lirazel | Fic: Infinitas Infinitio Infinitus (1/5)

This is a major departure for me stylistically, not to mention the fact that it's the first actual multi-chapter fic (as opposed to collections of vignettes or character studies) I've written in...years, mostly because I started things and never finished them, and so I swore to myself that I'd never post anything if I didn't know for a fact that I was going to finish it. But this is mostly written, and the later chapters only need to be cleaned up a bit, so I can guarantee it will be finished!

Also, I just about killed myself trying to come up with a title for this. The one I settled on is more pretentious than this story warrants, but it's all I could do. I'd really appreciate feedback on this since it is so different and I have no way of judging whether it's any good or not.

Title: Infinitas Infinitio Infinitus
Fandom: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Characters/Pairing: Buffy/Spike, Angel, Dawn
Genre: Romance, Angst
Timeline: post-"Not Fade Away"
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Learning to live is a lot harder than learning to die. And just when Buffy masters one, she learns she's a novice at the other.
Installment: Chapter One of five.

“For them that think death's honesty won't fall upon them naturally life sometimes must get lonely.” –Bob Dylan

Her fortieth birthday, and they can’t ignore it anymore. Till now, they could get by with not questioning, not verbalizing, even if it gets harder each time they meet up with the Scoobies. Dawn has looked liked the older sister for ten years now, and the silver hairs that Xander started complaining about that last year in Sunnydale have launched a preemptive attack against the dark ones, won, and now maintain the majority. And if magic has smoothed Willow’s face—Spike makes wry comments about her being well-preserved, and she smacks him—her voice has dropped an octave and there’s a wisdom that only comes with maturity in her eyes. And then there’s Giles, who’s getting old. Not so old, really, in years, not these days, but his hair is all silver and the ravages of cancer that may have been defeated have still taken a toll on his body, and Spike watches as Buffy mentally reminds herself not to hug him as tightly as she wants to.

The contrast is undeniable, but unspoken. There is no question that everyone’s aware, but no one is willing to speak of it. They’ll have to face it sooner or later, but they put it off again and again, and somehow the topic never comes up.

But there's something about the age of forty. Not that most people really think of that as old anymore, at least not once they get past twenty-five. In his human days, forty was on the way out and you were lucky if you reached it, but now most people don't even slow down. Still, there's a lot of tradition that comes with that birthday, over-the-hill and such, culture still making a big deal out of it, and it's fitting, maybe, that that's the day they have to face the truth.

So he wakes up on the morning of her fortieth birthday and finds himself in bed alone. Drowsily, he flops his hand over to her side and finds that the sheets are still warm. If he weren’t still half-asleep, he’d smile, but as it is he just flips over onto his back to call out and beckon her back to bed. “Want me to give you part of your present now, love? Spankings are traditional, so I hear tell,” he says, voice gravelly with sleep.

She doesn’t answer, so he drags his eyes open. Two seconds later, so awake that it feels like he’s just clawed his way out of his coffin and is exploring his new senses all over again, he jolts upright, his stomach clenching.

She’s curled up on the bench in front of her vanity, still naked, hair tumbling loose over her shoulders, staring at the mirror with a kind of absorption he’s never seen her display outside of a fight or sex. It doesn’t take more than a moment for him to realize that she didn’t even hear him speak, that he might as well not even be in the room. Her hand steals up, her fingers brushing across the pale face reflected in the mirror.

Some years ago, he’d held Joy, Dawn’s eldest, in front of the mirror and watched as the chubby baby discovered her reflection for the first time. Xander had made jokes that Spike would break Joy’s mind with the fact of the vampire’s non-reflection. But Joy had been so enchanted with herself that she barely paid attention to the mirror telling her she was floating in mid-air, and Spike never tired of watching Joy watch herself.

Buffy is reminding him of her niece now—that total, single-minded immersion in her own reflection. Except this is different, terrifying: all of the wonder has been sucked away, leaving only a kind of horrified fascination behind, like Dawn’s little boy Stephen picking at a scab.

Spike rises slowly, fighting back a kind of nausea he shouldn’t be capable of—vampires don’t get sick—and pads toward her, watching as she runs her hands over her body, staring at it as if it doesn’t belong to her. He knows every square inch of that body and makes damn sure she’s aware of every inch of it, too, paying attention to every delicious bit. And now she’s looking at it like she’s never seen it before, and yeah, he’s terrified.

He sits down behind her on the cushioned bench, hip bumping her rear, feeling her warmth flow into him at that point and then radiate through his entire being. “Surprised by how gorgeous you are, pet? Guess if I could see my reflection, I wouldn’t ever stop being surprised to see such a handsome mug starin’ back either.”

He’s too scared to really know what to say, but as soon as those words are out of his mouth, he winces: he doesn’t know what the right thing to say is, but he knows that wasn’t it.

But she doesn’t even acknowledge his presence; her fingers are at the corners of her eyes where Xander’s have started to show crow’s-feet, where hers are smooth as ever.

“Buffy? Slayer?” He drags his own fingertips up the length of her arm, and goosebumps rise like Braille only he can read in their wake, but she doesn’t even notice. His stomach tightens.

“Could look at you all day, too. For a thousand years and never get tired of the sight.” He drops a kiss where her neck meets her shoulder, one of his--and her--favorite spots, but she still doesn’t acknowledge him.

Then, after a moment: “A thousand years,” she murmurs. “A thousand years of looking just like this.”

His dead heart is aching now, throbbing with fear, but he tries to keep it light. They’ve each had their crises before, and it’s always up to the other to keep it under control for the sake of the one breaking down. “‘S not so bad, love. Could be nothin’ there but empty space.”

Again, she speaks and again he feels like she hasn’t even heard him. “I look like I’m twenty.”

“Just imagine if you could bottle that, love,” he says, pressing another kiss to her neck and raising his hands to cup her breasts. They’ve had lots of fun times with mirrors; maybe if he can get her motor revvin’, that will thaw her out of this frozen fascination. “Make a billion dollars, ‘specially in L.A.”

She strikes his hands away, stumbles to her feet, and grabs her panties and the dress she’d laid out the night before, jerking them on with movements devoid of her natural grace. “I look twenty, Spike,” she spits angrily, and he suddenly wishes for the carved-of-ice routine.

But no—no—they’ve lived through thousands of fights, what's one more? Besides, anything’s better than that catatonia that’s crept up on her before: when Glory took Dawn, far too moments during the horrible year after she clawed her way out of her grave, the night the Scoobies kicked her out. Those were her darkest moments, the ones he was never sure he could drag her back from, and if she’s still able to shoot fire at him, though he may walk away with burns, at least he can be sure they both will be walking away.

“I still get carded. I get dirty looks when I meet up with Xander, like I’m some gold-digger tramp who’s with him for his money. In five years people are going to start asking if Dawn is my mother.”

He holds up his hands, placating. “All right, love, but it—“

“I’m forty years old! And I have lived every single ones of those years, and I deserve to be able to wear them, too!”

Well, that’s not anything he ever expected a woman to say. But then, as far as he knows there’s only ever been two kinds of women: the ones who would grow old and age, and the ones who were technically dead and for whom their eternal youth made possible their hedonism. He could no sooner imagine Dru or Darla complaining about their unchanging nature than he could see them lamenting their victims. Human women long for never-ending youth, but of course none of them ever attained it, none of them ever had to face the brutal reality of it. But then, there’s never been anyone like Buffy.

“I can’t—I can’t look at any of them anymore! They’re slipping away, and I’m stuck here, and there’s nothing I can do to stop it, and one day they’re going to leave me alone, and I can’t handle that!”

He takes a step back, stung, though he knows he shouldn’t be. “You’re never going to be alone,” he says quietly but intensely. “You know I’d never leave you.”

“Yeah?” She shoves her feet into the shoes she’d bought just three days ago especially for her birthday party. They’d gone to Harrod’s and she’d tried on dozens of frocks and shoes, strutting like a runway model for his approval, giggling and flirting and making him carry her shopping bags. He’d watched her glow and felt his heart swell with love so that it almost felt like it was beating.

Now she doesn’t even take the time to admire the pumps, just throws her coat on and grabs her purse.

“Well, that’s not enough,” she finishes, starting towards the door.

A crack rips through the room and it takes him a few moments to figure out that he’d been holding on to the bedpost so tightly that it snapped off in his hand. Buffy freezes at the door, shoots a look over her shoulder, one that’s half-apologetic, but it doesn’t touch him. Because now he’s the frozen one.

She may have said That’s not enough, but what he heard was You’re not enough. And she knows it.

He stares at the carved wood in his hand, idly acknowledging that the ragged end would make one hell of a stake, then up at her standing framed in the doorway.

She walks out the door.

A few moments later, he hears the front door slam behind her.

He waits. Waits too long, really. With traffic at this time of night, it’ll take a good while to get from the Kensington mews to Giles’s inherited Mayfair mansion. He should have left twenty minutes to make sure he gets there on time, but he just can’t make himself open the door.

He doesn’t want to walk through it alone.

She’ll probably be there. This party has been planned for weeks, and everyone who’s anyone in Buffy’s life has made it a point to come to London to celebrate. She’s mature now, a woman, confident, contained, but there’s still a bit of the girl left in her, the girl who was so eager to please her friends all the time. She won’t let them down.

He hopes.

But still he waits.

It’s not like it’s the first time she’s walked out. Hell, they’ve both stormed out of their home so many times that the door hinges have to be replaced on a regular basis—their landlord makes jokes that carry just a hint of nervousness—most times just to find something to kill before coming back and shagging furiously for hours. Other times, though, one or the other of them will be gone for days or even weeks. Once, Spike himself took off for three full months before coming back and falling into her arms. They’re both passionate, high-tempered people, and there are times they just can’t be around each other. They’ve long ago agreed that it’s better to leave than to hit.

But those times were different. Because no matter how angry either of them were, the one walking out always took a moment to pause before flinging the door open to say, “I love you,” or “I’ll be back.” Sometimes the tone of those words was so acidic that it stung to hear them, but it was better than nothing. Because what they were really saying was, “I need this time. But I will always come back because I love you.” Between her abandonment issues and the low self-esteem that never lets him (even now) quite believe that she’s really his, chosen him, those words are completely necessary. They have to say them, and they always have.

But she didn’t say anything this time.

He’d left the bathroom door open when he took a shower; he would have heard her come in even with it closed—vampire hearing is like that—but he needed the reassurance. Didn’t turn on the radio while he dressed or the TV while he drank his blood. Paced furiously around the small space that most of the time seems just-cozy-right for the two of them but at this moment seemed like a cage.

And still she hasn’t come.

Finally, he throws on his duster over his dress clothes and plunges out the door before he can stop himself. He just hopes he can figure out something to say to everyone if she doesn’t show up.

No. She’ll be there. She will.

--

TBC

Chapter Two here.

Fic: Infinitas Infinitio Infinitus (1/5)

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