Goldenrod: Nocturne With Fireflies

Author: Chris Geary-Durrill
Rated: PG
Spoilers: None
Author's Note: The camp where this takes place is based on a childhood memory of a place known simply as "Bunker Hill". The Ozark Mountains go without saying.

It's another hot evening in July —a time when heat lightning tears at the encircling horizon as the Ozark Mountains rise gently about you in oak carpeted splendor; making you feel like you're being surrounded by a herd of gigantic but benign sleeping animals in the hazy blue twilight. As you lazily slap at the mosquitoes that are ignoring the nearby bug zapper, it feels like you, your family, and your friends —are the only people left in the world. You like it this way. For a few precious hours, a few short-lived days, you can ignore the outside world where family and friends are all too quickly stolen from you by time, distance and death.

You've worked hard for the last six months, supervising the setting up of this isolated little training outpost of the Watcher's Council in an old resort camp that dates back from the 1920s, with its charming little log cabins, huge communal dining hall, and nearby spring fed rivers —right off of what was once Route 66. The Watchers deliberately chose this place because the land's cheap and far enough away from civilization so that there's not too many people around to ask questions, but close enough to an International Airport should you need one.

It's delicious, sitting quietly in one of the locally made straight backed rocking chairs on the front porch of the dining hall, a bottle of beer in one hand, half-hypnotized by the fireflies as they begin rising one by one out of the grass of the big common area in a glittering slow motion sex dance while Angel, Spike and Sorcha, your six year old niece play her favorite game where just this morning you watched a doe and her twin spotted fawns ghost out of the edge of the dense woods that surround the place to graze on the freshly mowed lawn as the river mist slowly vanished with the rising sun.

The game is a simple one that Angel, but more likely Spike made up because he can't sit still for long, invented when Sorcha and her father stayed with Angel at the L.A. branch of the Watcher's Council so that she could go to a better school than the dismally cash strapped ones around here.

Sorcha calls it "Kidball".

You call it, "Oh God, I can't look!"

"Kidball", is really kinda funny once you got over your fright the first time you saw them play. What it is is simply what appears to be two grown men tossing a six-year old back and forth like a football as she shrieks and giggles, demanding that they do it faster, higher, and harder until she nearly throws up from all the excitement.

That time Connor joined in, making the game even more unpredictable; diving and rolling, keeping his only child from hitting the ground at the last possible second; leaving huge gouges in the lawn wherever the two of them landed, which pissed off the groundskeepers at the L.A. Center to no end the next morning.

Tonight as you watch, Angel lobs Sorcha at Spike like a grenade from thirty feet. Spike catches her around the waist, leaping five feet up into the air with effortless grace. This is one of those rare times when both Grandsire and Childe can actually cooperate at something without squabbling. Spike lands in a half-crouch, hair flying out in all directions —Cordelia has somehow convinced him to stop ruining his hair with peroxide. It's now a soft golden brown that spills down to his shoulders in a mass of loose curls that have once more escaped the tail that he now keeps it in. He looks like a dandelion gone to seed. Sorcha is laughing, unhurt and Spike grunts as he launches her with a little spin back at his Angel.

Angel catches Sorcha, dropping to his knees in the grass, tickling her until she squeals at him to stop or "I'll pee! I'll pee!"

It's nice to be so far out where Sorcha, where you, where a lot of your friends and family can be themselves, without drawing any unwanted attention. Dawn's child really does try to behave but her demon heritage keeps popping out in all directions so that accidentally smashing cherished toys and sending her little "normal" friends crying whenever she forgets her own strength is now the inevitable. To be able to roughhouse, to run, to shriek, to giggle, to play tag, to wrestle uninhibited...

...is bliss for the both of you. You'd seen the last landscaper off two days ago before calling everyone up, inviting them to come play, a free vacation as it were, before the girls come, overrunning the place with their high-speed antics, demonic group PMS, and noise. It was astonishing to see how many of them came; Angel arriving at sundown the same day in a rented SUV with Sorcha and Connor in tow, with a smelly anti-sunlight charm in the back seat and all the windows rolled down. Connor brought a fishing pole, his first, and wanted to learn how to use it because one of the L.A. Center janitors told him that's what people do on vacations.

They fish.

With a pole.

Convincing Connor not to eat his first still flopping catch raw right there on the bank in front of everybody had been a challenge. It was almost as disturbing as seeing first Angel and then Spike surruptitiously drink the blood that was draining out of the packages of raw hamburger and steaks in the fridge today before lunch, both thinking that nobody was looking.

Angel stands up in a single fluid motion, flinging Sorcha back at Spike. The six year old stretches out like Supergirl in her favorite comic book —posing against the rising moon, her grubby t-shirt flapping in her own jet wash. Spike catches her, grabbing her by the seat of her cutoffs, spinning twice before launching her backwards at Angel in a hammer thrower's move.

Spike and Cordelia showed up 2 a.m. the next morning loudly arguing over whose fault it was. Spike had ditched Angel, Connor and Sorcha back at Lambert International Airport after quarreling with Angel over the shared cost of the rented propane fueled SUV and whose turn it was to sit in the back seat next to Willow's stinky anti-sunlight charm. Angel hated it when Spike drove, he drove like a madman and they had Cordy and Sorcha to consider. Spike got pissy because Angel insulted his driving, and that he couldn't be trusted to not wreck the sodding dinosaurmobile with a woman and child aboard. He then sniped that Angel drove like an old man. Angel countered that Connor didn't mind sitting next to the reeking basket, so what was the problem? Spike yelled back that Connor grew up in a Demon Dimension where there were ten thousand things that smelled far, far worse, so why couldn't Angel sit back there withConnor and the charm and let him drive? When Angel finally bellowed at Spike to shut the hell up and get in the back seat with Connor, Spike had snarled, "Fine, I'll bloody well rent me own car and cover the fucking windows with duct tape and Hefty bags before I sit next to that bloody charm. Me and our Cordy will get there first, sod-you-Peaches!"

With an eye-roll, Cordy told you over breakfast that Spike had immediately gotten them lost in the maze of highways and construction bypasses that surround St. Louis like a tangled nest of serpents, and refused to stop and ask for directions. After three hours of this, she'd angrily ordered Spike into the back of their grubby little rented Dodge Colt with her ten large matching designer suitcases before she took over the driving, getting them onto the Interstate in a matter of minutes because of the two of them, she was the only one who could read a map.

Cordelia, now eight months pregnant, dozes beside you on a chaise lounge, legs sprawled out in front of her, reeking of insect repellant.

Now that had been a shock. Cordelia risking her figure to have a baby? Whodda thunk?

When Harmony somehow convinced her billionaire husband that she wanted babies, lots of babies because that's what married people did, he'd seen to it that she got all the Rumanian, African, and Asian orphans she could ever want. She has yet to succumb to instinct and eaten them —Cordelia, never one to be left behind, has decided that it's time to have a baby of her own.

Cordelia's decision hurt Spike more deeply than you ever thought possible once he realized that she wanted the one thing that he could never give her; so he tried to talk her out of it. Finally Cordelia loudly told him right in front of everyone at Sorcha's sixth birthday party that if Spike didn't like it, he could go to Hell for all she cared —they weren't married, he couldn't tell her what to do, it was her body, yadda yadda yadda. That night she'd packed up all her clothes, make-up and shoes and moved in with Harmony and her husband David, vowing to never come back.

Spike sulked for a week before he showed up in Angel's living room and cried, actually cried! on your shoulder. He then went on to wrap his DeSoto around a tree, going headfirst through the windshield somewhere down in Laurel Canyon after drinking himself half blind. He had been carrying the fake I.D. that Wolfrum and Hart had generated for him in his wallet, so the authorities had contacted you and Angel as the next of kin at 2 a.m. after they scraped his body out of the twisted remains of his car and forwarded it to the county morgue; otherwise, you never would have known where he was. It had taken fast footwork on the part of Wolfrum and Hart to gloss things over after he sat up screaming in the middle of a post mortem at the County Morgue. It had taken even faster footwork to get Spike released to your custody from a County Coroner who didn't want a lawsuit on her hands. He then spent a miserable month on painkillers in their shared bungalow at the back of the L.A. Watcher's complex with Cordy fussing over him while she picked broken windshield out of his scalp piece by piece by piece with tweezers. Cordy'd come into their shared bedroom as you and Angel tried to make him comfortable in the splints that were keeping his back and legs from healing crooked and said, "You've both done enough. Stupid as he is, Spike's my responsibility." before closing the door in your faces. You and Angel had leaned against the the wall, water glasses shamelessly pressed tightly to the plaster, openmouthed at what you heard.

After that Cordy'd made a point of finding an anonymous donor who looked as much like Spike as possible —which surprised you almost as much as her tenderness in looking after Captain Peroxide as his body repaired itself.

Queen C. actually loving someone enough to take care of them? Again, whodda thunk?

This afternoon after lunch you found the two of them napping through the day's heat in the room next to you and Angel's; Spike's head resting against Cordy's ever swelling middle, one pale arm draped protectivly over her. Her arms were around his narrow shoulders as the ceiling fan hummed lazily overhead and the gauze curtains blew around the windows in slow motion billows. Despite their non-stop bickering, maybe they really do love each other

Angel has now decided to treat Sorcha like a football, thundering across the Center's July-dry front lawn, with Spike easily keeping up, the two of them passing Angel's only grandchild back and forth, weaving 'round the flower beds, dodging the birdbath and the elaborate rock gardens, vaulting a split rail fence, and crashing through a hedge before leaping over Virginia and Wesley's little vintage Volkswagen beetle.

Those two have been out on a month long motoring tour of the Midwest (Wesley's idea, not Virginia's) before she gets too pregnant to enjoy the ride. They were at Cahokia Mounds across the Mississippi River in Illinois when you contacted them on Virginia's cell phone. They arrived right after Angel, Sorcha and Connor.

Virginia had been another surprise — without warning, the tiny wizard's daughter showed up on Wesley's doorstep one week before Christmas two years ago with a bottle of wine in one hand and a suitcase full of spellbooks and black silk nighties in the other. You'd always thought Wesley was a prat, but around Virginia, he was a different person. Virginia, once she got to know you better, confided to you that she'd given up on trying to lead a normal life, finding that life as a mage among "mundanes" just wasn't worth it and that Wesley was one of the only men she'd ever met who could accept her as she was.

You kinda sorta like Virginia. She would have made one hell of a Slayer. She and Wesley are getting ready to drive into town to get more ice and another case of beer. Virginia yells as Spike and Sorcha sail over her head without warning, before sending a sizzling blue ball of St. Elmos' Fire after them, hollering at them not to do it again.

Spike's now up on the split shake shingle roof of the big cabin that houses the main office building. Sorcha's scrambling up the drainpipe to join him. Angel's not far behind, his bulk's caused the gutter to collapse, spilling him into the cedar bushes around the foundation. Both Sorcha and Spike aren't helping — you have to admit, seeing your lover thrashing around in the cedars while the his grandchild and Childe pelt him with egg sized green burr oak acorns is hysterical. You take a pull at the beer, enjoying the coolness as it washes down your throat.

Xander and Willow are trying to get the big fieldstone bar-b-cue pit to cooperate. They arrived today after lunch in a literal puff of smoke in a coat closet with their clothes on backwards.

Kennedy's gone for good and those two are billing and cooing. They've been billing and cooing for three years now, four? Five? Xander's getting fat, construction worker fat with a big beer belly but muscular arms and legs. Willow's gone white with no trace of the red hair that you remember her for. Both don't seem to mind, though. Xander's starting to look like his father, complete with a bald spot in the back that he tries to conceal with a ball cap when he's not executing a combover which fools nobody but him.

Yesterday Spike convinced Sorcha to make a smiley face on Xander's bald spot with one of your favorite lipsticks while Xander was nodding over a fishing pole down at the crystalline Jack's Fork River that meanders along the bottom of the big Complex lawn.

Some things never change.

Xander swears and jumps back when the bar-b-cue bursts into a ball of flame. As usual, Willow got impatient and tossed in a few "Fiat Luxes".

What was that I just said?

Angel is now chasing Spike, who has Sorcha heaved over one shoulder like a sack of giggling potatoes, along the narrow ridge of the Administration building's roof. Spike's about five strides ahead and Angel's fast losing ground. With one hand Spike grabs a tree branch, using it to launch himself and Sorcha off the roof, into the air, and to the ground with Angel landing heavily behind.

Sorcha's laughing so hard that she's going hoarse. Earlier today you went swimming with her and her father in the river. There were dark, shady places along the stream where the trees met and the limestone cliffs rose high enough into the air to block out most of the sun so Angel joined you, nervously watching the sky, a tarp within easy grabbing distance. After Connor took Sorcha into the woods to look for blackberries, you and Angel found a deep overhanging ledge along the bank and made long, slow love in the clear cold water, a stake within easy reach as the sun beat down and the cicadas strummed and thrummed in the grass. Connor blushed visibly beneath his sunburn when he met the two of you later, but he didn't say anything. Sorcha's mouth was purple and she had to lie down for a while with a blackberry stomach ache.

There were still enough berries left over in Connor's hat for Giles, whom you drove up to St. Louis after lunch this afternoon to fetch from Lambert, to make a small cobbler. It's now cooling on the picnic table over by the now roaring bar-b-cue pit as he supervises Willow and Xander.

Sorcha's now showing both vampires how to catch the fireflies which are now rising thick and fast from the dew-slick grass. She's decorated Angel with glow worms so that he now looks like a man shaped Christmas tree —of course Spike's making the most of it. Cordy gets up out of her lawn chair and languidly stretches before padding barefoot over to join them. Spike puts his arm 'round Cordy's waist giving her a quick snog while Sorcha pretends to gag.

Lorne has joined Faith and Connor on the nearby Clematis vine draped glider. He and Faith showed up at right after Angel, loaded down with gifts for everyone and a karaoke machine complete with camping songs and Barry Manilow tunes, looking like the the entire cast of Ocean's Eleven on summer vacation while Faith was downright scandalous as usual in a pair of Daisy Dukes and a halter top that left nothing to the imagination. This morning you came down to breakfast in the big echoing dining hall and found Sorcha sitting on Lorne's lap, contentedly painting his horns hot pink with the nail polish that came with the little makeup kit he'd given her as Faith drank her first cup of the day while trying to convince Connor to take her caving. Faith now has her own Hellmouth and a small team of younger Slayers to contend with in Boston and wants Connor to come live with her.

Sorcha's abandoned her two playmates and has now joined Connor, Lorne, and Faith on the glider. She's climbing all over her father like a monkey, excitedly chattering about what a good time she's having as she tries to braid his lank hair.

Oh god, why can't it always be like this?

You dread the day when you have to explain to Sorcha that not everybody has an uncle and a grandfather that drink blood from a coffee cup, who will never grow old and die barring an ugly staking accident, or a playmate that has red eyes and green skin and who can shatter glass with one high pitched shriek.

So you finish your beer, surrounded by the warm darkness and the voices of your family and friends, savoring Sorcha's innocence while you can.