[fic] this mortal heart
fic: this mortal heart (1/10?)
authors: fluffyfrolicker and kwritten
fandom: btvs/tvd/teen wolf/tmi
characters: dawn/elena; spike; alaric; bonnie; kira; allison
word count: 2,300
summary: dawn thinks she's just an ordinary girl with a pretty boring dad and the best friend a girl could ask for, until the day she sees something she shouldn't and discovers that everything is not as it seems a lesbian mortal instruments basically
banner by the irreplaceable fluffyfrolicker
There is a club she sometimes goes out to, when she likes to have fun or when she wants to be alone, and sometimes when she wants to do both. She always takes her best friend with her. That works if she wants to have fun or even if she's trying to be alone.
The club's called the Bronze, which is a silly name if you ask Dawn, because none of it is, in fact, made out of bronze. Spike agrees with her, or more like it, he smokes, and nods along, because she rambles on about bronze sometimes, but she knows well enough the face he makes when he's tuning her out sometimes, and knows he doesn't mean any harm by it, so she forgives herself for rambling and she forgives him for slightly ignoring her sometimes. Being best Friends Forever is hard work -- they've both the scars to prove that, from that one time she wanted to climb a tree and Spike told her not to, because she'd get them both injured somehow. She shrugged her shoulders and smiled and Spike rolled his eyes and he went up the tree with her anyway. The leaves were green and soft to the touch and it seemed to Dawn that nothing that bad could happen to them in nice leaves like that. But one of them slipped, they've told the tale so many times both ways, to anyone who's wanted to listen, women that Spike picks up sometimes and Alaric, they've told them to Alaric so many times, it's wonderful how Alaric still listens every time, unfailingly, unflinchingly. Dawn's not sure anymore, from the sheer number of times they've told the story both ways, that Spike even remembers it was her branch that broke off and not his, and Dawn, whose body then was even tinier, went towards the ground, and Spike's even then black painted nails scraped her skin trying to keep her up the tree, and failing. It's a story nowadays, and it's just words and pictures, even - the walls two years ago in Dawn's bedroom were covered with this story, panel after panel of all the versions of it, during daylight and nighttime and with a cloudy sky and the moon as full as ever and as red as blood.
The moon, it's as red as blood tonight as well, Dawn can see, standing in the line to get into the Bronze, with Spike smoking one cigarette after the other, tapping his foot and scanning the crowd.
The line moves. everyone around them is dressed up -- everyone's always dressed up for the bronze - there's not much else to go to in this town anyway. Leather jackets, black silk dresses, piercings, combat boots. There's all sorts of people here -- most of them dressed up a bit more than Dawn and slightly less than Spike. Spike's got more make-up on than she does, and it's a wonder to behold, as it should be, after all those make-up tutorials Spike has watched, propped up on Dawn's pillows and taking up her precious bed real estate, usually stopped only by Alaric knocking on the bedroom door, a bit tired, reading glasses on, on Tuesdays and Wednesdays and really most workdays, stern but still kind, reminding them both it's a school night, and maybe Spike really should go home before his parents forget about him. (After a while, Spike and Dawn stop correcting Alaric when he says parents instead of adoptive parents.)
"You see anyone you like?" Dawn asks Spike once they've entered the Bronze, the stage to their left, still no musicians on it, but a pair of technicians carrying the instruments onto the stage.
As she's saying this, two girls catch her eye. The first thing she notices about them are their heights. The girls both seem like they'd be of average height usually, but right now, Dawn can vaguely see through the crowd, they're wearing impossibly high above-the-knees boots (seriously, showoffs, really) and impossible short black dresses. That's even more mean-looking than the average crowd here at the Bronze, and the average crowd at the Bronze is a lot meaner looking than most. But, truth be told, the mean vibe's probably coming from the way they're walking. Long, beautiful hair flowing out from underneath both their hoods -- hoods, those are weird too, for a club -- and the steady way in which they're walking where ever they may be headed. Much too calm and determined for the Bronze -- even this early in the night. One of them stops to signal something to the other, but Dawn can't see what it is, and then both of them make a turn right into the storage room, where just before them, a boy and a girl walked in. Right. Not suspicious at all. And then, one of the girls -- from somewhere, Dawn has no idea where -- pulls out a knife. A long one. A sharp looking one.
"Spike - " she shouts, though Spike's already a few feet from her, which means he can't hear her, no matter how much she shouts, so she goes after him, managing to close in on him enough to pull on his leather jacket sleeve.
"There's some girls. They have knives, and they went into the storage room," she points in the direction of the storage room door. "You should go get someone."
She only has a moment to contemplate that it might be sort of weird how no one other than her's noticed two hooded girls, one of them carrying a knife, casually walk into the club's storage room. But then, again, she's pretty sure no one sees her follow them in, anyway.
The door's open, which is a bit surprising -- if there was something really bad going on in there, well, they'd probably try to lock the door behind themselves somehow. Door closed behind her, Dawn takes a deep breathe, and finally, a look around the room. But, and this is weird - Dawn can't see a damn thing inside.
She reaches, fumbling, for a light switch. There has to be one on the side of the door, she knows it, that’s where light switches always are. Unless she’s somehow stumbled into one of those closets with the bare lightbulb hanging from the ceiling with a ratty string dangling down and catching in her hair. That’s exactly what this scenario needs, a horror movie light situation. She would laugh to herself if she wasn’t holding her breath, trying to hear the four other people that should be crammed into this small space.
As Dawn is still running her hands along the wall (which is a little sticky and gross) there is a flash of blue light from the far corner of the room, momentarily illuminating a small girl with dark skin and short hair smiling up at a guy with tattoos and spiked hair, except that Dawn can totally see the sharp knife the girl is holding behind her back.
“Look out!” she whispers hoarsely without thinking.
The next few seconds are a blur, the two girls from the club, in their hoods and their boots and their impossibly short dresses, leap out from opposite corners of the room and all three of them stab the guy… who is not a guy at all anymore? Dawn takes a deep breath and tries to memorize the sight of him (it?) to memory, something slightly green and not a little bit scaly with a long tail. It maybe looks straight at her and she can’t tell if there’s a look of gratefulness to its eyes for her warning, or a hard edge of warning. It’s the briefest of moments, for all three girls have turned their knives on him - it - sliding them through thick green skin as though it was butter.
Dawn’s read a lot of bad fanfiction in the past and every single paperback murder mystery that Alaric pretends to hate but litters the house with, so she’s read that analogy about two thousand times. She has a brief moment of wonder at how true it is, knives really do slide into flesh like butter. She takes a half a heartbeat to wonder if all those authors have done experiments, or seen something like this, or if the first person to say it, whenever that was (Alaric would probably know), had tried it out themselves. She thinks all this in the span of half a moment, in that span of time between the three knives being driven into the body of the thing that was once a not too unattractive guy and the body disintegrating into something that looks simultaneously like slime and dust.
She takes a deep breath and as she does so, hears the smaller girl - the one that lured the green-maybe-was-a-guy-but-maybe-not thing into the closet - say with a tinge of annoyance, “I officially hate playing bait,” as one of the girls with the hoods wraps an arm around her shoulder and the other one rounds on Dawn to whisper, “You can see me?”
And then she screams as loud as she can, backing out the door as quickly as her shaking legs can take her.
The girl who whispered to her reaches for her, eyes wide and confused, and Dawn longs to reach out to the hand that is seeking hers, but she’s already in Spike’s arms and the door is closed.
“What happened? Nib? What the fuck?” he’s shouting in her ear, but she can’t hardly breath, let alone answer his questions. She points with a shaking finger at the door.
Someone, a bouncer or a bartender - someone large and bulky, unlocks the door and peers inside, turning on the light with a flick of his fingers. She ducks around him to look. There’s the light switch, on the wall where she searched and searched. There’s the empty storage closet, full of battered boxes and cleaning supplies.
“But… they were here,” she cries out, turning to Spike wildly, grabbing his arms in desperation. “I saw them kill that guy.”
The bouncer-bartender-whatever catches Spike’s eye over his head, “Whatever she’s on, you should get her home. Making her paranoid.” He locks the door and twirls the keys in his hand, “Shrooms did that to me when I was a kid, fucked me up man.”
Dawn stares at the door, unhearing, “The door was locked?”
Spike guides her out of the club, his hand on her elbow. He’s surprisingly good at getting her out of scrapes, probably why they’ve stayed friends for so long. All appearances say that it should be the other way around, that he should be the one falling out of trees and seeing invisible girls with knives and getting caught for shoplifting, but they never really fit into the boxes that other people tried to put them into. She sags into his shoulder, “If the door was locked, how did I get in?”
“I don’t know,” he’s distracted, weaving them through crowds, shouting into her ear. “I took my eyes off you for a second and then you were gone.”
He hurls them out into the murky Sunnydale night air. The world never really seems to cool here in Southern California, the heat from the day only dissipating in the early hours of the morning, just before the sun pops up over the horizon. In the summer there is no relief, nights are thick and heavy. Dawn takes a deep breath and longs - not for the first time - for crisp air. For autumns with falling leaves, for snow in the winter, for something other than a dull, present heat even when it rains.
“Didn’t you see them?” she turns on him, her hair spinning out attractively behind her in a great circle. She is always aware of the effect her hair makes when she moves since the time Spike told her to flip it over her shoulder when she entered a room.
“Maybe they’re pumping drugs into the air,” Spike says dismissively, his feet already turned towards her house. “I saw Alaric watching something about that on 60 Minutes a few weeks ago.”
She has to run to catch up, panting a little, “What, so we didn’t breath the same air?!”
He puts an arm around her and hands her his cigarette, “So when you hallucinate you see leggy brunettes stabbing guys in the chest and when I hallucinate I see Bon Jovi making out with Kurt Cobain.”
Dawn laughs and they walk home hand-in-hand.
Sunnydale seems to have deeper shadows tonight, but it’s her birthday and her best friend is walking her home and she’s not rambling about anything for once.
“Hey wait,” she says as he climbs into her bed, Spike’s boots tripping her as she makes her way across the room. “I never told you what they looked like, the girls. How did you know they were leggy brunettes?”
She kicks him aside and tugs the blanket away from him as she squeezes herself into her tiny bed. There’s a small part of her that thinks Alaric got the smallest mattress he could find to force Spike to at least sleep on the couch when he stayed over, it didn’t work out that way of course.
Spike snorts, “Please. Who knows you better than me? You have a type, girlfriend.”
Dawn rolls her eyes, but snuggles into his chest without argument. She dreams of a girl with dark hair and hazel eyes, soft lips on her skin.
She wakes up and the first thing she sees is Spike standing at the foot of the bed in his boxer-briefs and a white t-shirt, holding a stack of papers. He looks over at her with wide eyes, holding up the paper, as if she can’t see the strange symbol on a thousand sheets of paper plastered all over her room.
“Fuck.”
authors: fluffyfrolicker and kwritten
fandom: btvs/tvd/teen wolf/tmi
characters: dawn/elena; spike; alaric; bonnie; kira; allison
word count: 2,300
summary: dawn thinks she's just an ordinary girl with a pretty boring dad and the best friend a girl could ask for, until the day she sees something she shouldn't and discovers that everything is not as it seems a lesbian mortal instruments basically
banner by the irreplaceable fluffyfrolicker
There is a club she sometimes goes out to, when she likes to have fun or when she wants to be alone, and sometimes when she wants to do both. She always takes her best friend with her. That works if she wants to have fun or even if she's trying to be alone.
The club's called the Bronze, which is a silly name if you ask Dawn, because none of it is, in fact, made out of bronze. Spike agrees with her, or more like it, he smokes, and nods along, because she rambles on about bronze sometimes, but she knows well enough the face he makes when he's tuning her out sometimes, and knows he doesn't mean any harm by it, so she forgives herself for rambling and she forgives him for slightly ignoring her sometimes. Being best Friends Forever is hard work -- they've both the scars to prove that, from that one time she wanted to climb a tree and Spike told her not to, because she'd get them both injured somehow. She shrugged her shoulders and smiled and Spike rolled his eyes and he went up the tree with her anyway. The leaves were green and soft to the touch and it seemed to Dawn that nothing that bad could happen to them in nice leaves like that. But one of them slipped, they've told the tale so many times both ways, to anyone who's wanted to listen, women that Spike picks up sometimes and Alaric, they've told them to Alaric so many times, it's wonderful how Alaric still listens every time, unfailingly, unflinchingly. Dawn's not sure anymore, from the sheer number of times they've told the story both ways, that Spike even remembers it was her branch that broke off and not his, and Dawn, whose body then was even tinier, went towards the ground, and Spike's even then black painted nails scraped her skin trying to keep her up the tree, and failing. It's a story nowadays, and it's just words and pictures, even - the walls two years ago in Dawn's bedroom were covered with this story, panel after panel of all the versions of it, during daylight and nighttime and with a cloudy sky and the moon as full as ever and as red as blood.
The moon, it's as red as blood tonight as well, Dawn can see, standing in the line to get into the Bronze, with Spike smoking one cigarette after the other, tapping his foot and scanning the crowd.
The line moves. everyone around them is dressed up -- everyone's always dressed up for the bronze - there's not much else to go to in this town anyway. Leather jackets, black silk dresses, piercings, combat boots. There's all sorts of people here -- most of them dressed up a bit more than Dawn and slightly less than Spike. Spike's got more make-up on than she does, and it's a wonder to behold, as it should be, after all those make-up tutorials Spike has watched, propped up on Dawn's pillows and taking up her precious bed real estate, usually stopped only by Alaric knocking on the bedroom door, a bit tired, reading glasses on, on Tuesdays and Wednesdays and really most workdays, stern but still kind, reminding them both it's a school night, and maybe Spike really should go home before his parents forget about him. (After a while, Spike and Dawn stop correcting Alaric when he says parents instead of adoptive parents.)
"You see anyone you like?" Dawn asks Spike once they've entered the Bronze, the stage to their left, still no musicians on it, but a pair of technicians carrying the instruments onto the stage.
As she's saying this, two girls catch her eye. The first thing she notices about them are their heights. The girls both seem like they'd be of average height usually, but right now, Dawn can vaguely see through the crowd, they're wearing impossibly high above-the-knees boots (seriously, showoffs, really) and impossible short black dresses. That's even more mean-looking than the average crowd here at the Bronze, and the average crowd at the Bronze is a lot meaner looking than most. But, truth be told, the mean vibe's probably coming from the way they're walking. Long, beautiful hair flowing out from underneath both their hoods -- hoods, those are weird too, for a club -- and the steady way in which they're walking where ever they may be headed. Much too calm and determined for the Bronze -- even this early in the night. One of them stops to signal something to the other, but Dawn can't see what it is, and then both of them make a turn right into the storage room, where just before them, a boy and a girl walked in. Right. Not suspicious at all. And then, one of the girls -- from somewhere, Dawn has no idea where -- pulls out a knife. A long one. A sharp looking one.
"Spike - " she shouts, though Spike's already a few feet from her, which means he can't hear her, no matter how much she shouts, so she goes after him, managing to close in on him enough to pull on his leather jacket sleeve.
"There's some girls. They have knives, and they went into the storage room," she points in the direction of the storage room door. "You should go get someone."
She only has a moment to contemplate that it might be sort of weird how no one other than her's noticed two hooded girls, one of them carrying a knife, casually walk into the club's storage room. But then, again, she's pretty sure no one sees her follow them in, anyway.
The door's open, which is a bit surprising -- if there was something really bad going on in there, well, they'd probably try to lock the door behind themselves somehow. Door closed behind her, Dawn takes a deep breathe, and finally, a look around the room. But, and this is weird - Dawn can't see a damn thing inside.
She reaches, fumbling, for a light switch. There has to be one on the side of the door, she knows it, that’s where light switches always are. Unless she’s somehow stumbled into one of those closets with the bare lightbulb hanging from the ceiling with a ratty string dangling down and catching in her hair. That’s exactly what this scenario needs, a horror movie light situation. She would laugh to herself if she wasn’t holding her breath, trying to hear the four other people that should be crammed into this small space.
As Dawn is still running her hands along the wall (which is a little sticky and gross) there is a flash of blue light from the far corner of the room, momentarily illuminating a small girl with dark skin and short hair smiling up at a guy with tattoos and spiked hair, except that Dawn can totally see the sharp knife the girl is holding behind her back.
“Look out!” she whispers hoarsely without thinking.
The next few seconds are a blur, the two girls from the club, in their hoods and their boots and their impossibly short dresses, leap out from opposite corners of the room and all three of them stab the guy… who is not a guy at all anymore? Dawn takes a deep breath and tries to memorize the sight of him (it?) to memory, something slightly green and not a little bit scaly with a long tail. It maybe looks straight at her and she can’t tell if there’s a look of gratefulness to its eyes for her warning, or a hard edge of warning. It’s the briefest of moments, for all three girls have turned their knives on him - it - sliding them through thick green skin as though it was butter.
Dawn’s read a lot of bad fanfiction in the past and every single paperback murder mystery that Alaric pretends to hate but litters the house with, so she’s read that analogy about two thousand times. She has a brief moment of wonder at how true it is, knives really do slide into flesh like butter. She takes a half a heartbeat to wonder if all those authors have done experiments, or seen something like this, or if the first person to say it, whenever that was (Alaric would probably know), had tried it out themselves. She thinks all this in the span of half a moment, in that span of time between the three knives being driven into the body of the thing that was once a not too unattractive guy and the body disintegrating into something that looks simultaneously like slime and dust.
She takes a deep breath and as she does so, hears the smaller girl - the one that lured the green-maybe-was-a-guy-but-maybe-not thing into the closet - say with a tinge of annoyance, “I officially hate playing bait,” as one of the girls with the hoods wraps an arm around her shoulder and the other one rounds on Dawn to whisper, “You can see me?”
And then she screams as loud as she can, backing out the door as quickly as her shaking legs can take her.
The girl who whispered to her reaches for her, eyes wide and confused, and Dawn longs to reach out to the hand that is seeking hers, but she’s already in Spike’s arms and the door is closed.
“What happened? Nib? What the fuck?” he’s shouting in her ear, but she can’t hardly breath, let alone answer his questions. She points with a shaking finger at the door.
Someone, a bouncer or a bartender - someone large and bulky, unlocks the door and peers inside, turning on the light with a flick of his fingers. She ducks around him to look. There’s the light switch, on the wall where she searched and searched. There’s the empty storage closet, full of battered boxes and cleaning supplies.
“But… they were here,” she cries out, turning to Spike wildly, grabbing his arms in desperation. “I saw them kill that guy.”
The bouncer-bartender-whatever catches Spike’s eye over his head, “Whatever she’s on, you should get her home. Making her paranoid.” He locks the door and twirls the keys in his hand, “Shrooms did that to me when I was a kid, fucked me up man.”
Dawn stares at the door, unhearing, “The door was locked?”
Spike guides her out of the club, his hand on her elbow. He’s surprisingly good at getting her out of scrapes, probably why they’ve stayed friends for so long. All appearances say that it should be the other way around, that he should be the one falling out of trees and seeing invisible girls with knives and getting caught for shoplifting, but they never really fit into the boxes that other people tried to put them into. She sags into his shoulder, “If the door was locked, how did I get in?”
“I don’t know,” he’s distracted, weaving them through crowds, shouting into her ear. “I took my eyes off you for a second and then you were gone.”
He hurls them out into the murky Sunnydale night air. The world never really seems to cool here in Southern California, the heat from the day only dissipating in the early hours of the morning, just before the sun pops up over the horizon. In the summer there is no relief, nights are thick and heavy. Dawn takes a deep breath and longs - not for the first time - for crisp air. For autumns with falling leaves, for snow in the winter, for something other than a dull, present heat even when it rains.
“Didn’t you see them?” she turns on him, her hair spinning out attractively behind her in a great circle. She is always aware of the effect her hair makes when she moves since the time Spike told her to flip it over her shoulder when she entered a room.
“Maybe they’re pumping drugs into the air,” Spike says dismissively, his feet already turned towards her house. “I saw Alaric watching something about that on 60 Minutes a few weeks ago.”
She has to run to catch up, panting a little, “What, so we didn’t breath the same air?!”
He puts an arm around her and hands her his cigarette, “So when you hallucinate you see leggy brunettes stabbing guys in the chest and when I hallucinate I see Bon Jovi making out with Kurt Cobain.”
Dawn laughs and they walk home hand-in-hand.
Sunnydale seems to have deeper shadows tonight, but it’s her birthday and her best friend is walking her home and she’s not rambling about anything for once.
“Hey wait,” she says as he climbs into her bed, Spike’s boots tripping her as she makes her way across the room. “I never told you what they looked like, the girls. How did you know they were leggy brunettes?”
She kicks him aside and tugs the blanket away from him as she squeezes herself into her tiny bed. There’s a small part of her that thinks Alaric got the smallest mattress he could find to force Spike to at least sleep on the couch when he stayed over, it didn’t work out that way of course.
Spike snorts, “Please. Who knows you better than me? You have a type, girlfriend.”
Dawn rolls her eyes, but snuggles into his chest without argument. She dreams of a girl with dark hair and hazel eyes, soft lips on her skin.
She wakes up and the first thing she sees is Spike standing at the foot of the bed in his boxer-briefs and a white t-shirt, holding a stack of papers. He looks over at her with wide eyes, holding up the paper, as if she can’t see the strange symbol on a thousand sheets of paper plastered all over her room.
“Fuck.”