The Taken Series

How Soon Is Now
A/N: "I was terrified of forgiving her. I was terrified of *not* forgiving her..."

~ ~ ~

I can feel her shifting around behind me, quickly guiding processed food from their cartons onto plates, wiping up any mess she might have spilled. My body continues to look as if her very presence doesn't affect me. My eyes turned towards the television screen, as if deeply engrossed in the program that I continue to not know the name of.

But we never talk. Never share anymore more than a word of hello and a word of goodbye. Dispite the sounds of my stereo or tv drowning out the quiet, the silence still wraps around me like a thick blanket, at times making it so hard to breathe, I find myself opening as many windows as I possibly can do, even if a chill lays in the air.

For days she just comes around, not bothering to knock anymore, just coming inside and heading straight for the kitchen. It's not as if I don't know who's there anyway. And each night she rustles up some food for the both of us. I'm not entirely sure where she golf olf of it, but now it seems she's found my kitchen completely bare apart from a few energy bars and cartons of juice in the fridge.

The first night she came, she spent an almost eternity of hours, until the sun had started to peak above the horizon and small birds were chirping the start of a new day in the tree that stood outside my bedroom window. And still, we never said a word.

Some far off and distant part of my mind, the part that hasn't crumpled and died without it's innocence, the single part of me that still *has* it's innocence, keeps bringing forth the questions that plague me most of the day. The rest of me following up one of those questions with another, the voices in my head over running and confusing themselves, to the point where I don't know which to trust anymore.

Her very presence knocks my senses into another galaxy. Her smell wrapping itself around my head, drowning me in the scents that could only ever be her: vanilla, wood, rain and something so individually Buffy that not one person alive could ever double it. All those smells innately covered over by some vanity product. The smell of sweet heathers somehow not hiding it all from me, but perhaps adding something to her, but also means my slayer senses will always smell her coming from a mile away.

My muscles always hidden, tightly knotted underneath the baggy sweater I wear, simply so she can't see how tense I become with her near enough to me so I can touch her. Something I want to do as if it was written in my very genetic coding. But I never do. I sit, and I watch, and I listen to the silence that is always a part of her being here.

Because for all that little innocent voice in the back of my head, the part of me that craves her like a drug, that needs her as if she were air, there will always be the rest of me. That dark and painful voice that suffered through years of beatings by the one person who was supposed to protect me in the first place. It whispers to me. That she isn't any different from the rest of them, that she will inevitably hurt me just as bad as the rest of them. No, more.

I feel the sofa pitching slightly under her weight as she sits and passes a plate of Chinese food over to me. I take it without question, using the fork she provided me to shovel in a mouthful.

The tastes explode out over my taste buds, causing me to wince slightly in the sudden attack within my head, but quickly calming down as I chewed and got used to the flavouring. Chinese had always been a favourite food of mine because of how the taste f it would almost make my head explode.

Just like her.

~ ~ ~

The room spins and blurs in front of me, colors crashing together to make one painfully bright wash of violence. Seconds bleed into each other as I stand there, watching the black blob in my vision waver in and out of focus.

I can hear him talking to me, words dribbling over my senses in slow motion, distorting into sounds I don't understand. Knowing that I never want to understand them.

His name is too good to come from this strangers mouth.

Forty cigarettes a day, gurgling tar in his lungs, rasping namename out that even through my cacophonic version of the rest of the sentences, I can still hear his name being said to me.

Like it's on repeat.

Jabe… Jabe… Jabe… Jabe…

With a clarity so slingling, my world comes back into screaming focus, and I'm still stood in my apartment, stood in front of the cop. I was still holding onto the doorknob, feeling her very presence behind me. She doesn't say, or do anything. Just stands behind me, listening to the words that I'm so desperately trying to rid my mind of.

Not even a second has passed since I regained the harsh reality I don't want to live in, any more than my place of funny clown colors and wailing of sounds, before it starts to tilt.

The darkly stained, hard wood floors washing into my vision, and I know that I'm going to fall. My face smashed painfully into the wood, knocking me on conscious.

And suddenly, I realise how much I don't want to sleep. Because then, for at least a little while, I'll forget. And then a new wave of grief will greet me when I wake.

Jabe…

My descent to the floor is jarred to a halt. Small arms wrapping around my waist from behind, holding me up. Her lips press gently to my ear, whispering words I don't quite hear, but I don't care anyway.

For at least a moment in time, she caught me as I fell.

~ ~ ~

"Miss Raven?" the cop I answered the door too looked astonishingly like the cop I swore blind was 'butch' a while ago.

"Yeah? And who the hell're you?" Buffy softly nudged me in the back with her elbow, causing me to smirk at her over my shoulder.

"I'm office Jenson, and I need to have a private word with you. If that's possible?"

"What about?"

"Can I come in? It's quite urgent."

"No, you can stay right the fuck there and tell me what the hell is going on."

"It's.. it's about your brother. A Mr Jabe Raven?"

"What about him?" I used to laugh at that expression, of someone walking over your grave. How can someone do that, if you're not dead yet? Now I knew. It the that impossibly freezing cold feeling that slowly slivered it's way down your spine, and raising the hairs on the back of your arms and neck.

"There was an accident. A car crash? He erm.."

"What the hell happened?! Is he alright?!"

"He died early this morning Miss Raven. The doctors did…"

And then my world blurred in front of my very eyes.
\r ~ \r ~

She handed me a glass of water, before sitting down next to me and wrapping her arm around my shoulders. I had the irreversible urge to shrug her from my body, but my body wasn't liste to to me anymore. It did as it pleased, it responded how it liked.

A voice started screaming at me inside of my head, yelling at me that I shouldn't be thinking about Buffy and how my body acted around her right now. My brother had just , an, and already I missed him with a passionate burn, dispite not having seen him for years.

"Are you ok?" I shook my head, looking down at my glass of water and wondering why it was everyone always asked you that, when they knew that you weren't ok.

"I was just wondering why I was thinking about.. something else. And not Jabe."

"Don't beat yourself up about it." she pulled me a little tighter into her body and laid a gentle kiss on my temp. "When we're hit by so much grief, our minds can't handle it all at once."

"You think I'm grieving?"

"You're mind is making the abnormal, normal. When my mom died.. I was worried about the patch of vomit I left on the hall floor."

We lapsed into silence, me thinking about Jabe, about what she just said to me. Wondering how I could make this seem like anything normal yet, realising that that's probably how people can deal with so much pain all at once.

Make it all normal, and it doesn't hurt so much anymore.

The bed pitched slightly to the side, bouncing me back upright as she got off the bed. I didn't want to see her walking back out through that door. I didn't want her to leave me alone.

But I didn't have the strength left in me, to ask her to stay.

The door clicked softly shut, leaving the room utterly silence.

And then I felt her hand, fingers running through my hair and coming to rest on the side of my neck. I looked up into her sparklingly green eyes and sat there in astonishment, as she leaned forward and gently kissed me on the lips.

"You don't have to be alone tonight." She laid me down on the bed, before climbing over me, and pulling my back firmly into her stomach, wrapping her arms around me and kissing the back of my head.

"But what about tomorrow?"

"I'll be here when you wake up."

"And the next day? And the next?" I was terrified that she'd stay the night, and then I'd never be able to let her go. I was terrified that if she stayed with me the night, that I'd forget all my anger and pain at her, for what she did. I was terrified of forgiving her.

I was terrified of not forgiving her.

"When ever you wake up. I'll be here."

The first comfortable silence we've shared in what seems like forever washed over us, lulling me into a place I refused to believe
I would ever get back to. No more words passed between us.

We had nothing lto sto say.


End