| |
Checking For Injuries
by ainon
Disclaimer: Ownership of characters belongs to Joss Whedon and relevant parties that don't include me.
Author's Notes: Dedicated to Ten and Debbie - here's to years of keeping them in the sandbox.
There are many wonderful benefits to teleportation. Not any old demon has the rights to teleport. One has to be a very senior, very experienced, very loyal demon. Teleportation solves a lot of problems when it comes to needing to be in the right place at the right time without exerting too much energy or wasting too much effort getting there. Teleportation is also an excellent way to get out of a place when it's turning out to be a bad place to be.
And side-benefits. Sometimes teleportation can be a useful way to anonymously visit an old ... friend. Well, lover. Former. Irresolute, betrayer lover. Almost husband-to-be. No. Betrayer: spineless, beady-eyed, gutless betrayer is what he is. And he will suffer. In time.
Anya turns around slowly, taking in the room and letting her eyes grow accustomed to the gloom. It's not as pitch-dark as she expected - he hadn't closed his door all the way, which she assumes is because he had just blundered in and crashed onto the bed. The room hasn't changed much. In fact, it doesn't look like he changed anything at all. A bit untidy, but not by much. She supposes that this is what the room would look like if she'd been gone for a week and he's expecting her back and doesn't want her scolding him for making a mess.
Although of course he's not expecting her back. He's just a lazy housekeeper. But he's not doing too badly, either.
She takes a deep breath, releases it, and looks at him. He's sprawled diagonally across the bed, taking up the whole mattress. He's lying on his tummy, left arm flung upon the pillow that his head had missed, right arm down by his side, with bloody cuts very visible on his palm and forearm. Left knee bent, right leg straight out with the foot barely jutting over the edge of the bed. He looks so much like a little boy gone right to sleep without changing into his pajamas first.
At least he got his shoes off.
There's some blood on his undershirt there, but careful scrutiny tells her that those are merely blood smears, probably from the cuts on his right arm. There's a bruise on his forehead that seems encouragingly ugly. She supposes he'll have to tell a story about how he got that. She helped him concoct some nice stories in the past: about armed burglars accosting them in the dark of the night and him fighting them valiantly away; or the one about violent muggers bashing him and him bravely defending her honour; then there were the merciless crazy loons just escaped from the hospital who jumped them as they walked home from the movies and him single-handedly holding the loons off till she could find suitable weapons to whack the loons away.
His co-workers are always so sympathetic about these things. One co-worker's wife was concerned enough that she sent him casseroles for an entire week, so that he'd have some care coming his way. That had been before he let Anya tell everyone that she was his fiance. That she would be the one who would be giving him care every day for the rest of his life.
Without her input she's sure he'll only come up with something lame to say, like, 'I fell down the stairs'. He's always one to revert to whatever worked before. But she quells that thought. It's really not a very nice thought.
Which she isn't here to do! She's not planning to think nice thoughts. She's here because she heard that earlier tonight, the slayer had defeated a particularly recalcitrant toyol demon. Anya'd been out of town, dealing quite expediently with helping a jilted lover wish her cheating penis-bearing fool of a mate into a pigeon. Anya won't call it one of her better jobs - why that silly girl wanted a vengeance of coo-ism on her ex was something that made no sense whatsoever. But who is Anya to question the taste of revenge on other women's palates?
So she'd gotten that job done, and then went back to hanging on the grapevine, and then as soon as she heard, she teleported back here.
The toyol demon story really was a juicy bit of breaking news. She's known a toyol demon or two in her thousand and hundred years - notoriously stubborn creatures that would absolutely refuse to listen to advice. This Sunnydale toyol had been told - this was the story she heard - told very, very explicitly, that living in Sunnydale is a rough deal for demons. Demons should not wisely endeavour to reside in the same town as the vampire slayer. But toyols ... no, they never listen. True, they're very notoriously tough to kill, but sooner or later the vampire slayer of that generation will kill the toyol. Must be a death wish this toyol had.
Anyway, it had been an epic fight; that was the story. One slayer. One toyol. The earth shook and all other demons quailed as the toyol battled and unleashed its fearsome power. And stuff. These stories - it's always about shaking earth and the unleashing of fearsome power. Nobody really wants to hear a story about the demon who met the slayer and then wham: two minutes later, dead.
There'd been a human with the slayer, though. The storytelling assumption made was that the toyol couldn't have known that it'd be dealing with the slayer herself when it tried to make that human its newest pet.
Now, having him made a toyol pet would be very proper vengeance. Without any effort on her part whatsoever, that perfect, proper vengeance would have been achieved! So Anya's not surprised that the slayer would ruin things. Sure. Save his life again, wouldn't she? Nuisance.
Except she guesses that he must have helped save the slayer too. He's always stupid that way. Throwing himself into fights with things that are bigger than him. Always wanting to help. Trying to help. Stupid man. The toyol slayer smackdown had been a rough one, the story went, but the slayer won out in the end without losing any limbs or having important vertebrae broken. She doesn't actually trust that last bit of information, though. Just how would anyone know for sure that slayer vertebrae hadn't been broken? Slayers are so easily mended. All the same, this slayer walked away from that fight with nary a lost body part. A most impressive outcome, even if the toyol's demise had been all but foreseen.
For the slayer to have won so mightily must mean that she had help. And now that Spike's gone missing and Willow's gone on don't-start-another-apocalypse-watch under Giles' vigilant eye, the only help the slayer gets is from him. Even if his helpful contribution was in letting himself get attacked, so that the slayer could use the diversion to come up with the appropriate slayer move to exterminate the toyol.
Anya earnestly expects broken vertebrae in him.
She studies the cuts on the forearm and palm. She recognizes these. Defensive wounds. They'd cuddled together one patrol-free night and watched four straight hours of 'Crime Night' on Discovery Channel and learned all about murder and shallow graves and DNA evidence and how splatter patterns can lead to very interesting court room illustrations as presented by prosecuting attorneys. She'd learned about defensive wounds that night. The wounds a person gets when an assailant is slashing at him, and he raises an arm to defend his face.
These wounds are relatively shallow. He doesn't even need to have them stitched. He's not going to bleed to death from them. She huffs in disappointment.
And he's breathing normally. Besides, he's lying on his tummy, which he can't possibly do if any of his ribs have been cracked or broken or are poking into his lungs with every intake of air. Very anti-climatic. At the very least, she would have expected his recently mended broken ribs to re-break. Did the toyol not throw him about at all? Well, at least the ribs had been broken recently. That's the one nice thing Willow did in the course of trying to end the world.
The bruise on his forehead isn't going to cause brain damage either. It doesn't look bad enough that it would. In all likelihood he will have terrible headaches for the next couple of days, and she's sure that he'll wake up sick at least once or twice tonight. He's always like that. He gets knocked on the head, passes out, wakes up and recovers fast, but once he's home, he's a throwing-up mess and all feverish and shivery and all he'll want to do is curl up and go to sleep. It used to scare her initially, how vulnerable he was. Is.
Some vomiting in the night - that seems to be the sum total of what she can expect from his encounter with the toyol. She really was expecting something more ... morbid. Permanent. More to do with frantic emergency room running and shouts of 'Stat!' than just him upchucking into a porcelain bowl.
What a waste of teleporting.
At least he's alone. He'll be sick and hurting and all alone. Miserable and alone. With an awful headache. And alone.
He'll still wake up tomorrow morning and go to work, though. He's always so particular about getting to work. He got that raise just last month, and they're giving him more responsibilities and putting him in charge. He even goes for meetings. That's really very impressive in that company for someone so young. He dresses up very nicely in a shirt and tie and dark jacket and slacks when he goes to meetings.
Not that she's watching him. Occasionally, she finds herself somewhere close by wherever he's working. Sheer coincidence that she'd just suddenly spot him. Or overhear little things about him. She never goes out of her way for him - not to avoid him, nor to see him.
Except for occasions such as these, when he's just had a significant run-in with a toyol demon and survived. She's just here to observe harmful effects, that's all.
She sits down where her side of the bed used to be. There's just enough space for her to sit without bumping into him. Her pillow is still there and she absently pats and fluffs it a bit. She imagines that if she were here, sleeping on her side of the bed when he came in, he would stand there at the door, and look at her. Then he'd decide that he mustn't wake her up by trying to crawl over her to get to his side of the bed, so he'd back out again into the living room and sleep on the recliner out there, aches and pains be damned. She would wake up later in the night and realize he's not in bed with her and she would go out to find him, and wake him and walk him into the room. She'd undress him and nurse his bruises and tend to him and he'd hug her and they'd snuggle together - but not too tight because if he's really hurt then it makes him hurt more.
He deserves all the more hurt. She should demand that he get all more hurts. By all means, go on more patrols. Maybe there's another demon out there that might want him for an ornament. A smarter demon that won't attack a human who's out on patrol with the slayer - of all people! A demon that would appreciate strewn guts yanked out of a still-gasping body that's been pummeled and hacked mercilessly. A demon that won't just stop at inflicting defensive wounds. Because, really, what demon can't go the extra mile and try to amputate a convenient limb? That toyol must have so had a death wish.
Or else was infatuated with Buffy. Because that seems to happen a lot with this vampire slayer. Get demons all infatuated and then fight them. Or make them move out of town. Strange creature, that Buffy.
He sighs a little and stirs. She watches him. He does this in his sleep. He sighs and stirs. Maybe three to four times a night he'll switch positions, and sometimes, when he does that, he'll reach out for her and when he finds her he'll give her the warmest cuddle, all without actually waking up. Sometimes, if she's awake when he finds her, she'll pull him closer and tease him and they'll engage in slow, sleepy sex, and afterward they'll fall asleep again together, arms entwined.
But if he's been injured then sometimes he'll wake up and need to rush to the bathroom because he's all nauseous and sick. Then, since he's woken her up in his trampling rush to get to the bathroom, she'll wait for him to come out and she'll rub his shoulders and comfort him and maybe suggest that he stay home from work next morning because he can't do anything if he's seeing double. And looking at the way he's hurt his hand this time, he won't be able to hold any of his tools. He can't even hold a pen to write. He should....
Absolutely become ill and nauseous now, right here in bed. Don't give him time to get to the bathroom. Let him be sick in bed and then have him clean it up himself. And she'll stand there in the corner, laughing and pointing at him while he's ugly and miserable and feeling sorry for himself. He'll be suitably humiliated.
He twitches and coughs softly. She stiffens. He rolls over onto his back and his left hand lands in her lap. He opens his eyes. Looks at her. She holds her breath.
"Ahn? I'm sorry, honey, did I wake you?"
She hesitates and then shakes her head. "No."
He smiles and sighs and closes his eyes. She looks down at the hand in her lap and then gently, lays her hand in his upturned palm. He reflexively wraps his fingers around hers. She can't help but squeeze back.
She doesn't actually want to say anything more but then she does. "You're hurt."
He blinks his eyes open. "Just a little," he tells her in a drowsy, tired voice, and gives her something of a half-nod. "It's okay. Nothing broken."
Then he's gone, pulled under again by the deep tide of sleep.
Well. Perhaps the head injury isn't so serious this time - it's not making him sick. All those head injuries ... it's just as well that she's no longer human and not marrying him. Who would want to marry someone who keeps getting knocked on the head? He's damaged goods, that's what he is. She was lucky to have been rid of him. The gods were smiling on her. It's true, you never know when something bad that happens actually turns out to be something good that needed to happen.
He won't remember her being here. He never remembers what happens in the night, after he's fallen into that deep sleep. He's always so difficult to rouse, which can really complicate things. She's sure that she'd be all on the verge of delivery before he's made lucid enough to understand that he has to take her to the hospital to have the baby.
The pretend baby. The one that she assumed they'll have made by now if they'd gotten married. But who'd want his baby anyway? He's damaged goods. That's all he is. Nothing better.
"But you're a very brave man, you stupid man."
She lets the whisper linger, and then she sighs. She plucks his hand off her lap and lets it drop. He doesn't wake. Doesn't even move. Not even a hitch in the breathing.
The next demon will make him suffer appropriately. She's sure the sufferance is due. In the meantime, he still pines for her. That's plain to see. She smiles at that thought.
She teleports away.
THE END
|
|
|