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Fic: Nightlights
I'm convinced that my internal sense of balance prompted me to write this because it's the antithesis of The Silent Stars Go By. Oh, y'all, it's dark and weird and very Season 6. I wrote it in pretty much one sitting and had no idea where it was going, and though I like the end result, I'm still not sure that it actually went anywhere, so I'll value your opinion.
Title: Nightlights
Fandom: Buffyverse
Characters/Pairings: Buffy, Buffy/Spike
Time: Season 6, post-"Gone," pre-"As You Were"
Genre: Angst
Rating: R
Warning: Gratuitous use of Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale." He would hate me for the way I've cannibalized his poem. Also, a reference or two to Byron. Clearly, no one should let me anywhere near the Romantic poets.
Disclaimer: Those characters you recognize? Don't belong to me. The quotations you recognize aren't mine either. Whenever the writing gets really good (or really ostentatious, depending on your perspective), you know I'm borrowing from Keats or Byron.
Summary: "There's nothing tender about the night." Buffy is not the slightest bit in love with easeful death.
When she was a little girl, her mom stuck glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling above her bed.
Buffy sat cross-legged in the middle of the lacy-and-ruffled comforter, all pigtails and pink socks, neck craned back all the way so that she could instruct Mom on the exact position of each star. She’d never been an exacting girl, really—some days she liked to get her Barbies all dressed up just perfectly for a party that she never enacted; other times she left the dolls a mess of slick blonde hair and tanned plastic limbs on the floor. But the stars—for some reason, they mattered. She created her own constellations, outlines like dot-to-dots she did back in kindergarten (she always liked those better than word searches or paint-by-numbers), like the pictures she made out of her chicken pox (Mom got really mad to see the lines darting across Buffy’s skin, orange magic marker zigzagging from one itchy spot to the next—tight lips and one of those typical Mom-sighs revealing just how unimpressed she was. The oatmeal-bathwater was stained slightly orange that night).
Years later, patrolling in graveyards on cool nights when the stars stood out sharp and precise against an ice-slick sky, on humid nights when the stars wavered and tumbled against the undulations of the darkness, she thought maybe it was foreshadowing, her obsession with those stars on the ceiling. Maybe it was the Slayer-potential softeninghardening her heart so that she fell just a little bit in love with nighttime, to make it easier when destiny came a-calling.
She’s still not exacting, but she can’t help but look for patterns (how could she live in this world otherwise? God does not play dice with the universe, Giles told her once, and though she’s pretty sure that wasn’t a confession of belief in a personal higher power, she clung to the words: how could she get up each morning if she didn’t believe that?).
Because she loved those stars on her ceiling as other girls might love a stuffed animal or an imaginary friend. She whispered her secrets to them—at first out loud; later, a bit older and more self-conscious (coolness is such hard work, and never more so than in middle school), in her mind. Or was that prayer? She doesn’t know the difference.
The neon-glow stars were a shade closer to green than to yellow, a really ugly color if you thought about it objectively (she never did). Unlike the real stars (she learned this much later, during the years when she got better acquainted with the night than she was with daytime—oh, the irony, suntanned California girl, with your blonde-from-a-bottle, your body made for a bikini, you look like the definition of fun-in-the-sun, the muse inspiring a Beach Boys song, and here you are, night after night in a graveyard, the setting for some heavy metal music video they showed at midnight on MTV in the ‘80s, and somehow the tan never leeches from you skin. Oh, you know the irony well), her plastic constellations never moved—every one a true north.
She cried the night after her first slay, hearing her parents’ raised voices. She didn’t cry again, not for months of slaying and broken dishes, screamed accusations or (worse still) fierce, under-the-breath hisses of Keep your voice down—she’ll hear you!
No, she didn’t cry again till, in a room empty but for carefully packed and labeled boxes, she climbed onto the top of her bare mattress and reached up to pull down each star, one by one, leaving behind darker dots where the sticky tack had been.
Then she collapsed back onto the mattress, cheap plastic stars scattered around her, and sobbed.
--
(She didn’t recreate the stars in her new room in Sunnydale. Mom nodded understandingly, saying something about growing up and putting childish things behind you.
But it wasn’t that.
After the stars fall down, what can you do?)
--
She’s always been positive that there’s something significant about her love of those cheap plastic stars (patterns again, see? She can’t help it, tracing them during long nights on patrol). Some deep meaning behind how they stole their light from something real, instead of generating light themselves the way real stars do (she thinks of stars burning themselves up till they collapse into black holes and finally have the chance to take something back from the universe—gulping down anything that comes near, forever and ever, bottomless and insatiable). Some significance to the fact that her stars never moved in those days when her world was simple and straightforward, black and white punctuated by glow-in-the-dark stars. Something insightful about how she feels that her life in
She’s just not sure she wants to know what that meaning is.
(She has bad luck with prophecies, oracles, spells. Still, she can’t seem to get away from them.)
--
Fast-forward.
January, 2002. Restfield Cemetary, Sunnydale. Inside her head, she talks to the stars.
--
Kendra, the Primitive, Angelus, Faith—they all reminded her, again and again, that the Slayer is alone.
And yeah, it’s true in a way. She’s the one that has to make the hard decisions—finds herself half in love with easeful death waiting in the Master’s fangs, in Glory’s portal (every Slayer has a death wish. Even you)—has to shove the sword through the heart of the not-man she loved (death is your art)—has to claw her way out of her grave (you’re just a little bit in love with it). All alone.
(Breathing in the dirt of her own grave, she left the search for patterns behind her. Chaos and chance—that’s all she can believe in now, because it’s kinder than any pattern that could have led her to that moment of being ripped out of heaven.)
But that’s to be expected. Even Buffy Summers, with her own special brand of Slaying (new and improved! Call now and get family and friends, absolutely free!) would never dream of denying that.
(She got to forget for a little while, with
No, it’s not the aloneness in the big moments that gets to her.
It’s the everydaynight aloneness, punctuated at random intervals by assistance from her friends. But they don’t belong out here, not really, and they go back home to their beds and wake up with the morning sun and know that that’s where they belong.
Her tanned skin mocks her, a mocking juxtaposition against her nighttime vigils.
Night after night, she goes out under the stars, alone.
--
But here comes Spike.
--
And he said she has stupid hair? His is ridiculous, moonlight white against the dark of leather and sky. Angel, he knew how to do things, head to toe darkness—that’s what a vampire should look like. Everything he wore was well-cut and fine without looking overly expensive. Angelus was always a proper vampire, and even Angel can’t shake that attention to the rightness of things.
Spike just looks like a biker wannabe, though he’s built too small for that (shhhh: don’t tell him; he thinks he’s bigger than Riley, than Angel. You can tell by the way he walks). But it’s that ridiculous hair that really gets to her.
In the diffused light of day—in his crypt, at her house, in the Magic Box—the paleness of his hair just emphasizes the whiteness of his skin: he looks anemic, like one of those Romantic poets who sat around moping and scribbling, then got consumption, saw spots of blood on their handkerchiefs, and died young, always making awkward bows (youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies).
But in the dark, the moonstarlight reflects off his ivory skin, catches in his bleached hair and she just doesn’t know what to do with that.
She can accept the irony of her beach bunny appearance, but the way he melts into the darkness and defies it all at once?
That petrifies her.
(She doesn’t want him to teach her how to do that, to be both. Shedoesn’tshedoesn’tshedoesn’tshedoesn’t.)
--
He’s really playing up the whole creature of the night thing, isn’t he, what with the candles and the “decadence” (he actually uses that word—what a moron) of the oriental rugs. Whispers in her ear that she belongs in the dark with him, that she walks in beauty like the night, that all that’s best of dark and bright meet in her aspect and her eyes.
She wishes he would shut up about the belonging in the dark. It doesn’t mean anything that he thinks that she does, just as it doesn’t mean anything that her friends (and that damn first Slayer) all believe that she burns with light (love).
(This is her new pattern this year: rejecting patterns.)
She told him, that day when she forced herself to walk out into the full sunlight, that the world was too hard and bright and violent. She thinks maybe he interpreted that as meaning that her Heaven was as dark as his version would be.
Stupid vampire.
Heaven wasn’t dark or bright, hard or soft, violent or peaceful.
It was the middle way, a balance she’s never known.
(All that’s best of dark and bright….)
--
The one thing she’s willing to admit to herself about being with him is that she likes the picture they make: her golden skin, his ivory in the candlelight of his crypt.
It’s kind of beautiful.
--
Out of the corner of her eye (Spike is moving in her—the holy dove was moving too, or something like that—God, she hates that song), she catches a glimpse of a battered book. She tangles her fingers in his white hair, arches her back, neck craned back all the way till she can see the title and recognizes the copy of Keat’s collected letters and poems.
She gasps as he withdraws (comebackcomebackcomeback) then plunges back inside her again (goawaygoawaygoaway), yet still manages to roll her eyes.
Sure, she liked her poetry class in college. Yeats and his widening gyres and blood-dimmed tides. Donne, all God and sex and how he never saw the discrepancy between the two. Dorothy Parker’s sarcastic And I am Marie of Roumania.
But Keats was an idiot.
There’s nothing tender about the night.
(She doesn’t let there be.)
(Now, post-death-number-two, she’s learning that there’s nothing tender about the day, either.)
--
Darkling she listens as he calls her soft names in many a mused rhyme, to take into the air his quiet breath, pouring forth his soul abroad in such an ecstasy.
Except that he doesn’t have a soul.
Fitting that the soulless vampire is the one to sing the Slayer’s high requiem.
--
They’ve been going at it (fucking, she calls it; making love, he said once, and she laughed at him till tears rolled down her cheeks. It was the first time she’d laughed out loud since she came back. He never said it again) for so long now that all of the candles have burned out (but here there is no light).
Shadows everywhere, sliding like velvet across their skin, but there’s a single crack of moonlight shining from who knows where that gets tangled up in his ridiculous hair, making it burn white in the darkness.
His eyes glow gold in the dark.
--
In the daytime, she feels like the world shines so bright around her that no one can make her out, like the way a faraway bird disappears once it flies over the disc of the sun, only to reappear again, a dark blot against the blue on the other side.
At night, she melts into the darkness without a ripple to whisper of her passing.
She’s invisible either way.
--
She can see the stars, even when they’re indoors.
(This is not some deep revelation about how she takes light with her wherever she goes. It doesn’t make her special or unique. It doesn’t even prove that she’s crazy, though she half-expects that she is. There. Is. No. Pattern. Here.)
--
Spike can see in the dark, she whispers to the stars. That’s why he’s the only one who can see me.
They don’t answer back.
--
(Was it a vision, or a waking dream?
Fled is that music:--Do I wake or sleep?)