lucetilogs | we have found our solace here in this unexpected place

The desert. Later, Buffy would be grateful for something else to blame for that tragedy. But now it tangled her up. It had always been tough to fully disengage from the anger she had felt, then. Mixed in with a kind of shame for hanging up on him once she had later realized the extent of the madness. Tentatively, she traced a line from his chin up to the corner of his eye.

Anyone probably would expect Buffy to leave in a trice. Anyone, at least, who hadn't already witnessed the strong mercy she felt for those fighting with themselves. After Spike had regained his soul, he had been so mad in the basement of the school and she had visited him faithfully. First to draw upon his vampire senses to help with small missions and then later to check in on him. To make sure he was okay. To find a place for him to live that wasn't right over the the Hellmouth and to rehabilitate him when he proved to be a sleeper agent of the First -- chowing down on innocents.

She gathered her mad, mad pirate closer to her. Hers.

"And she'll still have him," the pirate murmured, marveling at her. "She'll still have her Jack."

It had been one thing to feign madness while he was still searching out Barbossa and his stolen Pearl; back then it could be turned off and on at will, and if there was a lady to impress, Jack could easily switch into dashing captain mode without worrying about any figmental intrusions.

Not so much after the Locker, really, when things went all blurry and macabre. He snuggled against her, fitting their bodies into a comfortable interlock, a beautiful pattern. Jack had meant to give her all the comfort he could, tonight; he hadn't expected things to run the other way.

Edited 2011-04-19 15:34 (UTC)

Running the other way was better. Being comforted was like starting on a staircase that never ended. Issue after issue after issue. Buffy could work through those things in her own mind while she held onto him. She took a vicarious tack and would purge out the bad by doing good. It felt far more refreshing than revisiting her own mistakes.

A calm settled over her. It was peaceful to realize that there wasn't another body in this village that she would rather fit next to. It was nice not to feel regret in at least one corner of her life.

As they fell into a comfortable silence, Buffy wondered what chance existed for this house to stand empty after the next cycle. If the house by the lake was no longer a sanctuary, then she thought she might have to decide on some alternate meeting point for when Jack wasn't out by the ocean.

That was a nice idea, and one Jack was having for himself, actually. He hated interruptions, and they had had a fair few since that fateful persuasion lesson before the draft. Things weren't perfect right now, but they seemed to be on a track to getting better, with her calm in his arms like this, just being together...

And that made the pirate suspicious.

"Have you noticed, Annie, that when things seem to get better for us they get immediately worse?"

The eves of experiments...but that couldn't be a pattern, could it?

Edited 2011-04-19 16:13 (UTC)

"That's just life, Jack."

Buffy's life, at least. Things were always so good before they were bad. If there was a pattern then she couldn't see it because her whole life since the age of fifteen had been this same pattern. It was the kind of thing she had been forced to accept and it explained why she remained so hesitant before taking those opportunities for happiness.

Not my life, he wanted to reply. Unacceptable. Unacceptable when life was a high-seas romance adventure that seemed endless, especially when you stood on the deck of your ship and felt you possessed the world.

"Then I'll take the bad, if I can have more of this good."

"And if it gets really bad?"

Because in the fight with Derek, things had gotten bad. And they had gotten bad in the draft, too. The robot cameo hadn't been quite so horrible as she had managed to avoid too much explication there but...but it had still been a tough blow to happen after such a high, high night and morning after. But Buffy wasn't naive enough to think things wouldn't get worse. Experiments could steal a person's soul and they could make the most conscientious doctor turn into a sadist.

Buffy expected things to get worse -- she just didn't expect that worse to happen tomorrow.

He caught her under the chin with his fingertips, lifting it so he could meet her eyes. "We make it good afterward. Better. We come here and we make it better." It was getting so that he needed her after these experiments--physically, of course, but also to help re-establish the reality that he often found so slippery. Jack needed a touchstone and she had served that purpose, time and again.

"You remember Halloween, Annie?"

"You? A ghost. And me a nutcase. How could I forget?"

Those hallucinations had been just as bad as the one Derek had planted in her brain. Worse, really. Worse because they had lasted longer and Derek's had been faster to uncover as a fake.

She looked back at him. Buffy was good at meeting his eyes; she was comfortable with both the blood-charged stare down and the softer, more emotional kinds of eye contact. It was what made her own evasiveness equally as telling.

"And you told me not to touch you." That stinging rebuke would probably never be forgotten by Sparrow. "But that was the worst part; I might have fixed it, somehow. Convinced you it wasn't real. I couldn't."

Really, it had been Jack's fault that she had pushed him away so hard that night by the fountain. You can't comfort a girl you've hurt badly and who wants nothing to do with you.

"It was real, once."

The bloody hands. The doctors. Different times and kinds of real but still real. Buffy had never been mad but her family had thought she was. And then she had thought she was and nearly killed her family over it. There weren't many more words she wanted to say on the subject and so she simply dropped back down next to him and made up for the thenish non-touching with a lot of nowish touching.

And Jack interrupted that touching so he could kiss those hands, paying special attention to her fingertips. Not broken, or soiled, or bloody.

There was nothing he could say about it having been real once; he had come to be comfortable with his own issues on a day-to-day level, only growing concerned (as he had done) when they threatened his personal interests. McCoy. Buffy. His friends and neighbors in the village. In a land without treasure, that was the closest he could get to wealth, and his aim was not to spoil it.

"I don't trust anyone who is always fully in possession of their senses, Annie; they sometimes do irrationally stupid things. Monstrous things, in the name of progress and reason."

"Or science," she added as she thought of the Initiative. Buffy had only rarely approved of demons but the commandos' version of keeping Sunnydale safe has rubbed her entirely the wrong way. Experiments and Frankensteins and rank'n'file discipline.

She stretched her fingers out. The kisses were charming but also a little horrifying. Buffy could have wished that things had been more vague on Halloween. That she hadn't given so much away.

"Besides," Buffy took control of her voice. "There's such a thing as being too rational." So she agreed with him because she had long ago learned that emotions and imagination were important on the field. They offered an edge.

"Those are the worst, the too rationals. They can never see properly, can they. That was Beckett, through and through. Hm. And back in the beginning, it impressed me."

It wasn't regret exactly that tinged Jack's voice; perhaps more incredulity that he could have been that naive at one time, or that he had been so blinded by the "right kinds" of ideas in his youth.

"Remember how I told you that some girls are found before they're called and some girls just wake up Slayers?"

After reclaiming her fingers, Buffy began to idly knead them into his most reachable shoulder. "Kendra was one of the found ones. Basically raised by her Watcher. Total kool-aid drinking indoctrination. She had the moves and the powers but she didn't have the...chutzpah, you know?"

And then there had been Faith, who had too much.

"Whereas you have it in spades," was the gentle admonishment. Jack still thought Buffy went too far in claiming unslayerish things as her responsibility.

A confessional nod. "Buffy Summers -- otherwise known as she who plays with a full deck of chutzpah." And little else, some days. So much attitude for so few feet and inches. "Even if the only game she's playing is Go Fish."

She deflected his admonishment with some self-admonishing of her own. A most well-practice defense that she roundly followed up with a few (perhaps unfair) light caresses where his skin met with his wings. "But you. You're more strange." Than what? Well, she didn't specify. "All that precise technical skill alongside all that..." And her fingers drummed against him in a demonstratively theatrical way. "Everything else. Like eating potato chips and chocolate at the same time."

Which she knew to be delicious despite its strangeness. But its deliciousness was a secret she currently intended to take to her next grave.

Edited 2011-04-19 23:59 (UTC)

"Hmmmmmm..." A querying sound that turned into a sound of pleasure at the touches against the base of his wings; Buffy had learned some of his sensitive spots, it would seem. "I fail to see what you mean by that being strange, lovely. Alongside all what everything else? My devilish good looks? My skill at darts? My sparkling wit?"

"I'm just saying that I think I can count on my hands the amount of times I've seen you successfully walk in a straight line."

And yet? Dangerous enough with a sword in his hand. Being someone who consistently trumped expectations, Buffy wasn't so much surprised as -- well -- appreciative. But Jack did it with no super-powers and so either he was the world's best actor or just...strange.

"What's walking in a straight line got to do with anything, Annie?" Jack was not at all confused about this; he knew exactly what she had been getting at---one of his favored strategies was putting others off-guard with his behavior, of coming off as nonthreatening as possible if that suited him. And in Luceti, where heroes lurked on every corner and everyone could make lightning from thin air or launch laserbeams from their fists or crush you into gravel? It came in handy.

Fist-laserbeams, admittedly, also bothered Buffy quite a bit. But magic was never her favourite thing and she felt a kind of quiet superiority in her own style. It might have been supernatural in type but it felt wholly natural to her. Honest and without the kind of willpower-degrading side-effects of the magics.

"It's got everything to do with aiming for someone's gut and not sticking them in the foot instead." She responded with the suggestion in her voice that she thought she knew which of his two modes was more genuine. His moments of grace and ability had truly impressed her over the past year. Glimpses.

"Plus? I hear it's one of those important skills to have to avoid being arrested at a road-side check point."

"Captain Jack Sparrow," he drawled, gently tugging at the tip of one of her feathers to punctuate those three words, "Captain Jack Sparrow is never arrested at roadside check points. Ever. Never ever. Savvy? He gets through blockades in his own way."

"These aren't the kind of blockades you can just fancily maneuver out of. Not that cops are the brightest, cleverest bunch," her breath caught on the last vowel. "But outrunning their souped up police cars? Kind of a feat. And nothing, I'd bet, like sailing."

That feather-tugging eventually culminated in a small upper-body shiver. She set her nails against his skin on instinct as the delightfully conflicting sensation left her wings and radiated.

With a very serious expression on his face, the pirate continued to play with her feathers as he considered this conundrum, stroking them against the grain of the feather before reversing direction and smoothing them out again.

"Most of your run-of-the-mill law enforcement types, my love, are not clever. Although I've met one here who might be a bit moreso than most..."

Thursday Next. He still had her notebook, which he had been reading avidly. Jack wasn't sure what to do with this bit of leverage yet; perhaps it would be better not to reveal it to Buffy just yet either, even though her name figured prominently in it alongside several others.

"...Booth?"

The name and the curiousity was out before she could stop it; she immediately felt guilty. Bringing up Angel's look-alike (though she hadn't yet named the doppelganger to Jack) certainly seemed like the wrong thing to do when that stroking pattern on her wings was sparking electricity in her shoulder blades. Against the grain, it felt like a mounting and twisting tension. The smoothening that followed undid it all briefly and would bring her nestling closer.

After a sweet few seconds of enjoying this, she rushed to clarify: "He just...seems like one of those clever-type badges. FBI, though. So I'm not sure he counts as run-of-the-mill."

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