FIC: The Doomed Ship Comment Ficathon
Angel the Series: Drusilla/Spike
It wasn’t a very good poem. Drusilla knew poetry - she read it in the stars and wrote it on the faces of her prettiest victims - and her sweet little Spike, who had a great many talents, didn’t know how to string the words together properly. They weren’t beads or jewels or scraps of cloth. You put them together to get them to tell a story, not because they made pretty patterns.
Still, it was the end of the world. He was allowed to spend his last hours however he wanted.
(She’d seen it, you see. The circle - that vicious black circle - was tightening like a noose around the Angel Beast and his followers. Sooner rather than later, the city of the angels would sink to meet the devils.)
“My soul is wrath in harsh repose,” he said. He sounded terribly young. Strange, wasn’t it, how the years peeled away as he got older? She’d done her best to stamp William out of him, but the Slayer had rekindled the goodness. A waste of all his wickedness. “Midnight descends in raven coloured clothes, but soft, behold! A sunlight beam, cutting a swath of glittering gleam.”
Drusilla yawned widely, looking away from Spike to survey the audience in a cold, calculating fashion. Who was he thinking of? Not her. She was the moon, not the sun. She was blackness and ashes. The Slayer … but, no, he’d written this poem long before he’d met her.
This wasn’t for anyone. Her boy was singing for himself.
“My heart expands, ‘tis grown a bulge in it …”
She remembered when his heart had belonged to her. A long time ago and no time at all. They’d been pulled apart by forces beyond their control - not just the Slayer, but the threads of a destiny she wouldn’t have chosen for him - but he was still hers. Still hers in all the ways that mattered, whether he knew it or not.
“… inspired by your beauty effulgent.”
There was nothing but silence.
Moving swiftly and silently, Drusilla gripped the nearest audience member - a funny little man in a heavy leather jacket - by the throat. Her nails were already dark red. You could barely see the threads of crimson that spilled down his skin when she started to squeeze.
“If you don’t cheer for my boy,” she whispered, “I’ll have to rip your throat out.”
They all started to clap after that. Spike beamed with pride and Drusilla felt her heart - or what was left of it, at least - jump with a love she’d never really manage to forget.
Carmilla: Laura/Carmilla
With a gasp, Laura dropped the scissors.
The blood made a crimson stain on the bright white linen. When she looked from the cut on her palm to the spreading mark on the sheet, she saw Carmilla’s lips curving into a smile.
“Oh!” exclaimed Madame Perrodon, hurrying forward and shaking her out of her reverie by catching her wrist, “You careless girl!”
She opened her mouth to apologise, but, as usual, her words were brushed aside. They - Madame Perrodon, Mademoiselle de la Fontaine, even her father - had been handling her with kid gloves since Carmilla’s death. As if the slightest pressure would make her shatter.
They didn’t realise that she’d shattered as soon as she’d lost Carmilla. Her dearest friend and most bitter enemy. The other half of her.
When her governess scuttled out of the room to fetch water and a bandage, Laura picked up the sheet and, with a furtive glance over her shoulder, pressed her lips to the bloody mark.
She hadn’t wept for her. She never would. Tears, after all, were not enough to bring her back.
Robin Hood: Guy of Gisborne/Marian
She had infected him. He couldn’t sleep for thinking about her. He struggled to concentrate on anything else when she was in the room and, when she wasn’t, he found himself wondering - foolishly, desperately, inexorably - where she was and what she was doing.
It was a disease, yes, but it was a disease without a cure. He couldn’t cut Marian out of his life when she was the only thing that gave it some semblance of meaning. No surgeon would be able to come up with a remedy for an ailment that an impossibly irrational part of him savoured. No. All he could do was live his life, hoping against hope that, one day, she would look at him as he looked at her.
Guy of Gisborne - a lord without any land, with nothing but his own pride and determination to sustain him - had always known that love was a weakness. He’d seen far too many fall victim to it, falling in love and falling from grace and acting as if giving up the world - the power and the wealth that could have been theirs - had been worth it.
These days, however, he didn’t want a world that didn’t have Marian in it.
Did she know how she had corrupted him? Did she view him with contempt, with pity? Her eyes - such beautiful eyes! - gave nothing away and her demeanour revealed even less.
He was not a patient man.
She pushed him and pushed him but, in the end, she was the one who broke first.
She kissed him. Marian kissed him and Guy kissed her back with all the fervour of a man who had spent months dreaming of a moment that might not have come at all.
Oh, he could read so much in that kiss. More than he’d ever been able to read before.
Marian loved him. No one could have pretended such … such passion.
She was both disease and cure. It didn’t matter. She could run from him - she could hide herself in a nunnery if she truly wanted to - but she couldn’t run from her feelings. One day, she’d come home.
The Demonata: Dervish Grady/Meera Flame
As far as Meera Flame was concerned, fear was an alien sensation as well as an unwelcome one. She was a powerful mage and a skilled demon hunter and she was not frightened of anything.
Except losing Dervish.
Except losing Dervish.
She curled up in the chair next to his hospital bed, resting her head on her arms and drifting in and out of sleep as she listened to the uneven rattle of her old friend’s breathing. He was still sickly pale, but his cheeks had regained a little of their old colour. When Dervish finally spoke, Meera could hear the smile - his bright, beautiful smile - in his voice.
“Have you been here all night?”
“All day,” she corrected, sitting up and pulling her chair closer to the bed, “The sun has only just set.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be. How are you feeling?”
“Tired.”
Gently, she leaned forward to brush his hair - his greying and unruly hair - out of his face.
“You had a heart attack,” she reminded him.
“I know.”
There was a pause that neither of them knew how to fill. In the end, Dervish was the one who spoke.
“I don’t think we could win this war.”
For a moment or two, she simply stared at him.
“No.” She’d faced demons and monsters, but she wasn’t prepared to see Dervish - not Dervish Grady, the hero of the Disciples and the man who had changed her world forever - surrender. Not here. Not now. “Don’t you dare …”
“I’m an old man, Meera.”
“Rubbish! You’re the best warrior I know. And you don’t give up. You’ve never given up. Don’t even think about starting now. Grubbs needs you. I … I need you.”
Her confession was followed by an entirely different sort of silence.
Slowly, carefully, Dervish reached out to take her hand.
“What would I do without you?” he said, softly.
Meera smiled, leaning forward to press her lips to his temple. She’d loved Dervish for as long as she’d known him. The expression on his face made her think that her dreams - her dreams of a future together and the family he'd always been too frightened to let himself have - were closer than she'd ever imagined.
After all, when the war was over and the Shadow was defeated, everything would be different.
“You’ll never have to find out.”
Torchwood: Owen Harper/Toshiko Sato
As Owen watched, Tosh bent over the alien device on her desk and pushed her glasses up her nose. Her long dark hair had fallen forward to screen her face and he wanted - more than anything, more than he wanted a beer or a kebab or a proper night’s sleep - to step forward and brush it back.
It had taken him a long time to realise that Tosh was attractive. When they’d first started working together, Owen had been so intimidated by her quiet intelligence and computer expertise that he’d had difficultly thinking of her as female, yet alone an attractive female.
She made a half hearted attempt to tuck the stray strands behind her ears, biting her bottom lip in concentration.
Bollocks.
Why hadn’t be looked at her properly when he’d been alive?
Why had it taken something as … as bloody cliché as death to open his eyes?
“Are you all right? Owen?”
At least he’d been staring into the middle distance while thinking of her instead of staring at her.
“Yeah, I’m fine, Tosh.”
He wasn’t, of course. He hadn’t been fine since he’d died and she knew that better than anyone.
He could talk to Tosh. Really talk to her. He wasn’t the sort of person who liked talking about his feelings, but she was good at listening to the things that he didn’t say.
“I …”
She gave him an expectant look, her eyes so wide and innocent that it threatened to drive him crazy.
“I was wondering if you’d finished with the 3D scanner?”
“Oh, yes!” A little flustered and pleasantly pink cheeked, she held out the device. (He’d been lucky that it had actually been on her desk, really. But Owen Harper had always been lucky. That was why he was so good at lying.) “It’s fine. Take it.”
One day, he’d get up the courage to say what he really wanted to say to her.
“Thanks, Tosh.”
But not today.