Eeeh, why the fuck not.
Title: Lotus
Author: Zooeys_Bridge(Rachel)
Email: rsietz@gmail.com
Rating: PG(for now)
Disclaimer: Joss and ME own their characters. I’m just adding a little bit of spice. And not making a profit.
Spoilers: This is heavily steeped in canon, so be wary of all of it.
Feedback: Yes, please! This is my first story, so please feel free to scribble away with red pen. It’s highly encouraged.
Note 1: The previous chapter and the following take place in Lessons, Episode 1 of Season 7. They're sort of like scenes inbetween what we, the viewers, saw. Think about them logistically and place them chronologically. Any questions, please feel free to ask!
Note 2: Cliffhanger. Hee.
[center]
.::Lotus
::.[/center]
Anya didn't think it was very fair, the way she was being treated.
She was Anyanka, champion of mistreated women, a thousands years of enough torture, punishment, and evisceration experience behind her to frighten any being. And yet, here was Halfrek telling her she was a joke at the office.
A joke?! She'd seen hundreds of fledgling demons try and fail to make something of themselves. D'Hoffryn had given her 'employee of the century' eight times in a row. How
dare they mock her name. She'd been on top for decades before her little Sunnydale High romp, Cordelia Chase had just gotten lucky. If not for Giles' meddling, Cordelia would have stayed vampire food and Anya would never have lost her powers and gotten into this sopping mess.
A busy waiter weaved between the tables, delivering hot mugs and collecting empty ones. Anya thought about what she could do to that man. Torture him in ways he couldn't imagine. Delivering pieces of himself in tarts and cupcakes to the women he'd wronged.
But Anya merely sighed. She just didn't feel like it, today. That seemed to happen a lot these days.
The measure and test of true friendship rarely appears, but when Anya found herself human and alone in the world, she discovered just how real her friendships were. No well-wishes or condolences on her recent mortality. No fruit baskets, no singing telegrams. Anya was left to scrape together a life out of what little she knew. Did any of her friends or proteges care that Anyanka, champion of mistreated women, lived for weeks in an abandoned gym office in a high school before finding a cheap, dank apartment?
Without her powers to protect her, the trials of living in Sunnydale proved too much for a weak teenager to handle by herself. Anya needed friends. She needed allies. How little she knew at first how different those two were. She'd quickly picked up on the fact that the only thing Sunnydale had going for it resided in the high school library in off-periods and after school. The Scoobies were meek and small and had more odds stacked against them than anything Anya had ever seen. And she had seen a lot. How could she know that only a few stupid, mortal years later she'd feel more at home with them than anywhere else she'd been? How could she know of the steely inner strength Buffy held behind her facade of nail polish and cute shoes? What hope did Anya have of seeing anything more than ancient detachment bred of Watchers toward their Slayers from Giles? The power that dwelt deep within poor, compliant Willow? Or how quickly foolish, useless Xander Harris would rile her bones and quake through her being?
How could she hope?
But now she was here, sitting on a stupid stool in The Espresso Pump, holding a long-ago-cooled cup of a generic coffee drink, stuck. Summer lingered, warm and salty, and made her wish for things to be different. Ha! The vengeance demon, wishing! Irony slapped her in the face once again.
Anya wished, she couldn't help it. She wished she didn't have to go home to her apartment and cook for one. She wished Buffy would look her in the eye and that Dawn didn't always seem so sad. She wished Giles hadn't left and that the Magic Box was still there. She wished Willow would come back and that Tara could be sharing this coffee with her instead of Hallie's empty companionship. She wished she still had a place in the system that continued to turn, blind to the disasters of its quiet heroes.
Instead, she was listening to bad folk music, which assuredly did nothing to improve her mood. Anya frowned, took a sip of her drink, and straightened her back. She knew the uselessness of hope and the foolishness of wishing. Ask any of the women she helped if when they saw their wish granted, they felt better. If it was what they truly wanted. If they could only have him back. If, if, if.
Enough wishing. It's time to do what we do.
Anya cocked her brow and looked Halfrek in the eye. "Fine. If the Lower Beings want something to talk about, I'll
give them something to talk about."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Tara pulled the towel that rested over her shoulder and ignored the flapping noise it made when it hit the kitchen counter. She wiped her flour-dusted hands carelessly on the sides of her thighs and walked over to the stairs. “Spike?”
After a quiet moment she shouted again, “Spike, are you up?” When silence again greeted her, she started to climb the stairs while a faint worry seeped into her heart. She called ahead, “Spike? I made breakfast,” but was cut off by the slamming of the screen door downstairs. Full-out alarm exploded in her ears as she scrambled down the stairs, barely managing to see the last reverberating shutters of the door in the kitchen. She righted herself against the banister, sprinted through the door and turned sharply to see Spike’s boots disappear around the corner.
“Oh no you don’t,” Tara gritted her teeth and gave chase to her increasingly spastic houseguest.
Months of spending time without a nightly demon hunt had left her ill-motivated to exercise. With no Slayer to back up, no beloved to guard, no innocents to protect, there hadn’t really been a point. Not to mention the fact that there weren't any demons to hunt anyway. She felt the effects now only a few blocks from Revello Drive, as a cramp pinched painfully at her side. Tara made a small note in the back of her mind to resume exercising as soon as she could catch her breath.
Tara was so bent on forcing her mind to outwit her body that she hadn’t realized where he was headed. As his strides became more focused and Spike entered a dilapidated building, Tara wondered just how much longer she could hope to chase a being that doesn’t need oxygen.
She didn’t think she could run much longer when she saw Spike trot to a dazed halt in the middle of a burnt out hallway. Finally. She balanced her arms on her knees, too exhausted to stand straight. Her chest heaved when it smacked her in the face.
High school. He’d led her to the high school. It’s dark, broken corridors and corroded walls echoed the giant gap of time it’d been since she was last here. A small twitch of her eye and she could almost see the not-so-tiny Tinkerbell light in the distance. Before she could sink into a delicious, painfully memory, Spike’s possessed footsteps pulled her in the opposite direction, down a janitorial stairway and into the dark.
“Spike!” she shouted while she scrambled over fallen beams. Tara slipped suddenly, grunted as she hit the floor and watched a burnt yearbook page fly out from under her. A long-dead bright-eyed and bushy-tailed girl floated past her face.
Most Likely to Succeed.
What the hell is the matter with him?
Tara knew Spike, deeper than she expected to. It started in the milky beginnings of her and Willow’s relationship, though she didn't know it then, while sitting on the cool porcelain of Giles’ toilet seat making awkward small talk with Anya. She understood when she saw the bruises dance on his face after Glory, in the ways he'd avert his eyes for days. She saw, out of the corner of her eye, the hours he'd spend leaning on the tree in the front yard, cradling a forgotten cigarette between his fingers.
It came to her slowly, in moments and crises, just how similar she and Spike were.
Both runaways trying to escape what they were, inadvertently falling into this ragtag team of Scoobydom and becoming something entirely unexpected and different. Something
more. She understood, later on, how deep that path took them-when sacrifice, love, and loyalty become truths instead of sidenotes. Sure, they may have taken different routes, but ultimately they’d become the same. Tara knew. And she held onto it just in case Spike ever tried to forget or pretend otherwise. He was more than that;
she was more than that.
All of a sudden, he stopped. Frozen dead in his tracks, Spike suddenly seemed to realize where he was. He turned and squinted at Tara through the dusty light that filtered through foggy basement windows.
“Spike?”
They stared at each other for a moment, searching, but then Spike turned and faced a gaping hole in the wall where a door once stood. He laughed crazily for a moment, but his features soon softened and his eyes smiled tenderly at something Tara could not see. He raised his arm and gently spoke.
“Buffy…duck.”