Sequel to Loves Lost
Title: Love Awakened (3/8/06)
Author: Slaymesoftly
Rating: NC17, eventually
Word count: 24,580
Season: AU season II, no spoilers
Disclaimer and distribution: The characters and Sunnydale belong to Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy and large corporations that have so much more money than I do. This particular story about those characters belongs to me and may be archived if you already have permission to take my stuff. If not, just ask, I’ll probably say “yes.”
Many thanks to the overworking Always_jbj who took the time to read through this and try to save me from possible embarrassment.
AN: This is a sequel to another short story in which Angelus and Dru are both dusted, and Spike is still crippled. Buffy had been badly abused by the vampires at the behest of Ethan Rayne, who has been defeated by Giles and taken away to be punished. It picks up as Buffy arrives home after her ordeal. It will probably be part of a series of three or four stories, each of which edges closer to Spuffiness, but perhaps keeping the harsher tone of the original story.
Love Awakened
. Chapter One:
It took a great many soothing assurances that she was fine and nods of agreement from Willow and Xander to calm Joyce down enough to even listen to Buffy’s offer to explain both her lengthy absence and her current appearance. Insisting that she not call the police, Buffy offered to give Joyce a full explanation if she would just allow her to get cleaned up and dressed first. Buffy left her mother with a very nervous Willow and Xander and ran upstairs to step gratefully into a hot shower.
As she washed the blood, ash and smoke out of her hair and off her body, she had time to go back over the events of the past twenty-four hours and the full impact of what had happened began to sink in. Before long she had slid down the wall and was huddled under the water sobbing uncontrollably for all that she had lost. For the first time since she had been told it was prophesied that the master would kill her, she felt the full weight of her calling.
( No one told me I would be raped by a man – vampire- I thought was in love with me. No one told me that I would have to kill someone I thought was the love of my life. And no one told me that one of the vampires I’m supposed to fear the most would turn out to be the only sympathetic creature in the room.)
When her mother began to knock on the door, her voice a mixture of anger and fear, the Slayer left completely and only a sobbing teenager was left to try to respond to Joyce’s increasingly frantic questions. Finally throwing off the last vestiges of respect for her daughter’s privacy, she threw open the door and plunged into the water to pull the sobbing girl out into her lap.
There were no words exchanged as Buffy sobbed out her heartbreak and her delayed reaction to her treatment at the hands of the sorcerer and his demon accomplices; Joyce just held her tightly and rocked her back and forth as she had done when her little girl was much younger. While Xander remained downstairs, his hormonal urges to peek at Buffy in the shower losing out to his fear of reprisal from Willow and/or Joyce, the redhead ventured cautiously upstairs and stood in the doorway wringing her hands.
Joyce looked up over her sobbing daughter’s head and asked softly, “Can you tell me what happened to her, Willow?”
The novice witch shook her head slowly. “Only in a vague, it-was-really-bad-but-I-wasn’t-there-and-she-didn’t-tell-me kind of way,” she said regretfully.
“Where were you, then? And how did you know how to find her and bring her home?”
“Well, Giles actually—“
“Giles? Mr. Giles, the school librarian? Did he do this?” Joyce’s voice went up and her eyes began to express a sincere desire to remove the librarian’s important body parts.
“Wha-? Oh! No! No, no. Not Giles. Somebody he kn..knows. He knew where to find them, but I guess we didn’t get there in time to keep Angelus from---“
“Angelus? And keep him from what? Is this person under arrest now?”
“Um…no, I think Buffy probably kil….” Willow’s voice trailed off as she realized the hole she was digging. She put on her perkiest face and said quickly, “You know what? The only people who can really explain this are Buffy and Giles. I think Xander and I will go look for Giles right now. That’s a good idea, isn’t it? We’ll find Giles and he’ll explain everything!”
Before Joyce could argue with her, she whirled and ran back down the stairs, grabbing Xander by the sleeve as she bolted out the door.
Almost growling in frustration, Joyce abandoned the hope of learning more from Willow in favor of continuing to comfort her obviously distraught daughter. As she held Buffy and rocked her gently, her eyes ran over the girl’s naked body and she shuddered at the partially closed wounds that she could see everywhere, including, it seemed, places she would have hoped her young daughter had never exposed to the outside world. The scarring on Buffy’s throat from what had obviously been a painful gash there caused an unpleasant flashback to their last year in Los Angeles and Buffy’s attempt to make her parents believe in vampires.
With a shudder, Joyce suppressed fleeting thought that perhaps Buffy had been telling the truth; instead, she chose to worry that the “cult” into which she and Hank had thought their daughter had fallen had followed them to Sunnydale. Buffy’s nakedness, and the heartbroken sobbing that was just beginning to trail off to ragged gulps for air, led to only one conclusion as to what else might have happened to her teenaged child, and Joyce unconsciously tightened her grip as she silently vowed retribution on whomever had taken her daughter’s innocence.
As Buffy gradually cried herself out, she realized with some embarrassment that she was sitting, wet and naked, on her mother’s lap curled up like a two-year-old. With a rueful sniffle, she sat up and looked at her mother apologetically.
“I’m sorry, Mom. I didn’t know I was going to lose it like that.”
“It’s all right, honey. That’s what mothers are for.” Joyce smiled tentatively. “Are you ready to tell me what happened and who I have to kill?”
Buffy’s quiet, “Already done,” did nothing to reassure her mother about the events of the past twenty-four hours, but she smothered her urge to scream, “What do you mean?” nodding and standing up instead.
“I’ll give you a few minutes to get cleaned up and dressed,” she said quietly, “then I expect you to meet me downstairs and tell me exactly what happened and where you have been. Is that clear?”
Buffy nodded silently and bent over the sink to wash her tear-stained face. A full day of nudity in front of strangers had left her with no inhibitions about standing naked in front of her mother. Knowing it was too late to hide her cuts and bruises, she put her efforts toward organizing her thoughts as she wondered how much to explain.
Joyce picked up the abandoned tee shirt, recoiling slightly at the dried blood and smell of smoke. As she went to leave the room with it in her hand, Buffy’s voice stopped her.
‘Where are you taking that?” There was just the trace of panic in her tone.
“I’m going to throw it away,” Joyce said calmly. “It’s filthy and disgusting and it isn’t yours, so it’s going into the trash right now.”
“No,” Buffy said softly, pulling it out of her mother’s hands. “I’ll wash it. Spi- he might need it,” she added quietly.
Her mother’s face darkened at the reminder that it was clearly a man’s tee shirt, but she bit her tongue and forced herself to leave the bathroom. After a quick stop in her own bedroom to change out of her now-wet clothes, she went to the kitchen and began to make hot chocolate for them to drink during what was sure to be an unpleasant conversation.
The Slayer looked into the mirror and saw the scrubbed face of a teen-age girl looking back at her; in that face were the eyes of someone much older and she shuddered once for the loss of her innocence and youth before squaring her shoulders and turning her back on her reflection. Leaving the bathroom, she quickly pulled some sweats from a drawer in her room, covering all traces of the torture inflicted on her body except for the still tender wound on her neck.
By the time she got downstairs, Joyce was waiting for her with a steaming cup of hot chocolate and a grilled cheese sandwich which Buffy grabbed gratefully, her rumbling stomach reminding her that all she’d had to eat in over a day were Spike’s stale cookies. She tore into the sandwich, shrugging apologetically at her mother for her inability to speak immediately. As soon as her stomach was more content, Buffy slowed her eating and took a sip of her drink before looking at her mother with determination.
“How much do you want to know?” she surprised the woman by asking.
“Wha-? Everything,” Joyce stated firmly. “I want to know everything. How could you think otherwise?”
“You didn’t the last time,” Buffy said pointedly, dashing any hopes Joyce might have had that this current problem had nothing to do with Buffy’s activities in Los Angeles.
“Are we going to be talking about vampires again?” she asked in a tightly controlled voice. “Because you know I don’t—“
Buffy interrupted her mother by tipping her head to the side and displaying the still-open wound on her neck.
“This was not done by a stray dog,” she said quietly. “Or by a ‘vampire wannabe’, Mom. It was done by a vampire. A very old, very dangerous vampire who was trying to drain me.”
“Buffy…” Joyce’s voice held the beginning traces of anger. “We went through this before. There are no such things as vampires.”
“Mom, there are vampires; and demons and werewolves and witches and magic. I know it’s hard to believe, and I’m sorry you had to find out about it this way, but if you can’t accept the truth of that statement, then we can’t have a conversation about this.”
Joyce struggled with her urge to run to the phone and call the hospital for a referral to the nearest psychiatrist. They had actually done that the first time Buffy tried to tell them about vampires and something about her being “called” to “slay” the creatures, but after a few days in the hospital Buffy had recanted and offered an explanation that struck everyone as reasonable, thus convincing them to release her. The burning down of the school gymnasium could not be directly attributed to Buffy as no one had actually seen her set the fire and it could have been accidental. Joyce and Hank had kept their own knowledge of Buffy’s admission of guilt to themselves and she had been allowed to take Buffy and move to Sunnydale with no interference from the authorities.
Now, here they were, safely settled in this lovely, small city and here was her daughter, covered in strange-looking wounds and claiming, once again, that there were vampires in the world. With an exaggerated sigh, Joyce met Buffy’s eerily calm and certain eyes, asking, “And I suppose you are going to tell me once again that you are the one chosen to fight these creatures?”
Buffy cocked her head and stared back at her clearly disbelieving mother. “Mom, how long have I been gone?” she asked, seemingly off-topic.
“Well over twenty-four hours, I guess. Why?”
“Look at my wounds,” Buffy said shortly, pulling up her sweatshirt to show the already healed scars and deeper, but already closed slashes and teeth marks. “How long ago do you think I got them?”
Joyce shifted uncomfortably. “Well…”
“Did I have them when you saw me last?” Buffy demanded, her gaze boring into her mother’s doubtful eyes. She could see the rapidly developing confusion on her mother’s face, before the older woman admitted slowly, “N…no, not that I noticed.”
“Think, Mom. I was wearing a skirt and a short-sleeved top. Don’t you think you might have noticed gaping wounds bleeding all over the floor?”
Joyce glared back angrily, not happy about the sarcastic edge in Buffy’s voice, but was forced to admit that all the damage had obviously been acquired since she’d last seen her daughter.
When she didn’t answer, Buffy continued in a softer tone. “Look at them, Mom. Most of them are already just scars and the others are almost healed. By tomorrow you won’t see anything but healed scars, and in another week or so, not even those. Maybe this one,” she added quietly, touching the bite on her neck, “but not the others. Does that strike you as normal healing?”
Joyce shook her head silently, an inexplicable fear gripping her heart as she recognized the truth of what Buffy was telling her. Rather than belabor that point, Buffy stood up and walked over to her much taller and heavier mother.
“Stand up please, Mom,” she said quietly.
When Joyce silently obeyed, Buffy put her hands around her mother’s waist and easily lifted her into the air over her head. She looked up into the frightened face above her and asked plaintively, “Do you believe me now?”
Without waiting for an answer, Buffy lowered the astonished woman to the floor and went back to sit down and finish her sandwich. The room was quiet except for the sound of Buffy’s chewing and the rattle of china as Joyce tried to pick up her hot chocolate with a shaking hand. When Buffy had finished eating and had swallowed the rest of her drink, she looked back at her mother’s horrified face and asked gently, “Are you ready to hear me out now?”
At Joyce’s frightened nod, Buffy relaxed back into her chair and began. “Well, you remember the weird old guy I tried to tell you about when we lived in LA……?
squawks
05/18/17 04:16 am
pj! I remember wishing one of your stories would be finished seriously about a decade ago. Amazing. I just tried an old password I used to use and amazingly got in too. Memories!
pj
03/20/17 01:20 am
10 yrs later, i finally rem my username and password. Pari, you rock. Hope you are well.
Rabbit_moon1
12/23/16 01:12 pm
I donate every month. Please donate to keep this site up!
AudryDaluz1
10/06/16 08:34 am
Great post.
Chrissel
08/31/16 03:45 pm
And anyone else who loves this site, it's worth mentioning there's a nifty little "Donate" option just below the shout box here! ;)
Chrissel
08/31/16 03:43 pm
Just wanted to take a moment to thank Pari and all the mods for maintaining such a great site!
05/18/17 04:16 am
pj! I remember wishing one of your stories would be finished seriously about a decade ago. Amazing. I just tried an old password I used to use and amazingly got in too. Memories!
pj
03/20/17 01:20 am
10 yrs later, i finally rem my username and password. Pari, you rock. Hope you are well.
Rabbit_moon1
12/23/16 01:12 pm
I donate every month. Please donate to keep this site up!
AudryDaluz1
10/06/16 08:34 am
Great post.
Chrissel
08/31/16 03:45 pm
And anyone else who loves this site, it's worth mentioning there's a nifty little "Donate" option just below the shout box here! ;)
Chrissel
08/31/16 03:43 pm
Just wanted to take a moment to thank Pari and all the mods for maintaining such a great site!