valyssia

Summary: How bad can a piece of fanfiction that’s based on a truly terrible pun be?

Prompts:	#312: Catch-as-Catch-Can at Taming the Muse.
	manthk ’s request at The Awesome Ladies Ficathon and Art-a-thon 2012: Set during the high school years. Willow fantasizes about Cordelia and is conflicted about it.

Rating: FRT: Contains Some Mature Themes: Parental Supervision Suggested.
Word Count: 761.
Commas Brought to You By: Howard Russell.
Character: Willow.
Episode: #017: Reptile Boy.
Pairing: Anything that’s there is expressed as unabashed attraction.
Disclaimer: Another day, another…they don’t pay me anything at all. I just do this to amuse myself and you. That’s what allows me and mine to slip under the radar while playing with characters created by those more fortunate than us.
Author’s Note: The only thing that roots this to the episode is Cordelia hanging out with Buffy. I don’t plan to make using so thin a connection a habit. I just thought the piece was cute. It adds variety to the series.

Absolute Zero

A frozen mass in a sea of swarming bodies, I felt locked in. They orbited my station near the door. Some moved purposefully, others swaying, shimmying, bobbling and gyrating to the synth-laden thump-a-thumpa that overwhelmed the room. Thankfully the bad lighting was working in my favor. No one had noticed me. Being terminally ordinary wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.

By ‘no one’ I mean ‘Cordy and Buffy.’ No one else in the innocuous mish-mash of sometimes familiar faces concerned me. They concerned me lots.

And this was all Cordy’s fault! Or the fault of her fashion sense, or—umm…the shiny strips of insubstantial cloth she had on that almost passed for a halter top. I just had to go and have a random, silly, shameful thought about the likelihood—what with all the undulating—of seeing ‘Cordy in the buff.’

That had been troubling on a ‘collision of the theoretically impossible unstoppable and immovable objects’ sort of scale, mostly because the idea had somehow misplaced its adjective. A split second after it had been inspired by lots of sexy jiggling, mental trickery and hideous punnyness had transformed a state of being into a human being. A beautiful, wonderful, uniquely special bonus human person who in my broken, kaboomy, booby-trapped brain, Cordy had no right to.

After that deft act of self-sabotage, I should’ve just gone away. I would’ve if it hadn’t been for—

They were here together, or sort of, seemingly, somewhat together. Cordy needed to keep her grubby, yet meticulously manicured mitts off. She had her own friends back before she started weaseling her way into my life. These were my friends. It was hard to imagine even her being that petty.

No it wasn’t. Cordy’s evil.

But Buffy belonged to me, which was silly—what with the teensy problem of people belonging to other people. Stuff like that didn’t happen in a reasonable, rational world.

That hadn’t stopped me from having the thought in addition to all the other thoughts that were making me feel like a nudist at a nunnery. Pretty pieces of flesh bouncing, half covered by flowy, sparkly cloth, must be hypnotic if studied too long. My mind wasn’t set for reasonable or rational or anything even neighboring logical anymore. All that had gone bye-bye, giving way to brain spin, thoughts churning like confetti in a vacuum. The resulting heat wave made my face feel and probably look like the burner of a range turned up to boil water for tea.

Tea sounded good.

Tea wasn’t going to happen. Tea would be, as Giles often said, ‘soothing.’ Nothing soothing was apt to happen until I found the sense to beat feet, skedaddle, run away…flee in shame. Deep, crippling, thick, black, hideous shame. The sort of shame that would happen if Buffy noticed me right now. She’d doubtless ask, ‘What’s wrong?’

Shame.

Looking had always meant trouble. Seeing and being and doing had gone so far awry this time that I couldn’t even find the sense to avert my eyes. I was still looking. And Cordy was still acting like a shameless hussy. In heat. Cruising for a stud. That was nothing new.

It was embarrassingly jejune, but I was still waiting for her to waggle her boobies just the right way. They were bound to pop out of that skimpy top eventually. It was an inevitable certainty, like Xander needing help with math. He usually needed so much help with math that I did his math. Cordy’s boobs wouldn’t need that much help.

What with happiness being so catch-as-catch-can, missing something that could be both that pretty and funny at once seemed a shame.

Shame.

The actual watching was umm… Why’d such an awful person have to have such nice boobies?

I had a theory once that only mean girls got nice boobies. It was like the titty fairy actually seemed to be passing the nice girls up. Buffy had singlehandedly disproven that. Just the idea of Buff in the buff was troubling enough. The pun—which could’ve been doubly punny what with the buffness of Buff—made it that much worse.

Cordy insinuating herself into the picture had threatened to short circuit my brain for good. Poor curious thing. I wasn’t even consulted. It just scuttled off like a toddler in a minefield.

It was a purely creative exercise. Sort of. An exploration of the ‘inness’ involving cataloging mutually shared, not gender specific pokey parts that could replace other unavailable anatomically necessary—

Creative exercises might be the death of me.

That’d serve me right.