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"This lovely bit of walnut. Was it left out in the rain?"

Wesley picked up the gunstock, which had once been a gunsmith's pride. The grain was still a lovely thing under the stains.

"Something like that," Buffy said. Her voice was odd. Had he just trod on her toes again? He heard her fiddling with the tools strewn over the table. "Rains more here than it does in LA."

"And even more where Merrick and I came from."

Her chair scraped on the bare floor. Buffy vanished down the hallway. He'd transgressed again, and reminded her of past loss. Wesley wondered if she were finished with him for the night. He soaked a rag in gun oil and began rubbing it into the stock. Buffy reappeared a few minutes later and joined him. She had a bottle of nail polish, something pale pink, with glitter. She uncapped it and set to work on her hands as methodically as he was working on the gunstock.

She refreshed his teacup a little while later, silently. She'd noticed he took it with a little milk and no sugar. Observant. He opened his mouth to praise her, then shut it again. She didn't need praise from the likes of him.

Buffy capped the bottle of nail polish. Wesley gazed up at her. She was holding out her hands to inspect her work. There she was, the woman behind the Slayer. The girl who'd lived in California sunshine, there at his second-hand worktable. She smiled to herself, unconscious of his gaze, and stretched gracefully. Wesley's breath caught. He hadn't been expecting this. The Slayer he'd met last week had been all coiled violence and anger and instinct. She'd exploded at him and discarded him. This Slayer was nothing like her. This woman had a sweet smile.

Well done, Pryce, he told himself. His Slayer had been with him for three hours, just three short hours. He needed to keep his mind on his job. He was here to kill vampires, not to moon about over her. She would likely have no patience with him. He shook his head and forced himself to turn away from her, back to his work. Back to restoring some sense of order to his second-hand life.

He turned his attention to the second gun. It was obviously mate to the first, one of a matched pair by the same maker. It looked to be in considerably better condition. He pulled the trigger. Smooth, definite engagement point. The hammer snapped down solidly. The slide action felt good. He broken open the gun and sniffed. This gun hadn't been used since it had left the maker's workshop. A touch of oil to keep the mechanism smooth, then. He set it down.

Buffy stood and came around near him. He could smell the soap she'd used in her hair, and he breathed in deeply. Soap and nail polish and gunstock oil and a whiff of his tea. She leaned against the table and nudged the shotgun. "Brutal."

Aha, you're pointing directly at the ruling metaphor of that story.

"Gunpowder Tea" was written for the het mini ficathon comm, which gives you a week to respond to a prompt and requires a 500 word minimum. My prompter loves the Wishverse and asked for Wishverse Buffy/Wesley, so my first challenge was: how do those two meet in the Wishverse? She also asked for no character death, and that gave me the idea of a wacky Wishverse scenario in which Buffy lives through the Master snapping her neck. But, as with the S1 ender, she dies before she lives, so Faith is called. Giles will have his hands full with her.

Also in this scenario, implied by the story, is a Merrick who survives and is Buffy's Watcher until very shortly before the incidents of "The Wish". The rain-stained shotgun was his, and it was damaged when he died. It's also not something Buffy can deal with. There's a lot of detail packed into the description of the house that attempts to hint to the reader what sort of relationship Merrick had with Buffy, and how that might have shaped her into the Slayer we saw in "The Wish". Damaged. A lovely object left out in the rain.

I rewatched "The Wish" while I was writing this, because I wanted to refresh my physical impressions of Buffy. I have Wesley linger here on what I noticed: leather cord for the cross, scar on her lip, and yet she's wearing nail polish. There's a Buffy there under the stains.

In the section you excerpt, a green (unstained, unused) Wesley oils the gunstock while scarred (ill-used) Buffy polishes her nails. Wesley will begin a deeper rehabilitation process with Buffy as he continues to clean the gun.

Couldn't resist. Loved the metaphor and all the detail.

I hadn't noticed the details in The Wish of Buffy's nail polish. Now I'm hankering to go back and watch it.