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Disclaimer: Characters from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel: the Series are property of Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, Kuzui Enterprises, Sandollar Television, the WB, and UPN.

This story is a remix (done for Round 4.1 of the Circle of Friends Remix) of “Civilian”, by Velvetwhip, flavored by some minor elements from “Fire Extinguisher” and “He Is Good and Pure and from Iowa”.

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Riley Finn liked to read, and that was a fact. People who didn’t know any better might find that surprising; such people (the ones fond of repeating, as if it were original or witty, the old cliché that “military intelligence” was an oxymoron) tended to believe that nobody went into the Army unless he had no other options, that the “military mind-set” precluded any intellectual awareness. Actually, it was almost unheard-of these days for someone to become an officer unless he had a college degree, and Riley himself had known several NCOs (and, after September 11th, even a few junior enlisted) who had their Master’s. The days of ignorant cannon fodder were long gone, and America’s military needed people who could not only learn, but think. So, no, it wasn’t at all uncommon for a soldier to read, and enjoy it, nothing unusual or embarrassing about such a thing.

Riley did not, however, go out of his way to let anyone know that he drew the most pleasure from 19th century British poets. He wasn’t ashamed of it, but come on, why paint a target on his face?

*               *               *

He was all over the place after the unexpected meeting in Istanbul, eleven countries (and four continents) in seventeen days. Bakemono outbreak in Hokkaido, a Lagahoo in Trinidad, a ring in Glasgow breeding Homja-maleev for the market in musk glands, rumors in Brno of a Sadecki half-breed trying to telepathically influence Czech Republic politics, and various pockets of vampire activity across central Europe and dipping down toward the Mediterranean … there was more than enough to legitimately keep him busy, so that he was in transit or following leads or fighting in nearly every waking moment and getting by on six hours of sleep a night. He worked hard and fought hard and when he slept it was without dreams, exactly as he wanted it to be.

It couldn’t last, of course, and it didn’t.

*               *               *

A year and a half back, there had been an … incident … in Kyrgyzstan. Judgment call, and Riley was accustomed to making snap decisions and following them through with total confidence and inexorable commitment, and he’d made it work this time, too. It had been a delicate matter, however. Kyrgyzstan, while not officially an American ally, was favorably disposed toward cooperation, and the ‘incident’ had technically been a violation of that country’s national sovereignty and even of American foreign policy. The result had ignited a fight among the higher brass that was every bit as vicious as the one Riley had won, and rather less straightforward. One bunch wanted to put him up for the Medal of Honor (though the accompanying citation would have been classified eyes-only until, essentially, the heat death of the universe); another wanted him stood up against a wall and shot, for everything from treason to molesting farm animals; and a tiny, disproportionately influential faction had simply mused, quietly but without smiling, that it would have been so much simpler if they could have just given him a posthumous medal. The end result was that he was now a lone operator, setting and following his own agenda, still with access to government clearance and equipment — and authorized to commandeer support troops anytime he deemed it necessary — but without a chain of command that could be blamed if any of his exploits should ever become more widely known. Riley liked working with a team, enjoyed the camaraderie and solidarity of an elite unit, but he was fine with solo ops, too, and the plain fact was that such an approach was better suited to the kind of thing he specialized in now.

At thirty-two, he was in the best shape of his life. By all rights, he should have peaked in his mid-to-late twenties, with even the most obsessive effort serving only to delay the inevitable decline and stretch it out over more time. That wasn’t what was happening, though; a holdover, perhaps, of Dr. Walsh’s treatments (Riley suspected, with some reason, that the ‘vitamins’ she had been feeding him and his teammates back then had contained some demon extracts), or some other unknown cause, or maybe he was just that physically unusual. He knew plenty of men in their thirties and forties who routinely outperformed the nineteen-year-old enlisted soldiers who were the sinews of every army … but all of them had privately admitted, explicitly or by inference, that they did it by pacing and technique and determination, and needed at least a bit of recovery time afterward whereas the kids could jump up the next morning and do the whole thing all over again, day after day. Riley seemed to have the best of both worlds, a teenager’s effortless resilience coupled with nearly a decade of special training. Plus, he was big, and strong even for his size, and quicker than a lot of lighter men, and he knew a lot of really nasty tricks when it came to direct combat.

During that seventeen-day period, he left demon bodies — (or dust and scorch-marks, in the case of vampires) across a substantial slice of the globe. Doing his duty, earning his keep, and working as hard as he could to keep certain thoughts shoved to the background.

*               *               *

It was the Sadecki who brought that to an end, though he couldn’t have kept it up indefinitely in any case. Turned out, she wasn’t exactly a half-breed, but the daughter of two who were; so that, though technically the proportions remained the same, her heritage seemed to more strongly favor the human side. Her eyes were very pale, rather than pure white, and the usual dorsal spines were vestigial with her, so that she could keep them concealed by subtle padding in her clothes. Finally, her involvement in Czech government affairs was only incidental, in that she was the mistress of one of the ministers, using her partial psychic abilities to divine his moods so she could more effectively keep him happy and relaxed.

Dealing with telepaths was tricky, even those with only minor gifts, so Riley had investigated her thoroughly by proxy before ever approaching her, and did so then with a custom talisman that (he was told) would allow him to keep all but deliberate surface thoughts fuzzy and indiscernible. Eliška Černá was a year older than he was, earthy and sensual and apparently content to enjoy the life she had made for herself without trying to reach for more; and, while her affection for her patron seemed unfeigned, it didn’t appear that she was compulsive about being strictly faithful. Riley felt her out at length, doing his best to get a clear sense of the personality here so he could be confident in his decision (part-demon meant he could kill her if it seemed necessary, part-human meant he didn’t want to be overeager on that part, and he was a defender of humanity, not an indiscriminate assassin), and when the extended interaction eventually led them into her bedroom, well, that was okay, too.

They took their time undressing one another, her fingers tracing over the scars he had spent the last several years collecting; her skin was somehow velvety, and when she was stimulated she made a trilling sound that reminded Riley of the tribbles on the old STAR TREK. Riley liked women, was happy to share good times with them when the opportunity was there, but because of the current operational tempo it had been awhile, and it looked like this could be a very nice one indeed …

… and then Eliška pulled back from him suddenly, pale eyes widening, and said, “Oh. Oh! Oh, my.” And, even as he was wondering if he needed to try for the push-dagger in his belt buckle, she reached out to caress his cheek, and said gravely, “My dear boy, I won’t say you should talk to her — in fact, I’m not sure that’s a good idea at all — but you definitely need to get this sorted out in your own head.”

…

Well, crap.

*               *               *

He was still sorry about Buffy. He knew she had never intended to hurt him, and he was pretty sure that none of it was really her fault; for the One Girl in All the World to have a part of herself that she could never share, well, that actually wouldn’t be surprising, would it? And the ways he had hurt her … Even now, he couldn’t understand what had happened there, what kind of darkness had risen inside him during the time he had still shared her bed in Sunnydale, but that had been wrong in ways that went well beyond the effect it had had on Buffy herself. Most of all, he was sorry about the last time he had seen her: back in Sunnydale, she so empty and numb and he doing his best to show her that it was okay, that there was nothing for her to feel guilty about, his life had gone on and he’d made a place for himself and his own happiness (with Sam) … It had taken far too long for the awareness to seep into him of just how much she was hurting and of just how badly something was wrong there, so that he couldn’t think of how to address it when he finally was able to recognize it. Finding her in bed with Spike? that had been such a massive blow, he hadn’t even reacted because his body and brain simply hadn’t known how. All in all, not like any reunion he had ever imagined for the two of them.

When we two parted
   In silence and tears,
Half broken-hearted
   To sever for years,
Pale grew thy cheek and cold,
   Colder thy kiss;
Truly that hour foretold
   Sorrow to this.

(Lord Byron. Damn, but those boys knew how to put some punch into a line!)

She had needed something — maybe not him, but she had needed something with awful desperation — and he’d had no idea what he could possibly offer. His first discontent with her had been from the recognition that she didn’t need him, and now she was nothing BUT need, and he was completely clueless and horribly aware of it … Irony’s a bitch, ain’t it?

Even more, though, he was sorry about Sam. He’d been unable to help Buffy, there at the end, but he’d done wrong with Sam. They’d seemed to have so much in common (and, let’s face it, somebody who could fight alongside him as an equal, without breezily outclassing him, that was exactly what he’d felt was missing with Buffy), and it had been long enough since leaving Sunnydale that he’d been able to tell himself he was over it, he had his head straight now. He’d been worse than wrong on that one, he’d been almost-right; wrong, and Sam would never have put up with him long enough for them to lock the relationship into slow-motion destruction. And even then, there was enough solid between them that it could have worked out, in the end, if he hadn’t …

… hadn’t …

Sam hadn’t deserved that. And the sad part was, they’d been right at the point where he really was able finally to leave all the other stuff behind and start focusing (as he should have from the beginning) on what was there in front of him: on this tough, vulnerable, unconquerable woman who had chosen to link her life with his. It could have worked, it could have, it would have been so good … except, by then, she wasn’t able to believe that anymore.

If the mess in Sunnydale hadn’t been Buffy’s fault, the end of the marriage absolutely wasn’t Sam’s, that was all on him. But it hurt so much to admit that he had finally reached the point of being able to start fresh, precisely because he had used up everything in his wife that could have made her willing to keep trying.

*               *               *

A great deal had changed since he had left Sunnydale, nearly seven years ago. Some bad, most good, but in the aggregate so much of it that he could think of that time as a different life and himself, now, as an entirely different person. And then had come the accidental encounter with Willow, in Istanbul … and, somehow, the short conversation the two of them shared in a tiny, dimly-lit Turkish coffee shop had brought it all back to him in a way that his brief return to Sunnydale with Sam hadn’t come close to doing.

Willow herself had changed a great deal, and yet was essentially the same. Older, obviously, but most of the ‘obvious’ came from the fact that she was a grown woman now, whereas she’d still been barely-not-quite when they first met. The quick shifting of moods was there, the heightened self-consciousness and near-automatic empathy, but she no longer seemed embarrassed by those things, comfortable with herself in a manner she hadn’t yet completely achieved ‘back in the day’. There were years and miles between them now, but that actually seemed to operate as a buffer that allowed them to slide smoothly back into the ease they had once so casually shared.

And the two of them had been able, without gravity but with a genuine (if light) solemnity, to mourn together. For the end of relationships and the dreams that went with them: Sam, for him (and, unspoken but both of them knew it was there, Buffy); Kennedy, for her (and, just as unspoken but even more felt in the silence, Tara). For bereavement: Anya, who had died, and Xander, who’d had to go on without her. Ultimately, for the life they’d once had and the people they’d once been, long behind them now and forgotten except for unguarded moments like these.

We drank a toast to innocence,
   we drank a toast to now,
and tried to reach beyond the emptiness,
   but neither one knew how.
We drank a toast to innocence,
   we drank a toast to time,
reliving in our eloquence
   another auld lang syne …

(No literary citation this time, just memories of Dan Fogelberg singing on the radio. Hey, you take your apropos quotes where you find them.)

And then she had stood up abruptly and said she’d better go, and he’d smiled but remained seated, and she gave him an impulsive hug before exiting the coffee shop and striding quickly away down the crowded street. Leaving him to ache with the awareness of things said and left unsaid, and then to go out and throw himself headlong into his work, to lose himself in effort until such time as he could deal with what he had seen.

*               *               *

He wasn’t about to disregard what Eliška had told him, but he wasn’t ready to face it straight yet, either, so Riley compromised by getting soundly drunk on hruškovice and taking an extra day to recover before continuing on his way. A small vampire crew, operating out of Villacidro on Sardinia, was the last item on his current itinerary, and he’d need to restock and gather more intel before embarking on a fresh campaign, so he took his time here, scouting and planning and making sure everything was set solid. Then, once all that had been seen to, he torched their lair with a white phosphorus grenade — during the day, so they couldn’t flee outside — and stationed himself to cover their sewer access, using a double-mag of tracer rounds from a folding-stock M-4 carbine to take out the few who escaped the main fire. There were at least a dozen ways something like that could go wrong, but Riley had been doing this long enough to have a reliable feel on how to carry it through, and no insurmountable complications forced their way into existence so that was that.

Rather than move immediately on, he kept the hotel room he’d been using as a base, and gave himself some R&R time. The hruškovice had been interesting, so he found another bottle of the hundred-proof pear brandy and settled in to work his way through it: slowly, sipping, letting himself appreciate the flavor and building just enough of a warm, mellow feeling to facilitate some reflection and introspection.

Because, during his short conversation with Willow, he hadn’t lied to her about anything … but there were a few important items he’d not gone out of his way to say, and those were what lay at the bottom of what was driving him now.

*               *               *

I called out Buffy’s name … right after we were in Sunnydale, he had told Willow, touching on what had been the final straw for Sam. And then, That’s the last time I thought of her — that way, I mean. And it was true as far as it went, but there was a lot more in there that he hadn’t gone into. Yes, he was over Buffy now … but the truth was, he’d been over her for awhile before the return to Sunnydale. Seeing the girl he had once loved so much, lost in so much pain, had brought home to him that he still loved her but he wasn’t locked to her anymore. It was as simple as that.

And, no, he hadn’t called out Buffy’s name during sex with Sam. He’d known that was how it sounded to Willow when he said it, and left that impression uncorrected because it communicated the impact that Sam had taken, even if the actual facts were otherwise. No, he’d gasped the name as he was coming out of a dream, just pure, innocent chance … but by that time there had already been a lot of distance between him and Sam in their bed, and after that she’d found it preferable to go with separate beds. And lodgings. And, in quick order, marital status. Couldn’t blame her for that, even if what had worn her down wasn’t what she inevitably thought.

Because it wasn’t really the memory of Buffy that had come between the two of them, but the memory of how far downhill Riley himself had slid before pulling up stakes and leaving Sunnydale far behind. In the aftermath he’d had something to prove to himself, and been unwilling to admit it to anyone else, and that had made a barrier that eventually split him from the woman who would have stayed with him for a lifetime if he’d had the sense to hold her as close as she deserved. She’d married a broken man who hid all his wounds, and healed him even as he wore away all her faith in the future they’d once thought to share.

Just what had happened to him in Sunnydale, that first time? He still didn’t know, and there were so many potential sources, and for all he knew the different possibilities had interacted in some incalculable synergy. The sex-possession that had overwhelmed him and Buffy during the ‘haunting’ of Lowell House; Dr. Walsh’s conditioning treatments, and then his first withdrawal from them; his cyber-domination by Adam; the later quasi-hypnosis he and Giles must have undergone to make them believe that the ‘Dracula’ lair was an actual by-God castle; the follow-on effects of the Walsh treatments, that had imbued him with near-superhuman strength and threatened to explode his heart. Any of those things could have had permanent aftereffects, and he’d undergone the entire lot in less than a year.

Any of them. All of them. Something else he hadn’t been able to detect or thought to test for. Or, maybe, some unmeasurable Hellmouth emanation that folded in with everything else and jazzed it all up to crisis levels. Whatever was the cause, Riley had gone dark those last months in Sunnydale. Seriously dark. Letting vampire women drink from him? that was some of the least disturbing stuff that had been going through him back then, if only because it was so bizarre that he could see it as something external to who he was.

Yes, he had called Buffy’s name when coming out of a dream. Which was odd, because he hadn’t actually been dreaming about Buffy at the time.

And it hadn’t been the first of such dreams.

*               *               *

Riley slept in late, and in the morning he looked at the remaining half-bottle and decided he was good for now. He checked out of the hotel and found a café for breakfast, and after he had eaten he drove to Cagliari, parking at the docks and standing to look out at the ships departing and arriving.

No dreams last night, which was good. The kind of dreams that bothered him … most of those had faded out by the time he’d been gone from Sunnydale for a few months, and didn’t return often. Something had warned him, however, that the meeting with Willow might trigger a relapse, that being the impetus for his sudden frenetic activity; that, and other reasons.

Back then, the dreams had troubled him deeply. Bloody violence, and lurid sex, and all too often they combined in violent, savage sex. Anya, returned to her demon state — his dream-picture of that was vague and inconsistent — and him fighting her to a standstill that promptly segued into the two of them rutting like rabid wolves. Tara, shrinking from his touch but with his dream-mind insisting that she wanted him to reach for her, take her, show her just how good it could be with a man. Buffy goading him to command her, overpower her, dominate her, be the mate she needed, and him beating her bloody till she gladly accepted his mastery. Dawn, once — God, she couldn’t have been more than thirteen at the time! — and that one had been the first time he woke himself crying out to be rescued from his own demons.

That hadn’t been who he was, what he was made of. He’d dealt with all those people during the day, smiling at them and being the man he knew himself to be, and stuffed the darkness down. That hadn’t been who he was … but it had kept coming back out whenever he slept.

Willow had been in a lot of dreams, too, maybe more than all the others combined. And, in an entirely different way, that bothered him nearly as much as the bad ones, because …

… because those dreams weren’t savage at all.

Whenever he looked at Willow the next morning, those dreams had been so much harder to renounce. To deny. To not believe.

*               *               *

Rewind to 1999. Riley Finn, captain in an elite, clandestine unit, and simultaneously graduate student under a brilliant researcher at UC-Sunnydale. He’s twenty-four years old, healthy and eager and on top of the world, good-looking and knowing it and more than willing to share intimate recreation with whatever coeds are in the mood for some good, sweaty fun. Then he meets someone special. She’s bright and pretty and funny and quirky, they speak the same language and see things the same way and the connection is right there, flowing between them in a bright, sharp current. One in a million, the kind of raw affinity that might never come along in a single lifetime.

Then he meets her blonde friend, and goes for the blonde instead.

Okay, there was justification. At that point in his military career, serious long-term relationships would have been chancy for him, and despite her cheerful good humor it was clear that Willow would never be casual about emotional involvement, she’d undertake such a thing with total commitment of herself. Not to mention that Oz had been in the picture then, replaced (almost seamlessly, it felt, though Riley knew it had been rockier than that at the time) by Tara once he left. And what kind of nasty joke was it that Riley’s involvement with Buffy had turned into exactly the kind of roller-coaster total sensory overload he’d been trying to avoid? The fact remained, though, he’d seen something wonderful in Willow, and backed away from it because he simply wasn’t ready then to tackle something that major.

And, eight years later, he’s looking at her across a postage-stamp-sized table in a Turkish coffee shop, and it’s just not there anymore.

They were still friends. They could still talk, and share, and feel good about it. Hell, even the attraction was still there, for all that she’d limited herself to women for the last seven years; he’d felt it, seen her feel it as well, and watched her draw back, for her own reasons, just as he’d done in 1999. If they met again, and she was in a different place by then, they could reconnect and give it a try and maybe even make it work.

And it wouldn’t be the same. The he of then and the she of then had been so right for one another that it might have been destined by fate … and the people they were now just didn’t have that anymore. It had been there, but the moment had passed — he had let it pass, he had made it pass — and no amount of sorrow or remorse would ever bring it back.

… And nobody calls you a dunce,
   and people suppose me clever:
It once might have been, just once,
   and we missed it, lost it for ever.

(Robert Browning. God damn it, who told these 19th-century assholes they could write about his life, a hundred-some years before the fact?)

For hours Riley watched the waves, and the endless ships passing without ever touching. Then he got back into his car and started for the Cagliari-Elmas International Airport, from whence he could launch himself toward new battles and — perhaps — fresh forgetfulness.

– end –

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Questions? Comments? Any feedback is welcome!