Untitled fic
Feb. 16th, 2005 08:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lunabee34Okay, so I thought I'd try a little experiment. Everything I've written up to this point (which, admittedly is not much) has been outlined and drafted to death before I posted any of it. I'm going to try writing in small bits and letting the fic take the writing where it will. Hopefully this will work.
I also don't have a title for this. Any help in that regard would be greatly appreciated.
Pairing: Spike/Xander, eventually
Rating: NC-17, eventually
Beta:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
kitty_poker1 who deserves many snogs for all the help
Author's Notes: This fic takes place post-Chosen and picks up specifically immediately after the "Angel" ep "Damage." I played with the time-line a little. Here, about a year has passed between the destruction of Sunnydale and Andrew's visit to L.A.
Untitled
Xander Harris sat on the damp sand, chilly waves slowly licking up his outstretched ankles. He’d found the small, private niche formed by an outcropping of rocks on the second day he’d been in Nerja. Behind the boulders, a Mediterranean beach teemed with tourists—American college students slathering oil on each others’ backs and begging for more ice in their precious Cokes; old women, locals, naked from the waist up, their breasts long and flat against their stomachs; families building sandcastles and combing the shoreline for shells and sea-smoothed bits of glass. But inside this circle of rocks, Xander was alone. The tiny headphones in his ears blocked out the noise from the beach, and the bottle of wine propped in the sand blurred the rest.
He’d left Africa a week ago. The newly re-formed Watchers’ Council had pulled him out when the U. N. refused to consider the bloodshed in Darfur genocide. Giles had said on the phone in an accent thickened from nearly a year spent back in London, “Good Lord, Xander. Get out of there. I won’t take no for an answer.” And he hadn’t, not even when Xander had protested that Sudan wasn’t the only African nation where Willow had sensed emerging Slayers; he could go to South Africa or Egypt and keep busy until Sudan was safer. Instead, he’d found himself in an airport buying a ticket for the first city that caught his eye—Malaga, Spain. A short bus ride to Nerja later, and he was eating paella in a seaside restaurant and planning long, lazy days watching the surf.
Nine months in Africa had changed the former Scooby. His body was hard and lean, his hair much longer than he’d worn it in Sunnydale. He had tan lines on his face, thin strips of skin that had paled under the straps of his eye patch. However, the most noticeable change in Xander Harris wasn’t something an observer could have pinpointed, exactly. He’d changed physically, sure, but the things he’d seen in Africa had left a mark on him as well.
Sunnydale had been a kind of alternate universe, Xander now realized. A little anomaly on this planet called Earth. Bad things happened in Sunnydale, but not real world bad things. Xander had seen death, too much death, before his sojourn to the Dark Continent. He had first-hand knowledge of loss and despair. Still, he found Africa shocking. The bodies leached of blood, not through twin punctures in the neck, but gunfire. Refugee camps stuffed with too many people trying to eat/shit/heal/love/play/SURVIVE in too little space. An entire fucking continent dying of an STD, and not the sort to be magicked away, but the kind that left mothers sobbing, “What else do I feed my babies? There’s no formula. No clean water to mix it with, anyway. I can either watch them starve or kill them with my milk?” Xander saw those babies sometimes when he closed his eye, the same way he could still taste in the back of his throat the settling dust of Sunnydale. He wore that intangible, indistinguishable mark pain leaves somewhere on the face; in the square set of his jaw, maybe, or the slow, sad curve of his smile.
Xander drank a mouthful of wine and listened to the opening bars of a song that never failed to remind him of Sunnydale and the people he’d known there.
Oh, the city rain
It floods the city streets
And in my city bed
Out of my fucking head
Is it snowing in space?
God, I wish I could talk to you
Is it snowing in space?
And all the city snow
Freezes the Chelsea hotel
It stones the Chelsea girls
It stones the Chelsea boys
Is it snowing in space?
God, I wish I could talk to you
Is it snowing in space?
Xander had barely spoken to the remnants of the Sunnydale gang since they’d left the crater in the earth to forge new lives, or some other such end-of-the-book nonsense. He’d wanted to talk to them, lying in his cot in the dark, draped in mosquito netting. He’d had exactly a million and one imaginary conversations with his friends since he’d gotten on that plane at Heathrow headed for parts unknown. He told them how he took his malaria pills every day, without fail, that sharp medicinal taste as much a part of him now as anything else. How he’d ordered a gin and tonic on the flight to Malaga, and left it untouched once the bitter draw of quinine touched his lips. Those little things, things he noticed that would interest Willow or make Buffy laugh. But the few times he’d tried to call them, his throat felt like it was closing and he couldn’t find any words, just mumbled greetings and silence that went on too long before someone finally said goodbye. Dawn, he wrote to without fail, never leaving her a forwarding address.
His reticence wasn’t their fault, not really. Buffy was flitting around Italy with some immortal named the Immortal. How original and true to form for her. She had decided that she was going to live, Dawn was going to live, everybody was fucking going to live, goddamnit! And that’s what she was doing. Living. Getting a taste of what it was like for all the girls who couldn’t smash bricks into powder with a well-manicured fist. Willow was still in South America with Kennedy. That continued relationship surprised Xander, but he saw it for what it was. No child of the Hellmouth ever passed something that looked like it could be, might be, should be love without grabbing hold with two hands. Xander really had no idea what Giles was doing; the older man spoke to him in his capacity as current head of the Council and occasionally threw in a “Take care.” Xander thought Giles always sounded busy, harried. They were rebuilding the Council from its smoldering ruins, after all.
Xander’s mood shifted as the singer began the third verse of the song.
How does your body feel today?
I forgot to ask
Genius in a hospital bed with brier patch hair
It just isn’t fair
Taking bullets for a team of bad poets
How is it up there?
Taking bullets for the team
I really miss you
I fucked you over a million times
I fucked you over a million times
I fucked you over a million times and you died
You died
You died
You really died.*
This was the part of the song where he thought about the people they’d left in the bottom of that hole. Anya, who he’d loved more than he ever thought was possible. The girl he’d once upon a time hoped would make all his dreams come true. And if he could only think about her in clichés, who was going to call him on it? In the days leading up to the final battle with the First, Xander had made a kind of peace with Anya. She’d forgiven him for leaving her and forgiven herself for the messy swathe she’d cut in human lives across the centuries. When she’d had the chance to flee, she didn’t. Instead, she’d reached deeply inside her mortal frame for the dignity that allowed her to face death with a joke and a sword tightly gripped in her sweating palms. That’s the part that got Xander. He never really thought Anya would die—himself maybe, or Buffy again, and surely some of the Potentials. But not Anya. She’d done the right thing, chosen humanity, chosen the good fight. How could she die? He was glad he hadn’t found her body, hadn’t seen her face locked in the pain of her final moments. Xander could almost smile, thinking his girl finally had answers to all those endless questions about heavenly dimensions.
I fucked you over a million times and you died
Now, that line was for Spike, the strangest vampire that Xander believed had ever, or would ever, walk this earth. Xander hadn’t seen Spike die, either, but he’d heard Buffy tell the tale to Dawn. The Slayer had wiped her little sister’s tears and told her that Spike had glowed with the same light she remembered from her stay in heaven. She said that, in the seconds before he died, she could see his soul, shining even more brightly than that holy light. Most importantly, Spike had given his love and goodbyes to them all, Dawn especially. Xander was certain that Buffy was taking a bit of license with the story from the hard edge of pain she tried to keep from her eyes, but Dawn hadn’t questioned her sister. Just hugged her knees tightly to her chest and stared out the window as the bus crossed state lines.
Though he didn’t understand it, Spike’s death filled Xander with even more regret than Anya’s. He’d continually baited Spike since he’d become an unwilling Scooby. He’d tied the vampire to a chair for hours on end, forced him to beg for his food, and laughed at his slow emasculation. He’d refused to trust him, even after Spike had clearly shown that he loved Dawn, that he would literally die to protect her. He made himself believe that Anya and Spike sleeping together was something more sinister than two very lonely people trying for a short time to touch something that didn’t squeeze bruising hands around their hearts. Towards the end, they’d almost been friends. If Sunnydale was still standing, he might be playing pool at the Bronze with Spike right now, letting bygones be bygones. But the Big Bad was dead, dust. Xander felt the loss keenly. He’d fucked Spike over a million times. Anya, he’d only fucked over the once. Maybe that was the difference.
Suddenly, the phone in his pocket rang. Xander checked the caller I.D. and grinned. Andrew.
Andrew was the one exception to his code of silence. The two talked regularly on the phone, and Andrew had even spent a few days with Xander in Africa after Xander had found a new Slayer willing to relocate to London for training. They’d gotten drunk on something sweet and spent the night trying to outdo each other with ghost stories. The U. N. aid workers had laughed uneasily as the tales got more horrifying, never dreaming that each bit of terror was a page ripped right from the young men’s lives.
Andrew was, surprisingly, the most well-adjusted to life after the Hellmouth. Xander knew Andrew carried scars. Although he’d never asked, Xander was fairly certain that Andrew had been in love with Warren, maybe even Jonathon, too. Andrew still blamed himself for Anya’s death, though it now took half a bottle of tequila for him to admit that. Somehow, he’d managed to gather all the pain inside himself and worry it like a pearl under his skin, until it was something tangible he could hold or put down as he wished. He threw himself wholeheartedly into the mission of rebuilding the Council. He squawked over the shiny toys the Watchers gave him. He sent Xander boxes of books and cartons of cigarettes to trade in the markets. The annoying virgin was no longer quite so annoying. And probably not a virgin anymore either, if his tales of forays into the London nightlife could be believed.
“Xander, where are you?”
“In Spain. Sitting on the beach, drinking wine, and scaring the locals with the pirate get-up. You?”
“On a plane back to London. Listen, Xander . . .” Andrew paused. Xander could hear his Adam’s apple working furiously and guessed that whatever his friend had to say merited one huge drink before he could spit out the words. “I went to L. A. to see Angel. They had a crazy, newbie Slayer on the loose, and the Council sent me to bring her back to London for safe-keeping and the strongest dose of magical Xanax known to mankind. While I was there, I found out some things.”
“What kind of things?” Xander’s heartbeat sped up. Andrew never talked this seriously for anything other than apocalypses or the all important Deep Space Nine vs. Voyager debate. “C’mon, Andrew. The suspense is killing me.”
“It’s Spike. He’s alive.” Andrew paused for dramatic effect, then frowned when his pronouncement was met with silence. “Xander. Xander! Are you still on the line?”
TBC
*"City Rain, City Streets" by Ryan Adams
I also don't have a title for this. Any help in that regard would be greatly appreciated.
Pairing: Spike/Xander, eventually
Rating: NC-17, eventually
Beta:
kitty_poker1 who deserves many snogs for all the helpAuthor's Notes: This fic takes place post-Chosen and picks up specifically immediately after the "Angel" ep "Damage." I played with the time-line a little. Here, about a year has passed between the destruction of Sunnydale and Andrew's visit to L.A.
Untitled
Xander Harris sat on the damp sand, chilly waves slowly licking up his outstretched ankles. He’d found the small, private niche formed by an outcropping of rocks on the second day he’d been in Nerja. Behind the boulders, a Mediterranean beach teemed with tourists—American college students slathering oil on each others’ backs and begging for more ice in their precious Cokes; old women, locals, naked from the waist up, their breasts long and flat against their stomachs; families building sandcastles and combing the shoreline for shells and sea-smoothed bits of glass. But inside this circle of rocks, Xander was alone. The tiny headphones in his ears blocked out the noise from the beach, and the bottle of wine propped in the sand blurred the rest.
He’d left Africa a week ago. The newly re-formed Watchers’ Council had pulled him out when the U. N. refused to consider the bloodshed in Darfur genocide. Giles had said on the phone in an accent thickened from nearly a year spent back in London, “Good Lord, Xander. Get out of there. I won’t take no for an answer.” And he hadn’t, not even when Xander had protested that Sudan wasn’t the only African nation where Willow had sensed emerging Slayers; he could go to South Africa or Egypt and keep busy until Sudan was safer. Instead, he’d found himself in an airport buying a ticket for the first city that caught his eye—Malaga, Spain. A short bus ride to Nerja later, and he was eating paella in a seaside restaurant and planning long, lazy days watching the surf.
Nine months in Africa had changed the former Scooby. His body was hard and lean, his hair much longer than he’d worn it in Sunnydale. He had tan lines on his face, thin strips of skin that had paled under the straps of his eye patch. However, the most noticeable change in Xander Harris wasn’t something an observer could have pinpointed, exactly. He’d changed physically, sure, but the things he’d seen in Africa had left a mark on him as well.
Sunnydale had been a kind of alternate universe, Xander now realized. A little anomaly on this planet called Earth. Bad things happened in Sunnydale, but not real world bad things. Xander had seen death, too much death, before his sojourn to the Dark Continent. He had first-hand knowledge of loss and despair. Still, he found Africa shocking. The bodies leached of blood, not through twin punctures in the neck, but gunfire. Refugee camps stuffed with too many people trying to eat/shit/heal/love/play/SURVIVE in too little space. An entire fucking continent dying of an STD, and not the sort to be magicked away, but the kind that left mothers sobbing, “What else do I feed my babies? There’s no formula. No clean water to mix it with, anyway. I can either watch them starve or kill them with my milk?” Xander saw those babies sometimes when he closed his eye, the same way he could still taste in the back of his throat the settling dust of Sunnydale. He wore that intangible, indistinguishable mark pain leaves somewhere on the face; in the square set of his jaw, maybe, or the slow, sad curve of his smile.
Xander drank a mouthful of wine and listened to the opening bars of a song that never failed to remind him of Sunnydale and the people he’d known there.
Oh, the city rain
It floods the city streets
And in my city bed
Out of my fucking head
Is it snowing in space?
God, I wish I could talk to you
Is it snowing in space?
And all the city snow
Freezes the Chelsea hotel
It stones the Chelsea girls
It stones the Chelsea boys
Is it snowing in space?
God, I wish I could talk to you
Is it snowing in space?
Xander had barely spoken to the remnants of the Sunnydale gang since they’d left the crater in the earth to forge new lives, or some other such end-of-the-book nonsense. He’d wanted to talk to them, lying in his cot in the dark, draped in mosquito netting. He’d had exactly a million and one imaginary conversations with his friends since he’d gotten on that plane at Heathrow headed for parts unknown. He told them how he took his malaria pills every day, without fail, that sharp medicinal taste as much a part of him now as anything else. How he’d ordered a gin and tonic on the flight to Malaga, and left it untouched once the bitter draw of quinine touched his lips. Those little things, things he noticed that would interest Willow or make Buffy laugh. But the few times he’d tried to call them, his throat felt like it was closing and he couldn’t find any words, just mumbled greetings and silence that went on too long before someone finally said goodbye. Dawn, he wrote to without fail, never leaving her a forwarding address.
His reticence wasn’t their fault, not really. Buffy was flitting around Italy with some immortal named the Immortal. How original and true to form for her. She had decided that she was going to live, Dawn was going to live, everybody was fucking going to live, goddamnit! And that’s what she was doing. Living. Getting a taste of what it was like for all the girls who couldn’t smash bricks into powder with a well-manicured fist. Willow was still in South America with Kennedy. That continued relationship surprised Xander, but he saw it for what it was. No child of the Hellmouth ever passed something that looked like it could be, might be, should be love without grabbing hold with two hands. Xander really had no idea what Giles was doing; the older man spoke to him in his capacity as current head of the Council and occasionally threw in a “Take care.” Xander thought Giles always sounded busy, harried. They were rebuilding the Council from its smoldering ruins, after all.
Xander’s mood shifted as the singer began the third verse of the song.
How does your body feel today?
I forgot to ask
Genius in a hospital bed with brier patch hair
It just isn’t fair
Taking bullets for a team of bad poets
How is it up there?
Taking bullets for the team
I really miss you
I fucked you over a million times
I fucked you over a million times
I fucked you over a million times and you died
You died
You died
You really died.*
This was the part of the song where he thought about the people they’d left in the bottom of that hole. Anya, who he’d loved more than he ever thought was possible. The girl he’d once upon a time hoped would make all his dreams come true. And if he could only think about her in clichés, who was going to call him on it? In the days leading up to the final battle with the First, Xander had made a kind of peace with Anya. She’d forgiven him for leaving her and forgiven herself for the messy swathe she’d cut in human lives across the centuries. When she’d had the chance to flee, she didn’t. Instead, she’d reached deeply inside her mortal frame for the dignity that allowed her to face death with a joke and a sword tightly gripped in her sweating palms. That’s the part that got Xander. He never really thought Anya would die—himself maybe, or Buffy again, and surely some of the Potentials. But not Anya. She’d done the right thing, chosen humanity, chosen the good fight. How could she die? He was glad he hadn’t found her body, hadn’t seen her face locked in the pain of her final moments. Xander could almost smile, thinking his girl finally had answers to all those endless questions about heavenly dimensions.
I fucked you over a million times and you died
Now, that line was for Spike, the strangest vampire that Xander believed had ever, or would ever, walk this earth. Xander hadn’t seen Spike die, either, but he’d heard Buffy tell the tale to Dawn. The Slayer had wiped her little sister’s tears and told her that Spike had glowed with the same light she remembered from her stay in heaven. She said that, in the seconds before he died, she could see his soul, shining even more brightly than that holy light. Most importantly, Spike had given his love and goodbyes to them all, Dawn especially. Xander was certain that Buffy was taking a bit of license with the story from the hard edge of pain she tried to keep from her eyes, but Dawn hadn’t questioned her sister. Just hugged her knees tightly to her chest and stared out the window as the bus crossed state lines.
Though he didn’t understand it, Spike’s death filled Xander with even more regret than Anya’s. He’d continually baited Spike since he’d become an unwilling Scooby. He’d tied the vampire to a chair for hours on end, forced him to beg for his food, and laughed at his slow emasculation. He’d refused to trust him, even after Spike had clearly shown that he loved Dawn, that he would literally die to protect her. He made himself believe that Anya and Spike sleeping together was something more sinister than two very lonely people trying for a short time to touch something that didn’t squeeze bruising hands around their hearts. Towards the end, they’d almost been friends. If Sunnydale was still standing, he might be playing pool at the Bronze with Spike right now, letting bygones be bygones. But the Big Bad was dead, dust. Xander felt the loss keenly. He’d fucked Spike over a million times. Anya, he’d only fucked over the once. Maybe that was the difference.
Suddenly, the phone in his pocket rang. Xander checked the caller I.D. and grinned. Andrew.
Andrew was the one exception to his code of silence. The two talked regularly on the phone, and Andrew had even spent a few days with Xander in Africa after Xander had found a new Slayer willing to relocate to London for training. They’d gotten drunk on something sweet and spent the night trying to outdo each other with ghost stories. The U. N. aid workers had laughed uneasily as the tales got more horrifying, never dreaming that each bit of terror was a page ripped right from the young men’s lives.
Andrew was, surprisingly, the most well-adjusted to life after the Hellmouth. Xander knew Andrew carried scars. Although he’d never asked, Xander was fairly certain that Andrew had been in love with Warren, maybe even Jonathon, too. Andrew still blamed himself for Anya’s death, though it now took half a bottle of tequila for him to admit that. Somehow, he’d managed to gather all the pain inside himself and worry it like a pearl under his skin, until it was something tangible he could hold or put down as he wished. He threw himself wholeheartedly into the mission of rebuilding the Council. He squawked over the shiny toys the Watchers gave him. He sent Xander boxes of books and cartons of cigarettes to trade in the markets. The annoying virgin was no longer quite so annoying. And probably not a virgin anymore either, if his tales of forays into the London nightlife could be believed.
“Xander, where are you?”
“In Spain. Sitting on the beach, drinking wine, and scaring the locals with the pirate get-up. You?”
“On a plane back to London. Listen, Xander . . .” Andrew paused. Xander could hear his Adam’s apple working furiously and guessed that whatever his friend had to say merited one huge drink before he could spit out the words. “I went to L. A. to see Angel. They had a crazy, newbie Slayer on the loose, and the Council sent me to bring her back to London for safe-keeping and the strongest dose of magical Xanax known to mankind. While I was there, I found out some things.”
“What kind of things?” Xander’s heartbeat sped up. Andrew never talked this seriously for anything other than apocalypses or the all important Deep Space Nine vs. Voyager debate. “C’mon, Andrew. The suspense is killing me.”
“It’s Spike. He’s alive.” Andrew paused for dramatic effect, then frowned when his pronouncement was met with silence. “Xander. Xander! Are you still on the line?”
TBC
*"City Rain, City Streets" by Ryan Adams
