Earlier (The Retrospect Remix)
Remix of Earlier by Don't Make Eye Contact.
There are people who say that you wake up in the morning knowing when it's going to be the last day of your life. They're wrong, because they're alive. No fucking perspective. Death is the ultimate perspective. You know everything. You can see it all laid out, no opinions, no emotions, just there, like really clear memories. You know you couldn't have prevented it.
You spend a lot of time-- because what is time, anyway, in Heaven?-- thinking about what you would have done if you'd woken up knowing you were going to be dead before sunrise. You would have had a big bucket of extra crispy KFC. Some lemon meringue pie and a bottle of tequila. You would have found a playground and gone on the swings. The rest, you would have done pretty much the same. Saved a pretty girl from a vampire. Fucked a pretty girl.
Memories are really clear when you're dead. Clearer than photographs. Anything you think about, you can see. You just start to think about your last fuck and she's in your eyes (which aren't eyes anymore), the sweat tingling at the tips of her spiky hair, her sugar-glazed lips apart, her nipples firm like underripe strawberries. She went down on you like she was trying to get even with the orgasm you gave her. You liked fucking for revenge. It was the wildest.
Buffy was the least wild you ever had. She took off her clothes like if you saw her naked, you'd disapprove. Send her back to her sulky reformed vampire who in two hundred years must not have learned anything about foreplay, because the first time you licked her breast she squealed like you were opening up whole new worlds of pleasure. She could have made you come just by smiling at you, which was a good thing at first, because giving head isn't exactly a major component of slayer training.
You had to make her hate you because you couldn't handle needing her. Death is easier than love. Evil is the path you end up taking when you're not paying attention. You didn't need to die to figure that out.
Prison time was helpful, though. You stayed away from her for a year of parole, then Greyhounded it to Boston. You were safe from her there. But not. You saved up money at your bouncer job, keeping an eye on the Harvard and MIT dykes who would never be cool but would sometimes be drunk enough to get into it over some past-her-prime Catholic schoolgirl from BU.
You took those paychecks and turned them into a round-trip economy flight to California. The geeky Ivy League psych majors would have said you were seeking closure.
You kind of wanted her to kill you and get it over with. Instead, she let you in. She told you that she hated you and she loved you, and for today she was listening to the part that loved you. She made you realize that sometimes people really do devour each other with kisses. You showed her what a lonely girl can teach herself with her hands. And afterwards she held you. You hated cuddling, but she made you hate the idea of squirming free. She pressed the warm fur of her pussy into your thigh and whispered that she loved you, loved you, loved you. You whispered love back.
You thought as you were dying that you might get to see her. But it turns out that Heaven isn't the kind of place where you see other dead people. You don't know if she's even here. There's lots of dimensions, or they'd run out of room for all the souls. And while you know a lot of things about life and people and that stuff, you don't know much else. You just found yourself here. You're kind of starting to wish there was a handbook. It would be something to do instead of think.
You keep thinking of Buffy. Her hollow eyes. The knife that was in your hand and never in Willow's. A witch can stab her best friend through the heart, and her hands will be clean. She can use magic to twist your knife and kill your lover, leave all the evidence against you. The blood ran red over Buffy's breasts and Buffy's lips, tracing the routes your tongue had taken. And Willow's eyes black. You didn't know what that meant. You were stroking Buffy's white cheek. You yanked your knife out of Buffy and hurled it to throw it away. If Willow was in its path, even better. You drove it into her throat and it didn't hurt at all. You couldn't feel anything. Thought you felt Xander's eyes, but you didn't look. Jumped, ran, felt your legs and nothing else.
The murders you don't commit hurt the most, once the adrenaline wears off. One was Willow, and the other was self-defense. You put your clothes on in the neighbor's yard and washed the blood off your hands in the ladies' room at the Doublemeat Palace. You still had a plane ticket to Boston. You hitchhiked to LAX. Drank ginger ale on the plane and ate your little bag of pretzels, watched a cartoon movie about horses. Saw nothing but Buffy. Tasted nothing but blood. Went back to work. If anyone saw the pain in your eyes, they had the good sense not to ask.
You would kill for someone to talk to now. Okay, maybe not kill. That has repercussions, and you'd probably enjoy it anyway. But you'd do a lot of unpleasant shit for some company. You know how they say, in space no one can hear you scream? That's how it is in Heaven.
Hell would be kind of fun, come to think of it. More fun than this quiet white nothing. There's no one better than you at slaying demons, and you can't see getting tired of it, not even for all eternity. And the torture? Hellfire and brimstone, the occasional whipping? You could learn to embrace your masochistic side. You could totally handle all that. Fuck this heaven crap.
Fuck little Dawn, little sister nobody, trying to be somebody with her hair in spikes and her all-grown-up breasts fighting something that was more of an idea than a shirt. She looked like a one-night stand even when she was trying to play damsel in distress. You played a better heroine, saving her from that vamp. Put on a good show. Bitch was drunk and angry, easy to kill. You teased her to draw Dawn (who you thought at the time was just another girl) into bed.
She said that she only felt safe with you. You hadn't felt that strong since before coma, before prison, back in the glory days before the Ascension. Killing everything in sight and letting Richard convince you that you were saving the world by helping him devour it. There was nothing left in it for you anyway.
You have perfect knowledge of the world now, and you would have expected that to change. You thought you would see all the hidden reasons for living. Buffy might have been one of them. But she's not there either, anymore, and the world is a big fat nothing, seen from up above.
She wanted to fuck you first when you got to the motel. You almost let her. Tore off your shirt to show you were strong enough to tear cotton. Women like women with a good set of pecs. But you remembered the first rule of heroism: always let the damsel come first. She tasted like a virgin, although now you know her full sexual history, the boys and the girls and the girls who were boys. There will be more for her.
They'll be lucky. She has a talent for driving women crazy, and slowly. You can call up the thrill of her tongue on your breasts and belly. If you had a body, it would make you shiver. She made you scream during and tremble after.
That was the only time you had her completely in your command. She was consumed by your taste and your swell. It was the only power you had left. You should have held her head down and made her keep eating you till she passed out. Smothered her in your cunt. You would be alive today.
You wouldn't. She would have kept chasing you. And if not her, Xander, Giles, someone. You would have felt chased even when there was no one left to run after you.
Instead, you trusted her when she told you to close your eyes. With your eyes closed, you could almost feel her going down on you again. But you opened your eyes to a gun between them. She had you down, prone, a damsel in distress and no one to save you this time. "Don't you recognize me?" she said. And then the hot swim of lead deforming. A bullet to the frontal lobe will put a person out instantly. You didn't feel anything except waking up here in the nothing, alone with your thoughts forever and ever. Playing these memories with pause, rewind, slo-mo recap a million times.
You could have been a hero in hell. Sometimes you think the Powers don't want you to be one. "Thanks for the reward," you try to shout. You might have a voice, but you can't tell. You hear a lot of things that aren't real. You imagine yourself in a hell dimension, kicking demon ass. And everything you imagine is real now, so there you are. Fighting for your afterlife with Buffy by your side. It takes a moment for you to shake it off and remind yourself that you aren't there. You'd be happy there, fuck the fire and brimstone. You and Buffy side by side forever. The Dynamic Duo of the afterlife.
You always used to think that other people were the problem. That's what the man said, right? But there's nothing worse than being alone with your own thoughts. Especially when they're in three dimensions and surround sound for all eternity.
Nothing worse. Nothing. Worse.
Fuck.