the beginning of a bit of Wire fic:
Corwood gave me the idea, actually. What season five might look like to Alma.
Part one

At first, Alma couldn’t believe her good luck when Templeton told her he liked her copy, although it was a forgettable story buried on Metro.She felt foolish about doing it, but she’d been Googling his work more than a few nights. The man had some chops, she thought,”I liked your story about the twins serving in Iraq, too. Very moving. Put me right in the middle of it.”

She was surprised to see the tough reporter look embarrassed, like he was scuffing his toes in the dirt. “Aw, I’m just a humble instrument. You know? I’m just honored to have the opportunity to bear witness, right?”

“Exactly. My parents don’t understand why I took this job, instead of PR where I could make money and go to lunch. But, you know…” she shrugged, as if the concept was too big to put words on.
‘Nobody ever changed the world selling running shoes.”

“Exactly. You have such a great perspective, Scott.” A snort issued from Roger Twigg’s little cave. “That’s one way of looking at it, kid.”

Alma was kind of afraid of Roger Twigg. Sure, he was a legend and all that, but he was dried out and cynical and fried from the crazy hours, and she hated it when he called her “kid”. And she was afraid that if she got to know him she’d wake up thinking ten minutes had passed and it really had been twenty years and she’d be every bit as dried-up and strung-out as Twigg himself. Ew. He had no idea how to talk to women either. He was a relic.Not like Scott. He listened, even if she did sometimes catch him yearning over her more than she felt comfortable with. ‘Be careful, girl,” Alma’s friend Carmen said to her. “Maybe he’s got Jennifer Lopez issues.”

“It’s not like that. He respects me.”

But she had to admit it was a bit like that.

In Apocalypse, I mentioned that a backup of old hard drives allowed me to find a forgotten script. While trying to track down more info about it, I found something.

An uncompleted W/T fanfic I started back in WC's BitchFic thread.

Let's just say I am closing a lot of my unresolved open loops lately, and know that I know it is out there, I need to finish it, slowly or fast, it simply needs to get done.

But I can't even find the BitchFic archive. So I dug around on my backup, and found it. It had no name, hopefully in the process of finishing it, it will find its name.

It's been five years since I touched it, and I need to reacquiant myself to the versions of the characters I had in my head back then, so I am going to start reposting it, editing it as I go along until we hit the new stuff.

I hope everyone will forgive my indulgence...

this thread is very indulgent. feel free.

Looking at some of the episode guides, I have reminded myself when I set this. This was set in the window between Older and Far Away and As You Were in season six. Here are some story points to remind one of that time. Willow and Tara are broken up but the coldness of Tara towards Willow has thawed because of the events of Buffy's birthday party when everyone was sealed into the Summer home. Willow is going cold turkey from her magic addiction. Spike and Buffy are in the middle of their destructive sexual relationship, with the only one aware of it is Tara ( Dead Things final scene.) The Summer's finances are a constant concern with the episode DoubleMeat Palace are only a few episodes in the past.

As I reread this a few times, I realize that this story was an attempt on my part to 'get' lesbian relationships. Not in the guy way, the way it is presented in male-oriented porn, but how it really is. Plus, at this time this was a damaged relationship and the power dynamics of the characters are reversed, making it interesting to extrapolate from. Finally, I think my fondness for the Willow/Tara characters and relationship makes them easiest for me to 'get it,' to so speak, so that if I am ever going to 'get' lesbian relationships, it will start through their prism.

And that is way too much thinking and thought experiments to start off a story, but as I am submerging myself back into it, I find myself having to directly examine what the hell is going on in order to 'crash' back into it.

This was written in alternating POVs, so I will probably post one POV a day for the time being...

Willow examined herself in the window of the consignment store next to the Magic Shop. There were vintage clothes on display, presumbly the nicest there, but thankfully she knew better to go in, Buffy had repeated the annual 'fashion lesson' after she brought down Willow just inches from going out the house's door a few mornings ago. And with that memory it gave her mind the excuse it needed to wander off her self-examination and her precautions to the thought that perhaps Buffy could solve her money problems by merely reselling vintage clothes of some of the more well-dressed vamps she dusted but then there was the whole dusting problem and having to rip the clothes off the vamp before they went all poofy which Willow was sure that Buffy after Angel had no desire to see any vampire in the buff (buff! Buffy! feel the funny!) but a charm of cloth constancy would save the clothes except for the hole in the chest but that could be fixed with a phased stake resonating back onlyinto a heart and then Buffy wouldn’t have to work all the time and they could spend more time together because all Willow had was time and time and thinking of cleverer ways to pass the time…

Oh hey, charms and ghost stakes are magic, and MAGIC IS BAD!

No thinking about charms, spells, curses, incantations, the musty old books (oh, how she missed the smell of the musty old books, only allowing herself now to indulge in them when there was research, rather than skipping about in them, reading and learning and experimenting and frolicking and casting…

What was that about Magic again, you know, it being BAD?

Focus past that.

And not by Focusing on the ambient energies that crackled under Sunnydale's surface.

Information and thoughts had always tumbled through Willow. At first it had been programs and commands and the languages of logic but then of leylines and symbolic runes and the languages of power. The obsessive thoughts of magic was one of the signs that she was nervous. Well, being more obsessive that usual, thinking of it constantly rather than every other minute...

Is that what Xander meant about how he (and all boys) thought?

The mental slap she gave herself derailed herself back.

She hated doing this.

She needed to do this.

She felt the Higgs bosons jumping just within her skin, lightening her one second, intensifying the next. She needed to finish her physics homework.

The loop of thoughts, recriminations and desires, especially desires, needed to be stilled.

She looked in the window again, seeing her reflection

Seeing the hat on the other side of the window.

It looked nice, and retro, and her hair would just peek out from underneath, nice and baggy and shapeless and could conceal…

Well, this not obsessing and not getting distracted was not going very well, now was it?

She hadn’t thought it would be so easy to shoplift from the Magic Shop. But after everyone sat down to talk with Dawn about her shoplifting after Buffy's birthday, it turned out it was so easy. Anya ranted about it, planning to shackle an Eeyer by the doorway to stop it from happening ever again but Xander persuaded Anya that the 4 foot incisors Eeyers spat out would shorten customers' shopping time leading to smaller purchases.

But it was still so easy.

Willow wondered how she never even thought about it. All that temptation in small and affordable and thus very concealable packages.

But now that she knew, it was all that she thought about, preying on her mind, heckling with reminders on just how easy it would be fix things, with just a pinch of that, sniff of this, and a spoonful of sugar to wash it all down.

So, here she was, outside the shop, double-checking her clothes to make sure that there weren’t places to hide even a single vial. Just black leggings with no pockets, open sandals that hide nothing and a flowery loose shirt that couldn’t hold anything if it tried. A school book to be carried, not stowed away in a cavernous bag. A transparent plastic pencil bag to carry her highlighters, green and (continued...)

( continues...) purple and yellow and the organizational chart she hadn't updated since fourth grade and the great red highlighter debacle, her keys and cloth wallet. She even went without a bra today, not that she really needed it, just so her décolletage wouldn’t attract anything. Not that it ever attracted any attention.

She missed Tara.

It was only for the next few days. She would go back to her old, normal clothes. The ones from when she was not loved, unattractive and unnoticeable. Once the thought wasn’t so fresh, once she got it back under control, everything would be fine.

Control made everything fine. Really.

With that reassuring thought, she turned and walked towards the shop.

And that damn bell rang as she entered, warning everyone she was entering.

She so was going to fix that one day.

Hope you get a laugh out of this bit of silliness. Buffy/DirtyJobs Edited to fix linkage. I know there are some fans here, because I think I heard about it on this board.

Hee.

erikaj - you know on Moonlight they've got a character whose job is to clean up after vampire kills. (IJS)

Really? "Good God, woman!" (/Rowe)

Tara struggled to raise the axe again to block, wishing she knew any other way. Her arms trembled from all the blows absorbed and the few delivered. She had been doing this for an hour, barely keeping up. She had prepared, wearing her rarely-worn exercise clothes, a sport bra top and biker shorts, but her entire body was still soaked in sweat and yet she still felt flush. Her hair had been tied back beforehand but still wisps freed themselves and stuck to her forehead, distracting always when she needed to pay close attention to avoid losing an arm from the great sweeps of the sword. She needed to do this, she couldn’t let Buffy down. As she looked her opponent in the eye, she hoped she wouldn’t have to.

“Did I mention that Giles called?” Buffy remarked as the sword she wielded casually swept back towards Tara.

“No. What did he say?” Tara barely managed to swing the axe back around, blocking the sword badly with her axe’s shaft. It barely had any force to it, but Buffy dutifully allowed herself to be blocked and moved her sword back to the next attack in the drill pattern.

“He spent the first five minutes apologizing for not reaching me on my birthday until I told him that the house had been magically sealed off. Then I spent the next five minutes convincing him that I was positive that…” Buffy’s voice wandered off, as if deciding how often she could say the name.

“...a demon acquaintance of Anya was responsible.” Tara could see she had said the right thing by the thankful smile that stole across Buffy’s face. She wondered how she and everyone had missed how rare an event that had become. Everyone had been traveling in their own worlds so much that they had lost sight, even Tara herself.

She wondered if she should make a point of getting involved with Anya and Xander’s wedding plans. They seemed to have it well in hand, but that is what everyone still thought about Buffy.

Her distracted musings almost got her cut by another gentle sweep of Buffy’s sword, but her body responded to the pattern that Buffy had already drilled into her over the past hour and managed to block it. She felt a small thrill at successfully defending herself, a rarely felt sensation.

This had been Buffy’s idea, actually. Every since Buffy confessed her... relationship with Spike, Tara had been spending time with Buffy, separate from Dawn. But Tara wasn’t comfortable about stopping by the house and Buffy was uncomfortable about asking her to. She sensed that her presence at Buffy’s birthday party was the result of careful tiptoeing, whispered conversations and over-enthusiastic agreements.

So Buffy when had carefully and casually suggested working out with Tara, she gratefully took the excuse to meet Buffy regularly without having to worry about the awkwardness of stopping by the house.

Importantly, the only other alternative they discussed involved shopping. Tara knew that her dress style and fashion sense so outraged Buffy on a spiritual level that a trip to the mall would ultimately be far more terrifying for her than merely sparring in the Magic Shop’s workout room.