broken and narrow this road i am on, for wal_lace (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, R)
Title: broken and narrow this road i am on
Author: inkandchocolate
Recipient: wal_lace for the apocalyptothon
Fandom: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Rating: R
Warnings: Death, but not character specific
Summary: "I set out on a narrow way many years ago
Hoping I would find true love along the broken road
But I got lost a time or two
Wiped my brow and kept pushing through"
- "This Broken Road", Rascal Flatts
Recipient Request: see end notes
Author's Notes: Beta love to menomegirl and violetfrosting. All errors are mine, not theirs. wal_lace, I hope you enjoy this.
-----------------------------------
They dance to the music of knife and sword, spinning and weaving in their ballet of death. Slayer and demon, paired together, only the humans left standing when the music ends. The stage set of their battlefield is littered with the bodies of the dead and the triumphant grin at each other through masks of blood.
Then the wind rises and the dead change, bodies turning to ash and smoke, whirling up into the sky and across the grass. The grit of their remains clings to human flesh, then spreads, one speck becoming a growing slick of greasy black film that eats away at flesh and bone until there is nothing left. The ash rises again, less than before but still turning the sky as black as night, blotting out the sun.
In seconds the battle field is empty save for the for slippery remains of the humans, and the wind is carrying death to the world, utterly unstoppable.
-----
Faith was in another place when it happened, far enough away to get to shelter before death arrived to claim her. She could hear the screams of those who were not so lucky. It is a sound she will hear every time she sleeps, every single time she closes her eyes, for the rest of her life.
-----
It takes weeks for the ash to dissipate. The toll on human and animal is beyond description, devastating and enormous. How many more die of starvation and thirst is a number that Faith cannot allow herself to consider, not when there are so few survivors that she can find. Not when she has to face the fact every single day that she could not ever find them all anyway, even if they want to be found.
Groups gather, terrified and untrusting. Sometimes they let her get near enough to talk to them. Sometimes they shoot at her. She does what she can for the ones who let her talk, let her in. She helps them find their way to food, teaches them what she knows about getting by. There's more information to share as she makes her way up and down the roads; sometimes she leads one group to another, rebuilding or creating communities
One nasty little clan of men outside of Sarasota tries to catch her in a trap, which she neatly avoids. No real shock that she could tell they were there, lurking in the ditch at the side of the road. She could smell them, and more than that she could smell what they were cooking on their crude firepit. Once is all it takes to recognize burning human flesh, and she leaves the world a little less populated when she catches the ones who think it's just fine to survive by devouring the precious few people still lingering on the face of the earth.
-----
Time spins out without Faith keeping track. Days bleed into weeks, months into years. She's worn out boots, worn out clothes, hacked off her hair when it go so long she couldn't be bothered to work the tangles out. She's eaten everything from snake to snail, from coyote to alligator, from Libby's peaches in syrup to spam and stale Captain Crunch. She forgets the taste of milk, yearns to have something fresh in her mouth again, aches for the sound of traffic and the smell of smog. She cries into her pillow in a hundred motels, dusty and abandoned when the world moved on to this emptiness and trapped her in a life she doesn't want anymore.
She looks for them everywhere, Buffy and Xander especially. She looks for Willow, Giles, Robin, any of the baby Slayers. She asks questions and gets blank looks, some shock and some ignorance and some fear. She leaves notes on buildings, trees, houses, fence posts, abandoned cars. Tells them where she'll be and then waits for a week, sometimes two before moving on.
She tells herself that she's sure they're gone but it never makes her stop leaving those notes, asking those questions. There's resignation, but there's something worse and she thinks that maybe losing all hope is just asking to go out of her mind.
Sometimes she finds someone to connect with, a little human touch in the night to keep her from forgetting that she's alive. Sometimes they ask her to stay but she never does. She is never tempted to make anything permanent. She did that once and it left her here with the world to carry. Never again, she thinks, and a little bit of her dies every time she leaves a lover behind. She makes no promises to ever come back; there's no need to lie anymore.
-----
She thinks about getting herself out of it all. It wouldn't be hard to do, Slayer or not. She's not immortal. There's nothing around her but buildings to leap from. Her pack contains enough weaponry (from habit rather than need, more or less) to take out everyone left in this slipshod shell of humanity, herself included. She could walk into the ocean and just keep going. It would be so easy.
The thought of it possesses her for a long while. She stops paying attention when she walks, or when she takes a motorcycle or a car. She heads for the tallest building in the cities she comes upon, and sometimes she stares up for hours, until her neck cramps and she feels lightheaded and dizzy. Sometimes she goes to the top and perches on the edge, staring out at the emptiness and down at the street.
In Chicago, she puts her arms out to the side as she stands on the edge of some building so tall she lost count of the floors as she climbed thousands of steps to get there. It's hot again, another summer come round, and the wind feels like it's coming out of an oven somewhere. She closes her eyes and lets it blow her wherever it wants, back onto the roof or out into the space between rooftop and ground zero. She gets dizzy with the unknown and feels herself tip.
She only opens her eyes when her back hits the hot and dirty gravel of the roof. The sun is blindingly bright in a sky of such deep blue that it hurts somewhere in her chest. Nothing should be so lovely, she thinks. Beautiful and empty and full of forever, the sky makes her cry. She sobs and screams out into the void until her throat is raw and there's nothing left in her.
When it stops, she lies quietly and lets her eyes flicker from one thing to another - a bird flies overhead, a window flashes sunlight, there is a pebble on the roof beside her head with blue speckles on it almost the color of the sky. She draws in a deep breath, reaches for the pebble and closes her fingers over it tightly, marking her palm with the shape.
Faith sits up when the sky turns from blue to something darker. She opens her fingers and stares at the stone in her hand, then tucks it carefully into the pocket of her jeans before she stands. She is tired, and thirsty and she wants to go find a soft bed and a pillow and someone to share it with her.
She takes the steps back to the street one at a time. She puts one foot in front of the other and goes down and down and down, then out the door to the street. It's empty and cool in the shade of the buildings, and her pack feels familiar on her shoulder. The street leads her on and she follows it as night comes down and the world spins.
----
Recipient Request: The Slayers somehow cause the apocalypse. Faith is left to pick up the pieces.
Author: inkandchocolate
Recipient: wal_lace for the apocalyptothon
Fandom: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Rating: R
Warnings: Death, but not character specific
Summary: "I set out on a narrow way many years ago
Hoping I would find true love along the broken road
But I got lost a time or two
Wiped my brow and kept pushing through"
- "This Broken Road", Rascal Flatts
Recipient Request: see end notes
Author's Notes: Beta love to menomegirl and violetfrosting. All errors are mine, not theirs. wal_lace, I hope you enjoy this.
-----------------------------------
They dance to the music of knife and sword, spinning and weaving in their ballet of death. Slayer and demon, paired together, only the humans left standing when the music ends. The stage set of their battlefield is littered with the bodies of the dead and the triumphant grin at each other through masks of blood.
Then the wind rises and the dead change, bodies turning to ash and smoke, whirling up into the sky and across the grass. The grit of their remains clings to human flesh, then spreads, one speck becoming a growing slick of greasy black film that eats away at flesh and bone until there is nothing left. The ash rises again, less than before but still turning the sky as black as night, blotting out the sun.
In seconds the battle field is empty save for the for slippery remains of the humans, and the wind is carrying death to the world, utterly unstoppable.
-----
Faith was in another place when it happened, far enough away to get to shelter before death arrived to claim her. She could hear the screams of those who were not so lucky. It is a sound she will hear every time she sleeps, every single time she closes her eyes, for the rest of her life.
-----
It takes weeks for the ash to dissipate. The toll on human and animal is beyond description, devastating and enormous. How many more die of starvation and thirst is a number that Faith cannot allow herself to consider, not when there are so few survivors that she can find. Not when she has to face the fact every single day that she could not ever find them all anyway, even if they want to be found.
Groups gather, terrified and untrusting. Sometimes they let her get near enough to talk to them. Sometimes they shoot at her. She does what she can for the ones who let her talk, let her in. She helps them find their way to food, teaches them what she knows about getting by. There's more information to share as she makes her way up and down the roads; sometimes she leads one group to another, rebuilding or creating communities
One nasty little clan of men outside of Sarasota tries to catch her in a trap, which she neatly avoids. No real shock that she could tell they were there, lurking in the ditch at the side of the road. She could smell them, and more than that she could smell what they were cooking on their crude firepit. Once is all it takes to recognize burning human flesh, and she leaves the world a little less populated when she catches the ones who think it's just fine to survive by devouring the precious few people still lingering on the face of the earth.
-----
Time spins out without Faith keeping track. Days bleed into weeks, months into years. She's worn out boots, worn out clothes, hacked off her hair when it go so long she couldn't be bothered to work the tangles out. She's eaten everything from snake to snail, from coyote to alligator, from Libby's peaches in syrup to spam and stale Captain Crunch. She forgets the taste of milk, yearns to have something fresh in her mouth again, aches for the sound of traffic and the smell of smog. She cries into her pillow in a hundred motels, dusty and abandoned when the world moved on to this emptiness and trapped her in a life she doesn't want anymore.
She looks for them everywhere, Buffy and Xander especially. She looks for Willow, Giles, Robin, any of the baby Slayers. She asks questions and gets blank looks, some shock and some ignorance and some fear. She leaves notes on buildings, trees, houses, fence posts, abandoned cars. Tells them where she'll be and then waits for a week, sometimes two before moving on.
She tells herself that she's sure they're gone but it never makes her stop leaving those notes, asking those questions. There's resignation, but there's something worse and she thinks that maybe losing all hope is just asking to go out of her mind.
Sometimes she finds someone to connect with, a little human touch in the night to keep her from forgetting that she's alive. Sometimes they ask her to stay but she never does. She is never tempted to make anything permanent. She did that once and it left her here with the world to carry. Never again, she thinks, and a little bit of her dies every time she leaves a lover behind. She makes no promises to ever come back; there's no need to lie anymore.
-----
She thinks about getting herself out of it all. It wouldn't be hard to do, Slayer or not. She's not immortal. There's nothing around her but buildings to leap from. Her pack contains enough weaponry (from habit rather than need, more or less) to take out everyone left in this slipshod shell of humanity, herself included. She could walk into the ocean and just keep going. It would be so easy.
The thought of it possesses her for a long while. She stops paying attention when she walks, or when she takes a motorcycle or a car. She heads for the tallest building in the cities she comes upon, and sometimes she stares up for hours, until her neck cramps and she feels lightheaded and dizzy. Sometimes she goes to the top and perches on the edge, staring out at the emptiness and down at the street.
In Chicago, she puts her arms out to the side as she stands on the edge of some building so tall she lost count of the floors as she climbed thousands of steps to get there. It's hot again, another summer come round, and the wind feels like it's coming out of an oven somewhere. She closes her eyes and lets it blow her wherever it wants, back onto the roof or out into the space between rooftop and ground zero. She gets dizzy with the unknown and feels herself tip.
She only opens her eyes when her back hits the hot and dirty gravel of the roof. The sun is blindingly bright in a sky of such deep blue that it hurts somewhere in her chest. Nothing should be so lovely, she thinks. Beautiful and empty and full of forever, the sky makes her cry. She sobs and screams out into the void until her throat is raw and there's nothing left in her.
When it stops, she lies quietly and lets her eyes flicker from one thing to another - a bird flies overhead, a window flashes sunlight, there is a pebble on the roof beside her head with blue speckles on it almost the color of the sky. She draws in a deep breath, reaches for the pebble and closes her fingers over it tightly, marking her palm with the shape.
Faith sits up when the sky turns from blue to something darker. She opens her fingers and stares at the stone in her hand, then tucks it carefully into the pocket of her jeans before she stands. She is tired, and thirsty and she wants to go find a soft bed and a pillow and someone to share it with her.
She takes the steps back to the street one at a time. She puts one foot in front of the other and goes down and down and down, then out the door to the street. It's empty and cool in the shade of the buildings, and her pack feels familiar on her shoulder. The street leads her on and she follows it as night comes down and the world spins.
----
Recipient Request: The Slayers somehow cause the apocalypse. Faith is left to pick up the pieces.