly.
I wanted Buffy to be getting constant Spike reminders - but not to be getting upsetting reminders. So, yes, it’s upsetting her, because it’s an absolute pain not being able to get someone off your mind, especially when you’re trying not to think about them… but, at the same time, quite a lot of the reminders she’s getting are things she thought were cute, or funny, or sweet. Things that make her smile.
Xander asks what kind of job she’s after, and they start thinking up the most ridiculous ideas they can come up with, like rodeo cowgirl or lumberjack or astronaut. She points out that being on the International Space Station wouldn’t really give her much time for patrolling, but Xander just raises an eyebrow and points out that maybe there are vampires in space.
“After all, they don’t need to breathe.”
“Maybe that’s what happened to the Challenger.”
“Definitely. Rocket-attacking vampires from space.”
I love writing Buffy and Xander being silly together. They’re just so much fun!
Then he turns serious, and asks if she wants to try construction again. “Not that I’d trust you to build anything… but we’ve got a fair bit of demolition to get done. From what I remember, you were pretty good at that.”
He’s talking about her one disastrous day on a building site… but her memory smugly bypasses that one and skips on to the house they- she destroyed.
(She changes from “they” to “she” because she’s trying not to think about Spike…)
Bricks shaking loose, bits of wall crashing down, and it’s all just background noise because he’s there making her FEEL SO…
The only non-quotation. Referencing the scene from Smashed - I wanted to get that in there, but couldn’t think of a quote from that scene that would work.
“No thanks. Not feeling very demolitiony right now.”
Xander nods, and starts telling her all about the movie he saw last week, and how many explosions there were, and about the big car chase scene with the whole bridge collapsing right behind them, and how he didn’t really buy the time paradox thing but it was pretty cool when the villain had to keep rescuing the little girl to keep the day repeating until he’d finished his master plan - and right then she remembers a crypt and a vampire saying softly “Every night I save you.” and she completely misses everything else Xander is saying until he reaches the end bit with the fight on the Empire State Building.
Weird, weird movie. The sort of geeky action movie that there really should be more of. Why on earth there’s a time paradox and a fight on the Empire State Building, I have no idea, but I’m sure it could be done.
The quote is from Afterlife.
He frowns. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, Xan. I’m fine.”
He shifts in his chair and looks at her seriously. “Buff… are you sure that… I mean, I know you said you were over him, but maybe…”
Xander’s a reasonably perceptive guy - sometimes.
She could tell him that yesterday a guy wearing a black duster walked past her and she couldn’t stop watching him until he’d gone round the corner, or that she keeps expecting there to be someone hiding behind the tree when she walks out the front door, or that she still hasn’t been up on the balcony at the Bronze since he left… but it sounds so silly, and really she’s completely over him - not that she was ever anything else - and she’s moving on.
So she just smiles and says, “I’m sure. No maybes. Enough with the maybe-ing.”
“Yes, ma’am. No more maybes. Gotcha.”
And Xander’s now asked her about this twice in one conversation, which is completely against the whole unwritten rule thing they have, so it means she’s totally justified in her next question.
“Seen much of Anya lately?”
He grimaces. “Not really. She’s still pretty angry about… everything.”
A sympathetic nod.
“I’ve seen her at the Bronze a few times.”
She has too. Every time she’s gone to the Bronze lately, there Anya is, talking to a girl who’s in tears - a different one every night.
(Vengeance is a full time job.)
And every time she walks past and sees Anya hard at work, she hears him saying it again: “You always hurt the one you love, pet.”
This is from Dead Things.
She changes the subject.
They discuss patrolling, and cell phones, and more movies, and weapons, and the beach, and it’s all normal and friendly and not-subtexty… and then Xander suggests ordering pizza.
Actually, he says he’s got “pizza cravings” - and instantly she’s six months earlier, being told authoritatively: “I’m in your system now. You’re gonna crave me, like I crave blood.”
(From Wrecked.)
Why’d he have to go and be right?
(And yes, I think he kinda was…)
And suddenly it’s all flooding through her once again.
Xander tells the guy on the phone “Yeah, we want a meatlovers, a small vegetarian, extra olives…” and an impassioned voice tries to explain “I wanted something. Anything to make these feelings stop.”
(Seeing Red.)
He suggests getting the Boyzenberri With Bite! dessert combo, and she nods, while someone puzzled asks “So how come I don’t want to bite you?”
(Tabula Rasa.)
They go inside because it’s nearly nighttime, and a whisper follows her: “You belong in the shadows, with me.”
(Dead Things.)
Xander flops down on the couch and starts a rambling list of reasons he likes pizza, and summer, and eating pizza in summer, and she tries to grin, but she’s barely listening to a word he’s saying - her mind is years ago, hearing another list: “…dog racing, Manchester United…”
This is Spike’s list of reasons to save the world, from Becoming.
She’s getting a headache.
And she doesn’t want to hurt Xander’s feelings (“I don’t hurt you.”), but, really, he’s not who she wants to be hanging out with right now (“Girl just needs a little monster in her man.”). No! That’s not what she means - she just doesn’t want to be around anyone right now (“Tend to go a bit wonky if you cram them too close.”).
And it’s nothing, really, but even though there’s absolutely nothing (“You came back wrong.”) …amiss, she’s not sure she trusts Xander to handle this very well if she actually tells him what’s bugging her (“Trust is for old marrieds, Buffy. Great love is…”), so she just says she’s feeling a bit (“…wild, and passionate, and dangerous…”) edgy and (“…it burns and consumes…”) wants to have a bath.
Oh, boy…
Here’s a list:
1) Entropy (re the garden gnome camera)
2) As You Were (said very smugly to Riley)
3) All The Way (mandrake roots in The Magic Box’s basement)
4) Smashed (right before the Awesome Fight Of Smexiness)
5) Seeing Red (in the bathroom)
(Notice the groovy way in which that final sentence splits the quote up to answer Buffy’s thoughts. I was rather proud of that.)
Xander grins. “Sure, but you might want to hurry. If that pizza gets here, I’m not waiting for you to come back downstairs.”
She grins back - and then heads up the staircase.
A bath sounds like just what she needs. She’ll have lots of bubbles, and all the tension inside her will just waft away, and she’ll stop thinking so many insane thoughts about evil vampires…
Buffy tends to insist that Spike is EVIL much more when she’s trying not to find him attractive. (In fact, in Dead Things, it got all the way up to “Evil bloodsucking fiend”, because she was trying not end up having sex in his crypt yet again.)
As she gets to the landing, an annoyed voice says pointedly, “And I was insane to think - no, wait. You were right. You’re insane.” and she bites back a smile.
That’s from Older and Far Away - and is my favourite of all these Spike quotes. (Although if I'd been able to work “147 days” in there, that would have won by a mile.)
And, like I said, a lot of these things reminding Buffy of Spike are things that make her smile. I think she’d find the idea of Spike interrupting her “evil vampires” thought kinda fun…