This commentary is pretty much focused on the nuts-and-bolts technical side of the writing process and may be of special interest only to people who want to brood for a while on writing technique.
"I think you're missing the point here," Xander said, framing a foot-long point with his hands as he leaned toward his beer. "I was jilted. For a troll."
This starts "in medias res"--right in the
middle of the action. In this case the desired effect is to immediately signal
an AU that every reader familiar with season five will recognize:
post-"Triangle", Anya has for some reason chosen to leave Xander for
Olaf. Immediately, most readers will start to write the story for themselves,
filling in the details of an imagined backstory that I never really need to
tell. As I imagine it: Olaf and Anya were once together, so they could
plausibly be together again. If Joss had wanted to write Anya out of the show,
he could have done it pretty easily. Granted, in canon, we might have had a bit
more Anya/Xander tension for build-up, but even so: one snappy episode could
have broken those two crazy kids apart, because...well, look at them. No need
to belabor the details in the narrative.
Slouched across from him as if his spine were slowly being dissolved by alcohol, Spike looked unimpressed. "It happens."
This sentence has the dreaded pronoun confusion
common to slash, but I actually didn't notice this until after the story was
posted, so I left it alone, figuring if it took me that long to question it,
most readers probably had no problem distinguishing "him" and
"his" as references to two different men.
"A troll."
"Hey, chaos demon here."
That didn't parse. Xander studied Spike's shellacked head for budding antlers, saw none. There was also a distinct lack of slime. The literal kind, anyway. "Since when?"
"Dru, you git. She left me for one. Drippy, top-heavy bastard, too. Quoting
Pablo Neruda and massaging her shoulders." Someone
who read my draft mentioned this bit as a reference to another story,
"Hotel Lavear." I in fact had read that story once, but I didn't
bother to go check for similarities, because I remembered the story well enough
not to worry that I'd unconsciously lifted anything significant enough to (a)
rouse a cry of plagiarism, or (b) necessitate a polite mention of the story in
my notes. He made a huh sound that Xander
recognized, the harsh and scoffing huh of a guy dismissing another guy on the
grounds of being a punk-ass. I
Xander was of the opinion it had never mattered, certainly not to him or
anyone sane, but since they were bonding over woman trouble and a bowl of
peanuts, it didn't seem right to say so. He would settle for projecting an
utter lack of sympathy. Just as a tiny note, I first
had "women trouble" then realized "woman trouble" sounded
more right. Sometimes in such situations, when in doubt, I google to see which
is more common.
"Dru left," Spike rambled on, "Harm lit out for sodding
"Hey. Sitting right here."
"God." He stared at Xander. "I'm just like you."
"Tell me how this even happened," Xander said, refocusing inward
on the ridiculousness of it all. Here again is where,
instead of having Xander reply to "I'm just like you" I let him say
what feels more natural to me--what's on his mind. Having him respond to every
tiny jibe would be boring. It's a failing of too many S/X stories for one
thing.
"You had a tiff, big and ugly showed up, girl left you for him."
Spike had a way of being helpful at just the wrong moment. I love Spike's voice. He uses alliteration, drops his
subjects a lot of the time, has a snappy cadence, and is concise. I try to do
justice to his style without parodying it.
"Thanks," Xander said with zero gratitude in his voice, fixing the
vampire with an irritated gaze. I want to make a note
here on "gaze" because it's such a huge thing for me. I think the
success of fan-fiction--when it wants to mirror canonicity--hinges on capturing
a visual. So I try to mimic a scene as it would be filmed, and a lot of BtVS
(as with much TV, I think) is an eye-play as the camera switches between
point-of-view gazes. I'm conscious of eyes and when I read other stories that
have zero cues for how the characters are looking at each other, I feel
unmoored. I don't know how to block the scene. It's a personal need peculiar to
fan-fiction. I try to write what I want to read. "I did have a
front-row seat. But we're still missing the how. I mean, one day she's baking
me heart-shaped cookies and playing with my toes, the next she's leaving me for
a guy who eats babies." There are lots of
reactions that Xander might have to Anya leaving. I can buy a variety of them;
I like to be surprised. I think what's most important is that writers strive to
recognize the complexity of human emotion--muddiness, messiness, contradiction--rather
than trying to force a character into one extreme, such as snotty rage.
Over-simplification leads writers astray, into distortion and demonization of
characters who, in canon, are presented more sympathetically. I type this
having recently read a ridiculous characterization of Anya as a complete bitch,
someone who'd call Spike a "monster" dismissively and mean it, even
though she herself was once a demon. You don't need to nuke one character just
to pave the way for two other characters to hook up. On the other hand, it can
be just as painful when Anya happily derails her own relationship with Xander
to play gay match-maker. It may be politically incorrect, but I think
that bad writers are often lazy. Cartoonish portrayals are lazy--the writer isn't paying attention to canon characterization. Sometimes a writer can build up muscle and achieve more nuanced characterization. Others just dig in their heels and hide out in their funhouse, surrounded by freakish mirror versions of characters the rest of us long to rescue. Whatever.
"Mmmm," Spike rejoined thoughtfully, communing with his beer glass.
"Oh my god." Xander shuddered upright, camaraderie abandoned.
"You just had a, a--craving. You did!" A sharp note of accusation
lifted his voice, but of course Spike wasn't denying it.
"So?" he shot back, brow-pinched, surly, and maybe a bit confused. "Not like I can do anything about it."
"Baby eater." I find it incredibly hard to reconcile canon Spike with any "realistic" portrayal of what he must have done as a vampire. Sometimes I make a lame effort.
"Now, now. Let's not bicker."
"You're only saying that because you have no money and want more beer."
"You really do have a gift for the bleeding obvious," Spike observed, his faux-concerned tone suggesting he was pointing this out for Xander's own good.
Xander let his shoulders droop a little and picked up his glass to study its interior. "My beer's empty."
"QED," Spike said dryly and raised a hand to beckon the waitress for another round. Either that or he was inviting her to perform a lap dance. I have a definite visual in mind for this and it amuses me. Xander's mind wandered a few blocks into the red-light district then scampered back to him with a tail-tucked whimper. He pitched forward and banged his head three times against the planks that held a growing collection of cocktail napkins.
"Got to keep your nob off the table or they won't serve you."
Spike. Ever the voice of wisdom. Nob: I research British slang and sprinkle it carefully where I
can and then cross my fingers and hope that real British people won't mock me.
Straightening up again, Xander felt the room sway. It was like being a minnow trapped in a whale's belly. An aerobicizing whale. I kept tweaking the whale-minnow thing. I forget what the original phrasing was, but I kept revisiting this until it stopped annoying me. He played off his moment of nausea by turning sideways and resting his arm casually on the booth back. It slipped off the vinyl with a loud squeak just as the waitress came up with a tray of bottles and glasses.
"Hey, Mindy." He managed a charming smile that he felt certain was not at all lopsided. Mindy smiled back. At Spike. There are some things I've come to take for granted as a writer, which seem to need no explanation, but when I think about it more, I question that--like here, I've just introduced Mindy. In my mind she's been waiting on the guys for a few hours now, and they've already learned her name and established a relationship with her. But putting all that into exposition? Boring. I find it hard to sit here and put into words how one can convey something indirectly in a story, with hints or context, and contrast that to a lack of information which confuses readers. I just read a short story from a British humor anthology that baffled me, because the author assumed her readers would be familiar with a context that--forty years later--I didn't have, and therefore just launched into the tale without bothering to establish the setting. Smaller, less important details like Mindy don't need a lot of explanation though.
"I got you boys doubles," Mindy confided, then held a finger to
her lips with a shushing noise. "On the house. I figured you could use a
cup of comfort tonight." Cup of comfort: I did a bit of googling to find a phrase to fit here, something slangy in a country-western way.
"It's a very nice house." When the other two looked at him, Xander yanked another remark from the murk of his brain. "I was jilted for a troll."
"You poor thing," Mindy said, smiling at Spike. I could have had her react and respond directly to Xander, but she has her own agenda.
Xander put his head on the table again until Mindy left.
"Nice girl." Spike sounded admiring. When Xander raised his head, he found Spike watching the rear view as Mindy bumpered her way through the maze of bar tables.
"Right. Goes well with a nice Chianti." I
debated this. I'm sick of the fava bean/Chianti thing. It's tired. But then
again, Joss's stable of writers don't shirk clichés when they suit the scene,
so I went with it.
"Hey!" Cue one wounded vampire, defending his tattered chivalry with a scowl. I don't know that I spent a lot of time on the "Cue..." line, but it reflects something I'm constantly attending to as I write--sentence construction. I'll write a sentence and glance back at the paragraph it's in, and the paragraphs before it, to see if I've built up a rhythm that will undesirably distract readers. Repetition should be deliberate. For instance. Say you're writing. Say you're trying to get a sentence down. Say you're biting your nails and completely baffled. That's deliberate repetition. But it's too easy to let the default subject-verb-object construction become an unconscious habit until a story reads like a Dick-and-Jane primer. He sat down. He looked at Spike. He said...blah. "Cue one wounded vampire" is an oddity--it's just an off-the-cuff departure, I hope, from what the reader has come to expect of a sentence up to that point. (The downside to all this is that I sometimes feel that my stories are well crafted, but don't sweep along on the passionate scrawl of my soul. "Subtleties" is me at my most spontaneous.) "I don't eat waitresses."
"What, you're watching your cholesterol?"
"It's a rule," Spike said, almost sputtering with outrage. "It's unheard of. I may be a pariah but I haven't sunk that low."
Xander blinked and tried to soak up that thought with a shot of Jagermeister. "What about waiters?"
"Nah, they're fair game."
"So if Buffy were a waitress--"
"Now, look." Spike raised a finger. "Told you how I felt about her. I've reformed. Turned over a new leaf."
"Yes, but under that leaf is dirt." He knew as soon as the words left his mouth that he'd broken the bond of manly hops-sharing and commiseration; ["The bond of manly hops-sharing and commiseration" is where I try to wear Xander like a second skin, to talk like him, kind of goofy and grandiose, but tongue-in-cheek. Not sure how well I pull that off.] the hurt in Spike's eyes was almost real. At any other time Xander would have let matters take their course--suffer a few bitter British barbs and threats to his throat, then hunch into stage two of serious drinking while Spike stalked off to find a lower species of company. But tonight, post-Anya, it would just be too much.
Also, he would probably need help getting home. Bada-bing,
bada-boom. Moving a punch line off to its own line is something I might do a
bit too often, but trying to mimic comedic timing in the structure of writing
is important (even when it's thought and not spoken) as you can't hear the
pauses and nuances that actors give to their lines.
"Nothing personal," he said, keeping his tone level and unapologetic as he backpedaled. "But as your fellow man--sort of--I think it's my duty to point out that you're deluded."
"Is that right." Sometimes a question is
not a question, hence the period rather than question mark. I used to do that
trick a lot more, but someone pointed this out to me, and I cut back and now
only use it occasionally, when it's most fitting.
"You don't love her. You can't love her. And you can't change. And god help me for saying this, but the only way you're going to be happy is if you go back to Dru, find some mad doctor to pull your chip, and spend the rest of eternity making little vampire babies."
Spike sank lower into his side of the booth and sulked. "It's not true," he said after a minute. He sounded troubled. "I could change."
"Sure. You could change your clothes, your name--you could take up knitting and nurse sick kittens back to health. It wouldn't matter. You can't change you. Because you're dead. It's the ultimate arrested development."
"Says the expert," Spike parried. Xander could tell he was itching
to draw blood. "Clawed your way up the ladder a few rungs, didn't you. Out
of the basement, into the ranks of the happy little proles. Trouble is, that's
as far as you're going, and everyone knows it. Your girl knew it. Why d'you
think she left? You're an evolutionary dead end. Thirty K a year and a shiny
yellow hat." "Shiny" is a very Buffy,
very Jossian word. I'm sure I use it at least once per story.
"Proles" as a Spike word made me very happy.
"Right." Suddenly walking home alone through the vampire-thick
streets ["Vampire-thick" is a poetic sort of
construction, and I'm more careful these days to use that sort of thing
sparingly. When I say "poetic" I mean that it shoves words together
and makes you chew on them a moment. It's obtrusive. A story full of such
portmanteaus would be more difficult to push through as a reader, I think.] of
Sunnydale seemed a more attractive prospect. "I can't tell you how special
this has been--" Because it hadn't. "--but I think I'll be going. If
I'm not home by
"It's half past," Spike said flatly.
"Time to bake a pie then." He slid out of the booth, lurched to his feet, and took a brief moment to pause and contemplate the table top, into which someone had carved 'Ginny Luvs Harry.' He closed his eyes but when he reopened them the sentiment had not gone away. Neither had he.
"Any last words?" Spike asked.
"What?" Managing with great effort to winch his head up, Xander
gave him the beady eye. Words come into my head, like
"winch." And then I go look them up in the dictionary to make sure
they mean what I think they mean.
"For when the slayer asks." Spike lit a cigarette in that professional smoker way of his. "Not like you're going to make it home. If the vamps don't get you, I'm guessing telephone pole."
Before Xander could even formulate the first draft of a reply, the other man had palmed his wallet ["Palmed" is a great word because to me it suggests that Spike either slid the wallet off the table or out of Xander's back pocket--either way he did it smoothly and quickly, like a pick-pocket, and it uses one word to substitute for many, e.g., "palmed his wallet" versus "taken his wallet smoothly from his back pocket."], tossed three twenties on the table, and manhandled him halfway to the door.
"Spike. Please. I'm begging you. Let me go. I would rather kiss a
telephone pole at fifty miles an hour than--" When
dialogue is predictable, interrupt it.
Graciously [Readers can picture that I hope. Spike's
incredibly polite and interested face as he lets Xander collide with a beam.], Spike let him walk straight into a support beam. Even at three
miles an hour the result was somewhere between bender and concussion. While
pain rendered him speechless, he felt the vampire take his car keys. Sometimes you *do* have to say "the vampire." You just can't say "the blond vampire." You can only say "the blond vampire" when Buffy is talking to two strange vampires, both men, and she doesn't know their names, and hair color is the only useful thing to distinguish them. With characters we know, I prefer to use people's names, but sometimes the repetition of a name starts to tug at the reader's attention, and that's when you have to find a way to remove it, either by substituting something else, like here, or by rearranging the sentence so that a name isn't necessary at all. There might also have been a few fingers of scrotum-fondling through the front pocket of his jeans,
but he was prepared to forget that. I was conscious
here, in passing, of not wanting to linger boringly on the scrotum-fondling.
Make it funny, move on. Don't let it become one of those bizarrely loaded
moments where Xander dwells for twelve paragraphs on his repressed homoerotic
desires.
"Oh god," he said when the bar door opened to decant them. A wave of fresh, cool air slapped him almost as hard as the beam, and he grabbed the nearest thing to keep from falling over, then leaned against the wall. The wall was Spike; the thing was his belt.
"If you heave, I'm tossing you back."
Xander lay his cheek against a broad shoulder and patted some muscles
reassuringly. "I'm not going to heave." He pushed off the wall and
looked up into its face with a smile. "Hey," he said. "I love
you, man." And then he cracked up, several times.
That was the last thing he remembered for a while. When he opened his eyes it was to a vision so horrible he thought he'd been turned to stone. The vision stared back, equally petrified and marble-eyed. Gradually it occurred to Xander that the monster was familiar. And that he could move his left arm. Ah. Yes. He'd been propped on the passenger-side window of his car and was staring at his own face in the mirror.
His head felt sandbagged. He must have been out a day, even a week. He checked his watch through bleary eyes. Ten minutes. The car, he noticed, was not moving.
"Spike," he said in a small and reasonable voice. An adjective like "reasonable" in this position is,
if not quite clichéd, a definite nod to a recognizable comedic style, rather
British, I think. Kind of Wodehouse. I don't mind using a borrowed idiom.
Sometimes funny is still funny seventy years later. Not yet ready to
lift his head off the window, he waited, but there was no answer. No second
tries, he decided, closing his eyes again. Time for a nap.
"Start the car! Harris, wake the hell up! Start the car!"
He came awake in point-three seconds and flailed, ready to obey, but his hands didn't impact with the expected equipment. His right hand was rotating in the air, lost, looking for a key that wasn't there. The keys were gone! No, wait. The entire wheel was gone--someone had stolen his steering wheel! Bewildered at the specificity of the theft, he reached for the door handle and ended up flopping on his side like a seal, neatly missing something that whizzed through the car at head-level and into the driver side window with an explosion of broken glass.
"Fuck!" he yelled.
"Son of a bitch," Spike agreed
["Agreed" connects their dialogue, keeps the narrative moving and
sequential. It's also just funny to
"What's going on?"
"Poker debt."
"Yours or--" The car screeched rubber and spun a hundred and eighty degrees. "Never mind." They accelerated toward a brick wall and Xander braced himself with a healthy terror. Veering to the side at the last moment, Spike drove down an alley that seemed to narrow at the far end, but that had to be an optical illusion, because buildings were built to square.
They leapt out of the alley mouth and into the street, scattering the horses
that would've been there if this had been a Western, and instead skidding into
a mailbox before Spike got control of the wheel and drove Xander's first
respectable car--monthly payments of $239, not to mention the insurance--onto
the sidewalk. I grabbed familiar movie stunts, while trying to tongue-in-cheek acknowledge them; thus, "scattering the horses" distracts (I hope) from the complete cliché of hitting the mailbox.
Xander clung to the seat and concentrated on keeping his stomach down. No energy could be spared for hating Spike, even though this was the best possible time. "Why did you stop?" he yelled over the sound of the wind. "Your pay-off couldn't wait?"
"Thought I could cash you in," Spike said. He was too serious.
Xander boggled. I didn't even know where I was going at
this point. It's incredibly random, having Spike try to barter Xander off--it
pleased me because it seemed both hilarious and horrible, and thus in keeping
with the bizarre cognitive dissonance that season-four and early season-five
Spike induced in me.
"Excuse me?"
"Cancel a few debts, clear a few kittens off the tab."
"With me."
"Ten pints in that skin, eighty proof. No harm in trying."
"No harm?!" I don't usually double
punctuation, but the occasional question-exclamation-mark is useful to convey
tone.
"Hold on."
They took a corner and Xander was flung against the passenger-side door. His stomach, panicky and blind, tried to claw its way up out of his abdomen and into his throat. All he could think was: just wait until I tell Buffy. This would be a story. Death Breath would be slalomed out of Sunnydale so fast it'd chafe the denim right off that sorry--
"Bugger," Spike said, braking suddenly. Xander bounced between
dashboard and seatback like a pinball, getting his arms up in time to avoid
serious injury. A bloody lip and a few bruises, that would be all he'd be
sporting later, but right now his head was ringing.
"Déjà vu--no, wait, I've never been to Hell before." He stared down the road through his windshield at the...well, now. "Is that a...?
"Wizard holding a big stick? Yeah."
"I think the word you want is 'wand'."
"Any stick's a bad stick."
"Spike. Guy in purple robes with twig: not scary. Now if that twig turns me into a tiny, drunken badger..."
"Don't worry. Probably just kill you."
Xander took comfort from that, but it was a thin sort of comfort. "Why did you play poker with a wizard? Even I know better than that."
"Spike!" the wizard called. "I'm a reasonable man. Let's talk about this."
"Hey," Xander said with relief, "he sounds pretty--"
The vampire shoved open the door and dove for the ground like an action hero
practicing for his big scene. A few molasses-slow beats later, Xander mirrored
his action, making it out just as the top of his car blew off. Sheared metal
flipped away to land about fifty yards behind his car and tumbled for a few
more turns before clattering to rest on the asphalt. I
wanted to convey slo-mo here, even though if filmed, Joss probably wouldn't
have used slo-mo. It just amused me, giving a kind of absurd action-movie,
buddy-cop-movie tone to the scene.
Scrambling around the car out of sight of their attacker, Xander wondered where the hell his cell phone was, then remembered he didn't have one. A disheartening moment for the forces of technology. His car gently chugged to itself while he scraped hands and knees across the ground, pausing every few moments to peer underneath for fireballs. When he reached the far edge of his rear bumper, he came to a cold stop. He'd expected Spike to have set a new Olympic sprint record by now, but he was lying on his side in the opposite lane, unmoving, facing away from Xander. The big purple wizard was standing over him. Sucker looked old but moved fast apparently. As Xander watched he prodded Spike with his wand--easily the length of a sword or even a swordfish [Wordplay happens.]--and stroked his long white beard with thoughtful indecision before stepping back and taking aim.
"Hey, Dumbledore!" Xander yelled before common sense could kick in. "I'm a sixth-level sorcerer with forty-two hit points! Back off or you're sushi!"
His threat would have been far more menacing if he'd been aiming anything at the guy, but all he had to hand was a pair of Nike Air Huaraches [I researched the Nikes, matching them against canon air dates. Specificity can help overcome an uninteresting prop. Sneakers aren't interesting in themselves, but Xander's Nikes--which he probably chose with some attention to detail--are more so to me. I don't know if Xander in canon owned Nikes, and don't care.] with worn laces, not designed to make men quail. Despite the emptiness of his threat, the wizard's face took on a look of alarm and he turned and ran, revealing his own pair of battered sneakers beneath the hem of his robes.
Now was clearly the time to exult and shoot off a snappy catchphrase for any cameras that might be rolling [Here, I go "meta" for a moment because it amuses me to acknowledge the fact that the source material is televised and fictional, when I'm working hard to make this as real as possible.], but Xander was still plastered enough that concern for Spike outweighed triumph. He crawled toward the motionless body, trying to keep in mind that motionless didn't mean dead for vampires, and that even dead didn't mean all that much.
"Spike," he said, reaching the other man. He pulled at the heavy
leather coat until Spike rolled onto his back. He looked okay. Unconscious,
pale, unbreathing, but okay. "Wake up," he urged. "You're the
designated driver...who tried to barter me off to a wizard and once threatened
to eat onion dip from my skullcap, so why the hell I'm trying to mobilize you I
don't know." Here, if this were filmed
canon, we'd need Xander's thoughts to be spoken dialogue in order to carry the
scene along, so I just emulated that.
He'd originally caved to chauffeur service for the sake of getting home
alive--but did he have better survival odds with Spike or without him? Always a
fine point of judgment, and when in doubt Xander liked to remind himself which
one of them was the soulless killer and which was the registered owner of his
vehicle. With this in mind, he got up and did his considerate best to drag
Spike to the gutter where he'd be at less risk for ending up road-mashed under
someone's tires. Then he walked away, got behind the wheel, and sat there for
too long with the motor idling, debating the vicissitudes of his life. He
wouldn't even have vicissitudes if the word hadn't been on the SATs.
School really was to blame for everything when you got right down to it. Obviously, I was uncomfortable letting Xander use the word
"vicissitudes" without justifying it in some way. He's not stupid,
but he doesn't use words like that normally. I don't want to belabor the point,
though. So I try to skim over it lightly by cloaking it in humor.
A groan from the gutter reached his ears. Xander pressed his forehead to the steering wheel and moved on to blaming his mother. For being born. "I'm not going to get out, I am not going to get out." Then he took a deep breath and, in fact, didn't. He put the car into gear and drove away, feeling both proud and irrationally ashamed, clenching the plastic in tight hands to keep himself on course.
At the end of the street he took a left turn. And then another left turn. And another. The deliberately broken action and repetition gets across, I hope, the silliness and impulsiveness of what he's doing--the way he doesn't think any further than each turn and then ends up back where he began. The fourth left turn brought his car roof back into sight and he gave it a disgusted look, pulled up beside it, and studied the gutter. It was empty. Just a few soda cans and some scraps of paper. Directly behind it extended an alley, also empty.
"Even Superman wasn't this conscientious," Xander decided. Again, he has to talk to himself at least briefly here,
because if this was TV, we wouldn't know what he was thinking otherwise. He
shook his head once, left his arch-nemesis to the hands of fate, and went home
to sleep.
"He tried to barter you off for a poker debt?" Buffy said.
"Cut. Take two." Xander put an arm around her shoulder with a directorial air. "A little more outrage, please, and try not to emphasize the 'you' next time."
Her face turned contrite. "Sorry."
"Oh, I'm sure it was at least a litter,"
"This wizard," Giles said with a more focused area of concern.
"Did you happen to notice if he had any insignia--any magical symbols on
his robes or his, er, hat?" He stood by the shelves in a pose of
inquisitive attention, head tilted, a book splayed open in one hand, glasses in
the other. Still Life with Librarian. He was no longer
a librarian in season five, but no way am I going to lose a good line by
getting hung up on that point.
"No. I don't know. It was dark. I was distracted by my impending death."
"Of course," Giles said, putting his glasses on and his nose back
in his book. There was a dry, dismissive tone to his voice that Xander knew too
well. "You were very fortunate to escape death by badger." I swear, Jossverse emotional logic can be unpredictable and
erratic--sometimes the other characters will show genuine concern, and other
times they'll be completely blasé and even mocking about the danger and death
surrounding them. I think it just depends on the exigencies of the plot, and
whether or not the writer can get off a funny line. Far be it from me to depart
from this principle.
Buffy, who'd hopped up on the register counter and was kicking her
heels lightly against the glass, put down her latte to frown at him.
"Giles, Xander could have been killed. Even if he was just badgered, think
how awful that'd be. Look at poor Amy. Trapped in a cage, going round and round
on her little wheel. Speaking as an ex-rat, I can tell you--there's trauma in
the animal kingdom. I still dream of cheese." She stared off into space,
growing absent. "Sometimes I'm the cheese." I
rewrote this paragraph over and over, trying to nail Buffy's comic timing for
that final line--the delivery, the line read that I can just *see* SMG giving
here. It still nags at me. Oh well.
"Does anyone else worry about the kittens?"
"Okay, could I get a jot of respect here?" Xander asked sharply. Everyone stopped what they were doing and turned their eyes on him. Buffy had been tossing blueberries in the air and trying to catch them in her mouth. An interrupted blueberry hit the floor and rolled toward his shoe.
"A jot,"
"It's like a really tiny amount,"
"Thanks," Xander said, jaw taking on an edge. "That was my left testicle you just chewed up. Want to complete the emasculation process? Because, much funny."
"Xander." Giles put a thousand years of British reproof into his
name, as if invoking a gentleman's code that didn't need stating. Bad show, old
chap. A bit lazy of me. I am not sure I can really hear
Giles saying "Xander" here in quite that way, but I needed a
"beat" before
"For the record, I think you're overreacting
just a jot,"
"Forget it."
"No, I mean, what is that? Because we're lesbians we're all of a sudden
emasculating you with fruit?" One of my favorite lines--"emasculating
you with fruit." Er, sometimes I like myself and am pretty!
"Did I say 'lesbians'? Did anyone hear me say 'lesbians'?"
"I know you're upset because Anya left,"
How could an ordinary conversation fall apart so completely so fast? Like
this, kids: "Oh, so I can't run away to
He stalked out of the shop, exit punctuated by the jangle of bells over the door.
"What just happened?" Buffy asked the others. "Were we unsupportive?"
"Anya leaving has really got him down."
"He's young. Give him a month or two." Giles shoved his book back
on the shelf. "I'm sure that even as we speak there's some mummified
cicada or horrifyingly blunt hellcat just waiting for the right man to come
along." When he turned away from the shelves he noticed their amazed faces
and cleared his throat. "That was perhaps a touch cynical." I went back and forth on whether Giles would *really* clear
his throat or whether I was using a written substitute for what on TV would be
a complexly nuanced pause and hard-to-convey facial expression. I finally
decided he might in fact clear his throat and decided not to dwell on the
point.
Buffy wasn't quite ready to lower her brows. "That's ready-for-detox cynical."
"You have to admit, Xander's track record isn't what you'd call normal,
even for the Sunnydale dating scene."
"Or a vampire," offered
"Banshee, dryad, harpy--oh wait, that was Anya."
"Oh," Buffy said, "maybe we could find him a nice mermaid. They're okay, right?"
Giles picked up his tea. "Well, apart from their tendency to drag men into the ocean depths and drown them, I'm told they make charming companions."
Buffy looked downcast. "He is so doomed."
The next evening,
"Where's Spike?" And here I segue right
back into "real time" action. It was
Leading the pack, Buffy didn't even slow. "And
we care why?" Her heels dug into the turf with force. Pfft, pfft, pfft. I find this whole scene to be barely more than filler, hence
things like "pfft, pfft, pfft" to try and keep the language
interesting and engaging.
"Well, he is helpful,"
"We just took out three vamps." Xander backed up Buffy firmly, coasting on the success of dusting one of his own. "We don't need help from His Surliness."
"The last time you saw him, he was hurt, right?"
"He banged his head. Big deal. He's probably Johnnie Walkering it off
in his crypt." Word play happens.
"Maybe we should check,"
Despite Xander's reluctance, they did, and found it inhabited by a skanky vampire in game face who volunteered that his name was Burt and that he'd found the place empty three days ago when he was looking for somewhere to crash.
"A beauty, isn't it," he said with enthusiasm. "You don't find crypts like this in every boneyard. Real estate market's a bitch these days. Gets electricity and plumbing too. No cable, though, and the place could use a good dusting."
Buffy obliged him and they wandered off, musing among themselves over what might have happened to Spike. Xander aired the theory that Spike had fled town to avoid the consequences of his debts. A Spikeless Sunnydale. A happy thought, a buoyant relief.
A premature conclusion. Deliberate repetition of
structure for, I hope, humorous effect.
They became so certain he'd left that it was shocking when they found him. An expositiony sentence to red-flag that we're about to get
something new--Spike's re-appearance--then the narrative begins shifting back
toward a real-time sequence of events. There is probably some term for this
technique, and critical discussion of its effectiveness, but I've got no insight into
that. I honestly have no idea what I'm trying to achieve by signaling that
Spike is about to appear--does it build tension or undermine it? I don't know. There'd
been a few wizard sightings, never followed by good news, which made it a
priority to locate the bastard and see what he was up to. Through informants of
the demon persuasion they got a location for his den--"We're off to see
the wizard!" [Sometimes you want to use a cliché,
but you just have to toss it over your shoulder and recognize that it's not
that fun or new or interesting.]
But it was pretty much deserted.
"Wizard droppings," Xander said, holding up a conical hat and a handful of long white hair.
"What the hell is that?" Buffy asked in horror.
Giles didn't quite roll his eyes. "I believe it was his beard," he observed with quelling matter-of-factness. He took the hair, ran it through his hands, then unexpectedly sniffed it before touching his tongue to the strands.
"Tell me you did not just do that." Xander gave a wigged-out shudder.
"Hair is a useful spell element. You can trace a person, control their movements. No wizard would leave such a dangerous weapon against himself. This was merely a theatrical prop--glued on, I'd say."
"Huh," Xander said, picking up what Giles had tossed aside and examining it. "I thought that guy was a little too Gandalfy to be true."
"His power is real enough," Giles reminded them.
"My mechanic and my checkbook would have to agree with you."
Xander dropped the hair-piece back on the table and wiped his hand on his
jeans. "Anyone have an evidence bag?" He snapped his fingers. "I
need a baggie here, sergeant." There is no gap
between this remark and
"What's this?" Up a short flight of steps,
They got, mounting the steps and parting the drapes in a herd of curiosity. If I couldn't do fun stuff like "They got" or write phrases like "herd of curiosity" I'm not sure I'd see any point in writing. That's what makes the whole process interesting to me.
"Whoa." Xander halted just inside. Spike sat cross-legged on a round bed with heaps of pillows and silky covers, wearing a collar and what could only be called a harem outfit. The collar was attached to a chain attached to the wall. Eyes wider than an anime boy's, he gazed at them. Several days after posting this I read a story I'd never seen before that used the same "anime" description for Spike's eyes, in nearly the same situation. (!) I boggled briefly, wondered if people would think I'd stolen the image, then shrugged and let it go. Coincidences and tropes abound in fan-fiction. He was holding a small scruffy cat. It squirmed and dug its claws into his arm but he didn't let go. Both of them looked apprehensive.
"Spike." Giles was next to find his voice. "Are you..." He paused, obviously taking in the circumstances. "All right?"
It was several beats before Spike asked, "You the one?" The words
came out rough and low. When I was first writing this,
at this point I imagined a far more intense hurt/comfort story, and I think
Spike's reactions in this scene suit that unwritten story better than they do
the story I ended up writing. This story didn't have the slightest clue what it
wanted to be at first--I struggled with it, bemused, trying to guide it toward
a coherent plot and tone. I mean, I never did bother to identify and capture
the wizard. Eventually I allowed the ficathon to constrain my goals to some
degree--if this has had been my own story, no deadline, I might have kept
writing until I nailed down the dangling wizard plotline, for one thing. But I
am okay with how it ended up, because it feels like a slice of a season removed from the body, like a biopsy, and I can imagine the story continuing
"past the margin" of where it ends. Questions remain, like: what was
up with that wizard, anyway? And: did
Giles shot a glance at the rest of them. "The...one?"
"The buyer. Finch said I brought a pretty penny." The cat made a raw, creaking sound like a door hinge and wrestled out of his arms to bound away. Bewildered and forlorn, Spike watched it go.
A strange feeling tugged at Xander. He swallowed.
"Oh god,"
Giles let his head sink a notch. "So I gather." So I gathered? So I've gathered? Oh, who cares.
They all stood there for an uncomfortable pause until Xander said, "This is my fault. I left him. They must have--they must have caught up with him."
"It's not your fault." But Buffy sounded too quiet and not nearly
sure enough to settle his mind. She sounded like a friend saying the right
thing. Here's a place where I try to do justice to
Buffy's facets--she's not simplistically hateful of Spike; she's got some
sympathy. Like the rest of the Scoobies, she alters when she alteration finds.
She isn't a completely hard bitch who'd blow off Spike's fate with a blithe
"Who cares? Let's leave him." I try to capture that later, as well,
when she punches Spike to find out whether the chip is active, and then feels
confused and guilty when he doesn't react as expected.
While they talked, Spike abandoned his position and backed along the bed,
feet dragging the covers along. When he reached the far wall and began jerking
at the chain, Xander's heart rate kicked into a higher gear. Hands outstretched
in a James-T-Kirkian gesture of peace, he moved forward. It didn't seem so
important to hate vampires just now. When they knew who they were and what
they'd done, okay, fair game. But not now, not like this. I think this is one of those points in a story where a
reader has to take a leap of faith and accept that Xander's reactions might not
be black and white--that in the right circumstances he might soften or rise to
the occasion, react to Spike in a new way. Some readers do that, some seem to think only inside the box. I see the Jossverse as an incredibly flexible
universe, and I also see a potential for contingent reactions from characters--like, if fate twists a different way, characters will twist to follow it wherever possible. Twist without breaking. This is how I approach canon and AUs. I believe in human adaptability. Change the circumstances, and you want to keep the characterization "rigid" in the sense of adhering to certain basic
rules (Xander is sometimes generous; Xander is sometimes selfish, roll the dice
for his reaction--but Xander *always* cares for Buffy, unless you want to go
majorly AU or turn him into a vampire)--but as with bonsai or ivy, human nature will curve to the shape
it's given, reshaping to whatever constraints are imposed. Which means you just
need to carefully guide the characters to where you want them to be, to where
you want them to grow.
Spike flashed a blue gaze at him. His face was trying to stay tough and
hard, but it had a panicked edge. For a change, he wasn't the monster in the
dark, but the one who needed rescuing. Xander felt as if he were stepping into
the panel of a comic book and donning a cape. A nod to Fanboy!Xander.
"Hey. Relax." He settled on the bed, careful not to touch the other man. "They're not that scary." He jerked his chin back at the others. "Trust me."
"You...you're him, yeah?" Xander had to strain to make sense of Spike's murmur. This is Spike's dialogue, but Xander's POV. It's a bit odd that after Spike speaks we get a "Xander [verb]..." sentence, but I think it works. I'm not entirely confident of my POV techniques in terms of dialogue. It's something I still fiddle with and rethink from time to time. "Said he'd sold me. Said...said I owed him." He looked down and touched his stomach. "I don't remember." His fingers came away covered in blood. He frowned as if trying to figure out what he'd done wrong. This close, it became more apparent that he'd been drugged.
A wave of feeling threatened to drown the sensible, Spike-loathing guy Xander had been up to now. It might have been compassion.
"Don't worry," he said over a tightness in his throat. "You hurt?"
"Yeah," Spike admitted, sounding tired.
Xander reached out and Spike flinched and then straightened to show his belly. There were knife marks that stopped an inch above the trouser waist. Xander's fingers didn't quite meet the skin.
"What did--did he hurt you any place else?" God, what a creepy thing to ask. Next he needed to find a doll and have Spike point out the bad touches.
"Back." Spike didn't bother to turn.
"Right." That was as far as Xander wanted to go with this line of
questioning. He shifted around on the bed. "We need to get him out of
here." While Xander and Spike were
talking I "turned off" the background noise of the other characters.
In TV, we might have gotten a few reaction shots--Buffy, Giles--but it's not
always helpful in a story. The key is not to go too long without hearing the
others speak, or react--you don't want to go past the point of realism. I
couldn't have carried on an S/X conversation for ten more paragraphs without
readers starting to wonder why the hell none of the others were interrupting.
Buffy did some warrior-queen action with a broadsword and cut the chain from
the wall, then twisted the collar off while Spike hunched away from her,
looking as if he wanted to follow the cat's example and bolt. His vampire
instincts must have been going off like a siren, Xander thought, even if he
didn't know Buffy was the slayer. I don't often do the
"Xander thought" construction. I find it a bit awkward.
"He looks a little, um, spacey,"
Giles stepped closer. "Spike, stand up." His tone could have been sharper, but it got results. As the vampire stood there, muscles tensed, Giles tipped his face with a careful hand and checked his eyes. "He's probably been given a narcotic or sedative to render him docile."
"What," Xander said, "like roofies?" Everyone turned to
look at him. "Which I know of only by report." I researched for "roofie" references in the BtVS episode
scripts and found a mention in "Reptile Boy" but decided I could get
away with it here.
"Yes, something like that." Giles took one of Spike's arms and lifted it. When he let go it remained in place. "I'd say he's highly suggestible right now."
"It's like he's hypnotized." At this realization, Buffy perked up.
"Can we make him cluck like a chicken?" There's
a key difference between cruelty and a Jossian absurdity--the characters often
offer up a form of humor that's at bizarre odds with the situation they find
themselves in. Buffy probably wouldn't make this joke if it were Xander or
Willow who'd been kidnapped, but even so, it's not a *nasty* jab. It keeps the
tone of the show, which during this period more or less used Spike as a punch
line, with occasional side servings of angst.
"Tempting, but no."
To Xander's eye, Spike may have been a bit zonked, but he wasn't a zombie.
After a few moments he let his arm lower and his attention wander off to the
side, where the cat was making a comeback. When Xander snagged the animal and
handed it over, he curled his arms around it and buried his face in its ruff as
if he wanted to block the rest of them out.
"Oh, it's so cute,"
Right, thought Xander.
Less than an hour later they were back in the Magic Box, Spike sniffing out
the territory on restless legs, Giles mainlining
"What are we going to do with him?"
The Bat-Eared Boy can hear you just fine, Xander almost reminded her, but Spike wasn't showing any interest, so he kept quiet.
"Well, he's not dangerous," Giles noted with a half shrug. "Not with the chip intact."
"Um." One syllable and a tiny hand raise
and
With the decisive action that marked her the slayer, Buffy strode over to Spike, jerked him around, and punched him. His head snapped back with the force of her blow and for a moment a blaze seemed to cut through the fog, but it died almost at once. He lowered his gaze without hitting back or asking questions, without even wiping the blood from his mouth. When she raised her fist again, he averted his face and closed his eyes, waiting stoically.
Xander traded a glance with Giles. They'd both learned not to give a shit
about vampires and Xander liked to think of it as a common bond, one of the few
things that transcended the generation gap and the
"Buffy," he began.
But she was already backing away, fist lowering. She didn't look overcome
with regret, but Xander didn't think she'd be punching Spike again any time
soon. "Guess that answers that question," she said quietly. I know there's this whole derisive field of criticism against
adverbs (and adjectives!) as if the whole world can be boiled down to nouns and
verbs. What-*ev*-er. These are clearly the same people who subsist on celery
and wheat germ. I think a word like "quietly" can get across a lot;
Buffy wouldn't be quiet at such a moment unless she were feeling vaguely
unhappy with what she'd just done. It's a mix of emotions though, and I don't
want to delve too deep, because we're not in her POV, so I just let
"quietly" cue the moment--everyone should direct their attention to
Buffy for a tick, as she's speaking lower than usual, and if she's speaking
lower than usual, there's probably something wrong, and because *we* aren't
Buffy we don't know exactly what she's thinking, but hopefully everyone is
taking their best guess.
"Not directly," Giles countered, moving to Spike's side. "But I don't think we're at any greater risk than before." He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and gave it to Spike, who accepted it and studied Giles for a wary moment before rubbing the blood off.
"We could send him back to his crypt,"
"Harmony left." Xander rested his arms on the table. "There
wouldn't be anyone to look after him, and if that wizard guy came back..."
Enough said there. Fairly basic, but this is
another example of how you don't always need dialogue tags. You can just follow dialogue with action to convey who's speaking. Ensemble writing, when everyone in a group has at least a has a line or two, requires a degree of variation and care to avoid monotony (e.g., you wouldn't want to begin every paragraph with a person's name). But extremes of elegant variation should be avoided. In this section I've used "countered" and "remarked" and other things in place of "said" but I don't think it's particularly noticeable (at least not until now, when I've called everyone's attention to it). It's not as if these verbs violate the Geneva Convention. I've also used "said" several times, and other times used no dialogue tags. On the downside, sometimes this attention to craft--trying to avoid plodding, monotonous rhythms--ends up making me feel self-conscious about everything I write. I lose my ability to tell which things are unobtrusive and which aren't. And then I jam a sharpened pencil through my hand to refocus the pain.
Giles was the one to put the unhappy truth into words. "One of us will have to look after him."
Worse, though, was when Xander heard himself say, "I'll do it."
"Mister Responsibility," Buffy remarked in a look-at-you tone that
sounded more amused than admiring. Joss talks about how
in each episode the writers try to establish where Buffy is emotionally--in
canon her issues rarely take a back-seat to someone else's story. Even writing
S/X I will question myself: "Is this the right thing for Buffy to be feeeling
here?"
"Mister Dumb-Ass, more like. But I am. Responsible."
"Oh, you're so not." Now it was
"Five or five hundred, it doesn't matter. I'll keep an eye on him until he's his fiendish self again. And hey, what could be more rewarding? I'll finally get my merit badge in vampire care, not to mention Spike's heartfelt gratitude."
You can never have too much sex or too much sarcasm, that was Xander's motto.
Most days he just had the sarcasm. For lack of
anything better to do, I often close a scene on a beat--one snappy sentence
dropped onto its own line which acts as punctuation. If I see myself overdoing
this, I try to cut back on the
technique.
"This is it. The classic one-bedroom bachelor pad. Formerly the den of
sin, but without a girlfriend living in sin just isn't the same." Xander
turned to see Spike held at bay on the threshold of the apartment, palming the
air with an uncertain expression. "Sorry. Be my guest." He waved a
hand and Spike stepped inside, letting the cat drop out of his hold. It hit the
ground running and disappeared into the bedroom.
Based on events so far, Xander suspected that the vampire would do anything
he was told--close the door, get naked, dance a jig--but those were bad
thoughts [Which don't deserve belaboring.], so
he closed the door himself and circled Spike on his way to the fridge. Miracle
of miracles, he had beer. A half minute later he had six ounces less. The
Xander Harris beer distribution net
He thought about offering Spike a beer, then didn't. His first exercise of domestic tyranny. Beer probably didn't go well with whatever funky dope was in his system.
"I don't have any blood," he said. "I'll get you some tomorrow, okay?"
"Yeah." They stared at each other until Spike, apparently taking
Xander's silence for expectation, added, "...sir?" I reworked this line a lot and still don't like it. I try to
play it in my head, as it might film--start on Spike, cut to Xander for
reaction shot, then back to Spike as his voice slurs from the first word to the
second, a kind of dragging pause between them. Finally I just gave up and left
it alone.
"You don't have to sir me, Spike."
"All right."
Too easy, Xander thought. Didn't you have to repeat the command several
times before they picked up a new trick? No, wait, that was dogs. He needed to
stop confusing Spike with a golden retriever. In most
stories I thematically seem to compare Spike either to a dog or a cat. I try
not to mix metaphors too much.
"Why don't you," another hand wave, "sit down. Relax." When you're inserting something into dialogue and abusing the
punctuation a bit, it should generally match the length of the pause in a
natural way. So here, I could have written: "Why don't you," he waved
his hand around the room to indicate the chairs, "sit down. Relax."
But that's moving toward long and awkward, whereas the time it takes you to
read "another hand wave" matches the brevity of a hand wave. Also,
those other words are just unnecessary. I struggle sometimes with punctuating
broken sentences. Sometimes I use dashes and periods. "Like if you--"
Anna hesitated. "--well, like this."
Spike sat down in an armchair. Whether he relaxed or not wasn't entirely
clear. He had the lazy-boy posture of a relaxed man, but a certain tightness in
his shoulders suggested he had rigid thoughts. Moving his head only a few
degrees left to right, he inspected the lay of Xander's land in a judgmental
way. Giving it a fresh eye, Xander had to admit that he'd let the place go
since Anya left. The living room had a stale fug from layers of greasy
fast-food bags and unlaundered socks--manly territorial marking to reclaim his
domain. I'm always describing
Xander's living space as a collection of pizza boxes and beer bottles. So here
I've tried to get a little variation in.
He sat on the couch a safe distance from Spike. Safe meaning that Spike wouldn't be able to grab the remote away. "Around this time I usually like to sit and watch TV and wonder why I don't have a hobby. Model airplanes, fantasy baseball. Model fantasies, now, I have those. Cindy Crawford, Tyra Banks. Cindy Crawford and Tyra Banks." Xander stopped babbling when he realized that Spike had tuned him out and was fiddling with the cuts on his belly again. I often brood over whether or not to drop dialogue to start its own fresh paragraph. Should I have started a new paragraph with "Around this time..."? I don't know.
Guiltily, he abandoned his beer and remote and faced up to the fact that
he'd adopted what was basically a large, stoned vampire child with special
needs. And a weird line break here--I gave this its own
paragraph to accentuate/underline the joke about the special-needs vampire.
"You should probably take that off," Xander said as Spike fingered the hem of the silk tunic thingy that his crackheaded kidnapper had dressed him in. This line about the silk tunic betrays that I'd originally had a different sort of story in mind--dependent, obedient Spike in a slave collar, etc. And it's an example of something I tend to do in kink-based writing, which is to make the kinkier details matter-of-fact and to downplay them by keeping the observer's POV (here, Xander). So he doesn't dwell in loving detail over the spangled silk with the v-neck collar that fits Spike's trim form, blah blah--to him, the tunic is ridiculous. This kind of technique is useful in getting readers to accept all kinds of weird shit. Unfortunately, it can also dull the edge of kink. "Just the shirt," he added with emphasis. He gathered a roll of mummy gauze and a wash cloth and nearly flattened himself on the cat as he came back through the bedroom. "Good kitty," he said, while it purred and tried to kill him with sideswipes. "You hungry? You like Cheerios? I'd order in some mice, but I'm not sure--"
His idle prattle died when he saw Spike. Half-stripped, he was a raw mess, blood striping him from shoulders to waist. Carving and whipping didn't seem like the damage a wizard would do. Why not spells?
Maybe it had been more fun that way. Hands-on. I cheated a lot with Spike's wounds--I put them in to get that hurt/comfort effect, but glossed over them in the sex scene, and by the next day he's fine again. However, when putting him through Glory's tortures I amped up the injury level because we all know that Glory would have brutalized him *far* more than she did in canon--canon had to be restrained because they didn't want to incapacitate Spike too much; plus the FX of, say, a rib through the skin might have been prohibitively costly.
"They did a number on you, huh." Xander felt dry-mouthed and unsure of himself. Put in a position of having to give aid and comfort to a vampire he'd never liked and whose very existence he objected to on principle, he wasn't sure what was called for. Should he try to keep a business casual attitude or was he supposed to show a little benevolent TLC? And would that TLC get him in trouble later? Spike was a hurt animal right now, but when he snapped out of it he'd be all demon again, resentful of any coddling, expressive, loud.
Meanwhile, there was more blood than he'd bargained for. "I guess we're
going to need more towels." The delaying tactic bought him another minute,
but when he came back it was somehow worse; Spike hadn't even moved while he
was gone and the way his hands curled against his sides made him look like a
statue that someone had taken a lot of time over. The cat was nudging against
one shin but getting no love. I think this whole
section of the story is staged very poorly and strangely--the way Xander keeps
walking in and out of the room, etc. This is because the whole story hinges
here--I was struggling, deciding whether to write a very intense slavery-style
hurt/comfort, or to let the story go where it wanted to go. The story wanted to
be lighter, and it wanted Spike to snap back to his normal personality more
quickly; normal meaning alert and feisty, that is--the amesia notwithstanding.
I went with the dictates of the story--soon after this, Spike is talking
normally, and the next day, as Xander observes, the drugs have worn off and
he's nearly his old self again, despite the amnesia and the sex spell.
The apartment's silence made Xander hyper-aware of everything he did and was about to do, as if he were on a movie set under hot lights being watched by dozens of people. He'd left the ceiling lights on--Anya'd always hated that, preferred lamps--so that was probably why things seemed so bright and strange, Spike's skin whiter than usual, his blood redder, almost fake. He could just give the other man a towel, tell him to clean himself up, but he didn't.
"So why'd the wiz
"Guess so."
"You remember that?"
"No."
"Must have been a hell of a pot." Rougher than he'd meant to be,
Xander dragged across the edges of a cut with the cloth and saw Spike wince.
"Sorry." He slowed and shifted a few inches closer. Spike's chest
didn't move but every now and then he took a tiny breath. It was odd. He hadn't
been this close to a vamp before without the distraction of wanting to kill it
and that included Angel. It was usually an instinct, like smashing a bug with
your shoe. Didn't matter that the things had once been human. Close up, you
could sense the wrongness, dead meat that walked and talked--could feel their
creepy difference like air coming off an open fridge. It was a mistake thinking
of them as people. He shouldn't have had drinks with Spike or guy-talked with
him. Shouldn't be doing all this for him now, as if a vampire's pain or
cleanliness mattered. What mattered was that this fucking monster had killed
thousands of people, including a few kids and teachers he'd known personally. Another place where I awkwardly try to reconcile the
contradictions of chipped Spike--he's evil, but it's easy to forget that.
Xander is the least likely person to forget that. Plus, just overall, canon
glosses over a lot in its portrayal of evil vampires. Pre-soul, Spike was
presented as interesting and sympathetic; his worst actions weren't explored.
When we flash back in FFL, for instance, his slayer battles show him as strong,
victorious, attractive. We don't see him molesting ten-year olds or torturing
old people, or sitting repulsively in a stifling room with the blinds down,
surrounded by rotting corpses and scratching his belly. I'm not interested in
that gritty depressing realism, but I do occasionally try to give it a nod.
"I could put a stake in you right now," Xander said, voice edged. "I bet you wouldn't even fight. That'd solve a lot of problems, you know? The others, they'd understand." When he couldn't keep talking, he forced himself to meet Spike's eyes. Mistake, oh yeah. Spike was supposed to look tough and indifferent, cold and angry, amused and contemptuous. Not soft-faced and afraid and lost as if he was thinking that he'd have to let Xander do what he threatened because he didn't know how to stop it.
"I'm not going to stake you," Xander said and it was like talking to an animal. The silence helped. Maybe all Spike needed was the chip and a muzzle, and voila, a handy watch dog, a pet you could trust around children. "I just want to know how you do that trick. Looking like a real human, with a soul, when you're completely empty."
"I don't know." Spike's tone and eyes were cautious, making Xander feel like some crazy man with a gun who needed to be placated, who might go off the rails at the wrong answer. He resented that feeling. He wasn't the bad guy here.
"You get that I'm not the bad guy here, right?"
"Okay."
Xander hung his head a moment and shook it to dislodge his conscience. Didn't work. Giving up, he continued to clean Spike's wounds, front then back, grimacing to himself. You've got to be careful not to overuse stuff like "grimacing to himsef." Some of the most annoying things to read are long, long passages in a story where a character is alone with his thoughts, and grimacing at himself, and shaking his head at himself, and laughing at his own jokes, etc. Granted, a lot of do this when we're alone, but as a reader, the effect is as if we're watching the puzzling antics of a monkey sitting alone and pulling faces. Most had healed over but fresh blood welled up here and there. Still, give the guy a nice heme smoothie and by tomorrow night he should be okay.
That was more or less his thought when he put Spike to bed on the couch with
a blanket and the blinds closed and went to his own room--door very much
shut--to collapse. Some time later he jack-knifed upright in the dark, awakened
by sharp cries. Disoriented, heart hammering, he crashed to his feet, and after
a few blind fumbles for a light aimed instead for the door. I could probably have taken the comma out after
"feet." This is one of those front-loaded sentences I kind of like,
structurally speaking.
In the living room, Spike was a dark shape huddling next to the couch, head pressed to the coffee table. He was making the saddest sounds ever, sobs of grinding pain. The little hairs on Xander's neck rose to attention. It was a toss-up whether to grab the nearest lamp as a weapon or turn it on. I once read writing advice that should we should avoid "be/was" verbs wherever possible. Yeah, whatever. Right after I stop using all adjectives and adverbs, pal. I also plan to eradicate all carbs, sugar, and fat from my diet. I'll just be over here sucking on stones. He turned it on and went over to Spike, pacing himself to avoid startling him.
"Hey," he said, spooked but kneeling anyway. He touched one shoulder, careful not to brush any of the gashes criss-crossing the skin. "Spike." Interrupted sleep made him testy, but testiness had already been blown out of the water, leaving him anxious. "What's the matter."
"Hurts, god--make it stop--" He was shuddering, rough spasms that radiated from his shoulders to his hands, which struck the glass table hard enough to crack it. "Please."
"What hurts? Spike!" Xander hesitated, then tried to pry him up off the table to see his face. It was like trying to persuade a redwood to move to the left a few inches, but finally Spike shoved up and twisted and, whoops, Xander hadn't intended to invite an armful of vampire, but now he had a quivering heap wound around him, head pressed to the crook of his neck. If it hadn't been so obviously a non-bitey embrace he'd have panicked. Might have panicked anyway [The subject "he" is implied and unnecessary.], but was distracted by the heat pouring off the other man.
"Wow, you have body heat to burn," he said. "That's gotta mean a fever, and that...makes no sense."
"Hurts, hurts." Spike scrubbed his head against Xander's shoulder, curls thrusting along the side of his neck. "His head" = Spike's but "his neck" = Xander's. Slash pronouns are hard, man. "God." His voice softened to a groan but kept its urgency. "Please."
"You have to--uh, you have to stop that." Spike was mouthing his neck. "Remember the government hardware, turns bad thoughts into big pain, no, of course you don't, but take my word, oh--" Still unfanged, the vampire had worked upward to suck his ear. The hell? Sudden lobe fetish? Ear to jaw, jaw to cheek, Spike zeroed in for a lip-lock that stunned Xander. He squeaked with heterosexual objection and Spike groaned again and gave him tongue. Xander is speaking here, but once again the dialogue is embedded with Spike's actions. Such is the demand of tight POV. I think it works, but it requires a lot of careful attention to make sure it reads correctly. I always review a paragraph like this to make sure it hasn't wandered into ambiguity.
He worked loose and pushed Spike's shoulders back. "You want to tell me what's going on? When did I become taster's choice?"
"Hurts, bad," Spike said with persistence. "Please."
Xander wasn't even sure that Spike knew what he was asking for--he didn't look fully awake--but then he launched another blitz of kissing and, well, that was pretty clear. Evil, disgusting vampire, he reminded himself in an obligatory way, but it was one of those dream hours between midnight and dawn when a different state of consciousness took over and things that should have been horrifying became familiar and understandable, like when you suddenly get a joke that used to baffle you and hey, it was funny, and now you were in on it. The sex joke. Oh yeah, he had plenty of excuses ready. He could be dreaming, say. After all, vampires shouldn't be warm and kissable. That was a clue right there. Any second now someone would begin speaking German and clowns would break into the apartment and he and Spike would escape out the window in a hot air balloon with Buffy and eat chocolate-chip cookies as they flew over the Pacific heading for Spain.
It was very quiet and clownless and they kept kissing on his living room floor. Different, not-Anya kisses. He thought things. Thought: so this is what Buffy was into. Smooching the dead. Does Spike kiss like Angel? Did Spike and Angel...? He's hard. He's rubbing off on my thigh. I have good thighs. This is good, this is good. This is bad. This is good. I'm so going to Hell. This is the mouth to hell, in fact. And this is the tongue to hello, hello, is everyone having a good time, are you ready to party? Boogie. Down. If you're going to write dumb sentences like "He thought things," you have to do it *consciously*. As a stylistic choice. Here, also, we're getting stream of consciousness. Six or seven years ago I'd have put all this in italics. Now I use italics only when absolutely necessary. It's tedious reading long stretches of text in italics. It's a visual strain.
Thinking never solved anything.
Pulling away rather breathlessly, he asked, "Is there any chance you're under a curse? What I mean is, if I have sex with you, will you get your soul back? Because I could use some incentive here."
Spike grabbed Xander's dick and began massaging it through his boxers.
"That's...that's very incenting." I don't
know if incenting is an actual verb and don't care.
He made a ragged sound as Spike reattached warm lips to his neck and sucked like a sexy, sexy leech, hand still curling around his boxers in a rhythm Xander associated with a heavy bass beat, with clubbing, sweatiness, getting laid. Bingo.
"You should probably know that I've never done this with a guy before," he said as Spike pushed him onto his back and began grinding frantically against him. "Sweet Jesus, that--just--okay--good." A lifetime of resistance became a moment of profound not-caring and he relaxed and let Spike ride roughshod over him. Spike wore a look of desperation and was dragging sounds from his throat like nothing Xander had ever heard, harsh gasps and cries as if he was being whipped to pleasure. When it became clear he needed some help, Xander cupped his ass and lined him up, let him slide across home plate. Spike's eyes fell shut as he went still, then he jerked several times in ecstasy before his entire body melted, a heavy vampire blanket, head locking into the curve of Xander's shoulder.
"I am a juke-box," Xander said, staring at the ceiling as he contemplated his suffocating hard-on and prepared for disillusionment. "Put your money in, press the button, and get three minutes and thirty-two seconds of name...that...tune."
But Spike groaned and lifted his head as if breaking the surface of a wave,
gave him a heavily lidded gaze of pure sex--blue eyes, hair of sea foam--then
worked his way down Xander's body, lapping at him like a man with a salt
craving, shucking off his boxers, and blowing him until he forgot his middle
name, which he'd never liked anyway. I was playing with
the cliché of "he came so hard he forgot his own name." If I find myself
using a cliché--of language, not of concept--I'll see if it can be twisted
before abandoning it altogether. I'm more conscious of clichés in BtVS than in
any other previous fandom, because I think canon uses them to varying degree,
and also because they bubble up naturally when I'm writing and help me maintain
a snappier pace. The thing with clichés is knowing
where they belong: they
"I made a promise," Xander said. "Back when Angel went Jekyll-and-Hyde, I swore I'd never sleep with a vampire." He ran a palm slowly up Spike's hip. "Then again, I only promised that to myself, late at night, and was careful not to make a hard copy. So I won't lose miles of face with all my friends. Maybe just a few acres."
"Vampires bad then?"
He stared at Spike, incredulity returning for the space of a heartbeat...one, two, three. No cymbal clash signaled a punch line though, and something like sadness washed over him. "Vampires bad, yeah." He recited the gospel. "Soulless predators, demons, murderers of the innocent."
Spike's lashes lowered, covering his thoughts. "Guess that fits. Even if a man doesn't know his name, he knows who he is inside. In his gut. Knows if he's got a vocation to feed the poor, or if he's just lookin' out for himself." His gaze flicked up. "Not exactly overflowing with the milk of human kindness here."
"Not exactly, no," Xander said, and amazed himself by taking hold of Spike's dick. "But this isn't so bad. If you could stick to bad thoughts and good sex--" He hesitated on the brink of admission before stumbling into the danger zone. "There could be hope for you."
"So we knew each other before, yeah?" Spike pushed into Xander's hand, movement disconnected from the conversation.
"Yeah."
"We go to school together?"
"What?" Xander blinked out of a descending haze. "You're kidding, right? No. No. You're over a hundred. You're like this infamous master vampire, sowing death and destruction hither and yon, wherever you...uh, be."
"Why're you all come hither, then?" A smile was threatening the corners of Spike's mouth.
"Hey, you jumped me," he protested, but in his distraction he'd sped up the rhythm of his strokes. This seemed to give him the upper hand; Spike stopped smiling and gave a little cat rattle of approval from deep in his throat. "I was straight before you used your wicked vampire thrall on me," Xander went on, trying to convince at least one of them. "I can call character witnesses, previous girlfriends, purveyors of dirty magazines, Christina Aguilera."
"What's that about protesting too much?" Ugh.
One of the most prevalent clichés in X/S fiction. But sometimes I'm lazy.
"Oh yeah." Spike's hand had closed around Xander's own stirring dick. "I mean, no. I'm not protesting, I'm just...oh fuck it." He hitched closer to Spike, along an invisible border between straight and gay that ran between them on the carpet.
They kissed, they rekissed. And then Xander knelt and pushed the coffee
table aside in a deliberate way and moved on to the serious
He could stop cold if he wanted to, he wasn't that fuck-stupid, but just
then Spike roused himself and said, "You all right, mate?" in a
husky, hungry voice, and Xander looked at him and accepted the invitation to
his teacher's house and asked Amy for a spell and sent Buffy to kill Angel and
led the graduation charge to certain death and let the timer run out on the
bomb and sucked him off. A lot of readers mentioned
this sentence, and I'm glad that it works as I hoped it to work. It's like, here
we are at one of those moments where the dubious reader (and writer) is
thinking: Spike? Xander? Xander hates vampires! It needed a convincing argument that wasn't an argument. Xander just
needed to be in the moment, following the dice roll--because human nature is
both predictable and unpredictable. And the roll of the sentence is like the
roll of the dice until they stop tumbling and land, and there we are. Seven.
After a few more rounds of sex they fell asleep on the carpet side by side,
border crossed, wall crumbling, and Xander dreamed he was in East Berlin
surrounded by Nazis who had questions to ask him and who wouldn't take no for
an answer.
When Xander woke up he was staring into Spike's face. Asleep, Spike was a guy
in his twenties who went to the University of Sunnydale, whose parents called
him once a week and sent him checks from England. A grad student or a late
bloomer. He must have died at twenty-five, six. A good age to die, if you were
going to wind up immortal.
Xander left him on the floor covered in an afghan he'd inherited from his own parents, took a shower, and fled. He bought doughnuts, blood, and a newspaper, none of which he had to drive his reroofed car more than three blocks for. Running these errands made him feel like a grown-up, like when he first moved into the apartment with Anya and had to buy bath towels and tinfoil and water glasses. I am a man who buys his own paper, and blood for my houseguest. The "his" and "my" aren't parallel in structure, and when I recognized that several days after posting I was like, "d'oh!" But I left it in because I think the odd mis-step works. That sort of thing.
With the blinds drawn, his living room was dim and Spike was just a longish
lump by the foot of the couch, like a sleeping afghan-colored python. "Afghan-colored python" seemed so cute to me that I
began to worry I must have stolen it from someone; maybe even myself. A
strange Saturday morning lay ahead, unplanned. For a while, Xander sat and read
the paper and ate cereal, occasionally glancing over at Spike, who didn't snore
or even twitch. Dead snakes make the best pets.
"Meow," said something next to Xander's foot. He levitated right
off his chair, banged his toe, and hopped back out of reach. The thing
leap-frogged to his deserted seat and then to the table, where it began licking
the milk from his cereal. The whole
"levitating" phrase is a cliché, but it's like a stock comic
bit--recognizable but no less funny for being common, I think.
"Good kitty," he muttered, raking an agitated hand through his hair. "Not at all a fiend of darkness." But he did have one on the premises, he thought. At which moment the phone rang, threatening to raise the dead. He scooped it up before it could bleat again. "Xander's House of Pain, how may I help you?"
"Ahhhh, yes," Giles said, as if uncertain he'd reached the right number. He nailed that dubious tone so well Xander couldn't help but admire. "I called to see how things were going, and whether you needed anything."
"Couldn't be better. Brought Spike home, cleaned him up, had hot twisted sex with him for two--maybe three hours--then got a good night's sleep."
From the other end of the line came the sound of silence, followed by a delicate cough. "Yes, well. I assume you'll be all right on your own for a while then."
"Oh, sure. Tonight I'm taking him to see Les Miserables and then a late dinner, if he feels like eating. Always iffy with vampires."
A sigh signaled the ritualistic cleaning of prescription lenses. "You really
do have an extraordinary gift for irreverence. Irreverence
doesn't seem to me the right word here, but after pondering a while I gave up
on trying to find something better and decided it was good enough. Sometimes
I almost believe--what? Oh yes, several, though they've a tendency to breed if
you overfeed them. Excuse me, Xander, I've a customer. Do call if you run into
any problems. No, no, you should dehorn them first." I like to play around with phone-call techniques; in my older non-BtVS stories I have several scenes with one-sided phone calls which I had a lot of fun with.
"Wait--almost believe what? Giles?" Answered only by a dial tone,
he shut off the phone in resignation. His life would remain a mystery.
"I bought the tickets in advance," Xander said while they waited in
line at the theater that night. "I was going to surprise Anya, a late
Christmas present. Three hundred bucks." He paused, teetering on the edge
of the bitter dark pit that was his heart. Comic tone:
it's actually true that his heart is a bitter dark pit, at least for a moment,
but the surrounding context of the story lightens the tone so that this one
line isn't too earnestly angsty. It's Xander tone: truth delivered with a twist
of smile, in the face of bleakness. "Figured I might as well not
waste them."
Spike, dressed in Xander's clothes, studied him with a wordless frown, then flowed into his personal space and kissed him. I try on new verbs like trying on new clothes, and I often use a thesaurus, if only to jog and loosen up my thoughts. "Flowed" could have been "moved" but "moved" is boring. Loaded with blood and roofie-free, he'd become more like his old aggressive self over the course of the day, but impromptu nuzzling had never been in his arsenal before now.
Held fast, Xander waved his hands in a parody of spastic befuddlement, aware
of heads turning, of murmurs and giggles, before he grabbed Spike's arms. He
meant to thrust him off, the way you'd dislodge a dog from your leg, but he
noticed how nice the kiss was, and that was his downfall. "Nice" was
the word his mom used to describe a baby shower or a Mother's Day present of
cheap earrings. When he used it himself, he used it sarcastically. But now his
whole body was chiming nice, nice, nice and meaning it. It was a kick,
letting Spike try to kiss everything better in the middle of a line for Les
Mis with the good people of Sunnydale looking on. For just a moment, as the
doors opened to let the crowd in, as he held Spike's arms through the borrowed
blue shirt, as a February breeze touched his neck, he loved the craziness of
his life instead of hating it. Existential
moments: this final sentence reflects something I do consciously--or maybe I mean instinctively--when writing, which is try to crystalize the story for just a moment, so that the reader tunes in and feels: this is Xander *being*. He's real.
They went in and watched the show and afterwards he took Spike to dinner and explained to him that he liked onion rings.
"Yeah?" Spike said doubtfully, but accepted Xander's assurance and ate some. His face brightened when he tasted them. "Bloody brilliant," he said with feeling, holding a ring in his fingers to marvel, then looked up at Xander with a real smile, eyes trusting and fanning out in tiny crinkles at the edges.
It gutted Xander.
"Try them with ketchup," he said, when he could catch his breath.
Later that night, during back-to-back episodes of Farscape, Spike grew
restless and stroked Xander's thigh until he was successfully distracted from
the vision of Aeryn Sun in slick black leather, a minor miracle, a victory for
vampire pheromones.
"What's up?" Xander asked, already knowing the answer.
Spike straddled his lap and popped his shirt buttons and introduced Xander to his tongue again. By this point, Xander was feeling pretty friendly toward it. He kissed back, holding Spike's hips, pushing his shirt up. A whoosh of cotton came between them for a moment, then the shirt was off and the kiss back on. Taking clothes off is boring, so I try to play around with language in spots like this. Piano-fingering his way around all that naked skin, he discovered that healing had progressed further during the past twenty-four hours; every place he touched was nearly smooth.
Sex should have been the cherry on top of the evening, but the intensity of Spike's need was off-putting. Xander eased him back. "I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I think you may be under a spell." Spike unbuttoned both their jeans at once, in an impressively ambidextrous way. Xander took a breath. "Or two."
"Yeah?" Absent tone.
"A sex spell," Xander spelled out. "And the amnesia--at first I thought you'd bumped your head, but now I'm not so sure."
"Figured it was something like that." Spike pushed their cocks together and rubbed with the full force of his hips. Boy Scouts couldn't have started a better fire.
"Don't you care? This whole this," he gestured at their jutting organs, "might not even be you."
"Told you." Spike massaged Xander's shoulders and gyrated in his lap, eyes half shut. "I know who I am," a thrust, "and what I want. Didn't lose all my marbles."
Now was probably not a good time to mention that Spike had paired off with a dolly-loving girl vamp for a hundred years or that until recently he'd had a crush on the slayer. He looked supremely uninterested in pursuing this existential dilemma. Plus, speech was becoming a challenge.
"Okay then." Xander let his head fall back on the couch. "As
long as you're--oh, fuck--sure. But tomorrow I'm taking you to Giles. If you've
been whammied, we've got to--got to--oh man, yes, yes, yes--"
"I don't see why," Giles said [Bathetic
slide--change in tone from the "yes, yes, yes!" peak ending the last
section, into the bland, back-to-earth "don't see why" from Glies.
Canon did that a lot--practically a Jossian trademark, so I try to mimic it in
stories. Think of Spike dramatically proclaiming how he's going to take down
the slayer and then the Initiative guys come along and zap him mid-monologue.],
sliding his hands in his pockets and studying Spike through his glasses from
across the magic shop. Dawn was teaching the vampire her version of rummy,
which involved jelly beans and arm punches, and his ruffled head was bent over
his cards as he frowned and listened to her explain the rules.
Xander tried to assimilate the watcher's words. "Um, excuse me? Come again?"
Giles glanced at him, expression mild but eyes so cool as to be scary. "It's not as if he has free will, Xander. He's a demon. Self-determination, liberty, even the most basic right to exist that every human being takes for granted--these don't apply." His voice lowered and gentled. "You know this."
"So we're just going to leave him like this and, what, auction him off as a houseboy?"
That at least seemed to discomfort Giles. "You said he was, er--"
"Horny. Every night. Like clockwork."
And the glasses come down, ladies and gentlemen, and the handkerchief comes out. The more times I write Giles's glasses tic, the more aware I become of having to try and make it fresh and interesting. "Yes. I see where that could present a problem."
"Not from where I'm sitting," Xander said, earning a sharp look. "But he's not going to be too happy when he comes to his senses."
"Xander," Giles said slowly, "when I called yesterday and you
said that you'd, that you and Spike...oh dear lord." Watching the truth
strike was like watching a bug hit glass, but funnier. He put his glasses back
on and squared his shoulders. "Perhaps it would be best to find out what's
affecting him." He shot a tiny nervous once-over at Xander. "I'll
just--I'll just get my books." I tried out thirty
different words before settling on "nervous." It's a good writing
practice: it makes me think about nuance, forces me to reflect on Giles and his
expressions and reactions and to weigh which shading of tone is most likely for
what I'm writing. I'm still not sure I like "nervous" but it's what I
ended up on.
"Good call."
"Rummy," Spike said from across the room, and drew Dawn's jelly bean pile toward himself with both hands, smirking while she huffed in pique.
Xander wandered over and clapped a hand on Spike's shoulder. "How's it
going, Big Bad?" Some writers will use a nickname
like "Big Bad" ten times in a story, figuring if it gives them a jolt
of happy once, ten times equals ten times better. No. Each time you repeat it the
impact and pleasure is lessened until it becomes boring and then predictable
and then painful to your readers--or your non-readers. Maybe the ten readers
you have are perfectly happy to read "Big Bad" over and over again,
but the several hundred people who *don't* read your stories have absented
themselves for reasons like this.
"I've got all her beans," he said with satisfaction.
"Excellent." Xander affected a guttural accent and rubbed his hands together. "The first step in our plan is complete. You, puny human," he caught Dawn in a glower, "will soon bow down before the combined might of the two most powerful criminal masterminds the world has ever known."
"It's funny." Dawn cocked her head. "You're a lot nicer when he has amnesia. What's up with that?"
"Yeahhh," Spike drawled, sliding an arm around Xander's waist to reel him in. "What's up there?"
The vampire's leer was level with Xander's crotch and he tried to pull away before Dawn noticed. "Nothing at all. At the moment." He stepped safely out of reach behind Spike and immediately reestablished contact, massaging the slope of his shoulders. One hand slid up into the thicket of Spike's hair and was teasing it into new and interesting shapes when he caught Dawn's wide eyes on them. Quickly he moved away. "I'm going to go drink a latte, or maybe seven," he said, already feeling jittery. "I'll be back. After."
He left the shop and paused a moment to suck in some fresh air and sunshine. No hell gods around, no trolls with attitude, no defecting or defective girlfriends. Wordplay and concision aren't automatic skills. It's always possible to write wordier. "There were no hell gods around, and no trolls giving him attitude. He had no girlfriend to tell him how horrible he was..." Blah. I don't even know where I'm going there. Pretend you are writing poetry with short, tight lines; chop out articles (the, a), remove clunky word props ("there were") and see if the essential meaning remains. If you don't like the results, you can always rewrite a sentence. And possibly he had himself a boyfriend, which, wow. Head go blooey. He'd had a girlfriend who'd killed and cursed thousands of men, and he'd dealt with that, because she'd gotten a soul, she'd been humanized and retired. But now he'd hooked up with the real deal, an active demon who probably only needed a chipectomy and a hard slap to set him off on a killing spree.
Maybe Giles was right. Maybe Spike would be better off if they left him spelled under, ignorant of all the things he'd done.
It was the kind of thought that could make your mind go around in circles.
"You have a funny-shaped head," he said, tracing the edge of Spike's
face and pushing back loose curls for a better view.
"I do not."
"How do you know? It's not like you can look in the mirror."
"You expect me to trust your word?"
"Have I ever lied to you?"
"Well, I don't bloody know, do I." Spike pursed his lips slightly and assessed Xander as if looking for flaws. "Your ears stick out."
"Of that I am aware."
"And you've got big pores," he said triumphantly. "On your nose. And little bumps, alllll over."
"I missed my guava-avocado facial mask this week," he said as Spike licked the length of his nose. "Ewww," he added in a perfunctory way, betraying himself with a smile. He hid it against the pillow and pretended to rub his nose clean. Meanwhile the two of them were rubbing in all sorts of other good places, knees and hands and thighs. "You've got Ginsu-blade cheek bones."
"And that's bad?"
"I didn't say that."
"Mmm. Your upper lip does this...thing." Spike salaciously licked it and then flicked his tongue a bit further in. "Bizarre, freakish thing," he murmured at the next pause. "Dunno what it is exactly. Like a harelip."
"But is it a sexy harelip?"
"'S all right."
"I could get myself a club foot to go with it. And a hump."
"No worries 'bout that last." This whole
section is just an interlude, for the fun of it.
It was getting harder for Xander to ignore the trauma, the whimpering sounds of
distress, the wounded eyes.
Buffy's, that is. A fake-out there, so I
anviliciously gave the punch-line its own line.
"You're having sex with Spike."
Shoulders hunching, he continued to hammer the shelves he was making to replace the troll wreckage. "I've said it like fifteen times. I should just print tee-shirts."
"But you're having sex...with Spike." To be fair, she always gave the words a slightly different emphasis, as if by varying the frequency she could translate them into something meaningful.
"Look, you don't have to picture it. You don't even have to think about it."
"Oh," Buffy moaned unhappily. "You said 'picture it.' Why did
you say that?" So we've come in mid-scene, in
medias res, and Buffy and the others have already learned that he's having sex
with Spike, and there's been some conversation because Xander has said it
"like, fifteen times." But if I try to extrapolate back and figure
out how the scene began--like fanwanking--I'm not sure I know. In that way, I
think it's like the show itself, but I'm not sure whether "real" TV
writers think carefully about the flow of a story and then choose their mark,
dropping us into the action. Do they do that, or do they just do what I do,
which is to cheat and begin someplace that sounds good, feels right, but which
starts to look strange if you examine it more closely? I mean, what was Buffy's
first reaction here? How long has she *really* been saying "You're having
sex with Spike"? Did she go get coffee to try and settle her mind and then
come back into the shop and start a whole babbling interrogation up again
because she couldn't assimilate the news? How did Giles and
He sighed and began placing shelves on their supports. "Hey, did I mention that 'sex' is the hot new slang for 'arm wrestling'? Picture that," he said soothingly, "a manly bout of wrestling, followed by beer, spitting, maybe a game of darts, and some Christian hymns to round off the evening."
"It's too late." She was pouting, with a side order of panicky. "It's in my brain now, like an earworm, and I'll never get it out--it's worse than that Disney song."
"What Disney song?"
To his utter bafflement she began singing, "It's a world of laughter, a
world of tears, it's a world of hopes and a world of fears--" I'd actually been reading about the psychological basis of
earworms a week or so earlier, so this was fresh in my head and just fit itself
into the story here.
From all corners of the shop the others suddenly sprang into sight,
converging on Buffy. From "all corners of the
shop" and yet it's just Willow and Giles. Oh well.
"Stop, stop!" Willow cried, shaking her hands with a no-no-no gesture, horrified. "Oh my god, are you trying to get us all killed?"
"What? No! I'm trying to get Xander's gay sex out of my head!"
Giles gazed at her with a serious expression. "Buffy, no matter how justifiable the cause, the Magic Kingdom theme song is a powerful tool of evil. It can summon creatures more savage and dangerous than we've ever faced before." He paused. "It's also very annoying."
"I'm sorry. I didn't know."
Moving to Xander's side in a show of loyalty, Willow asked, "And what's
wrong with gay sex, anyway?" Her tone was a little hot.
"Nothing! In theory," Buffy said defensively. "But in Spike--"
"Please don't finish that thought," Giles interrupted. Wearing a pained look, he retreated to the back of the store. Buffy skittered off in the same direction, but toward the training room.
"Well. I've had my love life compared to a Disney ride and driven my
friends away--" Xander unbuckled his tool belt, a gunslinger hanging up
his gear. "I think my
"No. Just an unsouled one."
He laid the last of his tools back in their box and went to find Giles,
who'd settled in at his desk in the alcove by the training room. He had a book
open in front of him and was peering at it with a magnifying glass. Something in
the tension of his body suggested that he was aware of Xander's presence and
uncomfortable. Xander stood off to one side until the other man's gaze
reluctantly flickered up. This reflects me thinking
carefully about Giles's body language and mannerisms in similar situations and
trying to capture that in words.
"Yes?"
"Thought I'd see how it's coming."
Giles put the magnifying glass down and leaned back in his chair. "It's not," he said. "I'm no further ahead than I was an hour ago, or a week ago for that matter. I'm sorry, Xander, but I can't reverse a spell I can't identify. Unless this wizard turns up to share his secrets, I'm afraid Spike will have to make the best of his fresh start."
"And that's it? That's all you're going to do."
"I'm not sure what more you'd like me to do," Giles said carefully. "The brain is a delicate and complex organ, even a vampire's. Tinkering blindly will only cause more damage."
Faced with this dead end, Xander would have liked to offer a retort or a sudden, brilliant idea, but he'd run dry of both and had to walk away. Giles didn't try to follow, but Willow intercepted him. By her face he knew she'd overheard, or more likely had already known how things stood, since she'd been helping with the spell research