1. Lessons
Buffy looks alternately soft and warm, and subtly brittle. She has an air of
having read some self-help books, healing by design. Things are calm and good;
it's working, but I think she's healing from the surface down. Given time, it
might penetrate to the mantle, but who's got time in Sunnydale?
Buffy shares her power with Dawn: season theme in miniature. The cellphone symbolizes connection.
Xander's first entrance, completing their little family, is bizarrely sexy, but at the same time terribly sad. The silver sedan rolls to a stop and all I'm thinking of (as I'm supposed to) is Xander on his skateboard in Welcome to the Hellmouth — back when the possibility of B/X was sweet. And now? A marriage of convenience, essentially. And comfort. Their platonic, temporary Mom-and-Dadishness is vaguely eerie, throwing light on the holes where their lovers are not.
When Buffy tells Xander and Dawn about the counseling job, they insist on celebrating, so the three of them drive to the new Ethiopian place on Blythe St. for dinner. Sitting on the red booth, scooping up lentils and spongy injera with her fingers, Buffy thinks of fifteen different ways to say, Spike's back.
The basement saga has a sequel.
Of all the gin joints...
So, you know that song about the cat?
"Hey. Guys?" But Dawn's grinning, eating with one hand and punching buttons on her cellphone with the other, while Xander contributes geeky ringtone suggestions. When they look up, they're so carefree, so sweetly — and so untypically — unsuspicious that it makes Buffy hurt a little.
He hangs there, waiting, in her mind, an incomprehensible double image: the pale and jagged devil she knows, all butch grace and angry eyes, and hands, God help her, that take her from zero to orgasm in — Christ, she's sick, thinking of him that way after last spring, and what she saw today. This morning's apparition is at war with all those memories. Spike shy and small and fluffy-headed, like he's gone to seed.
How can she reveal to sister and friend what she can't even begin to reconcile on her own?
If she's silent, summer lingers. No monsters, no arguments, no sides to take or lines to draw, nothing to disrupt her tenuous little improvised family. Buffy holds on to just a few more days of summer. Just a few.
2. Beneath You
James Marsters. Idiot savant is not the correct term, but it'll do for an un-PC
analogy; he's a scene-chewer, his accent's a mess, his pseudo-Biblical dialogue
sounds ludicrous, but he's got, by God, a spark, and I can't look away.
Or maybe I'm just hypnotized by the dreadful blue shirt.
I like Dawn. She calls Buffy on her shit as soon as it, er, happens. I like the redness of her eyes when she confronts Spike, but I like that she does confront him.
I like everybody else, but not enough to talk about them.
Church. She's freaked out. God, look at her face, she does not want this, doesn't want him anymore, has no idea how to navigate what is right or just or righteous or safe— for either of them. She was moving on, healing, but the healing hasn't penetrated past the skin yet, and Spike's living up to his name. Buffy has every reason to be terrified.
To see this man who wears the face of her anger and despair, and, as I know she will do in a few weeks' time, lay her hands on him and take him not just under her wing, but into her heart, is astonishingly courageous. So far, I love Buffy. Let's see how long my patience lasts.
"Can we rest now? Buffy, can we rest?"
She has no answer. For a moment the chapel is dead quiet, and then his mad, ecstatic laughter curling up from his body like smoke jolts Buffy from her shock, and she dashes forward, grabs his pale shoulders and wrenches. He clings and scrabbles at the cross like she's trying to pull him out of heaven, but her strength is the greater, and they topple backwards. She goes down, cracks her back on the first step of the chancel, and he's on top of her.
Earlier, stalking worm guy, she'd chastised herself for flinching at the touch of Spike's cool hand on the flashlight. Get a grip, it's just him and he can't hurt you. Be the damned Slayer, already. But the throb in her spine and that precise weight, those shoulders covering hers, it's her nightmare, parodied. Spike makes the same connection at the same moment, and a panicked, animal sound escapes his lips. He flails and she shoves, and then they're facing each other, breathing hard, with the altar between them. For a raw second his blistering chest rivets her, (She can't look at his eyes. If she looks at his eyes she thinks she'll kill him,) before she turns and bolts for the door in a clatter of wood shards and broken tile. No howl or cry drags her back to him; only her footfalls ring in her ears as she pelts across the graveyard and into the street.
She doesn't slow until she's nearly home. Her mind is stuck on his burn marks; she can't contemplate anything else. "They're pink," she says out loud, inanely. "They're only pink, not black. He'll be okay." Her breathing slows. "Okay."
No. No, we can't.
August 18, 2005
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