Fic: 'I love you' is a thing you say to people who are dying (15/18); hard R

[quinara]

[start of fic and notes]

'I love you' is a thing you say to people who are dying
by Quinara

Season 7. Buffy/Spike. Some Watchers survived, because sometimes people do.

[bodies IV]

Comments

[rahirah]

This chapter makes me ponder once again something about S7 and the approach to the Potentials. Ordinary humans are not as strong or as fast as demons and Slayers, but ordinary humans are really, really good at something that demons and Slayers apparently suck at: working together. Perhaps Buffy can be forgiven for missing this, because she's become so entrenched in her lone Slayer mindset, where the world depends on her and only her, forever and ever amen, but I sometimes wish that someone else had brought it up...

[quinara]

This is very true, but it is difficult when your group of humans is just a horde of teenage girls, the Scoobies and Giles with whatever it was, two leftover books. There needs to be a plan, and even by the end of the show (if not especially by the end of the show) no one had a feasible solution to what was happening that anyone could work on.

Of course, I was thinking about your comment here today and I remembered what I'd actually forgotten once I'd finished this fic, that I conceptually see it very much as a tragedy - if not a conventional one - and so a study of how certain decisions get made, rather than necessarily a defence of them, so I might have something different to suggest if I was going to think about how you could actually fight back the First. (Dunno if I do have an answer, though.)

[shapinglight]

That nightdress sounds like an instrument of torture. Makes me feel as if Aunt Darlene couldn't have liked Buffy much at all.

I was hoping to finish this story before coming to Writercon, but I'm just not quite going to be able to do it, unfortunately.