Well, quite a lot of fuss. If I didn't know better, I'd think we were dangerous.

Mal ,'Bushwhacked'


Buffista Fic: It Could Be Plot Bunnies  

Where the Buffistas let their fanfic creative juices flow. May contain erotica.


deborah grabien - Feb 27, 2003 10:51:53 pm PST #1873 of 10001
It really doesn't matter. It's just an opinion. Don't worry about it. Not worth the hassle.

deader than dead, the topic today. However, here's a bit of understated you know what:

  • * *

"Tell me how and when you learned how to speak French."

I opened my eyes to a sky full of wheeling birds and moving cloud. The breeze, just short of actual wind on this early April day, had a voice: rest, it seemed to say, spring is actually here and you're another year older and another year wiser and another year stronger.

"Amanda? Are you sleeping? Because, do wake up, if you're sleeping."

I turned my head lazily, and regarded Rupert. We were, incongruously, in a punt on the River Cherwell, eddying and occasionally being held in place by Rupert's inexpert handling of the pole. By rights, we should have been very much elsewhere. It was too early in the season for punting, we were too young at fifteen and sixteen, respectively, to hire a punt, and in fact, we had been sent off to the Bodleian, to research a demon with a name full of rending consonants in it. Rupert had been given his father's membership card; we had gone to the Bodleian's Divinity rooms, looked vaguely around, decided that no mention of the demon was to be found, and gone off to climb Carfax Tower instead. After standing in the speaking wind with Oxfordshire spread out below us, we had clambered back down.

"What shall we do now?" I asked idly. I was enjoying my sense of stolen freedom from schoolwork and Slayer training, and I was certainly in no hurry to return to the confines of the Carolan, or Richard Giles' fish-eye.

"Would you like to go out on the river?" Rupert made the suggestion in a voice too innocent to credit. "I've, well, I've brought some sandwiches, and a flask of lemonade; it's in the carrybag at the front of my bicycle. We could rent a punt for a few hours, pretend to be undergraduates."

We'd done precisely that. Richard Giles' card might well have been some sort of passport, opening every forbidden door in Oxford. Rupert showed the card and was given punt and pole without any reference made to the fact that we were both obviously well below the age requirement. I hid any dubiousness I felt about whether his inexperience with the pole might leave us stranded midstream, took some comfort in the paddles at the bottom of the punt, and pulled out a cheese and pickle sandwich and an apple. I also hoped the river wouldn't be too crowded; everyone in this university town seemed to know who we were, and there were any number of them I was sure would be delighted to report to my Watcher that his young ward and his son had played truant, or been seen where they'd no earthly business being.

In fact, the Cherwell was empty. Either everyone had chosen the Isis, or else the weather on this mid-week day was even more unsuited to punting than I'd realised. We bumped about on the water, laughing as sudden strong gusts of wind snatched away our serviettes and carried them to the boughs of trees on the lee shore, eating our sandwiches, talking about weapons training and the long-dead demon with the impossible name and my precious, newly-purchased copy of "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band". Eventually, conversation grew desultory, then downright languid. I slept.

But here was Rupert, asking me the question his father never had. I didn't know if Richard Giles didn't care, or took it for granted. It was possible that his mistrust of me, apparent to even the dullest eye, would keep him from believing any answer I might have given. That was unfair; I would have told him only the truth, had he asked. But he never had.

"My father taught me French. From the time I was born."

Rupert had lay down beside me. We weren't moving; the wind had stilled, and so had the current. Everything suddenly seemed very still, very quiet, as if there was a maelstrom just beyond the quiet facade of willows and meadows and the dark green spine of water upon which we lay, a maelstrom invisible because we were in the eye of it.

"He wasn't with you, was he?" Rupert's voice was quiet; he, too, had sensed something, a moment perhaps, awaiting its time to happen. "Not living with you, and your mother, in London?"

"No." I let my eyes rest on Rupert's profile. He'd taken the glasses off and I saw how clean the lines of his face were, how sharply defined, how beautifully limned. Something thickened in me, a sudden tension, a coagulation in my belly, new to me. "But he was there. We spoke in dreams, every night. He taught me - he showed me what my power was. He taught me French, he taught me how to cast in French."

"He was a sorcerer." Rupert's voice had an odd tinge to it. It took a moment before I identified it as envy. "A loving sorcerer. Not anything like mine, then."

"A sorcerer, yes. Nothing like Richard." I turned my head and touched his lips with my hand, a light, consolatory touch. "I'm so sorry."

The kiss was inevitable; tentative at first, but not shy. Urgency came next, hands on each other, one hand moving down a breast, my mouth against his, following what seemed to me to be a logical path, down to his navel, his groin, both of us finding zippers, tongues touching first light, then violent, a coupling, a mating, coming together and the punt rocking wildly, spinning and then stopping as two healthy young animals came together.

When it was done, he rolled sideways and sat up, zipping his trousers. He looked stunned, pleased, and very triumphant. It was, in fact, everything I felt. I lay in the punt, my body bruised and laughing.

"Oh dear," he remarked, and sounded hilarious, a wizened old teenaged man who'd just had his first woman, "we've lost the pole. What are you laughing at?"


Rebecca Lizard - Feb 27, 2003 10:56:49 pm PST #1874 of 10001
You sip / say it's your crazy / straw say it's you're crazy / as you bicycle your soul / with beauty in your basket

Oh!

t too charmed for words


deborah grabien - Feb 27, 2003 11:03:13 pm PST #1875 of 10001
It really doesn't matter. It's just an opinion. Don't worry about it. Not worth the hassle.

Well, you can't say I didn't warn you that I don't do porn properly.

Still, they're teenagers. I suppose major porn would be totally inappropriate.


deborah grabien - Feb 27, 2003 11:48:39 pm PST #1876 of 10001
It really doesn't matter. It's just an opinion. Don't worry about it. Not worth the hassle.

finishing off that bit.

"Oh dear," he remarked, and sounded hilarious, a wizened old teenaged man who'd just had his first woman, "we've lost the pole. What are you laughing at?"

"We haven't lost the pole - I know exactly where's it's gone." I watched a pale colour mantle his cheekbones. He turned quickly, a paddle in one hand, setting the punt back upstream; we could see the pole, sticking out of the Cherwell like one of those old druid's stones one sees in places like Cornwall. "Rupert..."

"I'm not saying I'm sorry." His voice was muffled a bit, but I could still hear how fierce he sounded. "It wouldn't be true. I'm not at all sorry. It was absolutely splendid and I love you more than my own life and I'd do it again in one half a heartbeat."

"Well, I'm not doing it again in half a heartbeat, because I'm rather sore, actually. But I'm pleased you're not sorry because I'd hit you if you said you were. And I'm not sorry either. You might try asking me again in a few days time." He turned around and looked at me, standing precariously in the rocking punt with one hand on the pole, waiting in silence for what else I might choose to say.

"I've loved you since the first day I walked into the Carolan, and you took off your glasses, and didn't hide your eyes."

"Have you? Truly?"

"Truly. Even more than I've come to hate your father. Why do you think I stayed?"

  • * *


erikaj - Feb 28, 2003 10:12:04 am PST #1877 of 10001
Always Anti-fascist!

Good stuff, Deborah.


Atropa - Feb 28, 2003 2:58:37 pm PST #1878 of 10001
The artist formerly associated with cupcakes.

Oooh, lovely.


deborah grabien - Feb 28, 2003 3:04:01 pm PST #1879 of 10001
It really doesn't matter. It's just an opinion. Don't worry about it. Not worth the hassle.

Believable reaction from the 16 year old Rupert?


erikaj - Feb 28, 2003 3:07:18 pm PST #1880 of 10001
Always Anti-fascist!

I thought so. It didn't leap out as unbelievable or anything, anyway.


deborah grabien - Feb 28, 2003 3:08:51 pm PST #1881 of 10001
It really doesn't matter. It's just an opinion. Don't worry about it. Not worth the hassle.

Good. That's a relief; I didn't know if I was the only one out there who imagined the young Rupert as a bit of a finicky old man, who got younger and younger in spirit the older he got in years.


Beverly - Feb 28, 2003 4:34:58 pm PST #1882 of 10001
Days shrink and grow cold, sunlight through leaves is my song. Winter is long.

There are those finicky old man types who grow younger. Stands to reason Rupert would be one of them. Lovely stuff.