History is Done!
After making friends with the man on the end of the phone, I think it's safe to say that my computer is just too old. Stupid Windows 98.
Anyway, in happier news, this is the final chapter of History. You know the drill by now, PG-13, not mine, previous parts found here.
Thank you to amarasaa and everybody who's been reading. I hope this ends OK (I wont say satisfactorily, because, well...). :D
Oh, and it's not the Beatles song.
Warnings: Death/grief, graphic violence
Run.
But don't be scared to look behind.
Stop.
Don't wait too long, make up your mind.
She leaned against the rock face, shivering despite the warmth that was still around. The villagers were staying away, and for that she was grateful. She didn’t want to deal with anyone or anything. She just wanted to be left alone.
She closed her eyes, blocking out the surroundings. Things still didn’t make sense.
A new sound jolted her out of her thoughts and she blinked into the sunlight. Dawn was standing in front of her.
“What’s going on, Buffy?” Buffy didn’t look round. “You disappeared earlier, and now everybody’s looking for you. I thought you’d gotten over that whole ‘walking off on your own’ thing you did when we first came to London.”
She wiped her eyes, trying to ignore what Dawn was saying. “We should be getting back to the hotel. D’you wanna go?”
“No, Buffy, I don’t wanna go. Not ‘til you tell me what’s going on.”
Sighing, Buffy got up and began to walk up the slight slope back to the dig. Dawn trotted behind her, asking what she had done and what was happening.
“Nothing, Dawn!” They had left the village behind them now, and it was still a few metres to the edge of the dig. “There is nothing wrong!” Her shout echoed back at her from somewhere, and her nose began to twitch as her eyes stung.
“Buffy….” Dawn looked sympathetic.
“No! There is nothing wrong, and there’s nothing anyone can do.” Tears were forming and she squeezed her eyes shut against them.
“Buffy, just tell me what happened!”
She started to cry. Dawn didn’t move. Buffy drew her arms around herself and continued, looking at the ground. There was at least a minute of relative silence, before:
“I’ve ruined everything.”
“What?”
“There was this plan. A whole bunch of stuff that was s’posed to happen. Well, OK, one thing. But I didn’t do it. And now everything’s different from the way it’s s’posed to be and there’s only me to blame.”
“Buffy, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Then what’s with the crying?” She brushed her hands over her eyes. Dawn raised an eyebrow at her. “It obviously does matter, so just tell me. And don’t say I can’t understand either, because I’m older than you were when you started Slaying and I know a hell of a lot more about it.”
“OK,” she said, before taking a shaky breath. “OK.” She sniffed, once, and tried to calm herself down. “It’s to do with those mappy things - the amulet and the bracelet - what are they called?”
“The Mapacha.”
“Right. It’s to do with them. And Spike, I guess.” This was going to be hard.
“I knew you hadn’t grieved for him!” Buffy jumped.
“What? Oh, dammit, Dawn. Spike did what he did because….” She closed her eyes briefly. “He died so we could all live, and we should be proud of him! He didn’t die so that we could mope around and not get on with our lives.” It was six months ago all over again, and she was trying to convince a half-angry, half-worried Dawn that she was OK. “But that’s not the issue here.”
“He grieved for you when you died.” Dawn had never said that before. She really didn’t need to hear it. She closed her eyes again and tried to get her mind back on track, before she thought about it for too long.
“Look, Dawn, I’m trying to do the big emotional reveal here. It works a lot better without interruptions.”
“But…. OK, fine. Sorry.” Dawn looked anything but. Buffy ignored her.
“OK, so the Mapacha were made by the First Slayer and the First Demon-Helper-Guy.”
“Demon-Helper-Guy?” Buffy fumed for a moment.
“I don’t know if he has an actual title.”
“Who is he?”
“A by-product of the spell that made the Slayer.” She sighed. “He’s s’posed to fight with her, but gave up after the first one died and spent thousands of years sitting in that cave over there.” She pointed.
“Oh,” Dawn replied, looking over. “So they made the Mapacha?”
“Yeah, somewhere north of here. In a place where they have pot-mania.”
“What? Pot-mania? You don’t mean Mesopotamia, do you?”
“Yeah, probably.” She shrugged. Mangling words was nice to fall back on. She was never going to remember the actual word anyway.
“One day I’m gonna teach you English,” Dawn muttered. “Still, Mesopotamia. It explains all the Sumerian at least.”
“Yeah.” It probably did. “Anyway, they made it so they could call on all the power they gave to the Earth,” she caught Dawn’s look, “which they had connected themselves to after realising that the First Slayer was a killing machine and the First Demon-Helper-Guy was a love machine.” She blinked. “OK, that came out wrong.” Dawn giggled at her. “Anyway, so the Mapacha meant that they could take all their power back and channel it into something destructive and cleansy. After that they’d become just normal, powerless people. Well, the Slayer would, anyway. I don’t know about the demon-guy.”
“OK, that makes a kind of sense.” Dawn was frowning, obviously trying to take it all in. “But where does Spike fit in?”
“Well. You know I died that time?”
“Which one?”
“The first time.”
“Yes.” Dawn glared at her. “No thanks to you, though. You know I never knew you’d died twice ‘til I asked Giles about Faith last year?”
“Oh.” She blushed. “Sorry. It’s just you were too young at the time and then it never came up.” Dawn rolled her eyes.
“You’re the only person in the world who could say that about dying. Anyway, keep going.”
“OK. Yeah, so I died, and the Slayer line split - taking Demon-Helper-Guy with it. The thing is, I came back, so there was a Slayer without a Demon-Helper-Guy.”
“No way.”
“Huh?”
“You’re not about to say what I think you’re gonna say.”
“What d’you think I’m gonna say?” It wasn’t that obvious, was it?
“There’s just no way.” Dawn seemed to be ignoring her. “Spike was evil when you met him. Cool, and wanting to save the world, but evil.” She shook her head a couple of times, and then refocused her eyes on Buffy, who shrugged.
“I didn’t really get that bit either. It was something to do with his soul, the actual calling process. It wasn’t instant.”
“So he wasn’t actually called until he got his soul?”
“No.” She shook her head, trying to remember. “I don’t know. The demon-guy said something about it being easy to return his soul - that his calling was almost complete, because of,” her eyes widened, “because of my ‘presence’.”
“Oh God, Buffy. That means…”
“I know, Dawn.” She shut her eyes. She really wasn’t good with these revelation-things. “I know.”
“You don’t think him being in love with you was anything -”
“No.” She replied quickly, refusing to think about it.
“You can’t know, Buffy.” Dawn looked so sincere. It got on her nerves
“I know! But how would you like it if I said to you that maybe Spike only ever liked you because of some weird connection he had with the Key?”
Dawn said nothing. Buffy rolled her eyes.
“OK. If I’d’ve said it before you felt ‘neutral’ towards him, ‘because he saved the world’, and before you hated him?”
Dawn conceded after a moment, “I’d’ve called you a bitch.”
“There you go.”
They stood in silence for a couple of seconds. A breeze blew up, and Dawn spoke again:
“We should probably find out.”
“What?” She was going cold, and it wasn’t the breeze.
“Well, you don’t want it hanging over your head, do you?”
“What the hell?” Was this her sister? “No!” Hadn’t they found out enough? “The Mapacha project is finished with, Dawn, d’you hear me? We aren’t finding out anything else. I’ve got enough stuff to deal with without you and Andrew digging up more.”
“Oh, come on! Ooh, so you and Spike were mystically connected. That must be such a burden.” Buffy could barely believe what she was hearing.
“You heartless little bitch! D’you have any idea what all this means? It means that, for the first time ever, you were right, and I can’t trust Angel! You have no idea of how much that hurts me. And you have no idea of what it’s like to have to deal with the consequences of trusting him. To know that I…to know that I betrayed…
“I could be so happy, Dawn, did you know that? Yeah. Blissfully happy, and not feeling whatever I’m feeling now which is the complete opposite. And d’you know how I know that? Huh? I had a vision! One of those things that’ve been stealing every moment of sleep I’ve had for the past month! One of those that haven’t left me alone since we got here!
“So, yeah! Maybe I don’t want to do any more digging. Because I can’t take anymore!” She took a breath to start again, but choked on it, starting to cry once more.
“Oh, Buffy.” Dawn was hugging her now, and she cried into her shoulder. Grains of sand scraped her eyelids and she could smell Dawn’s sweat. She didn’t care, and just listened as Dawn tried to sooth her. “You should’ve said something. You should’ve…” She continued to cry. “Come on. We can go home tomorrow. We’ll blow some money in Oxford Street and forget all about this. Yeah?” Buffy pulled back, willing her shoulders to stop shaking and rubbing at her eyes, which just hurt them more.
She could do that. She could forget about it all. She could move on. It wasn’t impossible. Except….
“I don’t wanna go back to London, Dawn.” She sniffed, once, and wiped a fist across her nose.
“Buffy.” She looked so disappointed.
“I’m not running away, or whatever you think I’m doing, it’s just…. London is so much like him. And I think, if I’m going to move on, or grieve, or whatever, it needs to be somewhere that isn’t.” Dawn’s eyes were wide for a moment. Buffy stood firm.
“OK, I’m applauding your coming out of denial, but I’ve gotta say this. You’re deluding yourself if you think anyone in London sounds like Spike. He must’ve made the accent up or something, because it does not exist. I dunno….” She trailed off as Buffy laughed. “What?”
“Oh, nothing. It’s just…of course he made the accent up! It’s not as if he ever spent much time around the docks!” She kept laughing. She was starting to cry again, she knew, but she was probably already enough of a wreck that it didn’t matter.
“Huh? What d’you mean?” Understanding appeared in Dawn’s eyes. “You mean Spike told you about his human life! That’s so not fair! I liked him way longer than you did!” Buffy continued to laugh as Dawn made indignant noises. “When did he tell you?” Buffy shut up. It suddenly seemed very quiet.
“After Principal Wood tried to kill him.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah.” Dawn looked at the ground. She looked up.
It was dark now, she noticed. There was still that slight breeze and the village’s fire was crackling in the distance. There was a fire in the dig too, a smaller one, with camping tents around it. She hadn’t noticed those before.
Dawn was speaking to her.
“Huh?” she asked. Her sister rolled her eyes.
“I said, ‘if it’s not the people in London, what is it?’.”
“Oh. I don’t know.” She shrugged: this sounded so stupid now. “It’s just the place. It’s sort of monochrome, and kinda old, if you know what I mean. I think it’s the Victorian housing.”
“The Victorian housing?” Dawn stared at her. “You’re insane, Buffy, you really are. Still, I guess you are the weeping widow here. Where are we going instead?”
She shrugged again. “You pick.”
“OK!” Dawn looked surprised, and then thoughtful. After a moment, her eyes lit up. “Oh, Rome! Let’s go to Rome! Centre of the classical world!” Buffy was not impressed. “Oh, oh, and centre of the shoe world! And the coffee world!” Now she was interested. “Please, let’s go to Rome. I always wanted to learn Italian.”
Why not? It could be fun.
“OK.”
It looked like they were going to Rome.
Buffy came out of her room. At first she ignored Andrew and the television, from which a lot of over-dramatic Italian was coming, mixed with sounds of what she now knew were fazers.
She wanted Dawn. She was having trouble with her book, ‘I Tre Amici’. It was a story about a mouse, some sort of bird and something else in a forest, and she knew that if Dawn would just read the first page to her, everything else would make sense.
“Andrew, have you seen Dawn?” Why was he in their apartment anyway? He had his own, a couple of blocks away, paid for by Giles as part of his job as a “liaison” between London and Italy. (She was pretty sure it was just to keep Andrew out of the country.)
“Didn’t she tell you? She went out. Apparently we need more pasta.”
“What, more?” Maybe it was good to have Andrew around. He wasn’t pasta-obsessed.
“Yeah. Um, Buffy.” He flicked the remote and the TV went off. “I meant to tell you something.” He came round to the back of the sofa, fiddling with his hands. “Giles called, and apparently there’s Watcher business to take care of.”
“Oh.” Wait. Giles made contact with Andrew?
“Yeah. Apparently everybody’s busy, so I need to go retrieve a Slayer. From, um, Los Angeles.”
“Oh. Oh.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, um, if you see Angel…well, you know where I stand at least.”
“Yeah.” He was giving her that look again. That look that meant he was running an internal monologue with her as the ‘brave and noble heroine’. It made her so angry. She wasn’t brave, or noble, and nor was she going to be able to keep back those stupid tears.
“So.” Sniff. Dammit. “When’s that?”
“Early tomorrow morning.”
“Oh. OK. Good luck then, I guess.”
“Thanks.” They stood in silence for a couple of minutes. She sniffed a couple more times.
“I’ll leave you to your show, then.”
He might have said something in response, but she didn’t listen as she went back to her room.
Closing the door, she threw ’I Tre Amici’ towards a stack of Italian books. It bounced lightly off the thick volume of her favourite novel. At least, what had been her favourite novel. She’d bought it, hoping the words would be so familiar that things would click into place. Full of bright optimism, she’d opened the book, taken a look at the indecipherable page of words, all formed from Cs and Gs and Ps and Zs, shut the book and thrown it across the room.
The pile had grown quite quickly, from books with quickly regressing age recommendations. She thought she wouldn’t be able to go wrong with picture books, but it looked like she could. It just wasn’t fair, especially since Dawn knew enough to watch TV and laugh in the right places.
Buffy realised that it was probably something to do with the fact that she rarely left the apartment. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to; it was just that she didn’t see the point. She’d patrolled a few times, just so she had something to say when Giles phoned, and she’d gone shopping with Dawn a few times, before the novelty had worn off. She’d just found that she wasn’t really interested.
Which was ridiculous. This was Rome. In Europe.
Climbing onto her bed, she decided that she would go out. For fun. That night.
There would be dancing.
Or alcohol, maybe.
Oh yes, lots of alcohol.
Did they have pubs in Italy?
The end is almost here,
The sky, the air, so nice and clear.
The sound of your decay,
And the ringing in the air is the sweet debris of yesterday.
-Bad Religion, Yesterday.
Anyway, in happier news, this is the final chapter of History. You know the drill by now, PG-13, not mine, previous parts found here.
Thank you to amarasaa and everybody who's been reading. I hope this ends OK (I wont say satisfactorily, because, well...). :D
Oh, and it's not the Beatles song.
Warnings: Death/grief, graphic violence
Run.
But don't be scared to look behind.
Stop.
Don't wait too long, make up your mind.
She leaned against the rock face, shivering despite the warmth that was still around. The villagers were staying away, and for that she was grateful. She didn’t want to deal with anyone or anything. She just wanted to be left alone.
She closed her eyes, blocking out the surroundings. Things still didn’t make sense.
A new sound jolted her out of her thoughts and she blinked into the sunlight. Dawn was standing in front of her.
“What’s going on, Buffy?” Buffy didn’t look round. “You disappeared earlier, and now everybody’s looking for you. I thought you’d gotten over that whole ‘walking off on your own’ thing you did when we first came to London.”
She wiped her eyes, trying to ignore what Dawn was saying. “We should be getting back to the hotel. D’you wanna go?”
“No, Buffy, I don’t wanna go. Not ‘til you tell me what’s going on.”
Sighing, Buffy got up and began to walk up the slight slope back to the dig. Dawn trotted behind her, asking what she had done and what was happening.
“Nothing, Dawn!” They had left the village behind them now, and it was still a few metres to the edge of the dig. “There is nothing wrong!” Her shout echoed back at her from somewhere, and her nose began to twitch as her eyes stung.
“Buffy….” Dawn looked sympathetic.
“No! There is nothing wrong, and there’s nothing anyone can do.” Tears were forming and she squeezed her eyes shut against them.
“Buffy, just tell me what happened!”
She started to cry. Dawn didn’t move. Buffy drew her arms around herself and continued, looking at the ground. There was at least a minute of relative silence, before:
“I’ve ruined everything.”
“What?”
“There was this plan. A whole bunch of stuff that was s’posed to happen. Well, OK, one thing. But I didn’t do it. And now everything’s different from the way it’s s’posed to be and there’s only me to blame.”
“Buffy, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Then what’s with the crying?” She brushed her hands over her eyes. Dawn raised an eyebrow at her. “It obviously does matter, so just tell me. And don’t say I can’t understand either, because I’m older than you were when you started Slaying and I know a hell of a lot more about it.”
“OK,” she said, before taking a shaky breath. “OK.” She sniffed, once, and tried to calm herself down. “It’s to do with those mappy things - the amulet and the bracelet - what are they called?”
“The Mapacha.”
“Right. It’s to do with them. And Spike, I guess.” This was going to be hard.
“I knew you hadn’t grieved for him!” Buffy jumped.
“What? Oh, dammit, Dawn. Spike did what he did because….” She closed her eyes briefly. “He died so we could all live, and we should be proud of him! He didn’t die so that we could mope around and not get on with our lives.” It was six months ago all over again, and she was trying to convince a half-angry, half-worried Dawn that she was OK. “But that’s not the issue here.”
“He grieved for you when you died.” Dawn had never said that before. She really didn’t need to hear it. She closed her eyes again and tried to get her mind back on track, before she thought about it for too long.
“Look, Dawn, I’m trying to do the big emotional reveal here. It works a lot better without interruptions.”
“But…. OK, fine. Sorry.” Dawn looked anything but. Buffy ignored her.
“OK, so the Mapacha were made by the First Slayer and the First Demon-Helper-Guy.”
“Demon-Helper-Guy?” Buffy fumed for a moment.
“I don’t know if he has an actual title.”
“Who is he?”
“A by-product of the spell that made the Slayer.” She sighed. “He’s s’posed to fight with her, but gave up after the first one died and spent thousands of years sitting in that cave over there.” She pointed.
“Oh,” Dawn replied, looking over. “So they made the Mapacha?”
“Yeah, somewhere north of here. In a place where they have pot-mania.”
“What? Pot-mania? You don’t mean Mesopotamia, do you?”
“Yeah, probably.” She shrugged. Mangling words was nice to fall back on. She was never going to remember the actual word anyway.
“One day I’m gonna teach you English,” Dawn muttered. “Still, Mesopotamia. It explains all the Sumerian at least.”
“Yeah.” It probably did. “Anyway, they made it so they could call on all the power they gave to the Earth,” she caught Dawn’s look, “which they had connected themselves to after realising that the First Slayer was a killing machine and the First Demon-Helper-Guy was a love machine.” She blinked. “OK, that came out wrong.” Dawn giggled at her. “Anyway, so the Mapacha meant that they could take all their power back and channel it into something destructive and cleansy. After that they’d become just normal, powerless people. Well, the Slayer would, anyway. I don’t know about the demon-guy.”
“OK, that makes a kind of sense.” Dawn was frowning, obviously trying to take it all in. “But where does Spike fit in?”
“Well. You know I died that time?”
“Which one?”
“The first time.”
“Yes.” Dawn glared at her. “No thanks to you, though. You know I never knew you’d died twice ‘til I asked Giles about Faith last year?”
“Oh.” She blushed. “Sorry. It’s just you were too young at the time and then it never came up.” Dawn rolled her eyes.
“You’re the only person in the world who could say that about dying. Anyway, keep going.”
“OK. Yeah, so I died, and the Slayer line split - taking Demon-Helper-Guy with it. The thing is, I came back, so there was a Slayer without a Demon-Helper-Guy.”
“No way.”
“Huh?”
“You’re not about to say what I think you’re gonna say.”
“What d’you think I’m gonna say?” It wasn’t that obvious, was it?
“There’s just no way.” Dawn seemed to be ignoring her. “Spike was evil when you met him. Cool, and wanting to save the world, but evil.” She shook her head a couple of times, and then refocused her eyes on Buffy, who shrugged.
“I didn’t really get that bit either. It was something to do with his soul, the actual calling process. It wasn’t instant.”
“So he wasn’t actually called until he got his soul?”
“No.” She shook her head, trying to remember. “I don’t know. The demon-guy said something about it being easy to return his soul - that his calling was almost complete, because of,” her eyes widened, “because of my ‘presence’.”
“Oh God, Buffy. That means…”
“I know, Dawn.” She shut her eyes. She really wasn’t good with these revelation-things. “I know.”
“You don’t think him being in love with you was anything -”
“No.” She replied quickly, refusing to think about it.
“You can’t know, Buffy.” Dawn looked so sincere. It got on her nerves
“I know! But how would you like it if I said to you that maybe Spike only ever liked you because of some weird connection he had with the Key?”
Dawn said nothing. Buffy rolled her eyes.
“OK. If I’d’ve said it before you felt ‘neutral’ towards him, ‘because he saved the world’, and before you hated him?”
Dawn conceded after a moment, “I’d’ve called you a bitch.”
“There you go.”
They stood in silence for a couple of seconds. A breeze blew up, and Dawn spoke again:
“We should probably find out.”
“What?” She was going cold, and it wasn’t the breeze.
“Well, you don’t want it hanging over your head, do you?”
“What the hell?” Was this her sister? “No!” Hadn’t they found out enough? “The Mapacha project is finished with, Dawn, d’you hear me? We aren’t finding out anything else. I’ve got enough stuff to deal with without you and Andrew digging up more.”
“Oh, come on! Ooh, so you and Spike were mystically connected. That must be such a burden.” Buffy could barely believe what she was hearing.
“You heartless little bitch! D’you have any idea what all this means? It means that, for the first time ever, you were right, and I can’t trust Angel! You have no idea of how much that hurts me. And you have no idea of what it’s like to have to deal with the consequences of trusting him. To know that I…to know that I betrayed…
“I could be so happy, Dawn, did you know that? Yeah. Blissfully happy, and not feeling whatever I’m feeling now which is the complete opposite. And d’you know how I know that? Huh? I had a vision! One of those things that’ve been stealing every moment of sleep I’ve had for the past month! One of those that haven’t left me alone since we got here!
“So, yeah! Maybe I don’t want to do any more digging. Because I can’t take anymore!” She took a breath to start again, but choked on it, starting to cry once more.
“Oh, Buffy.” Dawn was hugging her now, and she cried into her shoulder. Grains of sand scraped her eyelids and she could smell Dawn’s sweat. She didn’t care, and just listened as Dawn tried to sooth her. “You should’ve said something. You should’ve…” She continued to cry. “Come on. We can go home tomorrow. We’ll blow some money in Oxford Street and forget all about this. Yeah?” Buffy pulled back, willing her shoulders to stop shaking and rubbing at her eyes, which just hurt them more.
She could do that. She could forget about it all. She could move on. It wasn’t impossible. Except….
“I don’t wanna go back to London, Dawn.” She sniffed, once, and wiped a fist across her nose.
“Buffy.” She looked so disappointed.
“I’m not running away, or whatever you think I’m doing, it’s just…. London is so much like him. And I think, if I’m going to move on, or grieve, or whatever, it needs to be somewhere that isn’t.” Dawn’s eyes were wide for a moment. Buffy stood firm.
“OK, I’m applauding your coming out of denial, but I’ve gotta say this. You’re deluding yourself if you think anyone in London sounds like Spike. He must’ve made the accent up or something, because it does not exist. I dunno….” She trailed off as Buffy laughed. “What?”
“Oh, nothing. It’s just…of course he made the accent up! It’s not as if he ever spent much time around the docks!” She kept laughing. She was starting to cry again, she knew, but she was probably already enough of a wreck that it didn’t matter.
“Huh? What d’you mean?” Understanding appeared in Dawn’s eyes. “You mean Spike told you about his human life! That’s so not fair! I liked him way longer than you did!” Buffy continued to laugh as Dawn made indignant noises. “When did he tell you?” Buffy shut up. It suddenly seemed very quiet.
“After Principal Wood tried to kill him.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah.” Dawn looked at the ground. She looked up.
It was dark now, she noticed. There was still that slight breeze and the village’s fire was crackling in the distance. There was a fire in the dig too, a smaller one, with camping tents around it. She hadn’t noticed those before.
Dawn was speaking to her.
“Huh?” she asked. Her sister rolled her eyes.
“I said, ‘if it’s not the people in London, what is it?’.”
“Oh. I don’t know.” She shrugged: this sounded so stupid now. “It’s just the place. It’s sort of monochrome, and kinda old, if you know what I mean. I think it’s the Victorian housing.”
“The Victorian housing?” Dawn stared at her. “You’re insane, Buffy, you really are. Still, I guess you are the weeping widow here. Where are we going instead?”
She shrugged again. “You pick.”
“OK!” Dawn looked surprised, and then thoughtful. After a moment, her eyes lit up. “Oh, Rome! Let’s go to Rome! Centre of the classical world!” Buffy was not impressed. “Oh, oh, and centre of the shoe world! And the coffee world!” Now she was interested. “Please, let’s go to Rome. I always wanted to learn Italian.”
Why not? It could be fun.
“OK.”
It looked like they were going to Rome.
Buffy came out of her room. At first she ignored Andrew and the television, from which a lot of over-dramatic Italian was coming, mixed with sounds of what she now knew were fazers.
She wanted Dawn. She was having trouble with her book, ‘I Tre Amici’. It was a story about a mouse, some sort of bird and something else in a forest, and she knew that if Dawn would just read the first page to her, everything else would make sense.
“Andrew, have you seen Dawn?” Why was he in their apartment anyway? He had his own, a couple of blocks away, paid for by Giles as part of his job as a “liaison” between London and Italy. (She was pretty sure it was just to keep Andrew out of the country.)
“Didn’t she tell you? She went out. Apparently we need more pasta.”
“What, more?” Maybe it was good to have Andrew around. He wasn’t pasta-obsessed.
“Yeah. Um, Buffy.” He flicked the remote and the TV went off. “I meant to tell you something.” He came round to the back of the sofa, fiddling with his hands. “Giles called, and apparently there’s Watcher business to take care of.”
“Oh.” Wait. Giles made contact with Andrew?
“Yeah. Apparently everybody’s busy, so I need to go retrieve a Slayer. From, um, Los Angeles.”
“Oh. Oh.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, um, if you see Angel…well, you know where I stand at least.”
“Yeah.” He was giving her that look again. That look that meant he was running an internal monologue with her as the ‘brave and noble heroine’. It made her so angry. She wasn’t brave, or noble, and nor was she going to be able to keep back those stupid tears.
“So.” Sniff. Dammit. “When’s that?”
“Early tomorrow morning.”
“Oh. OK. Good luck then, I guess.”
“Thanks.” They stood in silence for a couple of minutes. She sniffed a couple more times.
“I’ll leave you to your show, then.”
He might have said something in response, but she didn’t listen as she went back to her room.
Closing the door, she threw ’I Tre Amici’ towards a stack of Italian books. It bounced lightly off the thick volume of her favourite novel. At least, what had been her favourite novel. She’d bought it, hoping the words would be so familiar that things would click into place. Full of bright optimism, she’d opened the book, taken a look at the indecipherable page of words, all formed from Cs and Gs and Ps and Zs, shut the book and thrown it across the room.
The pile had grown quite quickly, from books with quickly regressing age recommendations. She thought she wouldn’t be able to go wrong with picture books, but it looked like she could. It just wasn’t fair, especially since Dawn knew enough to watch TV and laugh in the right places.
Buffy realised that it was probably something to do with the fact that she rarely left the apartment. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to; it was just that she didn’t see the point. She’d patrolled a few times, just so she had something to say when Giles phoned, and she’d gone shopping with Dawn a few times, before the novelty had worn off. She’d just found that she wasn’t really interested.
Which was ridiculous. This was Rome. In Europe.
Climbing onto her bed, she decided that she would go out. For fun. That night.
There would be dancing.
Or alcohol, maybe.
Oh yes, lots of alcohol.
Did they have pubs in Italy?
The end is almost here,
The sky, the air, so nice and clear.
The sound of your decay,
And the ringing in the air is the sweet debris of yesterday.
-Bad Religion, Yesterday.