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Fic: Infinitas Infinitio Infinitus (2/5)
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 2 of 5.
Previous chapter here.
Chapter Two
She doesn’t let out the sigh of relief when he finally arrives—late, no surprise—though she wants to. She jerks her eyes away guiltily when his find her—his first thought on entering any room is always to find out where she is, and then, no matter how large the room, how many people there are, he remains perfectly aware of where she is at all times; the knowledge of that makes her giddy at times—noting that he looks wilder than he has in years, more untamed. More like a vampire. Except that she’s never seen another vampire look wild with worry.
She knows it’s her fault, but she can’t bring herself to go over to him, to apologize, even to slip her hand into his or press a kiss to his cheek. She can’t, though she knows she should, knows she must, knows she will. But not now. Not yet.
She’d made up some silly excuse about why he wasn’t with her when she’d arrived. Xander and Dawn and their respective spouses had been too busy with their kids to really notice,
She’d ignored him, plastering on a big grin and giving hugs to her nieces and nephews, listening as Joy told her about her latest gymnastics competition, Stephen rambled on and on about his favorite video game, and Xander and Dalili’s twins, Adila and Anisa, related to her in their adorable accents the story of the latest demon their mom had killed. She’d teased Angel and Hannah’s solemn-eyed son Sean into giggles with a story about his dad and “Uncle Spike’s” adventures. Sometimes she aches with the knowledge that she won’t have children, but she has Spike, and she has these kids, and she wouldn’t trade anything for that.
She’d thrown her arms around Xander, making a joke about how he must be used to Slayer-strength hugs while his wife, Dalili, a Slayer he’d met fifteen years before in
But then she couldn’t avoid Angel anymore; he’d practically backed her up into a corner to get her talk to him, and it’s just her luck that Spike arrives just at that moment. He notices how quickly she looks away from Spike as the kids rush at him, a mass of curls and sticky hands and bruised knees, squealing “Uncle Spike!” in a pitch approaching levels only dogs—and vampires—can hear. Angel notices, of course, because usually nothing makes her bubble with joy the way watching Spike with five kids hanging from his neck and various limbs does. And right now she can’t even look at him.
She braces herself.
“Buffy,” Angel says, drawing out her name.
Here it comes.
“What’s wrong?”
There it is.
“I’m missing Faith,” she says, and it’s not a lie, not at all, even if it’s not what he’s asking. She feels her mouth twist wryly, one of those expressions she’s picked up from Spike over the years, just as he now sighs in exasperation just like she does.
She supposes it’s fitting, all the ways her life has done an about-face. Her best enemy becomes her best ally becomes her best friend becomes her only love. Why shouldn’t her greatest rival have turned into one of the few people who’ve ever understood her, a sister just as much as Dawn ever was?
Angel’s eyes have gone soft and sad, the way they always do when he’s thinking about Faith or Cordelia or Wesley or Fred or any of the others he’s lost—and there’ve been so many.
“I miss her, too.” She noticed recently that in times of high emotion, he barely moves his mouth when he speaks, as if he thinks that if he opens it too wide, all his sorrow will come pouring out. She knows how he feels.
“There was so much pain with us, you know? So much resentment, and I always blamed her for taking everything that was mine and she always blamed me for having everything she wanted. But she understood. In a way no one else could, because she knew what it was like to stand alone.” To fall alone. “None of the new girls get that. But Faith did. We couldn’t keep being bitter with each other after that.”
“You two were meant to be close,” Angel agrees. “You just let everything get in the way.”
“Yeah. And we finally were. Close. And now it’s been six years….”
Faith’s death—line of duty, apocalypse-averting, with her boots on—had nearly shattered her in ways no other hand. Maybe it was just the final straw after so many years of loss. MerrickJennyKendraAngelMomTaraAnyaSpike. So many.
Or maybe she’d been subconsciously counting on Faith to be here beside her while she faces this new terror, and she doesn’t know how to do it alone.
“Hey.” Angel’s hand is at her elbow now, warm and comforting, and he guides her to a chair in the alcove between the dining room and the kitchen. He disappears for a moment, leaving her alone with her shivers—When did I start shivering?—and when he returns, he’s holding a glass of wine. He puts it in her hand, and she lets her fingers close around the cool stem, stares into the burgundy depths. It looks like blood. But then, when you’re a Slayer, everything looks like blood because blood is always the point. Blood is life. It's what keeps you going. Makes you warm. Makes you hard. Makes you other than dead.
It’s warm, sliding down her throat, and she wonders if this is what vampires feel when they drink blood: warm and heady and—What’s that word?—robust, lingering on the tongue, pooling in the belly.
“It would be easier if she were here. We’d figure it out together.”
“Figure what out?” Angel’s voice is very, very gentle, a gentleness that she usually resents because it hurls her back to high school. Right now, though, she’s thankful: she’d shatter if his touch weren’t so light.
She puts the wine glass down on the table beside her so firmly that it cracks, but not all the way through. Not enough for the bloodwine (Maybe those Christians are on to something) to escape. Angel winces.
“How did you do it?” she asks suddenly.
He looks startled now. “Do what?”
“Just keep going. For centuries. Watching everything change. Watching everyone go away.”
She looks down at her hands in her lap. Hands that are just the same as they were in Sunnydale, only with a few new scars and a shade of nail polish she never expected to choose, a ring she never really thought she’d be able to wear on one finger.
He’s silent for a long moment, and yeah, it’s like high school again. She remembers so clearly his profound stillness, much more clearly than she remembers his kisses or his words. That was the single thing that always made him seem slightly alien to her, that let her really believe he was a vampire. He could be so quiet. So still.
Spike is, as in most things, the opposite of his grandsire. All nervous energy, too many words, jiggling his foot, bouncing on the balls of his feet, fiddling with his Zippo, snarking and mocking and flirting and just always so…hyper-alive. Only when he sleeps beside her does he seem like a corpse, but even then, he absorbs her warmth, falling into the patterns of her breathing. The line between them blurs when they sleep.
“Why aren’t you asking Spike about this?”
Her eyes burn, and when she speaks her voice cracks. “I…can’t.”
It would hurt him. I’ve done enough for that for one lifetime. Oh, God….Except that I did it this morning. I did it this morning when I walked out and I didn’t say anything. How could I have done that to him? I know what it’s like to get walked out on. How could I?
More silence in the alcove, but she hears Dawn’s laugh and the kids’ squeals in the other rooms. They sound very far away.
“Buffy, it was different for me,” he finally says, and she can practically hear him trying out words in his mind and rejecting them like puzzle pieces that don’t quite fit. “At the beginning I had Darla and the hunt, and then Dru and Spike. I didn’t need anything else. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to even want anything else.”
He’s come so far. Finally using first person, active voice, for those times, like being human again has finally let him admit that Angel and Angelus were never as far apart as he’d told himself they were.
“Then came the soul, and I thought I deserved every moment of agony. It was my due. But I had no one. No one to watch slip away.”
“Until me,” she says dully.
“Until you,” he agrees. “And for a little while, I could pretend. Pretend to be a normal guy with a job and a brave, pretty girl. And I ran away when I figured out that I couldn’t keep pretending. And then there was the promise of the Shanshu.”
Run away? He never would have phrased it like that back in the hold days. Come so far indeed.
“I had people then—Cordy and Wes and the others—but there was also this promise. One day I’d be like them. I could grow old with them. I wouldn’t have to watch them—“ He stopped. Started again. “That was the promise.”
She’s never given much thought to why the Shanshu was so important to him. She couldn’t imagine Spike ever wanting to be human; he enjoyed being a vampire so much. But this…this she could understand.
And all of a sudden the irony of it rushes into her, bitter and biting. He got his Shanshu, only to find out that he had no one to share it with. Every person he’d imagined spending his human life with was lost to him. Even she chose Spike.
Of course, he’d moved on. Found Hannah, who is wonderful and sweet (and tiny and blonde) and has a wicked sense of humor and prods him out of his fits of brooding—the ones that most definitely haven’t disappeared with his sun allergy—and he has his sons, and she thinks that he’s happy now. Only he can never be fully happy. Not when he has to live with that irony every day.
Angel raises his head suddenly, jerking her away from her thoughts. “You’re immortal, aren’t you?”
If she hadn’t been sitting, she would have collapsed under the power of hearing those words verbalized for the first time. She grips the armrest so hard she hears the wood creak, and her mouth feels coated with slimy bitterness.
“Yeah. It makes sense, I guess.” She speaks automatically, as though her mouth is speaking on its own, quite separate from her paralyzed mind. “That the one called to slay the vampires would be immortal like them. Balance, you know.” Her tone is flat. “And no one ever knew because Slayer just don’t live long enough for anyone to be able to tell.” Then, a whisper: “They still don’t.”
The spell that they’d thought would give the Slayers a normal life with bonus superpowers only bought the new Slayers five or ten years added onto their life expectancy. Buffy—and Faith till she died—is still the longest-living of the Slayers.
“You’re sure it isn’t—just you? Something involving the resurrection spell?”
She shakes her head. “It’s possible, I guess. But I think…I think Faith felt it, too.”
He nods, solemn.
“I wasn’t—this was the very last thing I expected. My second day as a Slayer,
Tears are burning back behind her eyes now, and she has to fight to keep from choking. “I’ve gotten so good at dying. I’ve spend my whole life learning how to do it. And now that I’ve finally accepted it and gotten the hang of it, I’m supposed to learn to do the opposite? It’s too late for me to learn how to live. How am I supposed to change every single way I’ve ever thought about my life? About who I am? When I was sixteen, I thought nothing could be scarier than knowing you’re going to die young. Only knowing I’m going to live forever and watch every single person I care about grow old and die, over and over…that’s so much scarier. It gets harder every day to look at Giles. What am I going to do when Dawn looks like my grandmother and my niece and nephew get old enough to be my parents? And how can I possibly get close to anyone else knowing that the same thing is going to happen every time?”
She buries her face in her hands, white-hot tears slipping between her fingers. Her shoulders shake, her hands tremble, and she has to bite back the sound of her own weeping.
“Not every time.”
She lifts her tear-stained face, still shaking with sobs.
“Buffy, you know Spike will never leave you.”
I do. And why can’t he see that knowing that makes it hurt even more?
Of course Spike will never leave her. It’s taken her almost twenty years to reach the point where she can really believe that; it’s not easy to combat thought patterns engrained by twenty years of every man she’s cared about abandoning her. But she’s finally really gotten there—really knows he’ll always be there…and it’s not enough.
God, she knew how that sounded when she said it to him earlier today, and the last thing she’d wanted to do was hurt him so badly. That’s the very reason she can’t talk to him about this. She loves him with everything she is, but he isn’t enough.
He wants to be enough, reason enough for me to be happy that I’m going to live forever. I love him with everything I am, but he isn’t.
At sixteen, innocent and in the best—worst?—kind of epic love, Angel would have been enough. No. That’s not true. Not true at all. But she would have thought he was. If she’d been told she was going to live forever, but she’d have Angel all that time…she would have thought it was enough.
But she’s older now. Wiser, by a whole hell of a lot. By lightyears. (Yeah, you proved that when you walked out this morning. She shoves that thought away.) And she knows that just one person can never, ever be enough. Not after she’s known so much love from so many people. Not now.
“But Dawn will. And Giles and
“Yeah.”
She leaps to her feet, trembling now not with sorrow but with rage. “I hate the Powers for this! What kind of sick bastards would do this to a person? And how could this possibly be good management, anyways? They can’t expect someone to just keep going and going and never rest and think that that person will still be able to fight, much less still want to! We deserve to rest!”
“Yes. You do.”
“And what about the other Slayers? If they start living longer, they’re going to have to deal with this, too! We’ve got to find some way to turn this off!”
“Buffy, do you really think that will work?” His voice is so quiet, so calm, that she kind of wants to pummel him, and she’s reminded, once again, why she chose Spike. Spike would know, would understand that she needs to get rid of these emotions somehow. He’d tease her into bed or into sparring or take her out and let her slay something. He’d see what a big deal this is and wouldn’t try to be all calm and mentor-y like Angel.
Yeah, you chose him. But you didn’t choose him today.
Again, she shoves the thought aside. “I don’t care! If I have go back to that desert-y place and fight those men and their big shadow rape-y demon, I’ll do it. They did this to us! They doomed me to this! I. Won’t. Be. A. Pawn. I refuse.” About-face of emotion, trembling chin, but determined, a solution: “I need to talk to Giles and
He catches her arm as she spins to go. “Buffy, think. Is this party really the time and place for that? The kids are all here. Everyone’s here to celebrate. Can’t this wait a few days?”
“Of course it can,” she shoots back bitterly. “It’s not like I’m getting any older.” Then she wrenches her arm from his grip. She knows she’s being too hard on him; he’s trying to help, and he’s such a good friend, and it isn’t his fault he isn’t Spike.
“Where are you going then?” he calls after her as she storms down the hall.
“To kill something.”
Continued here.
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Honest and bleak and totally captivating. That's what I was going for, so I'm so glad to know you feel this way! I hope you enjoy the next chapters just as much!