MASH NOTE
by perletwo
The sound of tears drew Sophie away from her station and into the breakroom. She found Buffy huddled up in a plastic chair, crying her eyes out.
"Buffy?" She touched the older girl on the shoulder. "Did something happen? Can I help?"
"N-no, nothing's happened, I'm OK," her friend sniffled. "W'l, not OK, actually, but - "
"This sounds like a romance problem," Sophie said, pulling up a chair of her own.
"No. Yes - maybe..."
"The guy at the party, the one that couldn't take his eyes off you? In the leather coat." Buffy nodded and swiped at her tears with a paper napkin.
"I just - " She broke off and sighed. "Sophie, have you ever had one of those things where you know something is wrong, but - all your experience, all your perceptions when you're faced with it, they all tell you it's right?"
Sophie nodded, and Buffy threw her hands up. "So what do you do, then?"
"What I do?" Buffy leaned forward. "I just - go with my gut, I guess."
"And that works out for you?"
"Well, no, not always. Sometimes it does, though. Best I can tell, situations like that, nothing works all the time," she answered. "And at least this way you know you're being true to yourself."
Buffy sighed again and leaned back, and Sophie noticed a folded piece of paper pressed to her chest.
"Is that from him?" Sophie pointed to the letter.
"Yeah. See, I know there's good reasons why he and I are wrong for each other. I mean, even if we could work out the emotional stuff, he'd never fit in to my life as I know it, and I wouldn't fit in his. And he says he understands and he can settle for what I can give him. But, but then he goes and writes me this beautiful letter - "
"SOPHIE! We're gettin' slammed out here!" The younger girl's head swiveled toward the door.
"Go. Don't worry, I'm okay. A good cry'll fix me up for the day, you'll see."
Sophie smiled and gave her friend a quick hug on her way out the door. "Call if you need me, okay? There's plenty of fast-food jobs in the sea." Buffy laughed at that.
Once she was alone again, she smoothed the letter out on the table and re-read it.
"Dear Buffy,
I know, I know. I said I wouldn't push you, and I meant it. But I've spent a good deal of time thinking about things after the Party that Would Not End, and since you're loathe to let me say them to your face I thought I'd say them this way. Bear in mind, it's your own fault this forum leaves you no room to answer back, as simply talking to me would.
First thing, of course, is that I love you. That's really the first thing to be said in any discussion of just about anything we might have. That's not as high-flown as it sounds; I love you - it's simply what I do. Had Poor Richard asked me at the PtWNE, 'What do you do?' the honest answer would've been, 'Love Buffy.'
If we were face-to-face, this would be your cue to run away as fast as your legs would carry you. But relax, I'm merely establishing the terms of this one-sided discussion, not trying to overwhelm you with my passion. (Though I'll be happy to do that if you'd care to stop by the crypt at your convenience.)
I love you. That said, it should follow obviously that I do not enjoy seeing you in pain. Granted, I prefer seeing you in pain to seeing you frozen inside as you were when you first came back, and consider the state you're in now to be progress. But you have the example of My Evening with Glory as proof of what I say. I haven't drawn you into this relationship and away from your Scoobies to hurt you, or to degrade you, as you sometimes seem to think.
I know you are conflicted about what your friends would think if they found out about us, whether they'd accept us together. For the most part I've respected your wish for privacy (I know, I tease, but I'd never just out you to them, luv - ask Tara). But the truth is I don't give a rat's ass whether the bloody Scoobies accept us or not. I had a long, rich life without their approval; when I thought I had earned it, it evaporated like so much fog once you came back; I get on just fine without them, thank you very much.
What I do care about very much is whether *you* accept us together. When we first began you treated our relations as something equivalent to using the privy - necessary to relieve a bodily ache, but hidden out of sight and mind and treated in polite circles as though it didn't exist.
Lately there have been times I've felt you were growing more comfortable at simply being with me, and with the idea that I have a place in your life, albeit a small, hidden one. The rest of the time, however, you beat yourself up - and me too, on occasion - because you can't allow a place in your life for me, or for what you need.
Which brings me round to my point in writing. Which is, I know what you're going through.
Now, now. Settle down. Of course I can't know everything you're going through, although the whole becoming-a-vampire thing does have eerie parallels. What I mean is, I know about that battle you're waging inside yourself over me, because I've fought it myself, over you, a very long time ago. Last year - was it only last year? Really? It seems a lifetime.
Last year, around this time, you were a simple schoolgirl happily embroiled in a simple college romance. You went to your classes, you helped your 'father' at his shop, rode herd on your sweet little sister and established a grown-up friendship with your mother. You also went out each night and slew vampires, infiltrated a sinister covert military operation and kept the world safe for the innocent.
Later that year both of your double lives twisted into knots because of your young man's betrayal, your mother's illness and what seemed an endless series of threats to your sister. Even at all that, though, you were solid, just as you were when Angel lost his soul and got up to his old tricks. You are more like a diamond than anyone I've met, Buffy - every turn of the screw to increase the pressure on you just makes you harder and more brilliant.
And at the same time last year, I was struggling to hold on to my life as I knew it, although the Initiative's meddling had left it irrevocably altered. I worked hard to become the Big Bad I was when I first came here, luv, and I was damned good at it. Life with the chip was changing me in ways I didn't always like, however, and I tried mightily to deny them.
Things like admitting, if only tacitly, that I trust you lot with my life far more readily than I do my own kind. That's why I came to Giles' that night seeking asylum. At bottom, I knew you'd not be willing to take my life simply because you could. Things like discovering that I didn't need the bloodlust of the kill to satisfy my demon's need for mayhem. Or that I was starting regard blood less as an end in itself and more as something in the line of a cooking ingredient, rather like some people do wine.
And the hardest thing I had to face at that time was that I was falling desperately in love with you. Oh, I didn't call it that at first, of course, not for a long time. All I knew was that seeing you fawn over your pallid young man made me wild with rage, that I felt more alive when I was around you - whether talking or fighting or simply looking at you - than any other time and ached for that feeling when I wasn't, that I was growing wildly protective of you because I didn't want to live in a world without you in it.
All those things were growing in me all that time, and I fed those needs by getting in your face, by lurking about your house for glimpses of you, stealing bits and scraps of clothing to obsess over. Treated Harmony abominably, as punishment for which I'm getting an ample taste of my own medicine. And still I denied what was happening to me, until a fairly explicit dream (I believe the words 'I love you, Buffy' were actually included) made it impossible to ignore.
Not that knowing helped any. You were still besotted with your young pissant; you were still the Almighty Vampire Slayer; you still got on my nerves like nobody ever has before or since, and my nerves are Drusilla-proof. I still had to struggle with the paradoxes, just as you are now.
I wish I had a pat answer for you as to how I resolved it, but I don't. It resolved itself, I think, or circumstances resolved it for me. Circumstances and Glory's bad behaviour.
I know it was easy to dismiss my feelings at first as a crush, because they did have their childish aspects; but by the time Glory got hold of me, I had found their true measure, and by the time you died all the childishness in me died away along with you. Loving you had become simply a part of me, like the remnants of William or the Aurelius blood or the chip.
That, you see, is the advantage I have over you in this. I have five months of life without you in the world to compare with what you're putting me through now. No contest, this wins going away.
While you were blissing off in your Heaven, I was slogging it out here on Earth. Got up in the evening, slew your vamps for you, tried to keep the Scoobies from getting themselves killed, looked out for Dawn. Helped her grieve, and let her help me grieve. Only thing that helped was Dawn, and it wasn't enough. Nothing was enough until I saw you on those stairs and heard your heart beating.
So as I tried to tell you in that alley, I can take whatever pain you want to put on me. I'm not sure you heard any of that sentence after 'That's my girl,' which seemed to set the match to the grass, but it's true. It's why I didn't resist - I hoped that pain would burn itself out of you, and this insane idea of going to jail along with it.
Nothing you can do to hurt me will ever, ever be worse than I hurt when you died. Skip the abandonment issues, luv; I'm not going anywhere and you can't do anything bad enough to make me want to.
I've never seen you cop out on a fight before and I won't let you cop out on this one either. You're going to have to come to terms with what I make you feel somehow. It'd be nice if you could do it in some way that won't make you hate yourself for how you went about it after you do get it resolved, but if you're bound and determined to fight it out this way then I'm right in it beside you.
Just like always, I've got your back. In this, as in everything else you'll allow.
Yours ever,
Spike"
Buffy carefully folded the letter and slipped it back into its envelope. Then she pulled herself together, adopted her most pale and wan face, and plead illness to Lorraine, who let her off the shift early. The manager grumbled a bit, but let it go when Sophie offered to cover Buffy's station as well as her own.
Then she slipped out into the night, to find Spike. They had things to fight out.