These were mostly written for various Open On Sunday challenges. They're arranged in chronological order of writing, with the most recent at the bottom.
That Look
That look of his--like he's waiting for me to shut up so he can say important stuff. It chops me into little embarrassed pieces. Xanderburger with a side of humiliation.
There's another look, sometimes, when he thinks nobody can see. Like I'm the remote-control transformable talking robot in the Toys-R-Us window, and he's the kid outside with no money.
I wonder which look I'd get if I touched him. Would he still think I'm stupid?
He's never said much to me, but the words I remember are: "Get out of my sight."
I wish he hadn't meant them.
Note: This is set during season 2, in the course of which Giles does indeed tell Xander, "Get out of my sight."
Warmth
Vampires are cold all through. They lust, they fuck, they kill, they feed, but love vanishes with the soul.
All Giles' training insists on this. But then there are the things that he knows.
Spike smiles differently, secretly, for him. Reminisces with him about '70s pop groups. Leans into his touch. Sometimes even makes him a cup of tea.
Spike's body warms from contact, during sex and afterwards, when they lie cradled together under the duvet. He could almost be human, then.
Giles holds Spike's warm body, his dead soulless body, and tries to span the gap between his knowledges.
In Control
Rumpling, Giles thinks. I'm rumpling him. Creasing, folding, spindling, disordering, disconcerting.
Giles is mussing that smooth hair, unknotting that school tie, wrinkling that bespoke suit, tearing that hand-tailored shirt. Making that prim voice go husky, unmodulated, raw. Making that ladylike mouth wrap itself around Giles' name, around his fingers and his cock. Breaking that self-command, stripping off that threadbare poise, dismantling that façade of dignity and authority.
Possessing him, entering his untouched body, taking his secrets. Deflowering him. Dirtying him with sweat and saliva and lube and, any moment, semen.
Never again will Wesley imagine that he's in control.
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow
Giles sleeps until the afternoon sun wakes him, doesn't bother showering, forgets the date and sometimes the day. Even the month blurs--who'd know it's January, in this climate?
Last year's calendar hangs on the kitchen wall, forlorn as the balding Christmas trees on every curb. Silver garlands drape limply over his shelves and around the windows, put up in a passing mood of December cheer. Eventually he'll take them down.
Time's not a line, not an arrow, not a journey. Time's a desert expanse, featureless and blank.
He'd welcome an apocalypse, but they never come when you need them.
Note: This is set during season 4, just before "A New Man."
No More Pencils, No More Books
Fall always meant school supplies. In elementary school they felt like treasures--pencils, erasers, glue, markers and glitter and construction paper for art, maybe a Superman lunchbox.
No treasures for high school. Just pens, folders, college-ruled notebooks, a brown leather bookbag he found at Goodwill. A few new clothes from Wal-Mart when his dad was working; otherwise Goodwill again, and weeks of hoping that nobody at school would recognize a cast-off shirt on Xander's back.
This year there's no more school, no shopping trip. Stupid of him to miss that fall feeling.
The seasons change no matter what he feels.
Closed System
Nothing can be created, nothing destroyed. There's only transformation.
Magic and thermodynamics follow the same laws: laws of undifferentiation, of the entropic slide into formlessness. Laws of Chaos. There are three states of matter, two faces of the god. Magic is solid, liquid, gas (bruising, seeping, evanescent); masculine, feminine, but never neuter. There is no steady state.
In magic, Ethan is a god, and he plays dice. Fiddles the grammar of spells, switches ingredients on a whim, draws sigils backwards, leaves gaps in his pentagrams. Invites Chaos in, gives entropy a starting shove.
Whatever he destroys is only made anew.
Note: The First Law of Thermodynamics says that energy is neither created nor destroyed. The Second Law says that systems tend towards entropy: they decay, lose their structure, and eventually collapse.
Dancing
B. dances like she slays, loose and easy in the hips. She moves like the trickle of sweat that glides down her collarbone and disappears into the shadow between her tits. Dances smooth and slick and sexy as worn leather, and why the hell did Faith think she was a priss?
They're sexy together. Guys stare. "Wanna give 'em a show?" Faith asks. Rests a hand on one rolling hip, draws B. closer, moves with her. Would she fuck like this, like dancing?
Closer, and lips brush, open.
And then B.'s gone, jumping into Angel's arms, and Faith's dancing alone.
The Stolen Child
Connor smells of wood and metal, sword hilts and stakes. Sometimes of sweat, sourer and more human. Wesley seeks it out, buries his nose in armpits and groin, and breathes Connor molecule by molecule. He remembers other smells, talcum and baby oil and the milky sweetness of the soft spot. Sometimes, when Angel wasn't watching, he used to nose Connor's infant head like a mother.
Connor used to squirm, then. Now he lies still, barely tolerant, wanting Wesley's tongue or his hand. Afterwards Wesley holds him sleeping and thinks of lullabyes. He's stolen Connor again, and now he'll keep him.
Foreign Objects and Nearly Normal (two linked drabbles for the Open On Sunday challenge: "hands")
Foreign Objects
The splints and bandages are coming off tomorrow. The doctor said his hands should look nearly normal.
Giles can't remember them normal. Only what Angelus made, raw semi-circles where fingernails should have been, splintered white bone-ends like toothy mouths eating through his broken skin.
He likes the bandages, cool and clean, bloodless. Prefers them. His skin should be layered white gauze, his bones metal splints. No nerves to make him scream and plead, no flesh to betray him.
His hands are Angelus's, conquered and won, ruled and destroyed by the torturer-king. Giles will never be able to trust them again.
Nearly Normal
Oz offers to help, but Giles can manage. Weeks of physical therapy have given him these complicated skills: turning on the tap, lighting the burner, filling the mesh ball with leaves, pouring boiling water without accident. His hands ache by the time the tea's ready.
"So you're feeling okay?" Oz asks, kindly.
Talking's the one thing Giles can't do. It breaks all his bones again, crushes him to bleeding helplessness. He stares down at his foreign, ugly hands.
Silence, and his hands are picked up, held in Oz's own. They shake, and Giles trembles, but Oz asks no more questions.
Notes: Despite some thematic similarities, these drabbles aren't related to my story "Unmaking" (or to the universe of It's Like Jazz).
In Comparison
(Doyle/Oz, for the Buffyverse 1000)
Oz is shorter than Doyle. Which is nice, 'cause standing next to Angel's like standing next to a fecking mountain, and sometimes Doyle gets tired of looking runty.
He's skinnier too, skinny as some poor seldom-fed bastard from Doyle's part of Dublin where the tourists don't go.
Scruffier. Even Doyle wouldn't wear that shirt.
And he's much drunker, after six pints of stout and how many whiskies was it again?
He's beyond drunk, he's mangled, he's stocious, and he's still the best kisser Doyle's ever laid a lip on. But not better than Doyle, and Doyle's happy to prove it.
Doubles
(Ethan/Angelus, for the Buffyverse 1000)
Ethan feels the curse break from 5000 miles away. Tastes old shattered magic, like spoiled blood and lace crumbling to dust.
The next day he's in Sunnydale, looking for the thing that was Rupert's very image. That was chaos ordered, a beast wrapped in chains of remorse. Paper chains.
And it's tall and dark and broad in the shoulder, like Rupert. Doppelganger, fetch, shadow, and it smiles when Ethan says, "You'll be the one to ruin him." It lets Ethan suck its cock, fucks Ethan's mouth bloody. Ethan draws sigils in blood and come, puts his blessing on the work.
Cool
(Jonathan/Michael, for the Buffyverse 1000)
Jonathan's the biggest loser in Sunnydale, and Michael's the second biggest, and at first all Jonathan can think is: we are so lame. Well, okay, actually it's kinda cool, the robes and the chanting and all, except Jonathan knows that thinking it's cool only makes him lamer.
But it works. All Jonathan's action figures start to move on their own, swinging swords and charging over the carpet, and it's like a movie but Jonathan isn't watching anymore. He's watching Michael's face and his glossy lipsticked mouth, and Michael reaches for him and they're kissing and yeah, this is so cool.
The Children
(Giles/Larry, Wishverse double drabble for the Buffyverse1000)
Every night, Oz, Nancy, and Larry sleep on Giles' living room floor. He's stopped sending them home after patrol, because that's how Amy was taken, and then Owen.
At first the three of them kept to a strict row of sleeping bags, but now they entangle, arms around waists, legs slung carelessly over hips, heads pillowed on shoulders or bellies. When he can't sleep, which is often, Giles watches them over the loft railing. He'd like to come downstairs, wriggle into the warmth of their bodies, but he's not yet completely lost to propriety. Bad enough that he can't get their interlocked bodies out of his mind, that sometimes he listens for kisses and moans that he never, ever hears. In this dying world, they're innocent as babies; only Giles is corrupt.
He's never touched any of them except to bandage a wound.
Perhaps it's true that people can feel when they're being watched; one night Larry wakes and looks back at him. Slips out of the pile, climbs the stairs silently, says "I thought maybe you were lonely," and his body's big, strong, comforting.
Afterwards Giles dozes in his solid warmth and feels more innocent than he has in years.
Showtime
(Ethan/Devon, for the Buffyverse 1000)
He's gorgeous, decadent, Ethan's type exactly, and when he sings he teases the audience. Sway and twist of the hips, offering, head thrown back and then forward with a growl, sweat gilding his half-bared chest and half-closed eyes, and he holds them all by their cocks and cunts and minds, strokes them with clenching, empty hands.
Hands in his pockets, rubbing his cock, Ethan quests out, finds, and the boy's eyes meet his in strobe-flashed darkness. Primitive magic, crude and urgent, riding the audience's hunger, and Ethan shouts with the boy, comes with him in the last chord's rolling burst.
Far From Home
The first time he changes form, Doyle knows why his mum never wanted him to leave Ireland. "Stop here with your family," she said. "Who else can you depend on?"
She was right. Jesus, but he's got a face only a mother could love.
He's got the filthy face she gave him.
California's gorgeous, full of gorgeous people, but he walks around not looking at them, and the sight of the blue sky makes him sick. He belongs in a Dublin slum flat where the elevators stink of piss.
Later, he dials half her number, then puts the receiver down.
Fade Out
(a Gunn double drabble for Glossolalia)
This is how black men always die. They bleed all over dirty Trojans and cigarette butts. Turn into more sticky slime on the concrete. There's probably not an alley in LA that a brother hasn't died in.
Gunn was never going to die like this. When momma was sick and Alonna was hungry and he could've fixed it all by moving a few rocks, he said no. 'Cause that ends in bullets. 'Cause Gunn was meant to kill monsters, not be one.
Nothing left now but monsters. Monsters to fight and the monsters he fights beside.
The monster he is, corporate vampire, a thing that sucked somebody else's knowledge. Nothing human in him, just tax codes and operettas and dust, and he sold Fred for this.
Fred's dead, Wesley's dead. Nobody can stay human and live.
Maybe Gunn's already dead, maybe he died when he signed those papers, got that big office, tried to duck fate and be something more than muscle. Black muscle. Field slave, sharecropper, clocker, vampire huntermaybe there was never any difference.
Maybe this is just another gang war, two sets of killers wanting the same turf.
Maybe he was always meant to die like this.
Just Another California Summer
Every day the sky's blue, flawless and flat as paint. Every day the air stinks of tarry asphalt, dust, and dying flowers. It smells like Buffy's grave, like dirt so dry it crumbled and rained off their shovels as they dug.
Every day it's hot. Giles wanders Sunnydale, sweating, burning, watching people eat ice cream while Buffy lies dead. He wishes he knew what kind she liked. He should have bought her ice cream, taken her to that skating show, not laughed at her shoes. He knew she'd die young, after all.
She should be here for this perfect summer.
Ars Memoriae
Wesley remembers everything now. Remembers the baby's weight in his arms, the blood-slippery flaps of his cut throat between his clutching fingers, the burnt-bleach stink of the hospital pillowcase--an awful smell for a last breath. Remembers being Judas and scapegoat and exile.
So it shouldn't matter, this other thing he remembers. Jasmine's days, honey-thick with joy. With love.
He loved everyone, but Gunn more than all. Never apart, day or night, eating and working and bedding together. The world finally right.
Nothing in his wounded memory feels real but that.
He'll remember 'til he dies.
Let it be soon.
Notes: For Glimmergirl, who asked for Wes in AtS season 5.
Sugar Rush
"Does anybody ever eat candy canes?" Oz asks, hanging one on a neglected, tinsel-less branch.
"I ate seven this one time when I was a kid," Xander answers from behind the tangle of Christmas lights he's unwinding. "You would not believe the throwing up."
"So that's a no."
"Mmm-hmm." Damn these wires. Maybe they should go for a low-tech tree. "Too bad, because if I remember--from before the throwing up--they're pretty tasty."
Oz unwraps one, gives it a slow lick, slides it into his mouth. "Minty."
"And delicious."
"Good for kissing."
"You think?"
"C'mere and we'll find out."
Notes: For Dolores, who asked for Oz/Xander and candy canes.
Travel Broadens the Mind
Oz knows the word for "werewolf" in eleven different languages (twelve if you count Mandarin and Cantonese separately). He knows that one hundred paise make one rupee and that in Eastern Europe, black market exchange rates are always better.
He knows that you can't eat olives or bananas straight from the tree, no matter how good they look. He knows he's small and skinny enough that strangers will buy him food, sometimes. And that sometimes they want sex afterwards.
He still doesn't know how to stop being a werewolf. And he doesn't know if he'll ever get to go home.
Notes: For Serena Kitt, who asked for Oz and olives.
Overcome
"Hay fever," Wesley says, and "No, don't take the flowers away," and there's fuss and Giles looks uncomfortable and when is he going to learn to say thank you like a sensible person? I'm sorry is easy, he's had plenty of dressing-downs for practice, and his eyes stay dry. No, it's only when people are kind that he's such a damned fool.
Kindness is a strange, unnerving thing all around. Giles detested him when he was doing his job properly, bringing two undisciplined Slayers back into the Council fold. Now, when one's comatose and one's rebelled and Wesley's in hospital with an inglorious broken tailbone, here's Giles with African violets and compliments on his bravery.
Perhaps Giles can only like him now that he's failed.
Giles doesn't say anything about his tears. Giles sits at his bedside and they talk about motorbikes, and when Giles laughs, Wesley notices again that he's an awfully good-looking man.
He starts to blush, of course. No explaining this away as a bit of dust in his eye.
This will test the limits of Giles' kindness.
Which are broader, it seems, that Wesley imagined, because Giles lays four warm fingertips on the back of Wesley's hand and looks at him, faintly smiling.
And Wesley thinks that failure, like kindness, is a complicated thing.
Notes: At 218 words, this isn't really a drabble. But it's so short that I couldn't be arsed to give it its own page, so here it is.
Tempest-Tossed
(Set in early season 5 of AtS, shortly after Spike becomes corporeal again.)
Wesley loves storms. The battering-ram winds, the brutal lightning, the rain like an over-ended sea, elements displaced and tumbling. He loves the hot-and-cold of fear, and how the world afterwards is trampled and yet cleansed.
And Spike, in his tornado-fury of delight, is a storm. So Wesley laughs at the slivered glass, the groaning half-conscious men, the barman calling 911, the favorite haunt he can never come back to.
"I can feel," Spike whispers, kissing Wesley against cracked paneling. "I can touch."
Wesley aches for gales, for ruin, for the calm that only comes after shattering. He says, "Touch me."
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