__Paper__
By Aviatrix
There are shadows under her eyes and he kisses them gently, scratching his
cracked lips across the soft flesh.
The same grey bruise is scattered
over her body. Splotches on her arms and legs and torso, and one
crescent-shaped mark on her neck. Every night they change, like runes that
shift and glimmer on an enchanted manuscript, and every night he re-memorizes them.
He thinks they're beautiful, in a sad sort of way. He keeps a
diary about them: location, size, cause. She doesn't always tell him
where they came from, and so he just guesses. He's pretty good at guessing, though.
There are shadows under her eyes, and he knows every inch of the sleeplessness that made them.
He writes about that in the diary, too.
* * * * *
Rupert Giles is not the type of man to believe in true love, or even romance. And Buffy, he
thinks, hasn't believed since she was a teenager. So there is nothing, nothing really, that
should make him unhappy. What they have is more than he ever expected. She is...
She's an angel, he thinks. She's an angel and she's (mostly) his
and he loves her more fiercely than he has loved anything else. They don't
give each other flowers or cards or letters or poems, they don't cuddle, they
kiss roughly and fuck just as hard. But there's something in the glances they
occasionally exchange, and in the way his fingers tingle when they touch her
skin, and in the smiles she sometimes gives him.
The silences, the fights, the locked doors and cold eyes and everything that keeps him out -
They don't matter, because he's still closer to her than he's
ever been. It's not perfect, true, but it's something.
It's something.
* * * * *
One night she comes home crying, and will not
speak to him. He swallows his own tears as he shakily undresses her and takes
careful note of every cut and welt.
|| Upper arm, left: approx. 5 cm, 2 mm wide. Cause: unk., poss. claw || Temple, right: circular
bruise approx. 3 cm radius. Cause: unk. blunt object, say the wobbly lines of
ink. He continues, one hand holding the pen and the other holding her hand.
By the time he's done, some of the marks have faded, and he carefully kisses
those remaining so as to imprint them on his memory.
In their bed, she is no longer crying. The diary rests on the side table and Giles
barely looks at it at all as he makes love to her.
She is graceful and compliant in his arms. Her neck falls back, like she's offering her life to
him, and her arms dangle over his shoulders. She looks like she's asleep, or
dead - but her eyes glitter strangely in the dark, and she never sleeps.
And she never dies.
* * * * *
(Well, sometimes she does.)
* * * * *
He comes home one afternoon to find her reading the
diary. She doesn't look up as he passes her on the couch, but perhaps slows
in her turning of the pages. A brief hesitation.
"You notice everything, don't you."
Not a question but a statement, delivered in a flat, not-quite-mocking tone of voice.
"Yes, I do," he says as he sits down beside her. He'd like it if she leaned her head on his
shoulder, but she never does.
"Why?" she asks, and he's incredibly glad that she's
initiating an interaction with him, even though it's a small one.
"I... I don't want to forget these things."
//I don't want to forget *you*//, his mind completes as she gets up and walks away.
"Well, I don't want to remember them. I think that book's a stupid idea. My wounds
never last, anyway. What's the point?"
* * * * *
The point is.
The point. Is.
Giles doesn't know if there *is* a point anymore. And now that he looks at it, the diary does
seem kind of... stupid. He doesn't need it. He has her in the flesh, he doesn't need her on
paper. He doesn't need to remember everything, and he doesn't have to remember her
when she's right there.
So with Buffy's entirely-too-rare smile in his mind, he rips every page out of the leather-bound
book and burns them all.
The bruises always fade, and the cuts always heal. She
kisses him like she's desperately trying to escape something, and he lets
her.
After all, there's nothing wrong with forgetting.
* * *