FIC: "A History" (Dawn/Darla, R) for lafemmedarla
I know I've been MIA of late, and for plenty of good reasons. I owe people comments and emails and all sorts of things, and I apologize because I'll be a while yet in getting those to you. Sorry for being flaky, but <3 you guys.
In the meantime, have fic:
TITLE: A History
RATING: R
FANDOMS: BtVS/AtS
PAIRING: Darla/Dawn
SPOILERS: “The Wish”
SUMMARY: Wishverse, future.
PROMPT: For lafemmedarla for femslash_minis’s Dawn Round. Requested was lip gloss and a view, with no non-con or character death. (Which, of course, completely ruined my first vision of this story . . .)
AUTHOR’S NOTES: For serious, Patricia, I feel so dirty now. Not yet sure if it’s the good dirty. Also, I really hope you like this, sweetie, and I apologize again for being late! Love you like cake, baby.
The Slayer is wearing sweet-scented lip gloss. It creates a plasticky barrier slightly separating Darla from the girl’s true taste: the Slayer as conceived by Mattel. But the balm is sticky enough that it moves all kisses to slow motion, and leaves small, nearly-transparent reminders upon Darla’s moonlight-pale skin. Normally, Darla does not like to be marked by her lovers, but there’s something appealing about this documentation: it’s a still life history of their lovemaking.
***
It didn’t take long to gut a town, if you had the numbers and hundreds of years of expertise . . . and a machine that made Lunchables of the townsfolk.
Personally, Darla had never cared much for technology. She was a fan of being waited on, don’t mistake, and she had an unrivaled eye for vogue, but modern advancements were beginning to make everything too impersonal. Like the Factory; Darla didn’t understand the point in impersonal death. It’s not as though she had snuggly feelings toward humans, but slaughtering them like cattle without even laying a finger on them . . . ? Where was the fun in that?
***
She’d taken her first Slayer when she was barely fifty, still young and a little stupid and drunk on the exhilaration of the kill.
They hadn’t left the New World yet, and the girl was dark-eyed and bronze-skinned, not beautiful but burning with a fire Darla could feel from beyond the city limits. Stupid, but brave.
Darla broke the girl’s neck first, and still remembers the feel of the limp body draped across her arms like a winter dress. The first taste was enough to literally fell her to her knees.
***
Sunnydale had been a hellhole since not too long after the Master’s rising, and Darla had mostly steered clear once she’d done her part in the occupation. She loved a war, but the town had fallen too quickly, and the chaos and fear that were trademarks of battle were nearly completely bled from the aftermath. Curfews and hiding, and beautification gone to shit. Add to that the shame of her Angel’s ill-fated display of his rotten soul, and there were a million reasons to leave, and only one to stay.
Duty got old, and Darla left. The Master had an empire to run, and a constantly increasing number of soldiers to enforce his will; Darla was loyal, but only as loyal as an only child. When it got crowded enough at home that she was overshadowed, she found a new arena where she could have more of the spotlight.
***
She twines the girl’s thick hair around her wrist and pulls just enough that she’s not sure which bond is stronger: the leash arresting the Slayer’s movements, or the shackle around her own wrist.
Darla pulls a little more until the balance is clear, and the girl keens. If she was stupid, she never would have lived this long.
***
She hung around Europe for a few years before it got old. Hell help her, but she never thought she’d be wishing for the old Venetians, the old English. This new breed was insufferable in a way that left her hungry, a bad taste in her mouth. They were hardly better than Americans.
***
She’d taken her second Slayer when Angelus was still learning to heel. After one particularly vexing incident with a Parisian clergyman, Darla had, the boy over her knee, carefully explained why discretion and care were needed in all things; she explained about the Slayer and her purpose, about perfectly respectable demons being hunted down and killed by one measly human girl.
At the time, Darla had felt almost foolish, spooning out cautionary bedtime stories like a common human mother trying to instill morals into her empty-headed offspring. But then, within the week, she received news of a new Slayer in her town. Like she had summoned the girl with her words.
It would have been her last scuffle with a Slayer - or anyone else, for the matter - if the child’s aim had been better. Darla had, after taking a nasty blow to the face, momentarily left herself open to attack, and soon found herself with a stake to the chest.
Unfortunately for the girl, French and ugly and soon throatless, she’d hit a lung, not the heart, and Darla pulled the stake out before taking care of the girl.
***
She would never admit it, but Darla is sentimental about America. The place of her birth - and her death, for that matter - remains sacred and beloved even as other truths and other loves disappoint her.
For this reason, she keeps finding herself back on the shores of the New World, a jaded and hungry Viola climbing from the turbulent sea to the waiting shores of Illyria.
She hates Shakespeare. Flowery queer.
***
The girl is pretty in the way that provokes most humans to say things like, ‘She needs to eat something’ or ‘She’d be pretty if she ever smiled.’
Darla doesn’t care about the girl’s health, and she certainly doesn’t want to see her smile. Darla can tell, even from across a crowded, noisy dance floor, that this is the Slayer, and you have to be stupid to want to see your adversary smiling at you.
***
Darla took her final Slayer not long before Spike took his first. The four of them were still tooling about Hungary after the earthquake. Angelus had been restless for the past few weeks; he’d said a couple things Darla had largely ignored about finding proper mayhem in Romania, but she was getting to the point of aimless ennui that the idea was beginning to have potential.
She’d taken Angelus out to find something interesting to eat, just the two of them. Angelus was jittery enough that he was bordering mania; he had been for days. Darla was tiring of it, but found herself too exhausted to knock him back in his place, so she let him huff and stamp around her without comment.
Angelus found the girl first. Darla was secretly furious, particularly when she identified the source of his recent irritation. She should have been flattered, she knew: she had created a keen monster. But sometimes Angelus’s talents exceeded her own by such a margin as to make her uncomfortable - like when he’d turned that idiot psychic - and she wasn’t sure, exactly, how to respond. She wasn’t used to being uncomfortable without being able to remedy the situation by swift elimination of the irritant. Swift and painful, if at all possible.
Angelus knew the girl immediately upon seeing her, and he cornered her like a foxhound rounding up its quarry. Darla had been, for a moment, almost certain that he wouldn’t obey when asked to back down, but - after a weighty pause, during which the barometric pressure rose several points - he bowed and retreated, hackles still raised.
The girl was too terrified and beaten to fight, and Darla drank her quickly. The blood this time was bitter. They’d leave for Romania in the morning.
***
Dark, wet alley. On the way to the wall, the Slayer’s slender legs rattle trashcans, causing a tin cacophony. Darla propels the girl against the brick wall with such force that her skin abrades on contact; Darla doesn’t see the blood but she smells it, tastes it on the back of her tongue, the moment it hits the air.
For a long moment she closes her eyes and just revels in the headrush. Slayer Slayer Slayer Slayer
And then the girl’s strong, thin fingers are grabbing her wrist, the waist of her skirt. Darla opens her eyes.
***
While still in Europe, Darla heard about the Master killing the Slayer at the opening of his Factory. Angel, it seemed, was killed, too, leading some sort of half-assed rebellion.
Darla returned home minutes before dawn, blood still sticky beneath her fingernails.
***
She’s stopped hunting, really. She is old, and the hunt hasn’t left her anything but memories and disappointments. Her boy, who was supposed to be her companion and her legacy, has disgraced her more than she’d ever thought possible. And left her alone with nothing but shadows and dust. So no more conquests. Nothing but the brief, ecstatic moments of the kill; none of the time and energy that goes into crafting a masterpiece.
She’s too old for that kind of thing, and what is it that they say? There’s really no new art anymore?
***
The girl is stretched out on her bed, pale and lean. Her white, white skin is stretched like silk over a configuration of seashells. You could lay your ear in the hollow of her hip and hear the ocean.
The dim twilight is beginning to lighten to gold and red. Darla should really close the curtains, but one of her few remaining indulgences is a view, and she likes to keep it as long as she can. The changing light illuminates the Slayer’s skin strangely. Kaleidoscope shadow puppets.
***
Darla certainly isn’t planning on hunting the Slayer, even when she hears that the girl is newly called and in her city. But then one night she’s quietly walking the alleys and feels a fever kindling behind her breastbone. Slayer Slayer Slayer Slayer
Her feet take a new path on their own accord. Soon, she’s watching the girl kill with the nonchalance of someone much older; she’s watching the girl twist and writhe to bass-heavy rhythms in a smoky, five-dollar-cover bacchanal.
***
“My sister died seven years ago,” the girl says. Her lip gloss mouth shines with the light of the brightening sky. “One day she just left, and a few months later we got a notice of death from some nowhere town in California. My mom had to fly out there and everything, to collect the body.”
Darla doesn’t say anything. Words are so meaningless, and the effort to speak is enormous.
“It’s not like she was home a lot, anyways. Ever since we moved to Cleveland, she was gone all the time. For nights, days. Bunches of days.”
The pads of Darla’s fingers run over the girl’s ribs. She thinks of topography, and then of that game school children play to remember the calendar, lining up their knuckles: Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November . . .
“At first I was really pissed-well, first I was sad, you know, but eventually I got really mad. I mean, she was hardly my sister. She was just someone who sometimes lived in the same house as me. She made my mom cry a lot.”
All the rest have thirty-one . . .
“Then one day I was going through her stuff, you know, seeing if there was any decent clothing? There was some good stuff left from when she used to be normal, a cheerleader and everything - if you can call that normal - but not a lot. But I found her weapons. Then I thought she was a super freak, you know? Like everyone said, in a gang or something.”
Darla doesn’t remember whether she ever had any siblings. Memory is so fragile and transient, and almost certainly a living thing. At least a living thing like the beach is, constantly changing itself; neither memory nor the dunes are ever the same twice.
“But then a year later my Watcher showed up, and I got it. It just sucks, you know? We had this big thing in common she never told me about . . . but, I guess, if she’d never died, I’d never have become the Slayer, so we wouldn’t have had this thing to bond over anyway . . . it’s a catch-22 or whatever.”
The Slayer’s hair is fanned across the disturbed sheets, a crimson wave. The effect is that of a suspension of gravity: a mermaid floating serenely upon the ocean.
Darla notices that the girl is completely hairless below the neck, a perfect porcelain mockup of a human being, a seashell skeleton. Darla does not understand why children today are in such a rush to become old, to die.
Beyond the parted curtains, the sky is quickly approaching gold. It shimmers off the Slayer’s red hair, falsely colors her pale flesh. In this light, the girl could be a young, freckled star of a fifties beach party movie: poodle skirts and hairpins and completely sexless sex.
Her smell is so heavy in the room that Darla fights the urge to lick it from her fingers.
She really ought to close the curtains.