B/A Fluffython Fic #1! :)

Soft

Author: Ducks
Email: ducksfanfic@yahoo.com
Website: http://ducksfanfic.denialbubble.com
LiveJournal: http://theantijoss.livejournal.com
Pairing: Buffy/Angel
Rating: NC-17
Timeline: Future (Post Old-School Shanshu)
Summary: But soft! What light through yonder window breaks?
Dedication: for my very dear friend, the wonderful, beautiful, AMAZING angelbuffy0 by request for the B/A Fluffython. Sorry this is so late, babe. I hope it's worth it. *smooch* And to the brilliant Shirley Ujest, who I am honored to have beta for me since the beginning. Finally, for polish, many slurpy thanks to marenfic for the last edit.

A/N: Requested elements are at the end.

~



A soft velvet morning rises, and Buffy gives a contented sigh to greet it. She rolls over before she opens her eyes, needing to be closer to Angel's warmth. He sleeps flat on his back with his arms splayed – one up, one down -- as if he fell asleep performing some wild, passionate dance.

Buffy smiles -- he actually sort of did. The last sound she remembers him making in the darkest of night was a weak, but heartfelt post-coital, "Jesus," as he curled possessively around her and tumbled into sleep.

She snuggles closer still, wraps herself around him as much as she's able to, considering he's almost exactly twice her size. As long as she can rest her cheek on his broad, muscular chest and listen to the soothing drum of his heartbeat, she's good.

Thump-thump, all-is-well, thump-thump.

His arm automatically slides up to encircle her, hold her more tightly against him. She loves that feeling: even when he's fast asleep, he's always protecting her, and they fit together so perfectly… so naturally.

She closes her eyes and drifts. Everything is so right, precisely in this second. So soft. The newborn sunlight filtering in through their bedroom window, casting them in pale goldenrod as if they were touched by some gentle magick. The summer birdsong, echoing through the dew-wet lilac bushes in the garden outside. The sound of the kids trying not to make noise as they rummage for breakfast, and Angel's long, deep breaths against her ear.

She loves to lie here, listening to the soothing sounds, her head rising and falling as his breath ebbs and flows, as if her own life force is tied to his. She can tell when he starts to wake – his pulse quickens just the tiniest bit, and his breathing shallows. The hand on her shoulder slides up, tickling the fine hairs on her neck before his fingers tunnel into her nasty bedhead. She moans – just another muted, pleasant resonance in the room – as his fingertips massage her scalp.

"Good morning," he murmurs, pressing a tender kiss to her forehead without opening his eyes.

"Yeah," she agrees wholeheartedly. Very good.

They're so happy now.

It's only in her dreams that she remembers what it felt like to think she could never have this. Those days when she accepted what the others had been telling her all along... the lie that she resisted so fiercely: she and Angel were never meant to be together. She has nightmares about that time. Remembers how deeply everything hurt. When just existing was a chore, let alone actually *living* without him.

All the times she'd failed to do either one.

But those trials were what brought them here, Angel always says. She believes him, but she doesn't know if that's really enough to wash the memories away completely. Or the scars, now diminished by time and joy, but still there if she looks for them.

"I can feel your brow furrowing against my chest," he points out.

Buffy attempts to deep-breathe her treasonous face into relaxation. She still sucks at poker, too.

"It's not working," he informs her, a hint of wry chuckle in his sleep-groggy voice.

"You can't smell me anymore, so you shouldn't be able to tell when I'm brooding outside your line of vision."

"Hm. I guess sharing a bed for eleven years counts for nothing, then."

She scoots her bottom backward until it's cradled in the fold of his body. His erection pulses against the back of her thighs. "I wouldn't say *nothing*."

He thrusts gently into the tunnel at the juncture of her legs. "You're just using me for my body, is that what you're saying?"

"Duh. Are you new here?"

He chuckles and gives another slow, lazy thrust between her legs. "I forget sometimes, what with all the love and the respect and friendship and everything."

Buffy reaches up and behind, and gives his thick hair a tug. Turns to face his descending lips. "It's all a smoke screen," she breathes a bare moment before they come together.

Angel rolls gently until she's beneath him, her tiny, powerful form stretched long as he pins her wrists to the bed and bends over her, ready to dive into the feast laid out before him.

The calico's emerald eyes regard him with only mild interest.

"Buffy."

"What?" she sighs, squirming in anticipation and the first flicker of frustration as she realizes yes, he really has stopped. "What, honey?"

"Gryffindor," he snarls. The word becomes a curse when he utters it.

The cat gives him one of those smart-ass feline "We're the Superior Species" smirks in reply.

"Get off, Gryffie!" Buffy calls in singsong baby talk that makes Angel twitch. The cat watches her hand waving ineffectually at him. "Off the nightstand. Daddy doesn't want you up there."

Angel hisses at the cat, but the mean-spirited beast just returns to staring blandly at him, completely disinterested in what "Daddy" wants.

Sometimes he suspects they adopted the spirit of Buffy's mother instead of the cat her sister had (conveniently) developed a deathly allergy to. He can't count how many times the ironically named Gryffindor has interrupted their lovemaking. He's fairly certain it's more than all three of the kids have -- combined.

"Get off my furniture, wok fodder," he commands calmly, knowing from experience that shouting at the creature will get him nothing but wounded. His nose itches in sensory memory.

Once upon a time it would have been worth it, but… He doesn't heal the way he used to.

The cat looks right at him, says something rude in Cat (something like, "Vrrrpmrw"), turns his butt in Angel's face, flicks his tail derisively, and slinks to the other end of the headboard shelf, where he sits back down and promptly starts cleaning his paws and face. Obviously, coming eye to eye with Angel had soiled him somehow.

Two seconds later, his adoptive father flops down on his back with a disgusted sigh. "That freaks me out."

"I know it does, honey. But... do you think you could put your discomfort aside for the time being?"

He glances down, and sees the frustration written on her face.

"I'm sorry, but I don't like the cat watching us."

Now the sigh is his wife's. "Then pick him up and put him outside the room."

Angel pouts, crosses his arms over his chest. "I feel like he's judging me."

"Angel? He's a cat. He's not judging you."

"So you say."

She snorts and scooches closer, slides up to perch on his broad chest. "Awwww…big hero's afraid of the little kitty cat. That's so cute! And… also sort of sad."

With a scowl, he rolls, dumping her onto the mattress and rising from the bed in one smooth motion – humanity hasn't dulled his agility one bit. "I am not afraid of that vermin-infested scavenger. It stares at me like it has an opinion about everything I do. Excuse me if that makes me uncomfortable."

Buffy gazes up at him -- all six feet, one inch of hard, tanned flesh, like some god emerging from an ocean of white cotton foam – and can totally relate to the compulsion to stare at him. For a minute, she almost forgets how to speak, managing only to mutter, "You're not in a can?"

Angel cocks an eyebrow at her seemingly non-sequitur comment. "I'm not in a what?"

She forces herself to look away so she can think more clearer... ly. Whatever. God, shouldn't she be able to control herself around him after all this time? "What I meant was, if you're not in a can, Gryffie doesn't care about you at all. Why would he take some personal interest in your sexual performance?"

"I told you my theory about your mother."

"Honey, we've been married for 11 years. I think my mother's spirit is comfortable with us having sex."

"Don't be so sure. I don't care how many years Katherine is married, I'll still resent her... personal activities."

"Her sexuality, you mean."

"Buffy? Please."

The cat in question, resenting losing his place as the center of attention, makes a chirping sound and leaps, plopping onto the bed beside them, where he immediately begins rubbing up against Buffy's flank.

She, of course, encourages his rude behavior by petting him. Angel makes a face at the fat furball.

"Stop teasing my baby," Buffy chastises when she catches his grimace, reverting back to baby talk mode as she scratches behind his – the cat's, that is, not Angel's -- ears. "Is mean old Angel being nasty to you, pretty baby? Huh?"

"Thanks a lot. You refuse to believe that he's trying to come between us, but you're okay with the concept that I can hurt his feelings by mocking him in some kind of twisted battle of wills."

She gives him her sunniest smile. "Of course."

"I don't know, Buffy. Sometimes I suspect that you love that cat more than you love me."

He says it lightly. Means it lightly. But she freezes, and a shadow passes over her face, blotting out her sunshine smile for only the barest of moments. "That's not funny. Don't ever say that. Don't even think it."

Her upset is almost palpable (not to mention extreme): her heart stampeding against his hip, the slight tremor of her free hand entwined with his. He sits back down on the bed, looks deeply into her eyes and sees familiar wounds there that never quite seem to heal.

There's a corresponding set on his soul, so that he always feels her pain acutely enough to take his breath away.

He needs it, now.

"I don't," he reassures her. "I never have. I was just teasing you."

How many millions of years have they been together now? What various Hells had they marched, walked or crawled through, individually and as a team? And yet there are still monsters lurking beneath the rosy dream their lives have become that they can't chase away. Why didn't it all just... mend?

He's surprised, sometimes, to be reminded how truly scarred Buffy is. It's a shameful flaw in his character that he still forgets she's not that wide-eyed, wild-spirited, invulnerable little girl he used to know. She's been down, seriously down. Dead. Abandoned over and over again. Torn from...

"Stop it," she commands, and nips his thigh. She's grinning when she glances up at him once more. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to bring on the brood. And I wasn't fishing."

One of her tiny hands reaches up, and he is compelled by the soft gleam in her familiar green eyes to take the unspoken offer, let her pull him back down beside her.

"It's Saturday. You don't have to go running," she reminds him. They save weekend mornings for the two of them. Every other sunrise finds Angel out, competing in an eternal marathon with the fiery orb that was once his most bitter enemy.

Like they're programmed to do it, they both slide downward until they lay side-by-side and face-to-face on the bed they've shared for over a decade.

"Hi, Mr. O'Brien," she greets, framing his face between her hands, her glowing smile back again.

"Hi, Mrs. O'Brien," he returns, along with the expression.

Sometimes, they are mended just by being together. Their hands sneak across the inches of cotton desert separating them to thread their fingers together.

"Say," Buffy goes on, softly so that she doesn't break the gentle bubble around them. As she speaks, her legs whisper forward to accept the space he's opened between his, and in a moment, they're pretzeled from head to toe. Just right. "You wouldn't be interested in material not suitable for younger viewers, would you, handsome stranger?"

"Why, Mrs. O'Brien, are you propositioning me?"

*Plunk.* "Mrrrrrrrrrrow?"

They look upward in tandem, as if compelled to do so, and find that same set of eerie green eyes nailing them with the same cool disdain they'd aimed at Angel earlier from the same perch on the nightstand.

"Just ignore him," Buffy suggests.

Which earns her a glare from her mate. "How can you possibly ignore your mother staring at us while we're having sex?"

"My M—okay, did I mention when you shared your insane theory that your theory's insane?" She doesn't pull out of his embrace, but instead arches backward so the cat is in her line of vision. "Gryffie, get down!" she commands – once the greatest of superheroes, now reduced to one of the voices from a Care Bear cartoon. And the useless gesture is no more effective this time than the thousand times before.

That's pretty much Angel's last straw. Screw patience and compassion. He rises, scooping the cat into his arms on his way up. "Okay, pal. Whether you're my mother-in-law or not, I seriously need you to be gone for a little while, okay? Your Mo-- Buffy and I need some alone time."

Gryffindor is not interested in being escorted politely from the scene. In fact, he objects in the strongest possible terms – loudly and with claws. Angel demonstrates his particular gift with languages by swearing at the feline in four or five non-Romance tongues as he pries the talons out of his flesh and tosses the wretched beithíoch out of the bedroom. Another loud "thump," a frustrated "MEOW!" and the door is shut behind him... and locked with brutal finality.

"Ha. There's a reason why opposable thumbs put me at the top of the food chain, you peanut-brained, bug-eating, oversized rat."

Buffy welcomes him back to bed, quite literally with open arms. "Come here, big, brave monkey-man. Your easy defeat of an inferior animal by brute force makes me all hot."

His lips touch hers before her arms get a chance to finish closing around him. The ritual is so familiar, so sacred, so intrinsic to their beings that it's only moments before they're naked together and two heartbeats from merging ultimately.

"I love you," they whisper together, and she leans up to claim his lips as he eases himself home.

They blend now like colors, like music, like a perfect margarita. Warm and hard against warm and soft, interlocking pieces of a stormy puzzle. He fills her, and she welcomes him; they thrust together, arching in, bowing out, this dance they celebrate more today than they ever have, and less than they will tomorrow.

They made a whole family this way. Painted this portrait of perfection with their love, their devotion and passion and all the years they had to wait for it.

He presses one palm to the base of her spine, bends her into a sensuous 'u', and drives upward into her, his teeth and tongue claiming one puckered nipple. She cries out, tangles her fingers in his hair, helpless to do anything but wrap her legs around his waist and try not to fall off the edge of the universe.

Angel feels the tether snap – his ties to reality obliterated as her super-strong inner muscles flutter around him, drawing him deeper still, impossibly deep and hard and fast as she clings to him for dear life.

"God!" he shouts in celebration, bending down to devour her lips. She sucks his tongue in the same frantic rhythm of his hips against hers. He moans deep in his chest until she lets him go.

Buffy takes control, flips him onto his back and impales herself on him, keening as she explodes, her palms flat on the bed behind her as she bows into a perfect backbend. He grasps her around the waist, pulls himself upright, and clamps down on the juncture of throat and shoulder with blunt teeth as he comes with a long, slow howl muted by her damp flesh.

They float back down together, and when they land, they're still completely entwined, now sated and sleepy. Not even the ragged sound of a cat clawing at the door breaks their blissful peace.

Soft weekend mornings are so good, and more reward than either of them ever dreamed they would get to have.

~

Fini

~

Requests: Angel bothered by being watched by an animal (real or stuffed). SMUT

Restrictions: Angelus, love him but not in a fluffy.

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