Mortar
Tara was only a few yards away from the door of the magic shop when she stopped. Looked at the familiar door, imagined the warm greetings if she opened it and walked in.
She turned and walked the other way.
As she headed away from Sunnydale's main strip, she felt the luxury of how stupid she was being. Instead of taking refuge in the headquarters of a slayer, she was walking down a badly lit street in a town infested by vampires. She didn't have a stake, she didn't have a cross. She was alone and unprotected.
She stopped for a moment, leaning up against a rough wall, just listening. A slight breeze swept some trash along the street, but there was nothing else to hear. She just looked into the darkness, her eyes filling with it, her heart pounding harder. This was not a room painted black to keep out the garish sunlight, this was the place where sunlight never came, where pure white brightness was forbidden.
Her palms were digging into the bricks behind her back, and for a moment, the fear welled up and she almost laughed with the surprising novelty of it. No kittens, no pajamas, nothing soft for her to need. Cold brick, dirt and a breeze in a place where she was allowed to die.
A sudden sound to her left caused her heart to leap into her throat, although she wasn't sure if she was more afraid of being found out or being killed.
(Or were they the same-)
"The wrist," a rough voice ordered, a voice that she almost knew.
She took a silent step, and another, and she looked around a dumpster to see him, leaning against a wall, one of his hands pressed into the brick as hers had been only moments before. He wasn't smiling tenderly, he wasn't being good natured or well behaved or supportive. He was looking mostly disinterested as a vampire with long brown hair sucked on his forearm, and Tara quelled her impulse to applaud.
She could turn away, smile at him from Willow's side later, watch him joke with Xander and never tell.
But it was a night for reality, and she walked closer, fighting the urge to smile.
When he looked up and saw her, he just nodded. "I'll be with you in a minute."
The vampire didn't seem to notice, because her focus was complete and his blood still tasted like sunshine, no matter how far away from it he tried to run.
A stake, a crumbling, and he walked over to where Tara stood.
"You didn't go to the meeting?"
Tara shook her head. "Are we in-laws?"
He smiled, tight, rough edged like brick. "Part of the family."
The corner of her mouth lifted.
"Tara, I don't want to explain this to you, I'm just-"
"Locked in her definition of who you are?"
He looked at her then, *her*, and he saw a person who had existed and would exist and didn't depend on any circumstance or living arrangement.
"Do you know," she whispered, looking at the sky that she could see, "how long it's been since I was allowed to introduce myself to anyone?"
He held out his hand, blood still dripping down his wrist. "Riley."
She shook it, smearing the red (red all around, but this was a red that was hot liquid and not soft on a pillow) and finally coming to realize that Riley's hands were his own. "Tara."
With that, he spun her around, slamming her up against the wall. She could feel brick through her coat, and it wasn't the pain that she wanted, it was the certain definition of sensation. No love clouding her senses, just brick and huge hands holding her still.
She was in love and he was in love and his mouth was full of anger, although if he was surprised to find some of the same in her own he didn't say anything. He didn't want her expressive lips and she had no desire to keep his tight fingers, but neither had gone looking for clear darkness to end up exchanging pleasantries in an alley.
Nothing pleasant.
Her neck hurt from its angle, but they were both second tries, and for a moment the brick and being seen by someone else made it all just right.
He let her go before it became wrong (for them- some might have called it wrong before, but there was obviously some flaw in their perspective if these two felt so desperate to escape it) and his blood was on both of them.
"I'll see you at the meeting."
He walked off, rolling down his sleeve, and Tara reluctantly removed herself from her groove in the welcoming sharp wall.
When she walked through the door, people smiled and she smiled back. She sat next to a girl with gentle lips and hands and Buffy didn't feel the fabric of bandages underneath her boyfriend's sleeve. Warm and soft was perfect again and three days later, she picked her coat up from the dry cleaners with a girl's tapering fingers laced through her own.