Blink and You'll Miss What You Never Saw
Name:
Gabrielle
Summary:
She can’t remember when she had the dream, but Buffy can’t forget it.
Rating:
FRM (just to be safe)
Notes:
This is my very first Buffy/Angel story.
Thank
you to Jo the Librarian for her help.
**
She doesn’t remember having this dream; can’t
remember waking up and feeling the longing and the loss. She should remember,
shouldn’t she? Because she has this
weird ability to remember her dreams. Always has. Even before she knew she was
a Slayer and that all those mondo bizzaro dreams had meaning (“import”, Giles
would say, in his stuffy, British way…except he’s off being stuffy and British
in England, where it probably doesn’t stand out nearly as much). She can even
date them. Well, not exactly, at least not all of them, but she remembers important
things that happened right around the same time and that’s pretty much the same
thing, right?
But not this dream, no, not this one.
It’s not even a whole dream, just fragments that change and increase and
decrease for no reason she can think of. None of it fits into any open slots in
her memory and try as she might, she can’t jam this jigsaw puzzle of a dream
into a month or even a year. It’s just there…as
if she was born with it, or, more accurately, born with the ever-changing pieces
of it and she can’t figure any of them out. They just hang around like ghosts
and no matter how hard she tries to at least jam them in a closet in her mind
so she doesn’t have to think about them, she still sees them. She doesn’t just
see them – she feels them. She tastes them.
She’s
flat on her back on a table – a kitchen table. Not her own. She’d never do this in her own kitchen, not
even with her mother gone. It would feel too weird. No, she’s in Angel’s
kitchen, flat on her back, panties torn, ankles locked around Angel’s waist,
some kind of utensil digging into her back, and ohgodohgodohgod – Angel’s
inside her. It’s better than it’s ever been. She’s not a virgin anymore and
they’re not worried about an impending apocalypse and it’s just about this –
this great thing that two bodies can do together. Ohgodohgodohgod. It’s never
been this good. Not ever. This is better sex than any two people have ever had.
It’s a fact. Not even Willow with all her cyber skills could find two people
who’ve experienced anything like this. She darts out her tongue to lick the
skin of his shoulder.
She
tastes sweat.
Vampires don’t sweat…do they?
The detail maddens her and it stays with
her even as other parts of the dream shift and fade. One restless night, a night where she’s tossed to and fro in her
bed by the pain of just being – breathing, existing, living – she has another dream… Maybe not a dream, she can’t sleep
well enough for that without the comfort of tight walls and a covering of
earth, but a fevered remembering that at least makes her think for a few
moments that she’s not the Buffy who clawed her way out of the grave, but the
Buffy she was before she ever leapt into the wide, blue yonder.
She’s
in Riley’s room. It’s a generic ‘frat boy’ room, not too different from Parker’s
(oh god, don’t think about Parker – never, ever think about Parker) but she’s
not thinking about that (not then, but later, much later). No, she’s
post-slayage and she’s horny. Hungry, too, but she’s really not in the mood to
stop for pizza. She just wants to get Riley out of those clothes and inside
*her*. Make the itch go away, celebrate the victory.
It’s
been a long time since she’s had a guy by her side who can at least sort of
match her, and if it takes an arsenal of weapons and a supporting cast to get
him there, well, she’s not gonna think about that right now because that would
kill the buzz building between her thighs.
So
she doesn’t and pretty soon, she’s flat on her back in that institutional bed
and Riley’s inside her. It’s good. Really good. Lots better than
‘the-one-who-shall-not-be-thought-of-ever-again’. Good enough that she lets go and closes her eyes, let’s her
tongue touch his skin as she kisses his shoulder.
Her
breath catches and her eyes shoot open. Something’s wrong. Something’s very
wrong.
She
closes her eyes again and tries to forget.
It all connects to the dream, the real dream – the one she can’t remember
well enough, the one she wishes she could just let go of and forget. She
doesn’t know how and she doesn’t know why, but it’s sitting there, salt and
bitter on the tip of a tongue that can’t tell the truth to the people who need
to hear it…a tongue that rises in songs of bitterness and numbness and a
longing for what she left behind – for a place from which she was torn, bleeding
from wounds no one but her can see.
No one but she and Spike.
So she lets it happen; lets the chaos
take over; lets herself drown in pain and the comfort of someone aching for her
in a way she’s sure she’ll never feel again.
Maybe she hates him. She’s not sure.
Maybe she just doesn’t care at all. It’s possible. Her emotions have been
reduced to the raw essentials and nuance isn’t exactly on the menu. She can
fight, she can fuck, and she can forget.
Well, she can forget everything except….
She’s
lying in Angel’s bed and there’s ice cream and cookies and nudity. The smell of
recent – very recent – sex mingling with the scent of cold and chocolate and
sweat. There’s magic of a very earthy kind crackling in the air and she can’t
stop staring into those big, brown eyes. He smiles at her and it’s the sexiest
thing she’s ever seen. The ice cream isn’t the only wet thing in this bed right
now. "God, I love food."
She
says something unimportant in return and they banter about chocolate and peanut
butter, but what she’s really focusing on is feeding him ice cream and how
perfect this moment is, how it’s better than those dreams of weddings and
babies and *big* moments, because this is real. This is a real moment
being shared by a girl and the man she loves.
Ice
cream falls onto Angel’s chest and she’s transfixed by the slow slide of it
down flesh now warm with life, a chest that rises and falls with breath after
breath.
"Okay,
mortal coordination leaving something to be desired,” Angel says.
She
smiles. "Wrong. It's just right." She shows him just how wrong
he is by leaning down and licking it off. The taste… It’s the most intoxicating
flavor she’s ever known. It’s ice cream and the taste of Angel’s skin – Angel’s
sweat.
Her eyes are still closed and she turns to
the cool body beside her, tongue delicately darting out for just
*one*more*taste. All she tastes is cold marble and ash.
In one shrill, piercing scream of a
second she gets it – she’s sure she gets it. More words from what she’d thought
was a dream echo in the cold, dank, depressing air:
“Mmm,
this is a dream. You're human…”
But it wasn’t a dream, was it? Not the
one dream she’d ever had that she couldn’t fit tidily into its context. No,
it’s more than that…
…It’s Heaven.
It all makes sense now and she wonders
how it could have taken her so long to see. This is where she was before her
so-called friends forced her to come back.
She closes her eyes again. For one last
scream, she sees Willow’s body, limp and dripping with mute, impossible agony,
hanging from a meat hook. (She should feel guilty about that; if she were still
the girl she was, she would feel guilty about that. She doesn’t feel guilty
about that…only guilty that she doesn’t.)
But there’s nothing she can do, is there?
She turns and looks at the sleeping mockery beside her – thinks about what is
true and what is real, about her sacred duty and how much harder her life will
be with this scarifying burden of memory added to an impossible load. There has
to be something, some way to fix this. Because she was given a gift, right?
Shouldn’t she get to keep it? But no…
What did she do? Didn’t she save the
world enough? Doesn’t anyone up there care that she’s in pain and she’s hurting
and that now this memory is slicing her up inside like a thousand knives? Can’t
she have anything? Just one little thing to make this okay? Not perfect, she’s
not asking for perfect, but okay…just okay. Okay?
Buffy blinks back the acid in her eyes
and she does something she hasn’t done since she was a little girl: she prays.
Sleep returns.
When she wakes up, she’s shivering and
her body aches from sleeping on the hard floor and from fucking Spike for all
she’s worth. She’s blank and cold and
all she can think about is how to explain being out all night to Dawn and
avoiding annoying questions from anyone else.
The dream (the memory) is gone.
It was never there.
The End.