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Sometimes Buffy still thinks of them.
In between night missions and training Slayers and getting Dawn off to school every morning, Buffy will close her eyes against the memories, lazy and blurred like the deepest of dreams. Dark hair, darker eyes. Tall, broad-shouldered. The safety of his arms and the pain of leaving them. The pulsing fall of a driving rain and the cold flurry of miraculous snow. Whispers in the night, heavy with regret, desire, absolution. Death, so dark and bitter like ashes, and passion, rich and throbbing with lifeblood. And their willfull sacrifices against the backdrop of destiny and circumstance. What was and always will be.
Or in between tea with Giles and nightly recaps with Xander and emailing Willow, Buffy will rifle through her mental catalogue and let the recollections play, grainy and crackling like old film. Hollow cheekbones, curling smirk. Lean, muscled body and clever, gentle fingers. A voice dripping with love and desperation, with a loyalty that could be only human. Leather duster and smoky smell, the apocalypse burning all around them as they fought in tandem. The shame, then guilt, then weightless euphoria of feeling. And the calm, blossoming bud of hope just before the world caved in. What was and what could have been.
Yes, sometimes in between all those busy minutes of her busy life, Buffy still thinks of them.
And it still hurts. So, so much.
†
The whispers are just shy of a shout sometimes, walking through the halls of the London branch of The Summers Institute for Gifted Girls. The training facility echoes with the sounds of clanging swords, bodies hitting mats, and the occasional instruction to tighten up and watch the flanks. And amidst it all, the girls gossip about The Slayer--the first of the generation. The Chosen one. The crazy one.
Sometimes Buffy finds it really offensive that all of a sudden she's the crazy one, but it's to be expected when the rumors begin their rounds.
"Omigod, Anna, you'll never guess what I heard! Randi told me that Andrew told her that Xander once told him that Buffy used to be in love with a vampire!"
"No way!"
"Yep, and not just any vampire, the most vicious vampire in like, three centuries! His name was Angelus. And then after she slept with him and he went all homocidal and she had to kill him and he came back from Hell and then left her again, she fell in love with another vampire! William the Bloody, you know, the one with the railroad spikes and the illustrations in that book?"
"No joke!"
"No joke."
No, there is no joke. All that the girls so succintly sum up is true--she did fall in love with men who were monsters (or is it the other way around, eight years since she was first Called and she still doesn't know).
And hey. Maybe it is psycho, or insane, or freaky, just like all the Slayers say it is, but it's Buffy. It's her past. And no matter how much effort she's put into erasing that past lately, there's no running fast or far enough away from it when a hundred young girls are around to keep it alive every day. Slaying, training, living and whispering that two vampires loved Buffy once and that she loved them, too.
Especially because everyone knows that rumors are based on truth. Some more than others.
†
Like she doesn't have enough ghosts already.
There's so much guilt (for every Slayer alive, there's another dead, sometimes girls don't want to be strong) and it's all heaped upon her thin, bony shoulders so that it's quite possible she could break at any moment. She's just so scared of the enormity of what she's done, and there's no one to tell her she was right to do it in the first place. Hell, there's no one to tell her she was wrong to do it in the first place.
"Buck up, Slayer," Spike says, smoking a cigarette while she buys oranges at the market. "So you unleashed a whole generation of mini she-devils upon the unsuspecting public. S'okay, you've done worse. Well, alright, no you haven't, but it's too late to change anything now. Quite your boo-hooing and get out there, really live," He lets smoke stream between his teeth. "It's what I died for, innit?"
And unlike before, there's no one around strong enough to catch her, to carry her cross as well as their own.
Once upon a time, she'd had Spike. Spike with his white, white skin and his dark, dark eyes and the vicious, raw red of the cross searing into his chest. Once upon a time, someone had branded themselves for her, had burned in front of an altar overflowing with sins, and he had said her name like she was absolution, not the damnation she's always been terrified she was.
"Actions have consquences, Buffy," Angel says gravely, his fingers steepled under his chin as he sits on the exercise bike across from where she's warming up on the training mat. "You have to give something up to gain something else, and in the end, it's really only all about whether the sacrifice was worth it." He closes his eyes. "I'm sorry that we were one sacrifice I was always willing to make."
Once upon a time, she'd had Angel, too. But she'd done the branding with him, had forced her love upon him, had seared her sign onto the hollow of his throat so that even now, if she closes her eyes, she can see the faint outline of her necklace upon his skin. Angel had bowed his head before her punishment, had taken the pain like the man he had once been. Making penance for his wrongs, even years after that moment--forever bending his long, tall, graceful body, cowering to some higher will. Once upon a time, someone had let her burn him, had watched as she left her mark, and when he said her name, it was always some sort of plea to hurt him more, to make him pay for the crime of loving her back.
Once upon a time she'd been a blessing and a curse, and now she is alone.
Now, it's just Dawn at school and Andrew in Rome and Giles at the office and her best friends scattered all over the world. Now, it's just Buffy. She's never been alone before, and for the first time in her life, being able to stake ten vamps in under ten minutes is nowhere near as great now that she realizes she has the emotional range of a tea cozy.
Who am I without you? she calls out to the ashes in the wind, and the silence is as deafening as its always been.
†
Decoys. There are decoys of her all over the place, pretty blonde things who look so much like her it's almost weird, but when she hears one has hooked up with the Immortal, she knows it's time for it to stop.
She goes to Italy and tells the blonde to knock it off and get back to Slaying, because she seriously doubts the Immortal would go over any better with the Council than the Scourge of Europe and William the Bloody. At least she had love on her side; the blonde girl's only got good orgasms.
A tingle races down her back when she enters the flat her decoy had been staying in and she turns around, her eyes suspicious.
It feels like more than just a memory. It feels like something gone terribly wrong.
Andrew is hauled against the wall in a second, and the whole sordid story soon falls from his lips. Buffy closes her eyes. They were here, her ghosts, here and she was somewhere else. Story of her life, isn't it? They're always at different points of the timeline.
Now the only two monsters (or is it men, and now it's been nine years as a Slayer and she still doesn't know) she's ever loved are gone, victims of a dragon and an apocalypse and Angel's stupid, idiotic propensity to have death wishes.
She'll never have the whole story, even though sometimes Willow tries to tell her something about a son or a sun and Cordelia. And she'll never forgive Spike for not telling her he was back from the dead, even though Andrew tells her that Spike just wanted her to remember how they were, not how they couldn't ever be.
She'll never know what could have been, that's the point. And she sort of hates them both all the more for it.
†
His name is David. He has dark brown hair and thick brows, and his smile is just short of sheepish. He is tall and Buffy likes that she can curl up in his lap after a long day and feel almost protected.
Then there's Jamie, thin and reedy, with sharp canines against the slope of her shoulders, and hips that feel divine when they thrust against hers. He's got blonde hair, too, though it's the golden kind, not the white kind.
Nick is next, with bright blue eyes and a wide forehead and a wicked grin. He makes her laugh and he dances like he's sparring, stepping forward and then back, playing some sort of game with her as the disco ball revolves.
There's Ian and Damien and Lance and Alberto, there's Manuel, George, Thomas, and Gary. There's man after man after man who sleeps in her bed, who trace her calves with shaking fingers, who kneel at her bed and kiss a path from her navel to her center, who hold her and vex her and make her days brighter and her nights less lonely.
Some know what she does, and offer to help her fight. Some are just normal men with normal jobs, and they give her backrubs when she comes home tense and bruised. None of them are what she needs. What she wants.
What she misses.
She gets married to Richard, on her twenty-fifth birthday. He is kind and intelligent. He reads her poetry and he can handle a sword. He has bittersweet eyes and dark hair, and prominent, slashed-into-marble cheekbones. He loves her and he doesn't mind that sometimes when they have sex, she closes her eyes and mouths strange words like Angel and Spike. He takes her for what she is, and she is allowed to take him for what he is, and that's all that matters.
She schedules the ceremony at dusk on purpose, keeps her eyes peeled for familiar features. She's a quarter-century old at midnight, and she's being given to someone else in the eyes of God. If any day at all, they should be here today. There are no swingy dusters or shiny black shoes, no tortured gazes or protestations from the shadows. Richard slides the ring onto her finger and Buffy looks out into the night.
"If I was blind, I'd find you..."
"A hundred years and the only thing I've ever been sure of is you, Buffy..."
They are really not coming. Three years have passed and it's three years too late. She was too much or not enough, and now, it's time for life to really begin.
†
"Do you love me?" she asks the darkness, her eyes searching, forever searching.
"With all my heart," comes the reply, moonlight flashing over blue eyes, then brown.
"Your heart is dead," she says, then her stake is moving through the air and pushing past cloth and skin and then--
Dust.
It always is, in the end.
The End