Fairytale Endings

Author: Doyle
Pairing: B/A
Rating: PG-13
Notes: for tablesex who requested dark post-Chosen.

Valentine's Day ficathon - my take on shanshu. Probably made even more depressing than I planned because of the cancellation news.


These are the things you learn, relearn, about being human:

Humans are adaptable. The two of you never have to talk about rules and lines but there they are anyway, the names that can't be mentioned, the history you both couch in euphemisms.

Humans are fragile. She was always stronger than you, but it's palpable now, the way she reins in her strength when you're together. You never mention the bruises she doesn't mean to leave. She hurts with you, and trips over herself with apologies and wounded eyes, and after a year of you telling her it's all right, not her fault, her eyes begin to slide over them.

Humans are more complicated than you remembered.

**

It's Valentine's Day, and you're obsessing (something you're still good at) over what to get her. It frustrates you, the thought that something this simple would come automatically to a human - you remember the other men you know and think, or maybe not - but you can't think of how to demonstrate your love. She says it's a lame Hallmark holiday and you can both just ignore it, which means you have to get her something, or those centuries in Hell will feel like a picnic. And you do love her, love her so much that there are times you forget that your lungs need air now, so much that you bury the guilt, because that was an aspect of the shanshu you never considered; that those you killed are just as dead, and you have no way to ever atone now.

Another thing you have learned about humans is that they are masters of denial. They have to be, or they'd go insane from the weight of the things they can't change.

So. Valentine's Day.

There's jewelry, or the tired old standby of candy and flowers, or concert tickets. She enjoyed the ballet that time, before the Count's enchantment affected you and… except that was Cordelia, not Buffy, and that's been happening too often recently, odd fragments of memory with the wrong faces attached. Buffy never fucked you beside the cooling body of a gypsy girl, and she never cowered beneath you in a convent, cloaked in fear and clinging to the last shreds of innocence, but that's how you remember it. Sometimes.

"Kill me," Drusilla screams in her last minutes of life, face streaked with tears and blood, but she's not Drusilla, and you're thinking about that when you jerk off in the shower after Buffy's gone patrolling.

You check out the jewelry store at the mall, rejecting necklaces and lockets, your eyes lingering uncertainly over the rings. "Buying for that special someone?" the shopgirl asks, and you killed a girl like her, ripped out her heart before it even stopped beating. Buffy loved that gift, more than the necklace Spike stole for her.

No, no…

"Sir? Are you okay?"

You leave the store empty-handed.

**

The two of you go out for dinner at her favorite restaurant. You remember every day how good food tastes, and that visceral thrill is always a surprise. She talks brightly about training the new Slayers, about the progress they're making, about a movie on TV tonight and a dress she wants to buy at the mall. You let the chatter wash over you, taking comfort in her voice as you did when she was a teenager and this was still taboo.

At home, you make love. If she leaves fingermarks on your arms, you don't notice. She leaves for patrol (it strikes you suddenly that she's never asked you to come along) and you spend an hour tossing and turning before giving up on sleep and padding downstairs to the study.

Drawing helps, sometimes, but all your sketches are of her and just recently they're not right. One feature wrong in some way that's not easy to identify, as if you're confusing that part of her with someone else. Many someone elses.

You've known a lot of women, and she is all of them. Everyone you've ever loved.

(You think that maybe the human brain wasn't build to deal with centuries of memories, hundreds of years of guilt)

Everyone you've ever killed.

(Never known anyone like her, but she's the same beneath the skin. Blood is blood and even now you dream about your victims. Thought you'd leave it behind you like a shed skin but you dream about the girls you've hurt and killed and done unimaginable things to, and they all. Wear. Her. Face.)

Could be you never read the fine print in that prophecy, or that this is one last fuck you from the Powers. It's not like they lied to you. Live until you die, that was what you were promised. Nothing about forgetting what you did, no clause that told you, by the way, you'll still feel him, Angelus beneath the surface, scratching to get out with claws that get sharper every day.

You clawed your way out of your coffin, choking air you didn't need, and she was waiting for you. You don't remember Darla's face.

And you're standing on a stone floor and your soul feels heavy and raw and Buffy says, "Close your eyes"

You're standing on a cobbled street and your blood is loud in your ears and Buffy says, "Close your eyes", and you don't remember any more whether this really happened

You're in a graveyard, long ago, and you're telling her that this isn't a fairytale. And you're here in the quiet study of a suburban house in Cleveland and you close your eyes.

Not a fairytale.

As you wait for the happily ever after to start, you wish you'd listened to your own words.

END

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