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cof_remix.Title: Love is Only Heaven Away (The "Ghost in You" Remix)
Author:
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sroniFandom: Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Angel
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: Not mine. These characters belong to Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy.
Original Story: “Absent Ghost” by
velvetwhip, though this was also influenced by All The Saints Are Dragons after I started remixing Absent Ghost.Love is Only Heaven Away
(the “Ghost in You” Remix)
You’re not happy. You want to be. You think that you could be, if only …
If only.
You’re in Brazil. Brazil is the land of fun and sun and sweat, with dancing to a pulsating beat that you can feel in your heart and your belly at the same time. But you don’t seem to have a lot of fun. You tried taking her to the beach, talking her into a little bikini, because you wanted to see her in the sunlight for once and not just the moonlight (her skin was made for moonlight, though, and you often wake up from nightmares that a bloodsucker has made that even more true than it already is), but she’s so uncomfortable in the sun and on the sand that you don’t know what to do and finally you rescue her and take her home and try to make up for your mistake with some quality time with your head between her legs. You sweat, but only when you’re chasing things that go bump in the night, or when you’ve exhausted her trying to make her scream your name. You tried dancing once or twice, but she hates to go with you and you don’t like to go alone, not when you’re dating her.
You’re not happy. You want to be. You think that you could be. But you’re not.
The thing is, you know what people say about you, have always said about you. That you’re a rich bitch, that you’re a spoiled brat, that when you want something you make sure to get it. That you have anger issues, that you don’t know how to talk to people. It’s true, to an extent. You are who you are and you’ve never changed for someone — you’ve changed because it was the right thing to do (you still get a clench in your stomach when you think about Chloe, and how she’s dead because of what you called her), because you’ve wanted, you’ve always wanted, to be better, be a better person, than you are. But you’ve never wanted to change for a particular someone before, being solid enough on who you are that it was just an alien concept.
You try. Really, you do. Of course you do. But it breaks you every morning she wakes up and there’s that flash of disappointment that it’s your face she’s seeing — which is a damn good one, if you do say so yourself — and not that of a gentle doe-eyed mousy blonde. You try to hide it, but you’re pretty sure you do about as good a job at that as she does of hiding her disappointment.
You’ve never had this issue before. In the past, when you just haven’t worked out with someone — and you’ve dated plenty of girls who were still hung up on their ex — you’ve just cut and run. This is different. You never loved those other girls, so now you keep digging in and trying to make it work. If she loved you, you could make it work. If it were a matter of enough, it would be different, but it’s not. It’s not a matter of enough because you love her enough for the both of you. You love her more than you’ve ever loved anyone. You love her more than you’ve ever loved anything. You love her more than you love the feel of a sword in your hand, more than you love running as fast and as hard as you can until your heart’s thrumping in your chest and it feels like it’s going to break free. It’s not that she doesn’t love you enough. It’s that she doesn’t love you. At least, not any more than she loves everyone else in the world, because the thing about your girlfriend is that she has an amazing capacity for love and she loves everyone so god damn much and you want to be loved a little bit more than that.
But she can’t, because she doesn’t know you. And she doesn’t seem to really want to. You’ve tried talking to her about the few things in life that you’re not secure on, and she just gives you that little smile that’s so her and strokes your cheek, and you can tell that she either wasn’t listening or doesn’t care and it makes you want to scream. You finally have someone you want to open up to, and she doesn’t care. After years of your “girlfriends” (because they always had deeper feelings for you than you did for them) trying to get you to talk to them, you’re starting to have an idea of what it was like for them.
Your relationship is dying. You know it. She knows it. The best thing you can do is break it off and go your separate ways and try to get over her (which you know you’ll never do). But you’re selfish, you know you are, and you just can’t bring yourself to be the one to do that. So you pick fights with her, hoping that she’ll be the one to end the relationship. That doesn’t work, so you come home smelling of other girls, hating yourself for doing it, but you don’t know what else to do. Those other girls, they can’t hold a candle to the one you love. She’s your everything, and when you’re with the other girls you miss the taste of magic thrumming just underneath the skin. But obvious evidence of infidelity doesn’t work, either, and she pretends to ignore the lingering scent on your skin.
You don’t understand. She’s not as invested in this relationship as you are, so why won’t she just let it die?
You follow her, trying to understand.
And that’s when you do understand.
You follow her to that little hill that most people stay away from, you watch those who appear to meet her. Some nights, it’s a dark-haired lady with haunted, sorrowful eyes. You’re not close enough to hear what’s being said, but obviously, it helps. Sometimes, it’s the boy that you’ve only heard about in the silences with her best friend, and doesn’t that just say everything? You don’t know his name, but you know who he is just the same. Every once in a while, it’s a lady with the golden Slayer’s smile and her younger sister’s eyes. But it’s never the person you know she’s waiting for. She goes to visit the dead, but the one she wants most won’t answer the call.
After a few weeks, that’s when you go back to your place and start packing up your things. She’ll never leave you, and you need to not be selfish anymore. That’s part of growing up.
You can’t help but think that you know the truth of why that one never came to your soon-to-be-ex: because, in an effort to be someone she didn’t hate, Willow became a ghost of herself.
END
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Gabrielle
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More Circle of Friends!
Poor Kennedy
You seem to have a knack for getting into Kennedy's head--I liked what you did in remixing "No More Be Grieved" last year and giving Kennedy a central position in it. I liked that you added Joyce to the cast of Willow's visitors, too--it makes me want to expand the "We Wait" mini-universe with the observing spirits perhaps finally managing to openly reach one of their charges.
Nice job. :-)
Warmest Regards,
M. Scott Eiland
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Tuesday, November 4
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I'm a bit late to this story and WOW - I realize it's no accident that it reminds me of All the Saints are Dragons but in the best way, as a companion piece or sequel as Velvetwhip said. I love it when people bother to get inside Kennedy's head because I think she's a genuinely interesting character. Very well done!
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I'm glad you liked it, and that last line was the one line I spent the entire story getting to, because I'd settled on that for an ending line pretty much as soon as I decided to write the story, so I'm glad it worked.
I think Velvetwhip is a great author, and so far, I think she and I work well together for things like this (I was lucky enough to get her prompt in the Buffy Gen-Fic last month, and this story), and I'd love to work with her in the future. I enjoyed writing this story, but she gave me an excellent foundation to work with first, and I don't think it ever would have occurred to me to write a story like this without "Absent Ghost" to spur it on.
I started off hating Kennedy - and to be honest, I still dislike canon Kennedy - but fanon Kennedy is so interesting that I can't help but dig in sometimes.
Thank you very much for commenting, and I'm glad you enjoyed the story!