drown the urge for permanence and certainty; crouch down and scrawl my name with yours in wet cement

[herotypical]

Who: lists_to_port & slaying
What: carpentry; catharsis; cutting a deal
When: october 17th; noon onwards
Where: house seven
Summary: buffy wants to build something for jilly's return. buffy also wants to borrow a boat.
Rating: clean enough to start but it's these two so don't be surprised if the rating climbs a couple hundred tags in.

Today looked just a little bit brighter. Not by much, granted. But enough to make a difference and enough to sweeten the sense of industry that was unfolding her backyard. The heat helped; the day was warmed than the ones before it and strangely warm for a late October afternoon. Buffy had quickly given in to summer's last hurrah and was hoarding her last chance to wear shorts before autumn established its firmer grip on the month and on the village. Misery and grief were very, very slowly opening up to allow silver linings and miniature blessings. And one such something was working just a few feet away from her. Not quite so silver, though, and she suspected his lip would curl if she referred to him as miniature anything. Buffy worked the plane across her chosen soon-to-be-planks of wood and she watched Jack Sparrow from the corner of her eye. Perhaps a tarnished, coated kind of silver that resisted polish like two too similar poles on a magnet. Blessing was a harder one to pin down. The word seemed as though it should be anathema to a rough-reptuationed pirate. But then again? In a number of ways, Buffy knew that Jack was less rough than she was.

The afternoon's project was a simple porch swing and it was a little bit of home improvement to impress Jilly with once she returned. And it was a way to keep busy while they waited for her while they waited out their grief. Keeping busy, she found, helped her focus. The work tricked her now and then into smiling when she hadn't intended to. Silly little mistakes would take place -- fumbling with a tool or trying very hard (without much success) to remember carpentry terms once taught to her by Xander Harris -- and somehow these mistakes weren't discouraging. They were comedic. They were okay. And Buffy knew that none of it would be possible had she been left at the house alone, this week.

So she worked diligently at Sparrow's side and took moments now and then to appreciate his work ethic before it inspired her to press forward with her own. And she soon had another plank smoothed and sanded. Buffy pushed it aside and sat back with her palms crushing into the grass that was just a little too long. It wasn't as though the place was crawling with lawn-mowers, after all.

"What colour, Jack?" She asked as she blew a fine stream of breath up and across her brow. Fluttering bangs and clearing her vision. "We should paint it. It should be painted. What colour?"

Comments

[all7seas]

"Exactly. Glad we see eye to eye on this issue, me an' you. You an' me. Us. Would you like to go for coffee?"

[herotypical]

"A coffee break might be called for. Iced, though. Today? Today's warm. It's like the fall is sticking its tongue out at us and mocking us with one last tshirt-and-shorts day."

A half-smile. Approbation for his ever-quick picking up of her more modern idioms.

[all7seas]

"Good thing you've such strong lovely legs, then. Thank you, fall. Thank you. Now: is it....a date?" Jack stood and reached for her hands.

[herotypical]

"...You have to ask?"

She stood (with his help) and slipped back into her shoes without untying them. The backs of the heels were getting squished and wrenched out of shape; she didn't seem to care.

[all7seas]

"I have it on good authority that sometimes it is and sometimes it isn't." He was a support for that process without acting too much like he was trying to be. He enjoyed them, though: those little moments where she accepted his help.

"Murphy! Just--keep shortening this grass, lad. I'm taking her on a date."

The pony barely acknowledged that Jack had said anything at all. Leaving him in the yard of House Seven made Jack a little nervous--it was so close, after all, to where Vincent had threatened him.

[herotypical]

"You and me? We're dating. I think that the law therefore states that everything we do is a date."

She surveyed their work so far before turning away and heading to the far side of the house -- where the path would be found.

[all7seas]

"The law?! There's laws? Oi! Wait!" He hurried after her, falling into step beside Buffy. "How are we to make our dates special-like and romantical if EVERYTHING we do is a date?" That was a terrible amount of pressure, even for Captain Jack Sparrow.

[herotypical]

"Oh, there's laws. A whole slew of them. And the cost of breaking said laws? Steep. Very steep. The steepest."

Idle, by-the-book teasing was a perfect way to divert her own attention away from less savoury topics and thoughts and worries. "You would've known this if you'd actually sat down and watched Dawson's Creek with me, you know. I was just trying to educate you."

[all7seas]

"This? Unsurprising. You know sod all about wooing but you're very keen on the laws." Dawson's Creek was something he had been trying to avoid after seeing what it actually was. Jack was far more interested in more Indiana Jones-like adventures.

[herotypical]

"Only the useful ones."

She was still trying to decide between Back to the Future or Aladdin for their next movie date.

[all7seas]

"It's probably not a good thing that I'm tempted to discover said steep cost. Curiosity---it's always been a bit of a problem of mine."

Either of those would be a good choice, really.

[herotypical]

"Problem? Try fully blown tragically fatal flaw."

Back to the Future alone, perhaps. But then all this talk of dating and customs surrounding dating made Buffy wonder if she couldn't corral the pirate into some sort of a double date. The question was only -- with who? A few months ago she would have known without thinking. Archie and Dawn.

[all7seas]

And poor Jack would be thinking "double date" meant he got two wenches at once.

"I seem to have many of those, actually." The foremost and most fatal---literally--was his capacity to trust. For a man who was near pathologically dishonest and untrustworthy, Jack certainly had a rather wide blind spot of trust for some people.

"Luckily the cat hasn't been killed very many times."

[herotypical]

Oh. Wouldn't that go down well.

"Twice is often enough, thanks."

[all7seas]

It would probably involve another stay in the clinic, somehow, that revelation. Jack stuck close to Buffy's side on the route to Seventh Heaven. There would be at least one more death, of course, but that would be far away and long ago.

"Just think of it this way: my curiosity might very well come in handy one day, eh?"

[herotypical]

"How? Paint me a picture, Jack Sparrow, of such a handy-dandy time."

[all7seas]

"Curious men find things and make things and do things and discover things. That's all very useful, isn't it?"

[herotypical]

"I think that all depends on the what that they're being curious about."

[all7seas]

"Valuable things. Valuable mysterious things. Think of it this way: if I were a less curious man, I'd never have met you."

[herotypical]

"By that logic? Every man I've ever met has been just curious enough to meet me."

Arm-in-arm was nice. After eight months -- less than that publicly -- she was just about getting used to being seen in such a state with the pirate. Around the village. Openly. She no longer checked about to see who might be seeing them in turn.

[all7seas]

"Dunno about that. How many of them tried to rob you at that meeting, hmm?"

[herotypical]

"...Just the one."

Any terrible point she could make about potential blood robbery was mercifully discarded. In its place: "Tried and failed, though."

/bed for me now!

[all7seas]

"Tried and SUCCEEDED, you mean." He held the door to Seventh Heaven in a rather patronizing manner. "You DID make me tacos. Woman. That was almost a date, possibly."

good night! /ALSO GOING TO BED

[herotypical]

"That was so not a date."

Times after that, though? Buffy would sooner eat her own shoes than admit it but for a while they had been dating in everything but name. Meals and midnight swims. Dances.

"That was charity. That was me feeling bad for your poor self and feeding you out of the goodness of my very own heart. And possibly to keep you from legitimately doing any damage because I was trying my very best to act like I was still a full-on Slayer. And maybe a little bit because your company was interesting company."

Certainly, she and Jack had got along rather well before the desert mischief. And on that bombshell? She strode into the restaurant -- hopefully rendering his patronization toothless by not sparing it a look.

[all7seas]

"Was so. Best date you'd ever had, up til then!" He followed her, trying to guide her to the booth in the back by the window.

Then not long after had come all that unpleasantness in the desert: the madness and the pain and that lost feeling, afterward---the sense that everything had slipped through his fingers. That he'd lost her, especially; and at times like this, Jack Sparrow was more than thankful for Buffy Summers's mercy and understanding.

The goodness of her own heart. He loved it.