Eternal Love
Chapter Three
DISCLAIMER: We own nothing except our original story idea. The show Buffy the Vampire Slayer and all of it’s characters belong to Joss, Mutant Enemy, 20th Century Fox, et al.
PAIRING: B/R
RATING: PG-13 for some mild sexual situations and sexual thoughts.
SPOILERS: Season 5, up to and including “The Gift.”
SUMMARY: Buffy ends up in a cabin in the woods after jumping off of the tower. Riley is there with her and things are very mysterious.
AUTHORS' NOTE: Anything in bold plus italics is a flashback.
DISTRIBUTION: THC & Beau, anyone else, ask and ye shall receive.
Buffy snuggled closer to Riley and began her tale.
“Well, you remember Glory, right?” She asked him.
“Powerful woman that you fought a couple of times, right? You thought maybe she was some kind of demon, but you weren’t sure?”
“That’s the one,” Buffy replied. “Only, it turns out that she wasn’t a demon at all. She was a hell god who got exiled from her dimension by some of the other hell gods that lived there.”
“Wait a minute!” Riley exclaimed. “She was a GOD??”
“Apparently so, at least that’s what the Council told us when they dropped in for an impromptu visit. Our research had failed to turn up anything on Glory.”
“The Council came to visit, as in the Watcher’s Council? The one that you quit?”
“Riley! I’m never going to finish my story if you keep interrupting!”
“Sorry,” he apologized. “It just seems like a whole helluva lot happened after I left.”
“You haven’t heard the half of it yet. But, yes, it was *that* Council.”
Buffy took a moment to shift around a bit on the couch. She had had her right leg tucked up under her and it was falling asleep. Riley took her right foot into his lap and began massaging it to help bring back the circulation.
She smiled at his thoughtfulness. He had always been so good to her, and she had never taken the time to appreciate it.
“So, Glory was an exiled hell god, and it seems that she had come to our reality looking for the Key.”
“A key?” Riley interrupted. “Sorry,” he added whenever Buffy gave him a perturbed look. “I know I said that I’d be quiet.”
“Not *a* key, *the* Key,” Buffy patiently explained. This key was apparently some form of mystical energy that could open portals between dimensions. Glory needed it to get back to her dimension.”
She placed her other foot into Riley’s lap to see if he would massage it, too. Of course he did, and that caused her to smile again before continuing her story.
“You will never believe who the Key was…” When he didn’t say anything, she added, “It’s okay, you can speak this time.”
Riley couldn’t help but grin at her. “So, you are telling me that the Key was a person? How is that possible?”
“Yes, the Key had been given human form by this group of monks who were sworn to protect it. Glory was closing in on them, so they did some kind of spell to make this energy human. They sent it to me to protect, since I’m the Slayer.”
His curiosity was definitely piqued. “So, who was this Key?”
“Dawn,” she replied simply.
“Wait a minute! Dawn, as in your cute little sister, Dawn? Dawn, as in the one who was always spying on us when we were making out?”
“One and the same.”
“But, how? I mean, we all have memories of her. How is it possible that she just suddenly appeared from out of the blue?”
“The spell that the monks performed to make the Key human also apparently gave me and my mom and everyone else memories of Dawn. She had the same memories, and she also had no idea what she was. As far as she knew, she was my kid sister, and my parents were her parents, too.”
“For awhile, only Giles and I knew what Dawn really was. My mom kind of figured it out on her own, and she asked me about it right before she went into surgery. I told her the truth, and she made me promise to take care of Dawn if anything should happen to her.”
“How is your mom, by the way?” Riley asked. He knew he wasn’t supposed to interrupt, but he wanted to know how Joyce was faring.
Tears escaped the corners of Buffy’s eyes and rolled down her cheeks. When she reached up to brush them away, Riley realized that she was crying. He sat up and reached for her, cupping her face in his hands.
“Hey, what is it? What’s wrong?”
“M-My mom, she’s dead, Riley.” Buffy began to sob. She had thought that she was beginning to get over some of the pain of losing her mom, but having to tell Riley about it opened up old wounds.
A look of disbelief crossed his face. “She’s dead? When, how? I mean, she was fine when I left Sunnydale. The doctors thought that they got all of the tumor.”
She took a couple of minutes to compose herself. Riley pulled her into his arms, holding her and stroking her back.
“She was fine,” Buffy finally answered. “She had gone back to work with a clean bill of health from her doctors. I came home one afternoon to find her lying on the couch. I called out to her, but she didn’t answer me. She was so still, and when I went over to her and touched her, she was already cold.”
The tears came again and she buried her face in his chest, crying as if she’d never stop. Riley tightened his hold on her and began to rock her back and forth in his arms.
After what seemed like a long time, she stopped crying and sat up. Her eyes were red-rimmed and puffy and her face was streaked with tears. She reached out to touch Riley’s now damp tee shirt.
“I-I’m sorry. I got your shirt all wet…”
“Hey, it’s okay,” he softly reassured her. “I have plenty more shirts upstairs.” He reached for her again and this time he pulled her into his lap, cuddling her up against him. “I am so very sorry, Buffy. I wished to god that I could have been there with you when it happened. It was stupid of me to ever leave you.”
She reached up and began to trace the strong line of his jaw, feeling stubble beneath her fingertips. “It’s okay, Riley. You had no way of knowing what would happen after you left, and I don’t blame you for leaving like you did. I really don’t.”
“I guess we both have some regrets, huh?” He softly asked.
“Yeah, I think we do. There isn’t anything we can do about them now, though, except to say that we’re sorry.”
“Well, then, I’m sorry, Buffy. I’m sorry that I let those vampires feed from me. I’m sorry that I allowed myself to feel shut out of your life, which is why I turned to the vamps in the first place. Most of all, I’m sorry that I left the way I did instead of sticking around and trying to work things out.”
“I’m sorry, too, Riley, more than you will ever know. I’m sorry that I got so caught up in my own problems that I couldn’t see yours. I’m sorry that I never loved you the way that I should have. Finally, I’m sorry that I didn’t make it to the helicopter in time. I had so many things that I wanted to say to you that night, and I never got the chance to say them.”
Riley now had tears forming in his own eyes. One of them escaped and trailed down his cheek. Buffy leaned up just a bit and placed her lips on his skin, absorbing his sorrow. She pulled back a bit and looked at him, waiting for his reaction.
A shiver ran through Riley at the feel of her mouth on him. He placed a hand on the back of her head, his fingers entwining in her hair, and pulled her to him. His mouth covered hers in a kiss. When she didn’t pull away, he grew a bit bolder in his advances, and his tongue darted out, seeking entrance. Her mouth opened beneath his, granting him access. For long moments, their tongues dueled with each other, but eventually they were forced to pull apart in order to breathe.
Buffy’s heart was racing. An electric current had coursed through her veins as his tongue had explored her mouth. A blush crept into her cheeks as she realized that her nipples were hard little pebbles beneath her shirt and the spot between her legs was damp with her juices.
“Wow,” she replied, staring at Riley in awe.
“Yeah,” he agreed. His heart was beating so hard within the confines of his chest that he was certain it was going to burst through his skin. The room suddenly felt way too warm and he had a hard on that was threatening to break the zipper of his jeans.
She wanted Riley. God, how she wanted him, but a part of her felt hesitant and even a little bit afraid. She couldn’t help but recall his words to her in the training room several months ago whenever he had confessed to her about getting bit by the female vampires.
"They made me feel something. Something I didn’t even know I was missing until-"
She had cut him off, not wanting to hear anymore. He had persisted, though, insisting that she needed to hear what he had to say.
"Fine. Tell me about your whores. Tell me what on earth they’ve been giving you that I can’t." She had been dying inside as she spoke those words to him. Here was one more man who apparently didn’t think she was very good in bed.
"They *needed* me, Buffy."
"They didn't need you, they needed your money."
"No, on some basic level it was about me. My blood. My body. When they bit me, it was beyond passion… They wanted to devour me, all of me-"
Again, she had tried to cut him off, for she couldn’t stand to hear anymore. Riley had always been one for finishing what he started, though.
"It wasn’t real. I know. It was just physical. But the fact that I craved it, that I kept going back… Even if it was fleeting – they made me feel like they had such hunger for me."
Stupidly, she had asked him, “And I don’t, make you feel that way?”
He hadn’t answered her, but he hadn’t needed to. The look on his face had told her all that she needed to know.
Because of that, because of what had happened between them in the training room, she was scared of going to bed with him now. What if nothing had changed? What if she still wasn’t what Riley wanted, what he needed? What then?
Buffy moved off of his lap and took a seat on the couch next to him. She ran a careless hand through her hair and focused on staring at the fire.
“I guess I should finish telling you the story of how I came to jump off of a tower…”
Riley had sensed the change in her even before she’d left his lap. He had felt her body tense up and he wasn’t oblivious to the fact that she had seemed to zone out on him. He wasn’t sure where she had gone, mentally speaking, but apparently it wasn’t good.
“Buffy, what’s wrong? One minute we were kissing, and the next, you’re practically sitting on the other end of the couch from me…”
“It’s… can we not talk about it right now, Riley? Please? I’d rather just finish telling you about Dawnie and Glory.”
“Okay,” he reluctantly agreed. “But, we *will* talk about it later.”
She merely nodded, even though she didn’t agree with him. For now, though, pretending to agree was better than arguing with him.
“Now, where was I in my story?”
“Let’s see, Dawn was the Key that Glory needed,” Riley answered.
“Right. Well, eventually, Giles and I were forced to tell the rest of the gang, but we didn’t tell Dawn. She found out anyway. Seems like she had Spike help her break into the Magic Box one night and she found Giles’ journal in which he’d been writing about what was going on.”
“How did she take the news?”
Buffy grunted. “Not well, not well at all. She acted out in a *big* way. She totally wigged on us, screamed ugly things at Mom and me, and even cut her arm.”
“Eventually, she seemed to accept it, though. Then, Mom died, and that threw both of us into a tailspin. We were just learning how to cope when Glory discovered that Dawn was the Key. We had to go on the lam in order to try and protect her. The whole gang went with us, including Spike.”
“Spike went with you?!”
“Yes, Spike went. I knew that if anything happened to me, he’d be the only one strong enough to fight Glory. He also managed to get the RV that we escaped in.”
She studied Riley’s face for a moment. “Riley Finn! Are you jealous of Spike?”
“Yes… no… hell, I don’t know!”
“Well, you can put your mind at ease,” she quickly assured him. “There was never anything between Spike and me, at least not as far as I am concerned.”
“So, even though we ran away, Glory managed to find us anyway, and she got Dawn.” Buffy had purposely omitted the whole part about Ben. It was just too confusing to try and explain how Ben and Glory had shared a body. Plus, after the way Riley had reacted about Spike, Buffy didn’t even want to tell him that she’d briefly been interested in Ben in a romantic sense.
“I kind of went catatonic after that,” she continued. “It was just all too much for me to take and I retreated to inside of myself. Willow used magic to reach me and draw me back out.”
“We continued to research Glory, and the more we learned about her, the less we liked it. It seems as if Dawn’s blood is what was needed to open a portal between dimensions. Her blood wasn’t just going to open a portal to Glory’s home dimension, though, but to all hell dimensions.”
“So, what did you do?” Riley was on the edge of his seat with anticipation.
“The gang ‘ponied up’ and we rode in to save Dawn and defeat Glory. Only, it didn’t quite work out that way. While I was in the process of beating the crap out of Glory, some old man climbed to the top of the tower where Dawn was tied up and cut her. Spike went up there to try and stop him, but the old man pushed him off.”
“By the time I made it up there, it was too late. Her blood had already opened the portal and all kinds of hell beasts were emerging. Our research had shown that Dawn’s death was needed to close the portal once it was open. I couldn’t let her die, though, Riley. She was my baby sister and I had sworn to my mom that I would protect her with my life.”
“So, that’s why you jumped?”
“In a nutshell. I jumped so that she wouldn’t have to.”
“But, how did that work as far as closing the portal? I mean, Dawn was the one who was the Key…” Riley was more than a bit confused by all that she’d told him.
“Don’t you get it? The monks made her *from* me, Riley. Dawn was my flesh and blood, so I figured I could close the portal because of that.”
“I think I understand, now,” he replied. “So that’s the last thing that you remember?”
“Yup, I took a swan dive off of the tower and I woke up here.”
Riley looked at her in disbelief. “My God.”
“Yeah, pretty intense, huh?”
“Understatement, I’d say. What was it like, diving off the tower? Did your life pass in front of your eyes?”
“Nope, it was like being in a dream. You know when you’re flying and look down at everyone. You wish they could experience the freedom and lightheartedness that you feel.”
“Was the ground rushing up to meet you?”
“No, I just seemed to be passing through a light. It was beautiful, peaceful, and somehow I felt like I was finally fulfilling my destiny.”
“Saving the world again, huh?” Riley looked at her and winked.
“Yeah, I guess you can say that.” Buffy smiled shyly back at him.
“Well, Ms. Summers, before the nasty world comes back to ask you to save it again, how about you and I enjoy this little vacation from reality and spend some quality time together?”
Getting up from the couch Riley held his hand out to Buffy.
“What do you have in mind?” She asked a bit cautiously. Was he thinking of taking this little discussion upstairs? Maybe employing the use of a little scented oil or a hot tub?
*Down girl, you’re getting wet again.*
“Something that I think you’ll really like.”
“Give me a hint.”
Putting his arms around her and pulling her closer to him, Riley whispered into her ear.
“Well, it lies surrounded by something warm and soft.”
“Yeah?”
“It’s round and long.” Riley said, leaning over to kiss her on the tip of her nose.
“What else?”
“Every time you put it in your mouth you get this cute little look on your face, because it’s so big you couldn’t quite fit the whole thing in.”
*Oh yeah, that spot’s getting larger.*
“You used to like to get it right after we finished with patrolling.” Riley continued, enjoying himself because he saw Buffy getting a look of unbridled passion on her face.
“Afterwards, you always got something to drink.”
*God! It’s getting hot in here and I know it’s not from the fire.*
“And one was never enough, no matter how big the first one was, you always wanted to eat more.”
“Yeah, Riley. I want it.” Buffy said, breathlessly.
“You sure?” He asked.
“Oh yeah.” She answered. Buffy could feel the perspiration beginning to form on her forehead, but she didn’t care.
“I don’t want to force it on you, you know.”
Buffy only shook her head ‘no.’
“I want it, Riley.”
“When?”
“Now.”
*God, why is he torturing me? Can’t he see how turned on I am?*
“Say pretty please.”
“Pretty please!” Buffy said, licking her lips. Again, why was doing this to her?
“Okay.” She heard him say as he walked toward the kitchen and opened the refrigerator door.
“How many hot dogs do you want?”
The story continues in chapter 4
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