lucetilogs | melt your silver down / kiss your lover's face / the sirens start to sound

"Buffy?"

It had taken Jack Sparrow several hours to prepare for this date. Most notably, he had taken a bath that didn't involve jumping into the ocean. But he had also come with a bouquet of flowers. Daisies and wildflowers, mostly, and delicate, fragrant sea roses that threatened to drop their petals at any second. Buffy had gone through a lot in the past month, and even though they had agreed on a date in a vampire-infested town, he wanted her to have something suitably beautiful and lovely and special. Like flowers.

From what the pirate had heard, Sunnydale was hell on earth, the place that had been a strong force in forging the lovely sad girl he'd met over a year before

Charming.

Now he was sauntering over to her, taking in the weapons bag. He pushed his hat back to a jaunty angle. "Should I have brought my sword?"

Edited 2011-07-10 03:45 (UTC)

Buffy downed her juice. So sweet -- almost too sweet, even for her. She crushed the plastic bottle in one hand and tossed it in through the propped open door. Hole in one.

"You can borrow one of mine, if you'll even need it. I popped in a little early and figured out how to turn the danger levels down to very low." Her eyes fell upon those flowers and a smile tugged at the corners of her mouth. How perfectly incongruous.

Edited 2011-07-10 03:51 (UTC)

"I suppose I'm dangerous enough and you're dangerous enough that we wouldn't want to turn up said danger level in the event that everything became thoroughly too dangerous for romantical enjoyments."

If Jack had been honest with himself, he would have admitted some trepidation at entering this battle dome room. For one thing, the idea of vampires still froze his blood. He might have moved on to a new place with Giles, but Jack nursed a hatred of the creatures that bordered on fear. Secondly---and he perhaps would have hated even more to admit this---the dome housed technology that he did not understand or know how to operate. The transporter was one thing, but these controls were quite another. It felt rather like putting one's life into another's hands and Jack Sparrow preferred his life in his OWN hands, thank you very much, no matter how lovely the girl he was with.

"That's the kinder way of putting it. 'Cause I was just gonna call it a beginner level vamp slaying lesson." Buffy nudged the door open a little wider -- inviting him first into the building.

She did not care much for the tech, either. The Slayer preferred the barracks because then the fake enemies were unabashedly fake. These simulated vampires left her feeling most unsatisfied. It never scratched that particular Slayer-specific itch. But this was not about the fight for her; instead, she was looking forward to seeing Sunnydale once again. The vamps would be like ants at her nostalgia picnic -- annoying, but negligible. Deal-with-able.

"Buffy?" He stood back, offering to let her go first as a matter of form. "You look beautiful tonight." And he held out the flowers. Lesson? Maybe. Date? Definitely, and it needed to be treated as such. Two Years: so much to make up for.

Buffy took the flowers but insisted that he walk on ahead. She held the little bouquet close -- breathing in its perfume and shutting her eyes for a fraction of a moment. "You're too sweet. I might get a cavity."

It went a long, long way towards soothing the ruffled feathers over what Jilly had told her back at the house. Window-entering. She knew she shouldn't care as much as she did but dammit she cared.

"How chivalrous of you." Jack gave in and walked in ahead of her, scooping up the weapons bag as he went. She could win one but not both. His relaxed mood possibly would not have been so relaxed had he known that Buffy had Found Out.

"What can I say? I just left my shining armour at the smithy for a good polishing. I'm downright knightly."

The weapons bag would be light -- lighter than one would expect it to be. There was probably one sword, Buffy's scythe, and some stakes. But there was something else taking up space but not weight.

She bee-lined for one of the dome's rooms on the far end of the hall.

"Sir Buffy of Sunnydale. Nah. I don't like it. Far too manly." He tripped along happily behind her, swinging the bag over one shoulder. "And I'll finally see her Ravello Drive."

"Revello," she corrected - only wondering after the fact if it had been his mistake or his accent. "And the sim doesn't seem to open up anywhere except downtown on the main street, so we'll have to hoof it to the house."

It was a walk she had done hundreds of times before. She knew which route to take with the most cemeteries; she knew which route to take with the least. It was the latter that she would be leading him through, tonight. Though Sunnydale had so many -- they were tough to avoid.

She leaned over the little console. Buffy was not gadget-savvy but she had made a point of familiarizing herself with these controls long before this idea had popped into her head.

"Ready?"

"Ready." He stepped back, feeling his chest tighten at the sight of that console and of the blank room inside. None of it was real.

This would have bothered him, the last time. Real things versus not-real things was a very important distinction to Jack--was to any madman who was unsure of his reality. Being flung into the desert by Aku had been a case in point: confusion, fear, desperation had combined to cause him to hurt the one who had come to help him. Jack had to remind himself that this was not real. He was real. She was real. The vampires, the buildings, the streets--everything else---was not.

"We'll be the realest things in there, my love..."

"...Think of it like a memory, Jack. All of it was real -- once. Or most of it."

She abandoned her playful chivalry for this moment. Reverently, she placed the bouquet of flowers on the top edge of the console. It shouldn't follow them in, she thought. But soon they would be back out and she could take them home and put them in a sweet little vase and maybe keep that vase on her windowsill. And then, perhaps, next time Jack would walk by and choose her window.

Buffy entered the smaller room and felt the simulation crackle into life around her. A street from the centre of the town. It ran right in front of the Magic Box. She breathed in, but it didn't smell like Sunnydale. The sun was not so far off from setting and a warm, Californian summer evening glow filled the spaces between buildings.

Oh well. Sight would have to do.

Edited 2011-07-10 05:07 (UTC)

"It's...."

Everything looked hard. Orderly. Clean. Straight-lined. Lawful. Squared-off corners, carts that seemed to move by themselves, people dressed modern like Buffy walking about. Jack wondered briefly whether his lover would simply fall over from the pure dishevelment of it all when she finally saw Tortuga in the Battle Dome, as they'd planned.

Still oblivious to the fact that Buffy had Found Out, because she Always Finds Out, he grinned as he finally arrived at a descriptive word:

"Tidy. It's very tidy, Annie."

She had to laugh rather dryly at that as she kicked a mostly crushed soda can out of the way. Tidy? She never considered it such. It was a nice little town with good works and uncluttered roads and even the darkest alleys had a kind of organization to them. But there was still litter. And for not the first time in her life, Buffy wondered if she was simply doomed to only ever see the worst in this place while simultaneously loving it.

Now that the room's door was shut, the simulation was complete. Very mundane looking people walked at a distance far enough away from the two of them to not allow their mundaneness to register. Except Buffy instinctively tried to look for familiar faces and found herself only disappointed. Of course.

"Welcome to Sunnydale," she turned on the spot and pointed out a little shop that had materialized into the simulation from behind them. "That used to be research central, once the high school blew up. Along with the high school's library."

Edited 2011-07-10 05:18 (UTC)

"The Magic Box. Ha." Curiosity overcame nerves and Jack found himself too caught up in the details of the place to focus on vampires. He tried to imagine living in a place like this. The merchants were common enough, he supposed. Magic. Magic for sale. Not that far off from Tia's place upriver, really.

And there were the common people, all milling about. They had those in the past as well. Milling was something that transcended time.

"It doesn't look threatening, does it. And I suppose that's the entire point."

"It's kind of a...double trick. I mean -- you set up a magic shop and then you keep all the actual spell ingredients and books and stuff but you keep them out of sight. And the people who know what they're talking about will know what to ask for. Everyone else just asks for love potions or lucky rabbits' feet. Or lemon-scented candles. So you pretend to be kitsch in order to keep being supernatural. The owner turnover rate was pretty intense, though."

She didn't bring up Giles. Not yet, at least. "They put together this pretty sweet training dojo-esque space in the back room. And from the looks of it? It's not boarded up which puts this at least about a year before Sunnydale went crater."

He tried to imagine this apparently bustling town as a crater. And failed. Jack had seen plenty of horrible things in his time, but never the annihilation of a city to the point of craterhood.

"Looks like the sort of shop that would do well for itself in Luceti, doesn't it. Not that I know anything about such things, of course."

Jack opened the little door on the front of a large blue metal box bearing the insignia of the US Postal Service and peered inside. "Seems like a very safe place, apart from the vampires. No ruffians about, eh?"

"...Every once in a while I'd catch a mugging on patrol but -- nah, it's mostly just the undead."

Her gaze was hopping everywhere -- from the shop to the little coffee spot across the street. To the clothing store that she had never been able to afford shopping in. "And the sun's not quite gone, yet. But they'll show. Maybe not on the main street but -- maybe they will. Sim-vamps are even dumber than the real things."

Buffy found her way back to Jack's side and reached for the bag. She wanted her scythe, at least. But as she tried to untangle it from the contents of the bag, she noted the mailbox. "For letters. That's how you send them. Put the letter in there and it'll go anywhere."

"Interesting." The scythe was handed over, and Sparrow pocketed a stake or two for himself before giving her the rest. "Fewer couriers to get killed here, eh? I've carried a dispatch or two in my day."

There was so much to see, but the pirate was content to let Annie show and tell. He was entirely in her hands in this illusionary world, and he was actually becoming rather comfortable with that fact. Of course, the sun hadn't gone down yet.

Who knew where she stashed those spare stakes. A jacket pocket here, a sleeve there. Buffy spent one more moment hesitating before she picked a direction and went with it. Out past the coffee-shop. It would bring them past the school but it would avoid most of the graveyards.

"Why would a mailman get killed? Y'know, besides the obvious."

"If he's carrying something precious or important that a killer wants? He should fear for his life, love." He sauntered along beside her, marveling at the smooth pavement of the streets. There was no animal excrement anywhere. No soiled straw. No open sewage.

"Your town's clean, Annie," he remarked again.

"And I like to keep it that way," she remarked rather flippishly. It wasn't that she misunderstood his meaning -- she got that he probably meant the actual cleanliness of it -- but there was now a certain pride to be had in leading the pirate through her turf. Sure, the normal world had its politics and its police force but as far as the supernatural was concerned, Sunnydale had been the Slayer's territory.

"And that, by the way..." she pointed out a little Toyota parked snugly in a side-street. "That's one of those cars I keep talking about."

"Can we ride in it?" He was already striding off toward the car. "I can drive it! Kennedy and I drove the war machine, back during the draft. Let's, Annie!"

"Jack, you can't just take someone's ca--" The argument died on her lips once she realized how patently absurd it was. This wasn't even a real town. This car didn't actually belong to anyone. This car didn't actually exist. "That car doesn't even exist." Her tone was dry.

"And even if it does work? I don't have my license. And you definitely don't."

She strode after him. Perhaps if the Slayer was lucky, the car wouldn't even start.

"License? Does Jack Sparrow ever gain license to do anything? No, I say! He simply does what he will." With a flick of his fingers, the non-existent car door opened, and the existing pirate slid into the driver's seat. He thwacked the pine tree air freshener and turned all the buttons on the dash and opened the glove box. A key tumbled out.

"Oh! Key."

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/going out running be back later

ENJOY.

07

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