dali oranges. [indesolution]

[amber]

dali oranges

fandom buffy the vampire slayer. [indesolution au]
characters andrew wells.
notes the aftermath of Compromise.


Andrew dreams of butterflies and sunshine, walking in a grove of orange trees and watching the way shadows play across his skin. The sky is an angry grey, but it’s warm; warmer than he’s felt in Babylon for a long time.

Dear Diary. The neat curve of his handwriting speaks of effort; every perfect o was a concentrated flick of Andrew’s wrist, lips pressed together in concentration, his tongue trapped between his teeth.

Maybe I’ve gone crazy.

He found the book in the little store called OK! Sunshine! that always smelled like citrus, where the shop-lady would speak to him in broken English and he to her in broken Chinese, and they’d both smile too-widely. She was always bruised, deep mermaid green bruises that slid around her neck, and Andrew never asked.

They’re telling me I was never real. They’re telling me I have to be real now.

The book feels like Giles and England in his hands; every time he picks it up he has a brief rush of homesickness. “The Watcher’s Diaries are an outdated concept,” Giles had told him, but Andrew had loved to run his fingers along the dark leather spines, each one a testament to redemption, responsibility.

I don’t know if I know how to be real.

What does he write in the book? Everything. No – not quite – Andrew was never able to separate the tedium from what was important, so devastating events are barely outlined to leave room for the emotions that filled the space between him and Warren, the soft skin in between Jonathan’s thumb and forefinger, the dead air in Andrew’s apartment that he tries to overcome with baking and cheerfulness.

I hate the internet. Sometimes it feels like everything we say there is painful just because we don’t have to watch each other’s faces fall. Sometimes it feels like everything we say there is a lie.

He’s five minutes into the shower before he manages to calm down.

He’s ten minutes in before he stops expecting Warren to join him.

I can’t eat Chinese anymore. It makes me want to hurl. Jonathan keeps calling it SzechuanGate and I keep trying to explain that it’s not any of our faults. But what I mean. What I mean is it’s my fault, because I brought them here and made them think about what they’d done and

Look, here’s the thing. It was selfish, and this, all of this, all the monstrous this, is payment for that. God forbid something I want actually make me happy.

Andrew tries to make a new friend every day. Maybe that’s who he’s playing, this time around; a flexible role, new every time there’s someone different standing opposite him. He smiles, and bakes chocolate-chip cookies with the grainy chocolate they have here and practices his bento (images of giving it to Warren and Andrew can’t help his daydreams, he’s grown enough now to know when something would be incredibly stupid but the idea of the look on his face makes warmth pool in Andrew’s stomach and that warmth is sometimes the only thing that gets him through the day.)

Maybe I should try Jonathan’s medication. Maybe having something stabilising will stop these feelings. It’s so wrong to have them after all this time, as though I couldn’t let go (and maybe I couldn’t?) and as though nothing he did matters. I have to pretend it did, because I don’t want to follow him down that path again. But I need to test my limits and I can’t do that if I’m going to keep rejecting all the anger and the darkness, over and over again. It wasn’t his fault, in the end it wasn’t his fault. We lived on a Hellmouth. There was nothing I could have done.

I’m going to bed.

He emerges from the shower and there is absolutely nothing worse than the candle-light flicker of hope that ignites in his chest as he opens the bathroom door, hair still damp, every inch of him scrubbed raw (but the need and self-hatred and rejection still cling to him like tar.) The familiar oppressive emptiness of the apartment doesn’t surprise him, not one tiny bit.

Andrew proceeds to check every inch of the apartment. He tells himself he’s looking for a shirt he wants. He knows he’s looking for hidden cameras, for bugs and other little devices.

He bought stuff. What if everything just repeats itself, goes the way it did last time? Or worse (better?) what if Warren succeeded in taking over

I can’t think like this, I can’t. That stage of my life is over

The day afterwards (as though there has been one event in his life and everything else was just build up and aftershock) he takes the book back to the shop, three quarters full, each page scrawled with fears and hopes and daydreams. “I don’t want this anymore,” he tells the shop-lady, and she just reaches up to touch the bruises that are just beginning to flower on his pale skin. He presses the heavy book into her hands, desperately, and she smiles sadly at him. “It’s for you,” he says, not quite able to meet her eyes. “Keep it.”

He never goes there again.

Sometimes I think if I just love him enough, nothing either of us has done will matter anymore. But it’s like unicorns and schnauzers. Wanting it to be more than a daydream, wanting it so hard it makes my stomach clench, that kind of desperation leads to bad things. I have to let it happen. Or not happen. He can rage and joke and bluster and cajole but I have to be real, now, like the velveteen rabbit, and just love him until he can be real too.

When Andrew reaches up to pluck the orange from the tree, it drips like a Dali clock, sliding through his fingers and no matter how hard he tries he can’t catch it all before it hits the ground.

Andrew wakes up, alone.