Star Wars link and Darla ficlet
Interested in reading essays analyzing Star Wars? (Without a single "George Lucas ruined my childhood!" whine...) Go and visit the new Star Wars Journal, launched by fernwithy et al.
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Kathyh wanted a human Darla at Christmas drabble for her inside beta-reading of the Londo essay. It turned out to be another mini ficlet (562 words). Why can't these characters keep it brief(er)? Anyway. Early season 2 of AtS. No Tiny Tim in sight.
Christmas Carol
Wolfram and Hart lets its employees celebrate Christmas. It's a quaint fact Darla discovers when Lindsey asks her, hesitating, whether she wants to spend the holidays with him. She declines, with a smile just amused enough to tease but not to taunt; after all, she is well aware she needs all the allies she can get in her new and weak human state.
"Someone has to be working," she adds, "and it is time that I…"
"Start earning your keep?" Lilah suggests. Darla's smile does not falter. Inwardly, she wonders what Lilah would taste like.
"Precisely."
So she is alone in the apartment they gave her, with a lot of food she has had to learn the names of in the last month. As a vampire, she posed as human occasionally, but there had never been the need to keep it long enough to go shopping. Spike, of course, had bored them each and sunder with his unbreakable enthusiasm for human delicacies, but it has been decades since she has last seen Spike and Drusilla, and whatever meals had caught his enthusiasm then might no longer exist now.
Recalling the enthusiasm the school children of Sunnydale had for chocolate, and the fact these children were rather tasty themselves, she tries products by Hershey, and is horrified by the blandness of the taste. The bread is even worse, white and soft and without any resistance. There is not much she recalls from her first life, but she is sure bread was better than that in Jamestown. So much for progress.
Thankfully, there is one taste that won't disappoint. Leaving her unaccustomed human body with its weaknesses behind, she tracks down her darling boy in his dreams. She is her old self again here, literally, wearing the robes of centuries past. It's better to confront him first this way, and it is fitting. Rather relentlessly, he dreams of snow. This is a new obsession she can't understand, and it disquiets her that the snow he dreams up melts on her cheeks. After all, her body is not supposed to exude any heat. She has not fed yet.
He is walking through a Californian street in his dream, but the snow is as thick and heavy as the storms she recalls from their journeys through Russia. It doesn't make sense. When he sees her, he stops and stares at her.
"It can't be you, not here," he exclaims, and two things occur to her. He is not surprised to dream of her as such, which is rather gratifying. But he did not expect her in the snow. He expected the other, the school girl. The cheerleader he killed her for.
Oh, he deserves everything the lawyers have in store for him.
Even now, though, her smile does not falter. Instead, she bites in her left wrist, then kneels down and lets her blood pour in the street. All the snow turns red, quickly, inevitably, and he runs to her to make it stop. But as he touches her wrist, his face changes. There he is again, her darling boy, and he drinks from her. She is what she wants to be here, and so feels her face transform as she bites him in turn. All the tastes she ever wanted are back, and there is nothing but lovely red.
The snow, though, keeps falling.
***
In other news, andrastewhite has written her first Crusade fanfic. Ah, fannish life is good.
***
Kathyh wanted a human Darla at Christmas drabble for her inside beta-reading of the Londo essay. It turned out to be another mini ficlet (562 words). Why can't these characters keep it brief(er)? Anyway. Early season 2 of AtS. No Tiny Tim in sight.
Christmas Carol
Wolfram and Hart lets its employees celebrate Christmas. It's a quaint fact Darla discovers when Lindsey asks her, hesitating, whether she wants to spend the holidays with him. She declines, with a smile just amused enough to tease but not to taunt; after all, she is well aware she needs all the allies she can get in her new and weak human state.
"Someone has to be working," she adds, "and it is time that I…"
"Start earning your keep?" Lilah suggests. Darla's smile does not falter. Inwardly, she wonders what Lilah would taste like.
"Precisely."
So she is alone in the apartment they gave her, with a lot of food she has had to learn the names of in the last month. As a vampire, she posed as human occasionally, but there had never been the need to keep it long enough to go shopping. Spike, of course, had bored them each and sunder with his unbreakable enthusiasm for human delicacies, but it has been decades since she has last seen Spike and Drusilla, and whatever meals had caught his enthusiasm then might no longer exist now.
Recalling the enthusiasm the school children of Sunnydale had for chocolate, and the fact these children were rather tasty themselves, she tries products by Hershey, and is horrified by the blandness of the taste. The bread is even worse, white and soft and without any resistance. There is not much she recalls from her first life, but she is sure bread was better than that in Jamestown. So much for progress.
Thankfully, there is one taste that won't disappoint. Leaving her unaccustomed human body with its weaknesses behind, she tracks down her darling boy in his dreams. She is her old self again here, literally, wearing the robes of centuries past. It's better to confront him first this way, and it is fitting. Rather relentlessly, he dreams of snow. This is a new obsession she can't understand, and it disquiets her that the snow he dreams up melts on her cheeks. After all, her body is not supposed to exude any heat. She has not fed yet.
He is walking through a Californian street in his dream, but the snow is as thick and heavy as the storms she recalls from their journeys through Russia. It doesn't make sense. When he sees her, he stops and stares at her.
"It can't be you, not here," he exclaims, and two things occur to her. He is not surprised to dream of her as such, which is rather gratifying. But he did not expect her in the snow. He expected the other, the school girl. The cheerleader he killed her for.
Oh, he deserves everything the lawyers have in store for him.
Even now, though, her smile does not falter. Instead, she bites in her left wrist, then kneels down and lets her blood pour in the street. All the snow turns red, quickly, inevitably, and he runs to her to make it stop. But as he touches her wrist, his face changes. There he is again, her darling boy, and he drinks from her. She is what she wants to be here, and so feels her face transform as she bites him in turn. All the tastes she ever wanted are back, and there is nothing but lovely red.
The snow, though, keeps falling.
***
In other news, andrastewhite has written her first Crusade fanfic. Ah, fannish life is good.