We never know if that part of the day that ends ends with us in useless bitterness or if what we are is false in the twilight and that there is nothing more than the huge silence without wild ducks that falls on the lakes where reeds raise their rigidity that collapses. We know nothing, not even the memory remains of the stories of our childhood, algae, not even the caress of future skies hesitates, a breeze in which imprecision opens slowly into stars. The votive lamp flickers uncertainly in the temple in which now no one enters, the ponds on deserted estates stagnate in the sun, no one knows the name carved long ago into the tree, and the privileges of the unknown were blown, like badly torn paper, along the roads filled with a high wind, into the chances of obstacles that stopped them. Others will look out of the same window that others have; those that forgot the evil shadow, nostalgic for the sun they didn't have, now sleep; and I myself who dare without gestures shall end without remorse among soaking reeds muddied by the nearby river and by soft fatigue, under grand autumns in the afternoon, in impossible borderlands. And through it all, like a hiss of naked anguish, I shall feel my soul through the daydreaming--deep, pure howl, useless in the darkness of the world. (1931)
Well, now. Wasn't that cheery? Actually it gave me a Spike mood, which I quite liked.
I wasted time today, I failed to pick up my DVD player, I napped, I drank--but I also wrote. I did some heavy lifting on the sidelines story, plotty stuff, exposition, balls of yadda, which makes me feel all the more closer to finishing. I am pleased, and I hold out hope for this week.
See my lovely, forlornly new icon, taken from the latest collection made by
poisoninjest. Xander. I have been entertaining a story idea that blows in now and then like some lazy leaf on a gust of wind, skating across the floor toward my ankles as a distraction. I'd like to write a proper, if short, Spike-and-Xander story set season sevenish, or later. One where Spike finds comfort in what is blessedly ordinary. Given his recent resumption (if that's not a word, it should be) of duster and bad-boy tude, S7 Spanderness becomes a more distant difficulty, a train pulling out of the station, drawing away from the outskirts of canon and heading toward La-La Land. It's probably no coincidence, my getting caught by an idea just as it becomes all the more implausible. I am a perv.
I threw this into a doc file, a possible opening for such a story--well, set a few years post show. Nothing is likely to come of it anytime soon. It's just the kind of scrappy thing you flick off and toss in a drawer.
It was pizza night, and Buffy couldn't face it. Monsters, sure. Vampires and demons and the death of innocence, the betrayal of trust, the end of the world--she'd grown used to all these things. But pizza night, never. Especially when Dawn was at Perry's house, doing normal teen things with other people's happily married parents, probably watching some trashy reality TV show and eating pot roast and two vegetables. It didn't seem fair, didn't seem right. The slayer alone, left to the cold comfort of delivery pizza and the absence of friends.
The sadness of her empty house drove her to call Xander. He wasn't her usual lifeline any more, now that so much had changed. It freaked her, how much had changed. One year since the last big evil, and it was like their lives were a board game, dice in a cup, shaken, tossed and rolled into combinations that landed you on strange squares you'd tried to avoid.
Oh, she called him. She called him more often than Willow, who was so busy in school, and so determined to make up for time lost and spells miscast and the unhappy veer of her life, that she barely noticed the world she'd set aside. But Buffy felt awkward around Xander--he was still an old friend, but he was no longer a close one, dependable and ready with smiles meant only for her. He was now a guy with his own life, troubles and pleasures she didn't recognize, that he didn't share with her. He'd become an adult when her back was turned, while she was worrying about evils and bills and her sister and the future. Or...not an adult. Not quite. Still very much a guy, getting by on a high blue-collar salary, biding time in a twentysomething apartment as other friends married and moved on.
Friends, marrying. How freakish was that? They'd both been invited to the weddings of old classmates lately. Catered affairs with dresses even Anya would turn down her nose at, and if you couldn't satisfy the sartorial taste of a demon, you might as well shitcan your subscription to Vogue. Sad, dull weddings, with commonplace invitations set at local print shops, and drunken receptions where Xander smiled with polite-eyed patience at girls who'd sneered at him once upon a time--when they'd even noticed him at all--as he escorted an amused vampire given to resting his chin on his lover's shoulder in defiance of social convention.
She'd once bedded that vampire, and now she was alone, a girl who couldn't order pizza without having an emotional crisis.
Should I have a salad? Should I eat my last hard-boiled egg? Dear god, it's ten o'clock. The world is late and strange.