Even for the insane, screwed up rollercoaster Buffy called her life, this had to be a first; in so many awful, awful ways.
If she ever needed to prove that her life was weird, the envelope she’d found in her pocket could always be produced as Exhibit A. The moment she’d pulled it out of her jacket, her heart had sunk to the pit of her stomach. It didn’t take a ton of deduction skills to realise how the little package had got there, how Spike must have slipped it into her pocket the last time she’d let him fuck her. That brief and angry quickie, sprawled over the hood of a car in the Doublemeat parking lot not long after she’d slapped last burger of the night into a sorry-looking bun, although brief, would have given him ample opportunity to hide a multitude of unwanted birthday presents in her clothes as he kept her otherwise occupied.
So she’d almost thrown his present away without opening it. She still wanted to and she just still might, but she couldn’t help herself, she wanted to know what a vampire like Spike thought was appropriate to give her, even though she had told him over and over that he wasn’t her boyfriend; that he was not to give her gifts, presents, tokens or trifles, or whatever he might want to call them. He needed to understand that she didn’t want anything from him, except maybe a few hours in the dead of night when her body needed something more than chores and slaying and burger grease to make it feel alive.
Ripping it open once she was alone, the mysterious envelope had revealed its treasure, dropping into her palm a piece of paper and a scruffy C60. Buffy couldn’t even remember the last time she’d even seen a cassette tape, least of all played one, yet here one was in her hand, clunky, analogue and decades out of date. It rattled ominously and smelled oddly of cigarettes and musty turned earth; familiar odours that triggered memories of fists and fights and desperate kisses, tangled tongues and bruises on milk white skin. Hard sex. Sweat. Blood. Semen.
She hoped to god he hadn’t taped all that.
But to her relief, instead of an hour of their homemade porno Greatest Hits, it appeared to be music; there was a tracklisting on the note that came with the cassette. She dreaded to think what he’d put on there, but the Anarchy symbol scrawled on the box in black marker pen made her think it wasn’t going to be Britney. It was a proper mixtape though. Spike, a hundred and whatever year-old vampire, had made her a mixtape for her birthday like some young virgin teen out to impress his first crush, complete with The Clash and a lame bunch of people she didn’t know. The kind of bands he liked, she guessed. Great. Blondie were okay, everybody liked Blondie, but the rest… as if she’d like any of that noisy punk stuff anyway.
But she’d never know because she wasn’t going to play it. Not ever. Not even on her mother’s old boombox, which had miraculously survived the flood in the basement by virtue of a high shelf well above the waterline. No she wasn’t carrying it back to her room in the dead of night. And no, she wasn’t inserting the tape; she was just seeing if the tape player actually still worked, that’s all.
And if she actually listened to the music and thought about the lyrics, well, that was just a coincidence.
Author's Chapter Notes:
Some sexual references and the F word. Season 6. Post-Older And Far Away, but before As You Were.