Fic: Everywhere We Have Been
Nov. 23rd, 2011 02:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
girlpireTitle: Everywhere We Have Been
Author: girlpire
Rating: FRT
Pairing: Angel/Buffy
Word Count: roughly 1,500
Disclaimer: This story is based on the "Angel" and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" series, with which I am not affiliated in any way. Joss Whedon is my master, etc. Also, the use of a map as a metaphor was shamelessly stolen from Roxane Gay.
Distribution: This story was written for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
iwry_marathon 2011. Please do not archive it anywhere else.
Summary: This thing they have can't be shut off like some kind of machine.
Warnings: It's Bangel.
*
Everywhere We Have Been
*
There are distances between Angel and Buffy, thick spaces that separate their bodies and seep into the gaps around them in their beds. There are holes between them, emptiness, like a long pause in a conversation you’re having with yourself, and when Angel looks far away into the direction where she is, he can feel the distance between that place and the place where she should be. He has measured this distance in miles and kilometers and feet and inches and centimeters. On a state map, the distance between his fingertip and first knuckle is fifty miles. Sometimes the distance to Buffy is two fingers. Sometimes she is only a knuckle away. Sometimes Angel is a red star on a map under a hard plastic cover at a rest stop, and Buffy is a dot somewhere six hundred miles west of You Are Here, and this distance between them is a length of crooked purple line cracking the land into pieces. He is here and she is there. He traces his fingertips over the lines to make sense of where he is.
He used to come to her some nights, show up just when she was getting home from patrol or clubbing with friends, and they would talk for hours or else say nothing at all, falling asleep together in a place where the sun couldn’t reach them in the morning. It didn’t matter where in the world she was. He would stay for one night or two weeks or however long it took for her to say she wasn’t ready yet, and before he left again he would go and kill the last thing that thought about hurting her. She never asked him how he was always able to find her. Even when she moved, he always came.
He came to her one night in Belfast after a battle. The fight had been long, excruciating, almost like the end of the world, and they healed each other in a thousand tiny ways that only left them more broken in the end. A year later, she married a man from Kentucky and told Angel she didn’t have any energy left for his kind of obsession, and then she fell out of his life like the trapdoor under a man condemned to hang. He was lost in the world after that; he couldn’t say where he was, only where he had been waiting for her when she disappeared.
He found Buffy in a hospital in Venezuela eleven years later. Her coma lasted eight months and an apocalypse and took up all the space around Angel the same way a massive singularity takes up the light from a star. He left the world to be with her, and when she finally awoke, Faith had died in battle and Spike had become human. The souled vampire who played a major role in the apocalypse had been rewarded while Angel picked out fuzzy slippers to bring to his unconscious, married ex-girlfriend in the hospital, who may never know that he guarded her at night for the whole eight months, lurking silently around hospital corridors and constantly startling the nurses. The man from Kentucky wept as he welcomed her back and Angel slipped away unnoticed, like a thing that was never there, like the distance had never been closed, not even when she’d squeezed his hand in her sleep.
He doesn’t say I love you much, not to anyone. It’s a thing that means something, and he feels nothing meaningful but this space all around him, these roads that connect or separate or just mark out the vast emptiness between two points. In a city known for the blues, he rents an apartment above a bakery and wakes every day to the smell of fresh bread and cinnamon rolls and her name on his lips. He says it out loud in that halfway place between sleep and clarity because he smells something like her, something that makes her his for one moment each morning. He thinks, I miss you, over and over, and it’s almost shocking that he still feels it, still feels anything at all, so clearly and so defiantly after so long and in the face of such distance. He always shocks himself when he thinks of her, when he touches her dot on his atlas and realizes, I could be there so quickly.
He makes a home in this empty space in this bluesy town above the bakery, and he exorcises spirits from old houses that creak underfoot and have small yards with giant mossy trees and graves grown over beneath them. He kills mean things and nasty things and ugly things that have one eye and smell like burnt rubber. And sometimes every part of him is there, but oftentimes one small part of him is wherever she is, and he is saving those words for a day when he can say them to her and she can understand what it is that he is saying. What he is saying is no matter what. What he is saying is forever. What he is saying is this is not going to end just because there are distances between us, years and miles and people and things that can’t be forgotten or unsaid.
Every year on her birthday, he writes her a long letter about everything he can think of. He signs it Yours, and he doesn’t send it because he doesn’t want to make things complicated for her. He sends her cards instead, short and sweet, with a picture of a cat or a cartoon lady with crazy hair making a joke about shopping. He’s not even sure what she likes anymore, what she would find funny or interesting or clever. He goes years without seeing her, and when his cards find her across the distance, he thinks of all the things he didn’t write in them. Sometimes he gets a Christmas card with a photo of her family in it, but he doesn’t know if it’s specifically for him or if he is just one name on her Christmas card list. Sometimes, randomly, he will get a long letter from her, as though she is writing to him everything she can think of, but when he writes her back after this, his letters are returned unopened. She writes on the back that she loves her husband. She writes that she is too old to be confused about who she is or where she belongs. She writes that she is not the same girl that she used to be. But she writes him again and again.
This thing they have can’t be shut off like some kind of machine. It doesn’t stop if you put it away while you live your other life but secretly pull it out every few months to hold it again. If you can bury it and walk away then it will eventually shrink underground, but if you keep it close by it will wander into your room at night and slip naked into your bed. He knows this and she knows this, but neither one of them buries it. They keep it in boxes at the back of their closets like ancient loveletters that are too beautiful to throw away, even if you hardly ever read them. What this means is that Angel will always be traveling toward her, and Buffy will always be wanting him to come. Through miles and fights and knuckles and spirits, and every time the world almost ends, they will each be loving the other one in the part of the heart where you do things in secret, alone. The distances don’t matter. This can be done anywhere in the world.
One day when Buffy is an old woman, Angel imagines that she will call for him and he will close the distance between them as simply as shutting a book about loneliness. They will touch each other the way lovers touch in the morning. They will dance to an old song. She will understand that what he has been saying all of these years is this: if we move the things that are in the way, we will always be able to reach each other. Like cities on a map, we are connected in more ways than can ever be drawn with lines. Everywhere we have been, we have been separately, but where I go from here, I will not go without you. We will be able to point to some place on a map and say, We are here.
*
Author: girlpire
Rating: FRT
Pairing: Angel/Buffy
Word Count: roughly 1,500
Disclaimer: This story is based on the "Angel" and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" series, with which I am not affiliated in any way. Joss Whedon is my master, etc. Also, the use of a map as a metaphor was shamelessly stolen from Roxane Gay.
Distribution: This story was written for
iwry_marathon 2011. Please do not archive it anywhere else.Summary: This thing they have can't be shut off like some kind of machine.
Warnings: It's Bangel.
*
Everywhere We Have Been
*
There are distances between Angel and Buffy, thick spaces that separate their bodies and seep into the gaps around them in their beds. There are holes between them, emptiness, like a long pause in a conversation you’re having with yourself, and when Angel looks far away into the direction where she is, he can feel the distance between that place and the place where she should be. He has measured this distance in miles and kilometers and feet and inches and centimeters. On a state map, the distance between his fingertip and first knuckle is fifty miles. Sometimes the distance to Buffy is two fingers. Sometimes she is only a knuckle away. Sometimes Angel is a red star on a map under a hard plastic cover at a rest stop, and Buffy is a dot somewhere six hundred miles west of You Are Here, and this distance between them is a length of crooked purple line cracking the land into pieces. He is here and she is there. He traces his fingertips over the lines to make sense of where he is.
He used to come to her some nights, show up just when she was getting home from patrol or clubbing with friends, and they would talk for hours or else say nothing at all, falling asleep together in a place where the sun couldn’t reach them in the morning. It didn’t matter where in the world she was. He would stay for one night or two weeks or however long it took for her to say she wasn’t ready yet, and before he left again he would go and kill the last thing that thought about hurting her. She never asked him how he was always able to find her. Even when she moved, he always came.
He came to her one night in Belfast after a battle. The fight had been long, excruciating, almost like the end of the world, and they healed each other in a thousand tiny ways that only left them more broken in the end. A year later, she married a man from Kentucky and told Angel she didn’t have any energy left for his kind of obsession, and then she fell out of his life like the trapdoor under a man condemned to hang. He was lost in the world after that; he couldn’t say where he was, only where he had been waiting for her when she disappeared.
He found Buffy in a hospital in Venezuela eleven years later. Her coma lasted eight months and an apocalypse and took up all the space around Angel the same way a massive singularity takes up the light from a star. He left the world to be with her, and when she finally awoke, Faith had died in battle and Spike had become human. The souled vampire who played a major role in the apocalypse had been rewarded while Angel picked out fuzzy slippers to bring to his unconscious, married ex-girlfriend in the hospital, who may never know that he guarded her at night for the whole eight months, lurking silently around hospital corridors and constantly startling the nurses. The man from Kentucky wept as he welcomed her back and Angel slipped away unnoticed, like a thing that was never there, like the distance had never been closed, not even when she’d squeezed his hand in her sleep.
He doesn’t say I love you much, not to anyone. It’s a thing that means something, and he feels nothing meaningful but this space all around him, these roads that connect or separate or just mark out the vast emptiness between two points. In a city known for the blues, he rents an apartment above a bakery and wakes every day to the smell of fresh bread and cinnamon rolls and her name on his lips. He says it out loud in that halfway place between sleep and clarity because he smells something like her, something that makes her his for one moment each morning. He thinks, I miss you, over and over, and it’s almost shocking that he still feels it, still feels anything at all, so clearly and so defiantly after so long and in the face of such distance. He always shocks himself when he thinks of her, when he touches her dot on his atlas and realizes, I could be there so quickly.
He makes a home in this empty space in this bluesy town above the bakery, and he exorcises spirits from old houses that creak underfoot and have small yards with giant mossy trees and graves grown over beneath them. He kills mean things and nasty things and ugly things that have one eye and smell like burnt rubber. And sometimes every part of him is there, but oftentimes one small part of him is wherever she is, and he is saving those words for a day when he can say them to her and she can understand what it is that he is saying. What he is saying is no matter what. What he is saying is forever. What he is saying is this is not going to end just because there are distances between us, years and miles and people and things that can’t be forgotten or unsaid.
Every year on her birthday, he writes her a long letter about everything he can think of. He signs it Yours, and he doesn’t send it because he doesn’t want to make things complicated for her. He sends her cards instead, short and sweet, with a picture of a cat or a cartoon lady with crazy hair making a joke about shopping. He’s not even sure what she likes anymore, what she would find funny or interesting or clever. He goes years without seeing her, and when his cards find her across the distance, he thinks of all the things he didn’t write in them. Sometimes he gets a Christmas card with a photo of her family in it, but he doesn’t know if it’s specifically for him or if he is just one name on her Christmas card list. Sometimes, randomly, he will get a long letter from her, as though she is writing to him everything she can think of, but when he writes her back after this, his letters are returned unopened. She writes on the back that she loves her husband. She writes that she is too old to be confused about who she is or where she belongs. She writes that she is not the same girl that she used to be. But she writes him again and again.
This thing they have can’t be shut off like some kind of machine. It doesn’t stop if you put it away while you live your other life but secretly pull it out every few months to hold it again. If you can bury it and walk away then it will eventually shrink underground, but if you keep it close by it will wander into your room at night and slip naked into your bed. He knows this and she knows this, but neither one of them buries it. They keep it in boxes at the back of their closets like ancient loveletters that are too beautiful to throw away, even if you hardly ever read them. What this means is that Angel will always be traveling toward her, and Buffy will always be wanting him to come. Through miles and fights and knuckles and spirits, and every time the world almost ends, they will each be loving the other one in the part of the heart where you do things in secret, alone. The distances don’t matter. This can be done anywhere in the world.
One day when Buffy is an old woman, Angel imagines that she will call for him and he will close the distance between them as simply as shutting a book about loneliness. They will touch each other the way lovers touch in the morning. They will dance to an old song. She will understand that what he has been saying all of these years is this: if we move the things that are in the way, we will always be able to reach each other. Like cities on a map, we are connected in more ways than can ever be drawn with lines. Everywhere we have been, we have been separately, but where I go from here, I will not go without you. We will be able to point to some place on a map and say, We are here.
*
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2011-11-27 09:52 am (UTC)A question for you; are you familiar with the song 'Set Fire to the Third Bar' by Snow Patrol and Martha Wainright? It is one of my imagined odes to B/A and your fic reminds me of it so wonderfully.
"I find a map and draw a straight line
Over rivers, farms and state lines
The distance from A to where you'd B
Is only fingerlenghts that I see"
I wish that Buffy wasn't so careless with his heart but I fully believe that this could happen. The way Angel continues to mold his life around her is heartbreaking, especially living over a bakery because it smells like her. And your last paragraphy was beautiful.
:)
no subject
Date: 2011-11-27 05:26 pm (UTC)anyway, thank you! i'm glad you liked the last paragraph. i always find it difficult to write about emotions without descending into clicheville, which is why i normally stick with much plottier stories, but i didn't have time for that with this one, so i've been a little nervous about it. but now i feel reassured. :D
no subject
Date: 2011-11-28 07:06 pm (UTC)Well you definitely did a fantastic job with this piece. I know writing emotions is a minefield for cliches but I can't say I have found that with your stuff. (I read Friday a little while ago and, while it was of course very plotty, I thought your use and description of emotions was beautiful. Especially the "favourite part" scene. I absolutely adored that.)
no subject
Date: 2011-11-28 07:38 pm (UTC)mehim most of the time. at least, that's how i see it.dude, you are irish? if that is the case, please never read 5 little deaths for liam o'hallaran because i totally mangled the accent. *cringes*
should we friend each other?
no subject
Date: 2011-11-28 09:45 pm (UTC)Ahem...I seem to have lost the run of myself *blush*
While we are on the topic of relating to Angel because we are as emotionally stunted and awkward as him, I think that's why I loved the fic so much, it seemed "right", like when he and Spike finally got together it was the first time Angel had been living honestly for years.
And yup, Irish born and bred :)
I would only be delighted to friend you :)
no subject
Date: 2011-11-28 10:02 pm (UTC)i am super glad you liked friday. that makes me really happy. i am terrible about starting things and not finishing them because they get so big i feel like it's out of my control, so my other epic angel-and-spike-fall-in-love story is still a WIP, even though i have written a couple of more chapters on it that i haven't posted yet. but i just signed up for
yay, friends! :D
no subject
Date: 2011-11-28 10:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-27 12:16 pm (UTC)*Sob*
Well done on dipping your toe into the B/A waters! :~))
Jo
no subject
Date: 2011-11-28 03:49 am (UTC)this Buffy isn't really worth the wait
i completely agree with this. but is it bad that i wrote about her exactly the way i interpret her from canon? i really think this is how she would be. i guess it's pretty clear she's not one of my favorite characters, ha. :)
no subject
Date: 2011-11-27 12:32 pm (UTC)What else is there to say?
Gabrielle
no subject
Date: 2011-11-28 03:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-28 03:53 am (UTC)Gabrielle
no subject
Date: 2011-11-28 02:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-28 04:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-28 04:05 am (UTC)Just... so amazing.
Fav line: What he is saying is this is not going to end just because there are distances between us, years and miles and people and things that can’t be forgotten or unsaid.
*happy sigh*
Thank you!
no subject
Date: 2011-11-28 07:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-28 04:55 am (UTC)I feel for Angel, to love someone that no longer loves you. But he is what he is. She is the reason he became what he is, a champion. He will never give up on her, and it was heartbreaking to see that she no longer wanted him in her life, even as far as letters went. That fell away all too soon.
I think Angel deserves better, but he would be the first to argue that he doesn't. He doesn't deserve happiness, for all the evil that he has done.
Thanks for a great read.
Ares
no subject
Date: 2011-11-28 07:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-11-28 09:35 pm (UTC)I'd like to think that Buffy wouldn't really behave this way, afraid of life or the risk, but life shapes us and changes us, and the later season writers weren't often kind to canon Buffy, and so maybe she could...
It would be so hard to pick a fav line, but the one leni quoted I thought was just amazing,and stayed with me even after the story was over.
thanks.
no subject
Date: 2011-12-01 03:54 am (UTC)i really appreciate the feedback. :)
no subject
Date: 2011-12-01 02:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-12-15 05:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-12-03 04:20 pm (UTC)Well done.
no subject
Date: 2011-12-15 05:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-12-15 05:41 pm (UTC)First of all, thank you so much for stretching your boundaries and writing a pairing you ordinarily don't. This year's IWRY marathon was better for it. Also, on a more trivial note, thank you for using your participation banner; I haven't seen enough of those around plus I kinda lost mine so I got to save yours, phew!
Okay, the actual story: no dialogue! That's like reading a book without any pictures! And you pulled it off. The whole piece kind of reads like it's set nowhere and in no place in time, like it's the back of the box that contains Angel's life.
Your use of metaphor and simile is beautiful. My favorite was the second to last paragraph, the option of burying their love rather than hanging onto it like they do. I think that's totally true for them: they can't help loving each other, but it's also a choice they make, knowing that they could be rid of each other but not wanting to let it happen.
If the Buffy of canon really has become the person we see here, I hope it's because the years of pressure and grief have done a job on her, and not because she was like this from the beginning. Who knows, though? And if she was, I still love Angel just as much for loving her in spite of it. THEY'RE SO DOOMED, I LOVE HOW DOOMED THEY ARE.
In summary! That was fantastic and so much yay.
no subject
Date: 2011-12-15 06:26 pm (UTC)i really do think this is a believable direction for canon!buffy. i can't imagine that there's a scenario where she and angel end up together happily (though i've read it before... i always consider it AU). i think she would either completely get over him (except in that sentimental way you never really get over your first love) and move on, or she would do like she does in canon and be all, "i want to be the slayer AND have a normal life, but woe is me, that's not very realistic, so i will just deny myself the things that i really want because it is my duty, but i will feel sorry for myself the whole time." which is, i think, how a real person would act in buffy's situation, but it still annoyed the crap out of me while i was watching the series. that's why i almost never write buffy into my fics.
ANYway! thank you for the feedback and for calling me cool. twice! :) i appreciate your hosting the marathon this year. it was a lot of fun. it actually made me sign up for a spangel one in january.
no subject
Date: 2011-12-15 06:34 pm (UTC)When I write happily-ever-after Buffy and Angel, I usually give him the Shanshu treatment and/or make use of the post-Chosen Slayers to get Buffy to retire. I sympathize with her wanting a normal life much more than her wanting to be the Slayer, but her refusal to let anyone else take the reins regarding anything ever is definitely part of her character and it's tough to get around that.
I actually did comparatively little regarding the marathon this year; most of the credit goes to
no subject
Date: 2012-03-21 04:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-01 01:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-03 09:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-05 12:02 am (UTC)I love that look at them.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-05 05:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-14 11:54 am (UTC)I'm not bangel, but I do love Buffy and Angel and I think that this fic is really a gift for the fans. You describe Angel's emotions with care and tenderness. I believe the true core of B/A relationship is this pure love that not fades away.
no subject
Date: 2012-02-15 04:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-02-15 10:17 am (UTC)And I love Angel! I'm going to read other fanfics in this lj, I hope it's fine for you!