FIC: These Roads We Travel: Detour Ahead

["Kimber" <feralspirit@xxxxxxxx>]

TITLE: These Roads We Travel: Detour Ahead
AUTHOR: Kimber (FeralSpirit@xxxxxxxx)
DISCLAIMER: All BTVS characters belong to Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy.
SUMMARY: Laurel?s POV on her relationship with Lisa.
SPOILERS: Everything is fair game.
DISTRIBUTION: The usual suspects. Anyone else, e-mail me please.
AUTHOR'S NOTES: For my ?perfect drug?. Just because. . .you?re you. :-)

-----

Laurel walked into her hospital room, exhausted. Everything happened so
quickly, she barely had time to catch her breath. Buffy found out about her
training with Angel, and her crush; Faith was Lisa?s mother; Her own
mother, Willow, wasn?t dead after all, but laid in a bed much like her own,
two floors away in a coma the doctors weren?t sure she?d ever come out of.

The young Slayer looked around the room and spotted her backpack. She
retrieved it and sighed in relief to see that her Journey book remained
inside. Willow had given the book to her. It wasn?t anything fancy, just
your standard wire bound journal made from recycled paper. It gave the book
a worn look and Laurel was quite fond of it. Often, she?d sit for hours
writing in it. It was her best friend and held all of her secrets, fears
and dreams. Dreams that seemed to be revolving around one person lately.

Her Journey book had been filled up with complaints about teachers
misunderstanding her, Buffy telling her to pick up her room, a dust count of
the vamps she ran into on a nightly basis, and other teenage things. Lately
though, the book had taken on a whole new meaning in her life. It became
the place where she could flesh out her feelings and not have to take
anything back. It was the place where she could say how she felt without
the fear of being judged. It was her safe haven and where she could try and
put to words exactly how she felt.

-------------

Will you?

Will you let me whisper sweet nothings in you ear? Brush the strands of
hair from your face? I want to watch you sleep, and be able to plant a
kiss on your forehead if the urge strikes me, which, I?m sure it will. I
want to look at you and know you?re having sweet dreams, and not haunting
nightmares. I want to kiss your lips, your nose, your lips. . .your
eyelids, face, cheek, and lips again just for good measure.

I want to listen.

I want to hear your darkest secrets and deepest desires. I want to
understand. I want to look into your eyes and tell you I love your with a
certainty I thought I?d lost.

I want you.

I want you to tell me; everything. I want to let you know me for who I am,
and not what others perceive me to be. Speak to me. Tell me the good, bad
and indifferent things in your life and make me want to know more. Let me
look into your eyes and see reflected there, a promise of us ? what ever
that may be. Let me know that I?m not alone anymore. Teach me to trust
you. Make me feel like I can stand on the edge of a cliff with you so close
behind that no air can pass between us, and still feel safe.

Carry me with the strength of a thousand men, but with the tenderness only a
woman can provide. Comfort me. Protect me from the world, but most of all,
protect me from myself in the way only you know how to do. Run your hands
up and down my back, my arms, my cheek; simply because you want to and aren?
t ashamed to admit it. Make me feel that this is real, tangible, touchable,
and not some dream I?m going to wake up from.

Feel me.

Feel with your heart, what you mean now and have the potential to mean in
the future. Please, God, let me mean something to you. Anything at all.
Hold me and don?t let go, especially if it hurts, or confuses or compounds
the problems we know already exist outside of you and me.

Kiss me.

Hug me, hold me. Open your arms and welcome me the way I want to welcome
you. Stand next to me in a world where people abandon the ones they love
the most out of fear and anger and hatred. Share with me. Share the
passion and gentleness, warmth and strength I know exists somewhere in this
world. In our world.

Touch me. Everywhere. Touch my soul. Thrill me, scare me, make me feel
alive.

Make me stand there with the most interesting expression of contentment on
my face from the sound of your voice and the way you say ?hello?. Most of
all, above all this, above everything with or without meaning; I have one
last request.

Exist.

-----

?I do exist.? Lisa whispered to a sleeping Slayer as she placed a kiss on
her forehead and tucked a stray piece of hair behind her ear. Carefully,
she pulled the covers over the sleeping form and closed the cover of the
Journey book. After placing the book in Laurel?s backpack, Lisa got
comfortable in the chair next to the Slayer?s bed. Not long after, she
drifted off to sleep and to a place filled with nothing but sweet dreams.

---------

~~Kimber

List Gutter Lust Goddess, Masked Road Runner (meep, meep!!), Keeper of the
crazy lil comma, Pat's Elmer to his Wabbit, and Official Tormenter the
Phantom Chimpunk and her band of crazy nuts. Proud supporter of the Mad
Poet Society and the Troll under the Bridge.

"What's that feeling you get when you're driving away from people and they
recede on the plane until you see their specks dispersing? It's the too
huge world vaulting us and it is goodbye; but we lean forward towards the
next crazy venture beneath the sky."
Jack Keruac, 'On The Road'

Member of the BtVS Writers Guild: Because fic makes anything possible.