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Mystery Play
by Glossing
These are some of games they play. The air between goes solid and she has to push through it to move. Distance is the key.
Before anyone knows he returned and afterward, too (but then, they are even more careful. Strange that knowledge engenders greater secrecy). Back and forth, eyes and hands, testing each other. Safe distance, always a safe distance, three bodylengths between them. Sometimes he's in chains.
Metal rattling and jangling, the muscles in his shoulders bunching up as his eyes widen. That feral gaze from the woods, unseeing and unknowing, yet fastened on her.
Look, don't touch: Their game is simple. All their games are one. One rule, and if it's broken, they will break, too.
It was the rule before Buffy knew the game existed. Angel had known, Angel had always known. From Hemery through the first months in Sunnydale, he looked at her. Never touched.
She didn't know. She knew a lot, back then, from how to dab a lighter shade in the center of her bottom lip to make it look plumper to how to soothe a freaking Mom to how fake a jump right and bring the stake home to the left. But she thought she could touch.
She touched him one night in January, took him deep inside, and the pleasurepain of it all didn't cease until May, until she returned the motion. Thrust the sword once as he watched her, eyes welling with memory, fucked him right through to hell.
Now that he's back, they circle each other with wary, weary eyes. Solid air, mansions of molecules and suburbs of oxygen, between them, maps and miles weighing down their hands. His chains rattle, her breathing whistles.
He sets out the cushions on the floor for her well before she can get away from school, home, slaying. He lights a candle if it's that kind of night, or let the fireplace light the room if it's not.
She wants both kinds of night, both and more. She wants what she had once, rain crawling like tears down glass and the weight of him, the presence. She wants what she can't have, his hand cupping the back of her head and the pressure of his mouth on hers so great she can feel his heartbeat.
Sometimes she wants what she had all summer, every night. Dry mouth and bad dreams, knotted stomach and her fingers scrabbling between her legs as she cried. Easier then, her left hand in her ponytail, yanking her hair until she came over her right hand. Salt above and below, and sharp jerks on her skull, through her hips.
Buffy wants everything and nothing. She wants Angel and she wants to have never met him and she wants him to be what he can't be.
Tonight, she doesn't know what kind of night it is. He pads around in black pants and a loose dark shirt, more shadowy than the long red-fringed shadows reaching from the fireplace. He drinks the blood she brought and keeps his face turned away.
"-- so she's not talking to Xander except to make fun of him."
Her chitchat dies on her lips. Stupid news, news about people he doesn't care about, people who fade to less than ghosts when she crosses his threshold and pushes aside the curtain. Giles, Willow, Cordelia. Xander and Oz. Various small miseries and betrayals, the kind that must seem tiny to him. The kind that must make her seem just as trivial.
Angel looks like he might be smiling. Trick of the light, she decides, and then he comes over. And he is smiling. "Not that that's difficult," he says, and his hand is on her shoulder, loosening her jacket.
"No," Buffy says and the space between them is a wall. No thicker than skin, his palm, her neck, but strong as a fortress. She takes a step back and her heel hits the coil of chains. "Angel, I think --"
"Don't."
He's right. Thinking is a problem. Not the problem, but one among many, and she nods. Drops her jacket and then to her knees, grabbing the chain. She brings it with her as she rises, cold and heavy, petrified snake, and hands it to him.
He accepts it, clapping the cuffs around each wrist with such care that she sees Xander struggling over a chem test, Oz onstage tuning his guitar, Giles translating something. Boys, all of them, being careful and trying hard and she could kiss him. Stroke his hair and whisper and make him feel better.
Not here, though, and not him.
Angel stands before her, waiting. His head should be bowed; aren't prisoners supposed to be respectful? And he's still wearing his shirt. Its tails lift slightly like organs, like antennae, as she walks back and forth.
"Not a prisoner," he says, and lifts his chin even higher. "Not yours."
"No?" She yanks on one shirt-tail, upward, sprays buttons everywhere, and pushes it off his shoulders. He's so broad, her hand looks tiny and tan and ugly next to the bone-and-parchment spread of his shoulder.
"Ours. For us," Angel whispers, and now his eyes do drop and Buffy steps back. Back and backward. "Sit down."
She does. Drops back onto the cushions and he drops down, too, arms bowing upward with the strain, and they're almost eye-level across the floor. One cushion and three broad tiles between them, his arms spread like wings and her legs splayed like a whore's.
Every night, it's the same. She'll stop and stutter and look away. Can't do this, I'm sorry, I want to, I can't -- and he will hush her and coax her and call her his girl, just like he did when it rained, just like he did all summer, right in her ear, so close he was almost there.
Her mind's next door to hell.
Not tonight, whenever tonight is. Her hand aches slightly from ripping his shirt, low red throb that matches the one in her chest and between her legs. Tonight, she drops entire scenes and skips to the fifth act, the one where everyone's confused and dies and weddings happen and gods appear.
"Want you," she says roughly. "Want you."
His eyes widen and the chains creak. He can try to pull away, but he can't get far. She stands up, tottering for a second against the pull of gravity and habit, and then she's in front of him, running her hands down the air over his chest. She won't touch -- some rules are too eternal and too steadfast to break twice -- but she's close and coming closer.
"Turn around," she says and he tries, hampered by the chains, twisting himself at the waist. One palm on his hip, and she presses him forward until his forehead knocks the wall with a hollow thump.
"This is what was like, right?" she asks. She doesn't know when, if she means Hell or Darla or something else.
Angel nods and the muscles ripple along his shoulder blades. When she slaps him on the ass, the sound is muffled by his trousers, but she hears him suck in a breath. He'll take anything from her. She's known that since May, since his eyes locked on hers and she pushed in the sword.
She's not supposed to know that. She doesn't want to know that. It's too much, all of the time, knowing that he knew and she knew and it was her fault. Angelus's birth wasn't her fault -- she knows that, now, finally -- but the rest of it, murder sprees and her friends almost dying, that was her fault.
Hell was her fault.
She slaps him three more times and all he says is "Buffy". All he ever says is her name. Sometimes, some nights, he says more, but it's all her name, it's all about her. Wish I could touch you, wish I could taste you, wish I was there, that's my hand, touching you. Just variations on her name.
"Why'd you come back?" She snakes her hand, stinging now, between him and the wall, flipping open his belt. Freshly returned from Hell, and he's dressing as well as he ever did; the belt is heavy leather, rich to the touch as she pulls it haltingly from the loops. Why couldn't you stay gone? Why can't you really be here?
She asks with her hand, with the flick of her wrist that sends the belt singing over his back. The belt's shadow is red on his white skin, glowing like the fire. She asks again, and again, as her arm burns with the snake-whip whoosh of it, asks as his skin glows and his pants puddle around his ankles.
She asks with her entire body. Arm burning, the heat slithering down her chest and spreading, stoking. Asks until she's wet, until he has to be able to smell her, until she's gasping.
Asks without words because she doesn't have them. Words are for Watchers, like translation and instructions to be scoffed; action is hers.
Asks until Angel groans. Once, a soft little moan that sounds like something Willow would say in her sleep or Faith when she's knocked to the ground. Half a growl, half a moan, and she stops, the belt slapping against her leg. The contact stings and makes her want more.
"Buffy," he says to the wall. One breath, two syllables. His hands are fists, white rocks, icebergs; his back and the tops of his thighs are red. So many reds, so much pain.
He twists around, slowly, as haltingly as the belt came loose, and then his face is in hers, quicksilver gleam of monstrous brass eyes absorbed by his human eyes, black and hungry.
He has a scar in his belly from her sword. Silver, half a shade darker than the rest of him, and fine as a stray hair. She'd touch it if she could, but all she has are her eyes. She tracks her gaze downward, almost despite herself -- but not despite, not with a belt burning in her hand, the buckle clinking like his chains -- to where his erection rubs pink and hot against his stomach.
She's a fool, because her first thought is, no underwear? She knew that, but she hadn't let herself know that. "Angel," she says instead, and understands now why he can only say her name.
Names are small things, but they cover everything. Adam had only names, but it gave him...something.
"Dominion," she hears herself whisper, and looks him in the eye. "Angel."
His mouth is open, dark cavern and white teeth. His eyes drop to his cock, shame and need swirling. "Buffy, please --"
She unlocks his right cuff. His hand uncurls, from iceberg to palm, pink with strain, and then he shoves her back.
His hand cupped her once, lifted her and spread her legs, thumb rubbing down her lips, and she dreams about that hand until it's the size of the world and all she wants.
Buffy lands sprawled on the cushions, back where she started. But she has the belt now and the ache down the center of her arm, and Angel looks at her with narrowed eyes as he wraps his hand around his cock. His eyes close as he starts to pull.
"Look at me," she says. "I'm right here. Over here."
"Take off your shirt," he tells her. His voice is rough, like the plaster walls, like the sting of leather, and she does it. Strips off her flowered skirt, too, and now they match. Naked, and her skin's streaked with sweat like his back is ribboned with pain. When he adds, even more roughly, "Good girl," she shivers and clenches down.
Her lips crack when she says, "For you."
"Beautiful girl," he says. "My girl."
"Want you all the time," she tells him, remembering her lines, remembering why it's not a script but a confession. She pushes her hand under the waistband of her panties and gasps. "Angel, want --"
"Buffy." His eyes on her, black in a twisted face, and his hand a blur, pulling and releasing, thumb crooked, dropping to pull at his balls. She didn't know, last year, how to touch him like that. She wishes she'd known. "All the time, all I think about."
"Yes," she says, and her back is arching and for the first time, she's not thinking about that night, or the summer's worth of nights, but this night.
Tonight, and the way his back arched and trembled when she brought down the belt, the tiny wheezes he gave off, how he looked bent over, offered up to her. She spreads her lips with two fingers and runs the side of her thumb back and forth over her clit. Trapped beneath the cotton, it's all hidden from him, and something about that makes her laugh, throw her head back and rub harder. The heat of it spreads like oil through her, into her cheeks and the back of her throat, heat and need that hunger and gnaw.
"Does it feel good?" he asks. Tonight, every night. "Are you feeling good?"
"Yeah," she says, looking at him again, at the chain clamped to his wrist, at the need that stretches his face and lights his eyes. She lifts the belt and brings it down on herself, across her stomach, and the pain electrifies everything else. Two more times, until she jerks to the side, lip in her teeth, hair slashing her face. She must be glowing, she has to be, every pore is a bulb burning bright. "You? Feel good?"
He bites his lip and nods. Black hair drooping into his eyes, the way it must have before he discovered gel, and she smiles at him. Boys. He's just a boy.
She wants him to feel good. Not happy, never happy, because that's her curse. But good, skin on skin, ache of distant vision.
"What are you thinking about?" The lines come easily tonight. She doesn't stutter, and the only blush is the full-body one radiating from her crotch where her fingers are sliding and slipping. "Tell me."
"You," he says, a growl again. Stammered in time with his hand on himself, roll of his eyes, sweep of the chains. "Always you, and the belt, and. So fucking good. Buffy. Why?"
Crooking her wrist and lifting her ass, she shoves the panties down to her knees and closes her eyes for half a second. Shows him everything because she can't say.
"Wanted to," she says. There aren't words for how she can love him this much, need him like air, and still be so angry. At him, at herself, at the whole fucking goddamned world. Her eyes fly open at the curses that are only thoughts and she's so tight inside as she fingers herself, she wonders how he ever did it. "Needed to."
He's quiet but she can hear his skin, see him moving faster, and she matches his pace, rubbing herself near raw, her hips canting higher and higher, her toes curling against the slate floor. Tension's spiralling, corkscrewing, deeper inside her, unbearable and deafening.
If they did it now, if he was here on his knees, pushing into her, big hand on her shoulder, her breast, her neck, she'd know what to do. How to wrap a leg around his waist and fight his rhythm, twitch her hips so he would groan. She's learned everything behind this wall of air.
She wants him bent over, she wants him inside, she wants him holding her down and staring at her wild-eyed as he comes. Buffy wants and her nail scrapes the shaft of her clit as she pushes a third finger inside and she might start crying.
"Angel, I'm --"
"Do it," he says, and somehow the growl is gentle, like rain, like his lips on her forehead when they say goodnight. "Please, Buffy. Come for me, let me --"
"Coming --" she says and then can't speak, can't breathe, and she's still rubbing, still watching him twist to the side and jerk in the chains and moan as he comes, too. She's still coming when his chains are silent.
"Buffy," he says sometimes later.
Pink and red and orange sunsets streaking past her eyes. Buffy tries to catch her breath. Heat and cold in streamers, wrapping her, tossing her around. Belts and welts, pain and need, glowing at the edges.
"Buffy?"
She struggles up onto one elbow, gasping. She pulls her shirt over herself, cold and shy. Her hands are shaking, her body is shaking, and breath is shallow and tentative. "I'm -- wow. I --"
"Let me down?" he asks. Meek, never mild.
She dresses first, hands numb, then pulls his pants up. Only when they're dressed does she unlock the other cuff.
Angel leans against her for a moment, pushing her against the wall, arm heavy and welcome around her waist. When she looks up, she can see herself -- tiny and pale -- reflected in his eyes.
He can't, she realizes. Angel steadies himself, kisses her hair, asks her if she wants something to eat. Hugs her close, says he loves her, and she knows that.
He loves her, but he doesn't see anything of himself in her eyes. He can't. She cleans his belly, even when he hisses Don't and looks away, and buttons up his shirt. Cups his cheek in her hand and kisses him. The way they always do, shallow but hungry, just a graze of tongue, and he clutches at her shoulders with his hands.
This is the epilogue to the game, when they sit before the fire and talk and she dozes until she wakes up and he's still looking at her. They can touch now, but happiness is very far away. Wrapped in barbed wire and shoved far down in her heart, and Buffy kisses him one more time before she heads for home with her empty eyes.
THE END
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