Archive of Our Own ^beta

She is nineteen and her twitter status is a picture of the Golden Gate Bridge with the hashtags #hashtagthis #freefalling #liveitup #onlydietwice and that's the last anyone has heard from her in five days.

And you're just bleedin' telling me about this now, Slayer? he growls into his phone because fuck and also because I can still feel you naked on top of beneath me is not proper phone etiquette when your ex calls about a missing sister somewhere in the greater United States.

There's static and something about a demon horde in the Congo and something about a credit card having been used in Los Angeles earlier that week and the threat of booze lingers in the air because apparently just before the tweet was posted the nineteen year old half-wit updated her facebook status with 'ROADTRIP TIME #TIJIUANA #HASHTAGTHIS #HATERSGONNAHATE' and Spike is starting to think that a) between the two of them he's better at this whole hashtag phenomenon and b) he's gonna have to hitch a ride to Mexico.

Luckily Lindsey and Eve have been looking to do some vacationing and it doesn't take much to convince them to leave town for some quality drinking.

He passes out in the back of Lindsey's ridiculous truck under a tarp and hopes this doesn't take more than a couple of days because if it does there's going to be a whole Slayer situation and he is so not sober enough to be dealing with something that headache-inducing.

Two weeks and three tweets later

(1. livin' la vida loca #hashtagthis #fuckyourmexico #tequila
2. no #hangover if youre still #drunk #fuckyourmexico
3. gettin' my beach on #lostinmexico #hotties #walkofshame)

and he's no closer to finding her, but has decided to leave it in the hands of the experts (Listen Slayer, everyone goes a little crazy in college just let her get it out of her system... no I'm not saying I'm a better par-- ... look it's just that I .... THEN YOU FIND HER AND LEAVE ME THE FUCK-- ... yeah I'll let you know *click* fuckingfuck) which doesn't exactly go to plan so he heads to Mexico City to lie low for a while and hope she comes to him through underworld osmosis.

Five days of fish tacos and margaritas later (and more frequent tweets that leave much to be desired in their use of hashtags) and he gets a whiff of a rumor from a Kevlar demon about a scary something digging around in demon lore down in Panama City. It's not exactly what he was waiting for, but moving beats waiting and kicking ass against something nasty is something he's actually good at. So he catches the red eye down to Panama City and takes a cab to the University as soon as it's dark.

She's sitting in the library as cool as you please, her hair cut shorter than he remembers and the scent of a fresh tattoo coming from her ribcage (like scabbing wounds and sensitive skin and blood too close to the surface that's how he knows), but still she gets the jump on him and there's a stake digging too close to his heart before he has the sense to back off.

How'd you find me? she says it over her shoulder because she's already sitting back down and is looking at her books - nasty old ones by the smell - and her voice is resigned tinged with suspicion and so he sits down next to her because what the hell, right?

Was poking around Mexico City for you when I heard about a big nasty down here. Thought I'd do the Slayerettes a favor and kill it while I was in the neighborhood.

They are silent for a long while and he likes it, remembers long afternoons in his crypt when her hair was long and her face was soft and she didn't seem so brittle.

So... you seen this big nasty?

She looks up at him for the first time and there's a row of piercings in her left ear and one in her nose and when she talks there's a glint of metal in her mouth and on the edge of her neck where the hair meets the slightest hint of a tattoo and he wonders where his little bit has disappeared to behind all that ink and metal like armor against a war he didn't know she was fighting, You're looking at it.

He blinks and looks around. You trapped it in the book then? Right. So's let's get you back to the big sister now, alright?

She stares at him and there's something he's missing behind her brittle skin and strange eyes and false armor, Just gotta make a quick stop and then you can ship me wherever you need me to go.

He hopes they're stopping at a sorority house for some laughs and few tearful goodbyes, but instead she leads him straight to a scary looking (even to him) tattoo parlour run by an old woman who speaks a language Spike's pretty sure is dead everywhere else but in that shop and Dawn of course speaks it fluently (with more ease than English, which raises the hair on the back of his neck) and he tries not to notice that it's all a little magicky because his job is a delivery service, not private investigating, snooping, spying, or reporting.

('party don't start till ME #fuckyourhashtags #drunk')

You should really let me be in charge of your twitter account if it's all a lie anyway, and maybe he's hoping for a confession.

But he's not a fucking priest and he can't absolve her so in the end he's glad that she just laughs softly (and it's like the laugh of a child he once knew, probably) and says, Sure why not?

('pitch perf w the gurls #hangover #girltime #COFFEE')

She raises her eyebrows at him and he shrugs, Gotta start slow or they'll be suspicious.

There's some chanting then and some incense that makes him sneeze and so he goes out on the sidewalk for a smoke. He's probably the worst chaperone ever and maybe he should inquire into what the holy fuck she's gotten herself into, but that would surely open an entirely new conversation that goes something like are you okay? and he knows the answer is no and that he's not ready for that so he doesn't. He walks back in the shop and sits down in the waiting room and falls asleep.

There's a fresh wound racing it's way down her spine and he can smell her blood there, pulsing with energy and pain and it doesn't make him hungry.

Which should have been his first sign.

She convinces him that a roadtrip is better and he convinces her to call her sister (which is a mess of a phone call of overacting and slurred speeches and fake crocodile tears that churns his stomach) and they pick up a cooler full of blood at a hospital that probably needs it more than him and she rents a black sports car with tinted windows on the company dime and grabs her dufflebag full of books and clothes from the cheap hostel near campus and gives him the keys.

She sits sideways in the seat, facing him, leaning into her shoulder to protect the fresh ink on her back that seeps blood onto her shirt. It shouldn't bleed that much, he knows, but instead of asking he turns on the radio and instead of answering she pops in the first disk of an audiobook and whispers, You'll like this one it's about a girl with a dragon tattoo.

And he really likes it.

(He likes it more because they can both ignore the things they aren't saying when the car is full of someone else talking.)
He thinks maybe he should start reading more, if this is the kind of thing that’s being written these days.

Her phone gps says that it should take them 71 hours driving straight through. She keeps them on coastal roads, sometimes stopping in small villages for inexplicable reasons while he stays in the car and hopes the tint on the windows keeps him from catching on fire (he doesn’t) (he stops worrying the second day).

She gets a cord out of her bag when the first book ends. Her phone has the rest and they spend days listening to the soothing sound of Lisbeth kicking ass.

With a twinkle in her eye one night she turns on something about a girl named Amy and he spends the better part of three days listening to it over and over. She laughs at him over the steering wheel and promises him access to her Audible account – which is twice as mysterious as twitter but apparently much more useful.

He makes her take selfies on the beaches they pass (You’ll want to remember this.) (It’s a once in a lifetime drive.) and he wards off calls from a pleased – if exasperated – Slayer.

They live out of the car for the first four days (which is right around the time that he figures out she’s stalling and her wound isn’t healing fast enough and the ocean seems to be getting darker and the roads smaller) but on the fifth day he demands a bed and real food for both of them. Which means finding the nearest hotel (which isn’t much of a hotel honestly) and eating lots of fresh food forced upon them by the owners (which he samples from but doesn’t kill and not because he’s scared of what she’ll do but because he’s scared of what she won’t do) and then tucks her under the covers of the bed like a polite gentleman.

In the morning she says something about swimming at the beach and throws him into the rumpled bed and he doesn’t argue because bed and when he wakes up to her curled up into his chest fast asleep, still in her bikini and salt clinging to her skin, he pretends he was still asleep.

He also pretends that he didn’t see the scrolling tattoos of words and words and words racing across her body.

She pretends that he doesn’t pull her closer to him and bury his face in her hair.

They pretend a lot these days.

On that beach they pretend for four days exactly. Listening to audiobooks on her phone and hiking around the town and countryside and swimming in the ocean (her blood racing down her back and mingling into the dark waves) and they never take selfies of her with any tattoos showing.

They drive.

Later, when she’s ready, she’ll tell him about the words she carves into her body and tells him that she’s locking herself up. He doesn’t hear her the first time, because the piercing in her tongue is doing damage to his senses. He shouldn’t be playing with her fragile armor like that, covering himself up in the pleasure of it and letting it dance upon his skin like a gift she can offer and he can take away. She has nothing to give that isn’t permanently attached and he has no right to take anything anyway.

Later, when she’s ready, she’ll tell him about the blood that sings in her veins and gives birth to demons and monsters that her heart aches to protect; she’ll tell him that she’s locking herself up so she never has to lose any part of it again and he hears what she doesn’t say about the children she has locked up inside ready to spring at any crack in the earth and burrow their way into her heart. She’ll tell him about a body she pricks and prods to lock up but also to test – and how she longs for it to break apart as surely as she longs for it to stay strong and unbreakable.

Later, when he’s deep inside of her and her legs are wrapped around her waist, she’ll whisper the secrets to the universe that lie buried in her blood that his body is now a part of and when she screams he hears the echo of a monster clawing for release.

They drive.

(‘beaches beaches beaches #selfie #nofilter #hottstuff’)

They listen to audiobooks about women who are monsters or who slay monsters or monsters who eat women and they talk about them like they are real. (There is nothing more real than her.) (There is nothing more fabricated than her. She walks in story and he can’t help but find that beautiful despite himself.)

The Slayer calls and they giggle about beaches and pina coladas and local boys that flirt with her and buy her presents. They buy souvenirs to send away, they buy less than they should and overcompensate later. The Slayer calls and they giggle and she pretends to be a child and his heart aches for something that never was.

He wraps his hand around her wrist and doesn’t ask her to promise things she can’t and she smiles at him and pretends not to notice what he can’t bear to say.

(’moving day!!! #collegebound #ucla #badass #blondiebear’)

Later, she’ll leave clues buried in hashtags about hashtags and he’ll find her, with a barely healed wound in a place where the locals cringe away from her in fear and they’ll #roadtrip with words beating against them, racing them to the finish line, as they pretend that she’s a girl and he’s a man and that’s the biggest worry they have.

Next time, someplace where I won’t burn, okay?

There’s a legend about a green dragon in a village off the coast of the Kara Sea. Is that cold enough for you?

(’brrr! #sexyinrussia #vodkatime #roadtrip’)