lucetilogs | >> this is my endgame

>> this is my endgame

Who: [Bad username or site: gotmebones title= @ livejournal.com] & [Bad username or site: a_slayer_slays title= @ livejournal.com]
What: Now that the snark has subsided, these two need some quality time.
When: Mid-afternoon, Friday.
Where: House Seven
Summary: Damnit, Bones! I'm a Slayer, not a chess nerd.
Rating: PG-13ish

In the haze of the improving season, Buffy had begun to contemplate where she had once heard that there was nothing really good, or nothing really bad--except in how you thought about it. A significant portion of her guessed that it was probably some stale English class back at Sunnydale High. The day had probably been quite similar to this one, with green tinges of growth outside the window. Back then, she had probably been aching to get out and into the green. Today? Well, today there were far too many interesting things going on inside the four walls of the house. Electricity had sprouted, as if from no where, and it had not taken her long to make what use she could from what they had been given. All morning, House Seven was treated to the incessant dinging and whirring of a microwave being rather over-used. As Buffy plunged her fork into the soft belly of a pizza pocket (new food had arrived in the shops, after all), she did not care that it was her fifth today. The point was that it was a good day to be a twenty-first century kinda girl.

She was sitting by a window in the house's lounge, her knees drawn close to her chest and the plate balanced precariously on the tops of her feet. Her chin, set in the crevice between her knees, tilted and shifted for each delivered bite. By all accounts, she looked peaceful enough. But how long would that last, with a certain medical doctor on the prowl?

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The peaceful atmosphere in house seven would not last very long, considering the doctor hailing from the twenty-third century had been successfully wound up by the latest events to hit the village and made no attempt to hide his utter displeasure about the situation. Although the electricity that most of the residents had delighted in chatting about loudly over the journals had proved to be a saving grace for the surly southern man... even if they had fitted the kitchen with a bunch of different antiques that Kirk would only truly appreciate.

Still, the sprouts of growth outside had also had an effect on McCoy, even if they were the mundane changes such as alternating his drinking pallet and now favouring the minty taste of a cool, refreshing glass of Mint Julep instead of the charred, bitter flavour of his usual glass of bourbon. That was one of the other reasons for his prowling around outside today, being ever-accompanied by Brown, whose whines and scratches at the door from outside announced their arrival before he even had the chance to slam the door shut behind him in another fit of grumpiness.

He passed by Buffy nibbling at the newest food that had appeared in the stores and headed straight for the kitchen, discovering the five discarded packages of something called 'pizza pocket' on the counter and the microwave door left wide open to the side, as if expectantly awaiting another fast food item to be shoved inside and filling the house with yet more whirling and the perpetual dings.

"... Wonderful." He uttered out loud in premature defeat, submitting to the fact that this would always be the sight to greet him after Buffy had finished in the kitchen now, placing a box that he had been carrying underneath one arm on the top of the counter.

Her fork scraped jarringly across the plate's surface, when she heard the dog at the door. Bones was back. Buffy's bare feet slid off of her cushioned seat and hit the floor with a light thud. The plate was gently set on the floor by the corner of the chair, singed pieces of crust abandoned on its milky white, china surface. When she stood up, the Slayer shook the stagnation out of her arms and legs. She bounced, briefly, in place to psych up her mind and her body. These were little habits she had developed since losing her mojo. Tiny tests to keep her reaction time at least within the realm of commendable, if not superhuman.

The movement tugged her mind back to present matters. Murders, war, and all the realities of here. It was enough to cramp anyone's shots at happiness. Idly, she wondered if Bones had heard about the killings and about the theories now trickling out about the perpetrator's identities. Any whiff of Kadaj and she was certain she would be on lock-down again, so she intended to approach the Doctor with careful courtesy. Stretching her arms back and behind her, Buffy followed the sounds into the kitchen.

"What's wonderful?" She crinkled the last plastic packaging piece up in her fists and chucked it gracelessly into the trash. "The weather? 'Cause it does look kinda wonderful, from this side of the glass."

McCoy looked over his shoulder as the Slayer approached the kitchen after his comment stemming from exasperation at the mess that greeted him and watched her fling the packets into the trash with an arched eyebrow. He had heard about the spree of killings lately and it was a definite cause of frustration for him at the moment, although it did not stop him from honing in on the messy aspect. Or not.

"Never mind." He grumbled in response, although he did agree that the weather was quite splendid at the moment, after putting up with the long winter of catching colds and cleaning away the snow and generally being stuck in a house where everyone trolled him. Not that this sentiment would ever be vocally addressed by the man – unless he fell into a fountain of that happy wine or fell on his hypospray, anyway. "Guess I'm just re-adjusting to this wonderful act of bribery."

"Thought you'd be thrilled, considering how techy the future is supposed to be. If the gadget-glass is half full, that's better than it being empty--right?" Her slaughter of that particular idiom seemed to please her and she buried a smug smile in a glass of milk. Extra cold, refrigerated milk. Oh. It was glorious. Bribery, however, wasn't. "The way I look at it? I was going to volunteer anyway for the sake of a whole lot of other things. If they feel the need to lavish us with mod-cons at the same time? I will not complain."

As was customary to the Slayer, she hopped up to take a seat on the corner section of the counter. Her feet swayed and occasionally slid against the wood cabinetry below. The crooked brass handles were cool with the invading spring breeze and she held a heel to one for a few seconds. The chill and subsequent shiver was like a premonition of summer. "What's in the box?" She questioned, full-blown curiousity creeping over her face and replacing the daydreamy look. "Please tell me it's some kind of radio? I think I've become all funned out with the microwave. Oh, and to be honest? Lightswitch raves with no music and no one else dancing? Very lame. Or, so says my very scientific experiment of earlier today."

Edited 2010-03-26 17:40 (UTC)

McCoy was used to the blonde slaughtering any good old fashioned idioms that had survived and clawed their way into the twenty-third century to be used by the future folk, as she seemed to refer to them. After spending that much time of captivity with someone so vastly different to himself, it had become somewhat endearing... or annoying. The line tended to blur between those two emotional responses. After she mentioned that rave with the lighting, he glanced over at the newest light bulb and was satisfied that the bulb was still intact in the newest socket that had appeared on the ceiling, with no glass littered on the floor and imbedding themselves in the paws of Brown trotting around the living room.

"Why would I want something that primitive?" He asked as he looked back over at the Slayer, although he did not expect an answer to that rhetorical question that was not some kind of quip that he had no retort for. He doubted that any of these devices would be able to receive any electromagnetic waves that would by chance happen to come their way and that were not from the experiment-happy scientists or from someone across the village happily tinkering with their own radio. Besides, Spock would be all over it and he wanted to avoid having yet another argument with his Vulcan crew mate since it tended to be a bit of a mood killer for the harmony of the house. He reached over to the box and pulled out... a chess set. (http://i15.photobucket.com/albums/a363/Miss_No_Face/Role%20play%20stuff/Boneschessset.jpg?t=1269626471)

"It's six tiers less to what I'm used to, but I couldn't just ignore it." He looked exceedingly pleased with himself... if that was even possible for the man whose face was a permanent scowl.

She watched as he eyed the light socket, pouting at the implication his eyes made. Like she would ever had thrown her rave in the kitchen. The living room had been a much more appropriate space; besides, she had already swept up the broken glass and had replaced the bulb with a new one. It had been on her trip to find a replacement that she had found the pizza treats. The only evidence left was the fact that the broom had not been put away. As the two spoke in the kitchen, the broom was haphazardly thrown across the couch. The dustpan was wedged between two cushions. If anyone asked, she would claim innocence and that she was only trying to offer a helping hand around the house.

But now, they were on to radios. Radios? Primitive? Buffy had known that iPods were coming to favour around the time she had been yanked rudely out of her own existence and into this one, but she was hard pressed to imagine a world without radio. How else would any self-respecting hip individual learn that week's top tunes? Her indignation was clearly cleared away as the chess set was pulled into view.

An eyebrow rose, quirkily. All this fanfare for a nerd's game. She leaned forward from her seat on the counter, anchoring her elbows on her knees. "Six tiers? What are you talking about--some kinda chess themed wedding cake?" She teased only lightly; after all, she could see how sunny the board seemed to make McCoy look. And that meant so much to her that she could suppress any flippant chess club comments.

Luckily for McCoy, he had not seen the household tools that were strewn across what she had recently began to dub as his 'nap couch' in the living room and her teasing could not dampen his subdue version of glee at this miraculous find during his roaming in the stores after his shift at the clinic and walking Brown. He placed the timeless game onto the newly cleaned counter after showing it off to her and the pieces rattled inside their compartments in a burst to get free and be used after sitting on a shelf for so long.

"No, it's three-dimensional chess." He explained as her teasing flew straight over his head and there was no emotional sting at the mention of marriage or anything wedding-related. "It's new, but it's damn popular."

"Three dimensional chess." She echoed, dropping down from her pedastal and approaching with a curiousity that she tried very hard to glaze with fake reluctance. "Isn't chess tough enough? Did they really have to add a whole two more dimensions?" She toyed with one of the drawers, ignoring and sense for personal space as she did so.

Chess. She did know a bit about it. Giles has tried it a few times in the capacity of mental training for a Slayer. She had never achieved much within a game. The tactics seemed to lack rationality, to her. Why were the pieces so restrictred? And why did anyone want to protect a king so much, anyway? However, she did care for the queen. A strong warrior-leader, able to move how she wanted to. Dominating the board.

"You like it?" She indicated the game, tugging one of the drawers out and plucking the black queen out, rolling her between her fingers.

Personal space was a luxury and not one the Malnosso thought necessary to reward him with for signing up to their war. While the Slayer fiddled around with the chess pieces, he decided to put away the other contents in the box where the chess set had emerged from and dominated the conversation since his return and up until this point. It was hard not to enjoy the game since he had played enough with his father and with Jim during their years at the Academy, but he was not about to vocalize the latter and remind her that the Captain of the Enterprise was gone from Luceti.

"I like it." McCoy said from somewhere behind the refrigerator door as he lent in and placed his beloved Mint Juleps at the back of the newest appliance and closed the door with a loud slap. "I thought you'd enjoy a game like this, what with strategic thinking... no wait, you just tend to run straight into things, don't you?"

"Not always." She defended herself, lightly. "I've got plenty of strategy. Sure, some of that involves the kind of strategy you develop on the fly--but, still." Certainly, her strategizing had developed further once she had taken her place as leader of the Slayer Organization. Strategy, Buffy had realized, became more important when there were other lives than her own depending upon the strategy.

She went forward and sat the queen down on the board, then stepped back. "Giles always insisted on mental training, too. Meditation, games. I've played a bit of chess," Buffy admitted. "Giles wasn't like the rest of the Council. He never saw me as just a weapon, or a beatstick, to be pointed an enemy and let loose." She smiled, fondly, to herself.

"He's someone I didn't think I'd miss this much."

"Strategy on the fly... of course it is." He shook his head before he listened to her refer to this Watcher Council whilst opening the draw on the opposing side of the chess board and took out the queen and placed it on top of the board.

"You know what they say in this place; if they're not here, then they are better off at home." He hated that saying even if it had a grain of truth to it. Overall, he did not have a particularly fond opinion of them from the snippets he had heard, but the name was one he recognized, if only vaguely.

"Of course." She agreed quickly, sliding a few more chess pieces into their places. She captalized on the ambiguity of her sentence, content to leave Bones thinking that she had meant that she missed Giles here. Truthfully, she had separated from Giles well before arriving here. He disapproved of her administration style and, honestly, she was more surprised about how much she missed him at home, too.

"Giles would hate it here, anyway. Too many rowdy kids running around and not enough stuffy English things." She did speak rather fondly of the man. He hadn't just been a Watcher, he had been her partner in everything. Almost everything. And towards the end, things had certainly begun to crumble.

But, the Slayer shifted where she stood, time for other subjects. "So, what? Are we gonna play? 'Cause it might be your only chance of beating me, ever."

McCoy noticed the ambiguity, but he would not force her to expand on the missing friends from her world. He was a doctor, not a shrink and decided to focus on how her Watcher would not enjoy this setting. "Sounds like a kind of man I could like." It was a rare occurrence for McCoy to warm to someone before he had even met them, but Giles had joined the ranks of her mother, who earned the doctor’s utmost respect for threatening the latest undead bastard to pop up in Luceti (that he had bickered with since then) with an axe back in their world.

He began to add more pieces to the boards before he added: "Minus the English things, anyway." Because he would only attempt to enforce his Southern tendencies on people. His lips twitched into a smile at the challenge, even if it was a board he was not particularly used to with the wave of three-dimensional chess.

"... Why not? It's not like I'm itching to work on my Goddamn tan or anything." It was a lame wisecrack from the man, but the temperature was just not comfortable enough for him to sit outside and drink from a Mint Julep yet.

"The two of you would probably get along. Though..y'know, you're younger. Definitely." That was supposed to be a compliment, Bones. As is: "And less stuffy. It's kinda tough to be stuffy like Giles is. He's always taking off his glasses and cleaning them." She described the motion as though it were the epitome of dullness, tapping a few more pieces into place.

"Aren't you contractually obligated to be anti-tanning or something, as a doctor? All scary faces and eee skin cancer?"

"Gee thanks."

He stared at Buffy as he grabbed the chess board and led it perilously into the living room and away from the smell of pizza from when Buffy had abused the microwave earlier in the day.

"I forgot that cancer is still a deadly disease in your time." McCoy mused out loud with a vague hint of amusement. Those type of diseases had been eliminated within fifty years of first contact with the Vulcans and he thought back to Pyong Ko with admiration as he brought forth a new age in Earth medicine... until he was brought back crashing to the situation at hand and the lack of a proper medical facility in the village. "Well, I guess it's a deadly one here too, since I haven't got a sickbay to work with."

The Slayer follows him, fretting a bit as she does. "In the future, can you fix aneurysms, too?" She asked. Buffy tried to keep her voice as even as possible. She did not want to betray the seriousness of the question and opted instead to aim for light curiousity. It helped that Bones was not looking at her and that she could focus on the space squarely between his shoulder blades instead.

Fortunately for Buffy, she had sent him onto a tangent about medicine and would not have been able to see any emotion in her face once she asked that question, cloaked by curiosity that was not uncommon from the blonde.

"Yeah." He said gruffly, before he sighed. "I'll never understand how doctors in the twentieth century thought that drilling holes in people's heads and cutting them up with butcher knives was the answer." He lamented over the ineptitude of that century's questionable medicine before new breakthroughs were discovered.

"Yeah," she responded, reserved. "And I'll never understand why the wicca-folk couldn't just whip up a whammy for that kinda thing. Burn a few herbs, chant some funky Latin and--bam. All better."

She grabbed a seat on the same chair she had occupied earlier, hauling it towards the table by hooking her big toe around a leg. It was more like a low, cushy ottoman than a chair and Buffy sank down onto it with a sigh of comfort. It was fast becoming her favourite perch.

McCoy stiffened at the mention of magical healing instead of the good old twenty-third century medicine which could cure cancer and run laps around her timeline’s medicine. He sat down opposite Buffy with an expression of annoyance as he placed the set in the middle of the table and crossed his arms, leaning back in the chair that did not match the set, glancing at the side.

"Not magic." He grumbled at her. His tone could almost be described as petulant, but despite his stubbornness about magic and how everyone seemed to flock to that alternative, he did have to reluctantly add considering his arm was no longer in a sling thanks to Raine: "Maybe some of it isn't that bad, but it's not the answer."

Hell may have started to freeze over, but house seven remained comfortable.

"It should be the answer when medicine can't do anything. Like, y'know, my time." She kept her eyes on the board. "After all, you're the one always criticizing the twenty-first century docs. A little magical healing couldn't be that bad." Buffy wrapped her arms around herself.

"What colour do you want?"

"... Fine, I concede." McCoy replied somewhat hastily after deliberating going further with his point that medicine was a lot better than magic overall. But he wanted to avoid another sudden flare of her Slayer strength stemming from a heated debate and breaking another one of his bones.

"You pick."

"Black," she picked. A fingertip reached to touch a black pawn. After all, she was already on that side of the board. It made it easier. And the white seemed so pristine--as if they lacked strength or experience. She would much rather lead the black into battle. After all, she was more familiar with combat in the night.

"I warn you, Doc. I haven't played in a while. At least, like...three years. It'll be a miracle if I remember which way the pieces go." She said this with a soft smile. Back into the path of casual camaraderie, she went.

"I'm sure you'll pick it up again fairly quickly." McCoy said with a vague amount of optimism that felt a lot more like trepidation as his eyes glanced over the white chess pieces lined up on his side of the board. The doctor liked the colour he had been left with; white was a colour that was associated with his line of work, healing properties in that culture that shall remain nameless, the particular shade of the chess pieces reminding him of the walls of sickbay back on the Enterprise. With any luck, Chapel was taking good care of the facility while he was here.

He rubbed his chin as he observed the board. And he was probably going to cough very loudly if the Slayer made an illegal move in the opening round as he moved one piece and implemented the game.

If someone were to suggest that Buffy Summers lacked subtly, they would be absolutely correct. She came out a-swinging, plucking the rook from its place and shimmying it between two pawns, completing its L-shaped move with gusto. To her, this was the chess game equivalent of kicking a door down at high-noon in a vamp nest.

"I bet Will probably'd give you a good game, after I get inevitably thrashed in this one." Buffy looked up from the board with a slow smile. There was no sarcasm, but instead genuine affection for the red-head. "She was the chess club type, in high school. Luckily for her, I kinda stepped in and got in the way of that social doom."

With that much gusto behind her move, he had no reason to cough and focused on moving his own piece without too much contemplation or tactics at the moment, choosing to reminisce as she mentioned the red-haired girl from her world and how she enjoyed the chess club.

"Nothing wrong with a game of chess, Summers. I used to play a few games with a friend when I was a kid in Georgia.. Mark Rousseau, his name was." It seemed to be a current theme that most of his best friends excelled him in academics and ran circles around him as he continued with the story. "He kicked my ass every single time we played." Despite his harsh words, he seemed amused.

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