Comics!Fic: Her Right Hand
Title: Her Right Hand
Rating: PG-13 (a little swearing)
Word Count: 4,600
A/N: This is a Buffy/Spike comics!fic inspired by the cover for #8 that was released a few days ago. Be warned, the cover is EXTREMELY spoiler-y (or so Scott Allies claims; personally, I’m hoping he’s a lying, trolling jackass). There isn’t really a summary for this fic except, well, Buffy and Spike reacting to what that cover shows.
ETA: Everything in italics is supposed to be in italics, but the different fonts are not on purpose and don't mean anything; that's just LJ being stupid.
My arm is gone.
I have one arm.
I have one hand.
I don’t even have my good hand. I have my left hand. I will never do anything right-handed ag-
“Do you want me to leave?”
“No.”
It takes a few seconds to focus on Spike, glazed as her vision is by tears and drugs and pain, but the word comes out immediately, automatically.
“The sun’s out.” Her voice crackles like burned paper. Her throat is parched, but she doesn’t think she could swallow anything if she tried. And she doesn’t feel like trying.
“I could bunker down in some other part of the hospital.”
“Don’t leave.”
It comes out harsher, more arrogantly imperious than she meant, but she’s too sick of everything to be polite.
She’s afraid of being alone, of what thoughts will consume her then, but if that were her primary concern she could have had Dawn or Xander or Willow stay. They offered to take turns leaving to get food- they stayed at the hospital all night while the doctors tried
failed.
to fix her arm- but she told them to go. There’s nothing they can do for her, and she can’t bear their pity. She can’t bear the constant trails of tears on Willow and Dawn’s cheeks or Xander looking at her with his one red-rimmed eye. (Does he feel a vindictive sense of justice? She lost him his eye all those years ago, and now she’s damaged beyond repair, too.)
If she just needed to escape her thoughts she could ask for enough pain meds to knock out even a slayer, but she’s also afraid of waking up. When she woke after the first round of treatment and remembered her arm was gone-
Numbnumbnumb why is she numb what’s wrong with her oh God please no nonononono
She gasps anew, feeling the panic again as though for the first time.
Can’tbreathecan’tbreathecan’tbreathe-
Fingers touch her (remaining) arm, gently, delicately, inexorably pulling her back to the present. Spike’s eyes are huge and concerned, and if she looked closely she’d probably see a glaze of tears. So she doesn’t look closely.
More than she’s afraid of being alone or of waking up, she just doesn’t want him to leave. It’d be hard to explain why, since they haven’t been especially close lately; he hasn’t joined her on patrol or come round to the apartment very often since Dowling started helping out; last night was the exception. (What else would she have lost if it hadn’t been?)
Maybe it’s because when that axe sliced through her body and she fell, he was the one who kept demons from finishing her off, a task they could easily have accomplished by trampling her, let alone with weapons; he was the first to try to staunch the flow of blood, pulling her into his lap and pressing his duster against her stump (the coat’s draped over his chair now even though it should probably be thrown out; he’ll never get her out of it); he was the one who screamed her name and told her the ambulance was coming and ordered her (begged her) not to die.
He was the one who looked at her with more anguish than if it had been his own limb torn from him, and so no, she won’t let him leave, not as long as he’s willing to stay.
His fingers leave her arm. She wishes they hadn’t (half-wishes he had touched her hand instead but is also glad he didn’t; glad he recognizes that holding her only hand would be an imposition). She wishes he would hold her, but she won’t ask him. There’s no room on the bed, for one thing, with the zillion and a half IVs and wires connected to her, but she’s also afraid of how it will feel. If he cradles her from the left, it will make her right side feel even emptier,
gone
and if he cradles her from the right she’ll just…fall into him; she won’t have any way to support herself or hug him back-
She looks down, trying to keep him from seeing her fresh tears, and picks for a moment at an IV cord.
But only for a moment.
Holding anything in her (only) hand, whether it’s a water glass or her blanket or Dawn’s hand, feels wrong now (bad); she’s only got the one, and what if she needs it? If she’s holding something in her left hand, that’s it; nothing else she can pick up. She’s full up. And what if she needs something quickly? No right hand reflexes to kick in now; only her clumsier left hand ones, so she can’t afford to be holding anything that might delay her.
How is she supposed to fight? If she holds a stake, she won’t be able to throw a punch. If she throws a punch, she won’t be able to slay her enemy. Will she be able to kick? Does she have enough balance to do that with only one arm?
It won’t work. Slaying. She’ll have one weapon only, her fist or her stake, and she won’t have good reflexes, and it will take the barest luck or the barest skill to overbalance her, and then she’ll be wind-milling pathetically with one arm and falling and unable to catch herself-
No. No, she can do this. She can fight. Surely lots of people fight with impediments, and she’s the slayer, she can adapt. Stop feeling sorry for yourself, at least you’re alive. You can fight another day.
But why shouldn’t she feel sorry for herself, goddammit, she doesn’t have her arm anymore-
And she’ll always be scared now, panic twisting in her gut that any moment she’ll fall, and it’ll cloud her mind and make her an even worse fighter, and soon that little knot of yearning she’d thought she’d untangled will start to grow again and she’ll want it all to end.
God, she doesn’t want to feel that way again, please not again-
I’d have two arms in Heaven, right?
“My hands were chopped off once. Don’t think I ever told you.”
She’s startled into looking at him, though for a moment she thinks she must have heard wrong. His expression is utterly serious, though, and he doesn’t lie to her, not about inconsequential, unrelated-to-resurrecting matters anyway.
She wants to say something sarcastic and bitter like, “They don’t look chopped off to me,” but instead she can only stare at his hands, resting motionlessly on his knees. He’s been very still tonight, not restless or constantly fidgeting as usual, and his physical composure upsets her more than she ever would have expected.
“Do you remember a slayer named Dana? Mentally unbalanced, had PTSD. Andrew collected her from LA in spring of ‘04.”
After casting back through her memories and finding the right one, Buffy nods. Her insides burn when she realizes that LA and’04 really mean “when I was with Angel,” but since Spike didn’t mention his name, she won’t either. She also tries not to think of Giles, who told her about Dana in the first place.
(God she wishes he were here right now. Or her mom. And her mom. Why are they both dead when she still needs them, she’ll never stop needing them, now more than ever-)
“Dunno if Andrew ever told you the full story.” His voice is gruffer than normal, and she thinks it’s probably because of guilt. They still haven’t discussed the fact that he never told her he was alive. Things were too busy, and then their friendship was too fragile. (And what if now she’s always too fragile?)
“He told me you were there,” she says stiffly. Afterward. After I found out you were alive, he told me. “But not any details.”
“We went looking for her, and she got the jump on me. Knocked me out with a lot of drugs, and when I woke up, my hands were gone.”
Despite her bitterness, the thought chills her; she can barely accept that her arm was sliced off in battle, let alone imagine the idea of waking up to find for the first time that it was gone (bad enough the waking and remembering). Maybe he’s also gruff because the memory is still painful after all these years. His eyes have lost some of their focus, which says a lot, given how he’s been burning a hole through her for most of the night; she felt his gaze even when she was talking to Dawn and the others.
“She’d been abused as a child,” says Spike. He grimaces, and Buffy gets the feeling that it’s an understatement. “She thought I was…well, she was punishing me the way she wanted to punish her tormentor. A- the others found me. The docs were able to reattach them. Probably used a bit of sorcery, too, to make them…”
“Good as new?” she says, and now she can’t help sounding acidic.
He looks pained, and she would feel bad if this weren’t such an idiotic story to share. How is this supposed to make her feel better? Her arm can’t be reattached, and (thanks to her) there’s no sorcery to help either.
“Good for you,” she says, and even though she means it (well, more like she doesn’t mean the opposite), it comes out sardonic and angry. Truly, the thought of his hands being gone horrifies her, not only because of what it would mean for him but also because of all the visceral memories of what those hands have done (trading blows and flaming in hers and holding her and oh god his talented, talented fingers inside and all over her), but this is perhaps the most inconvenient way for him to start opening up about his absence.
He looks down at his completely fine, reattached hands, and she knows she’s probably hurt him, but she can’t bring herself to care.
“What I mean is, I know a little about what it’s like-”
No, you don’t, because you didn’t have to live with it.
“-And since Andrew said he can build you a robotic arm, I think you could be okay, too. The boy’s a silly chit sometimes, but he knows his science.”
He knows his science fiction.
“He says he worked with Warren on the, uh, bots back in Sunnydale, so he has a good idea of what he’s doing. He can build an arm, and you heard him say that stuff about sensors and…wires.” He looks sorry that he can’t repeat all of Andrew’s technobabble as he continues, “He’ll be able to make it so you can feel things and move it just like a regular arm. It’ll be-”
He lapses into silence before finishing the thought, and she’s grateful, because if he said something as stupid as “it’ll be okay,” she might actually have to tear the IVs out and hit him with her one remaining fist.
(Probably wouldn’t make much of an impact. She always hit him with a right punch.)
(She’ll never throw a right hook again.)
“It’ll be better,” he says, which is true but still feels like a lie.
Acid is churning in her stomach, burning through her and leaving behind someone she doesn’t know (someone venomous and spiteful who will never be happy again). The words come out automatically.
“You got your real hands back.”
Spike holds her (furious) gaze for a few seconds before dropping his in clear apology and deference (defeat).
Buffy clenches her left fingers around the blanket, a fuzzy blue number that feels synthetic rather than warm. For a few seconds the mere act of holding something helps (grounds her; reminds her that she can still feel, even if only in half doses now), and then the seed of panic that she has no free hand sets in, and she lets go.
To keep from looking at Spike, she looks at the only picture in the room, an unexceptional landscape of a verdant countryside. It’s probably a pretty thoughtless, crappy decoration for most patients since it would only make them more depressed about being in the hospital, but as she’s always been a city girl, open green fields hold little appeal for her.
It’s still pretty crappy, though. She’d much prefer a television.
She turns away quickly, though still not to Spike, because the picture is to her right, and even when she’s looking straight ahead, she can sense what’s missing below her chin.
She remembers the first time she saw someone with a missing limb, when she was a child. Mom took her to see The Princess Bride in the theaters as a special treat, leaving Dawnie alone with their father, and in front of them in the line for tickets had been a man in a wheelchair with only one leg. She remembers asking loudly where his other leg was, and Mom had shushed her, only explaining once the man was out of earshot that he might have lost his leg in war or because of illness and that she shouldn’t ask questions like that in front of handicapped people.
Lost.
She had lost her arm.
No, she hadn’t fucking lost her arm, because ‘lost’ implied that it could be found. But she knew where her arm was, on ice somewhere, useless and on its way to rotting. Unless it had been thrown out already or- or incinerated-
What did hospitals do with limbs that couldn’t be saved? Was her arm just trash now? Was she going to have to sign a form (she can’t write left-handed; how will she ever sign anything again?) approving their disposal of it? Better that it had been left on the street for others to see, to remind horrified passersby that others sacrificed so they could have their safe little world. Better that it rot in the ground and feed the fucking circle of life than that she have to agree to throw out her arm-
Oh God oh God oh God-
“Tell me about the bot,” she blurts outs.
She needs him to talk, even if it’s not helpful and a little painful. She can’t be alone with the thoughts in her head.
He looks surprised, even more than she is to hear herself respond to this of all subjects, so she clarifies, “Your bot.”
Your sex robot of me.
Now he looks more uncomfortable than she can remember seeing him since…well, since sometime in Sunnydale, she can’t think of an exact moment. It’s understandable; the robot was
Gross. Obscene.
not one of his finer moments. Or maybe it was. Offensive sex toys were still better than murder and rape and pillage, after all.
“What do you want to know?” he asks cagily.
“What could it do?” Tell me about its fine motor skills.
“It could fight.”
And fuck.
She waits, but he doesn’t say it.
“Could it fight well?”
He shrugs. “Yeah.”
“Can you give me a little more than that?” she asks testily. “You spent a lot more time with it than I did. And not just because I was dead.”
He looks down at his lap, where his fingers have curled into balls. She thinks at first that he’ll refuse to speak, and maybe she wouldn’t blame him, but then his voice comes, low and unemotional.
“It fought well. Not as well as you, but that’s because it had a machine for a brain, not because it wasn’t capable. It couldn’t adapt on the turn of a dime like you; it wasn’t resourceful or quick thinking. It wasn’t you.”
He’s barely audible, and she finds it hard to speak herself when she finally comes up with a response.
“Did it break a lot?”
He hesitates. “Not the hardware.”
She wants to ask what that means, but instead memories light up in her head, terrible and still painful after all this time. She remembers watching the bot be torn apart (drawn and quartered? That was the term, wasn’t it?) with her very own fresh-from-the-grave eyes. She saw it
die
break. Irreparably.
Like me.
“It was a good bot,” says Spike. His voice is stronger now, almost with a hint of affection, and for a moment she feels a bizarre surge of jealousy. Then he looks squarely at her and adds, “And not because of that. I hated it when you were…gone because it was just one more reminder. But it did what we needed it to. Dunno what we would have done without it with Dawn and the Hellmouth to look after.”
A less generous or more cynical person might think he was trying to excuse himself (“Aren’t you happy now that I made a sex toy out of you!”), but Buffy knows better.
Especially since he then ducks his head again and mumbles out the next bit. “And aesthetically, it was believable.”
It’s inexplicable how this could amuse her when she feels like she’ll never be happy again, but the idea that they could have this conversation now of all times makes her almost smile (almost). Given the situation, her next question is inappropriate, absurd, and probably a bad idea (it’s not like Andrew’s building her a cyborg vagina), but the thought of it sends a surge of vicious satisfaction through her; misery loves company.
“Was the sex believable?”
He looks at her like he doesn’t think he heard correctly, or maybe like he hopes he didn’t, but she knows he did. His Adam’s apple bobs convulsively. He doesn’t speak, as though if he’s silent long enough she’ll ask another question. She cocks her head and lifts her brow.
He swallows one last time. “It was believable enough. At the time.” His voice is husky in a way she likes. “Nothing compared to the real thing.” His head drops.
She twists an IV cord in her fingers, lets it go, and says lightly, “It had good motor skills?”
Again, she thinks he’ll refuse to answer. Even with his head bent, she can tell his brows have contracted, and his lips are pursed and ugly looking, not lush and bitable as usual. Then-
“Yes.”
It’s barely a whisper, and then he’s looking at the picture of the unappealing countryside himself, probably wishing he had never tried to cheer her up in the first place or maybe wishing he’d left with Dawn and the others.
She’s hurt him, asking her questions this way when she could just as easily have asked them in reference to fighting. Her cruel amusement flees as quickly as it came, replaced by guilt. Though she feels sorry, she almost welcomes the sting; this pain she can ease, both of theirs.
She can’t make herself smile, but she does say casually, “Good. Because I might need those again at some point.”
His head whips back toward her, and again he looks like he can’t believe his ears. She feels herself blush, which is utterly, utterly ridiculous given the circumstances, and for a second she panics that he’s going to make more of it than she means, like he used to. But then the corners of his lips lift, and it’s such a gentle smile, nothing like a smirk, that her anxiety drains. It’s- it’s okay- they can talk like this.
She’s searching for something else to say, not because silence with Spike isn’t companionable but because any silence at all is still dangerous, when a knock sounds on the door. A nurse steps inside, carrying a tray that holds a small cup of red glop.
“Still not asleep?” she says, without the surprise she’d exhibited a few hours ago but still in a disapproving tone, as though Buffy is purposefully keeping the pain meds from knocking her out; a normal dosage worked during surgery when she was in shock and half-dead from blood loss, but now she’d need twice that. Pitted against her revived slayer powers, the meds make her numb and merely dazed.
“Would you like a higher dosage?”
“No thank you.”
“Are you feeling any worse?”
Buffy likes that she doesn’t ask, “Are you feeling better?” or “How are you?”; the nurse is wise enough to know what a stupid question that is.
So Buffy can say truthfully, “No.”
The nurse gives a small nod. “I won’t need to change your bags for a while yet, but I brought you some jell-o in case you’re hungry. Would you like it on your lap or on the table for later?”
“Lap, please.” She’s not really hungry, but eating will give her something to do.
The nurse, whose nametag reads Mary Ann, sets the tray gently on her lap and peels the lid from the jell-o with smooth efficiency. She tosses the lid into the wastebasket by the bed but doesn’t leave. Her lips have tipped downward in an ominously sad way.
She glances at Spike, slouched in his chair nearby; wary of all the wires around her, he’s at an odd distance, sort of next to her but only near enough to touch if he hunches all the way forward. “Can you help her if she needs it? I can stay.”
For a second Buffy doesn’t know what she means. Then it hits her like a punch to the stomach (axe through the arm), and her cheeks burn.
“I can feed myself!”
Mary Ann and Spike both look at her, and their faces are almost inscrutable except- oh except for a tiny crack, in the set of her lips and the wrinkles around his eyes, where their pity is leaking through, and it stings like a slap, and she has to look down, at the jell-o and the spoon that she’ll hold with her only hand, to keep from crying.
“I’ll help her,” Spike says quietly, and after a pause Buffy hears Mary Ann leave.
She still doesn’t look up as Spike carefully drags his chair closer so that he’s right next to her, within easy touching distance.
“I don’t need help,” she grates out.
“I know you don’t need it.” His voice is still quiet (unbearably gentle). “But if you want it-”
“I don’t.”
“Okay.”
She doesn’t even want the damn jell-o now, but she has to eat it to prove her point (to herself, too). So she picks up the spoon and digs in.
Her clumsiness is undeniable. Except for a few brief times when her right wrist was sprained from a fight, she’s never eaten with her left hand; her fingers feel like a stranger’s as she tries to coordinate them, and the fact that jell-o is a slippery, unhelpful substance to corral in the first place makes matters worse.
She wishes she had chocolate pudding instead. At least then there would be some reward for this miserable, humiliating effort.
The jell-o makes her thirsty, but if she wants to drink water she’ll have to put the spoon down and that would feel like admitting defeat. So she soldiers on (quickly, she needs her hand to be free again) until there’s only one or two spoonfuls left. When she tries to scoop them up, though, the plastic dish slides on the tray; without another hand, she has no way to hold the dish still and angle it to get the last bite.
She doesn’t (can’t) look at Spike as she makes a few more unsuccessful attempts to get the jell-o. Her eyes burn as much as her face, and suddenly her fingers are trembling around the spoon. If she can’t scoop out the last dregs of jell-o, then she won’t be able to scoop the last spoonful of soup or the last melting puddle of ice cream, and if she can’t do that simple thing, what else won’t she be able to do?
The spoon drops to the tray with a clatter. That’s okay because she’s not hungry, she doesn’t want the last bit of jell-o anyway, and now her hand is free and she can get her water-
But her hand stays curled on the blanket. She can’t make it move, and before she can double her effort, her chin is dropping to her chest, her shoulders are wracking, and tears are inexorably slipping down her cheeks.
A minute passes, and then Spike’s hands appear in her blurred vision. She hears the scrape of the spoon against the plastic and then the silence that means he’s holding it out to her.
She looks up, ready to tell him that she doesn’t need to be fed like a baby, but he’s simply offering her the handle, not aiming it for her mouth. His blue gaze bores straight and solemnly into hers.
Hand still trembling, she takes the spoon and swallows the last bite, along with a few salty tears. The jell-o feels lumpy and sticky and completely not worth crying over as it slides down her throat.
Tears still fall, though, and she doesn’t look at Spike as she puts down the spoon, turns slightly to her left, and reaches for her water. It feels much better on her throat than the jell-o, and she takes several huge gulps, even though her hand is shaking so badly she thinks she might drop the glass (what would she do then? How do you clean up a mess without a second hand to hold the dustbin?); at least this she can do alone.
When she puts the water down, Spike lifts the tray from her lap and places it on the table. Though he’d probably do the same as a simple courtesy if she had two arms, the gesture feels like another defeat. She looks at the ceiling, but no matter how much the fluorescents make her blink, her weeping won’t stop; it feels like it won’t ever stop. (The robot arm isn’t looking too shabby now. It has to be better than this.) A whimpering sound escapes through her clenched teeth.
“Buffy.”
For the first time since last night (as much as last night), Spike sounds urgent, desperate; afraid. He leans toward her, his mouth and eyes scrunching as though he might cry, too.
“It’s all right, love. It’s going to be all right. You’re going to have two arms again once Andrew’s done, and the new one’s going to work perfectly.”
He can’t promise that.
“You’ll hardly know the difference.”
He shouldn’t dare to promise that.
“You’ll be able to do everything that you could before. It’s going to be-”
“Don’t!”
Her yell rips through the room, and he falls silent as abruptly as though she’d yanked some kind of plug.
“Don’t tell me it’s going to be all right!” She’s hoarse but still shouting, loudly enough that Marry Ann might come running; she doesn’t care. “You can’t promise that! You don’t know! You can’t pr-pr-promise that!”
She breaks off to draw a gasping breath, but before she can find something else to hurl at him, he leans forward, his eyes bright and yet as steely as she’s ever seen them.
“You’re right. I can’t promise you it’ll be all right. No one can. But I can promise you this: I will always be here for you. I will help you and protect you and be your right hand in whatever way that I can. I will never stop trying to make it as all right for you as is possible. And I will never leave you.”
There’s a beat when she can only stare at him, and then he mutters, eyes flickering, “Unless you want me to.”
More seconds pass, and she doesn’t know what to say. He looks at her mulishly, defiantly. It occurs her to her that though her cheeks aren’t dry, they aren’t getting any wetter.
She doesn’t know what to say, except for maybe, “I'll never want you to.”
She grabs his hand and holds on tight.