have some more words
you see there's no real ending // ats, fred, plylea // written for the multi_genfic bingo fill “allusion”, which I hope you get.
It is a nightmare she thinks as the hole in the ground opens up, appears from thin air.
It is a nightmare, she thinks as she goes tumbling down it.
(there is no white rabbit when she lands.)
It is a nightmare she thinks, but she cannot wake up, and waking nightmares are not nightmares at all. No, waking nightmares are horrors dressed up to look like something else. A waking nightmare is just your brain trying to make sense of something there is no sense of.
Someone appears (something appears), as she lies on the cold hard ground, curled into herself. Tries to make herself smaller, tries to make herself invisible to those around her.
They laugh and it is a terrible laugh, a mad laugh, she thinks, and one day this will become ironic, even to her. They take her, put a collar around her neck, and lead her away.
“How did I get here?” She asks and she feels so very very small.
No one answers her.
They give her things to do instead, call her slave, call her a cow, they call her theirs. (She is something to collect now, you see.)
She tries to talk to the other slaves, to get answers.
Fred gets hushed whispers in return. Told to be quiet and behave. She does as she’s told.
She watches as the slaves around her die. Broken and dirty, their collars tearing them apart.
Its magic she thinks once, while she is eating slowly. Something like stale bread (she closes her eyes and pretends that it is cake) It’s magic, she thinks, and magic is just science that people don’t understand and science she knows.
Science is everything she is.
She disables her collar.
Not on the first try of course, but she does.
She picks the right wire and walks through the door to freedom.
Only there is no such thing as freedom, not in this world, maybe in none of them at all. She fell and fell and fell (and there was no white rabbit to in the end) and she became a part of that world, she became a slave, a cow.
Fred became someone without freedom.
She runs anyways.
She hides in caves and behind trees and she eats the berries and she does not grow bigger or taller or anything at all, but she survives.
There was a hole in the world, you see, and it only appeared to some, but when it did it chased you down, you did not go chasing after it. Fred did not get a choice to do anything but fall.
there is an empty space next to you // haven, audrey-centric (mentions of others) // written for the multi_genfic bingo fill “pathetic fallacy” which I hope I figured out correctly…
Audrey changes (again) after everything happens. After in some ways it ends. After Mara is put back into the bottle and Audrey is all that is left.
(That is the lie of course.)
It’s slow at first. Or maybe that’s just how it seems because no one wants to notice, wants to ask. Because one Audrey and no Mara seems like the solution to everything
(Another lie.)
But the dark circles under her eyes are hard to miss and she moves for her gun too quickly when she hears a noise and she stays at the bar until closing times not wanting to go upstairs, to go home. She mentions names that neither Duke nor Nathan have heard her mention before.
It becomes hard not to notice.
It becomes hard to pretend.
For all of them.
She’s a walking diary, she tells one of them, too much liquor on her lips.
She is a newspaper entry, page after page of them, she says when no one is listening. When she is alone.
She has five hundred years of memories in her head (some of them of other people, of people claimed and formed into someone who once looked like her, she has memories of Haven, of her, of them, of troubles, of horrors and death spread out before her), five hundred years of memories and sometimes it’s hard to pick through the pages and find the happy ones.
There are happy ones of course, there is laughter and smiles and friendship and love and a little baby boy who only Lucy really knew.
She flips through the memories in her mind, turns the pages when they get to rough. When she sees the barn, she turns away.
There are things she does not want to remember.
There are memories in her head that do not belong to her and yet-
Ink has formed, written into her mind in calligraphy of what had happened to those who came before her. Of those who had formed who she was.
Her mind is a diary filled with five hundred years of memories and terror and confusion and Audrey wants nothing more than to lock it away.
(This diary has no lock. It spills its secrets while she is busy trying to save the town until her head starts to throb. Until her mind is in the eighteen hundreds and her body is on a bar stool.)
I miss dreaming, she tells someone.
I miss knowing who I am, she says to herself, quietly when she is sure no one else is around.
I miss being a person, she says, and not a record book.
I miss, she says.
She doesn’t finish the sentence.
Five hundred years. There were so many things she missed. Even the things that did not belong to her, even the things, the people, that Audrey Parker had never known.
I know that I’m damned (all the dead seem to know where I am)) // btvs, buffy-centric // written for the multi_genfic bingo fill for “sensual description”. note I never said I was good at it.
She picks her clothes out carefully. Her hands running down different items, different textures under her hands.
She does it slowly, picks each piece carefully.
(There are reasons, there are always reasons for this, but she does not think of them. Of the whys. She just moves her hands slowly over the clothing and the textures underneath her fingers. Of the way they feel against her skin.)
Buffy puts them on slowly, white against light skin, smooth fabric against her. Dark jeans, tight against her legs, and boots that she strings with ease.
She has done this all before.
It feels similar every time, but not the same. Never the same.
There is something dangerous in it, in picking out and changing clothes. Of choosing white and not red, of sliding on a leather jacket and feeling different.
Feeling powerful.
It feels powerful under her hands, as she runs them against the jacket, as she buttons it. Something about it makes her feel powerful too.
Buffy leaves the room and the rest of her clothes behind and does not think of anything.
She runs her hands down her jacket instead, her tight jeans and fingers her white blouse.
(There is something that draws Buffy to each one, something she cannot define. Something she cannot explain, not that she ever would.
There would be no one else to understand.)
Tomorrow she will go through the same movements, the same time spent before her closet, before her dresser, before her bed as she looks at the things, the colors, the textures, the softness, the hardness that she has picked out.
Tomorrow her hands will glide and her mouth with have a touch of a smile and she will sigh as she feels leather underneath her hands.
That is if tomorrow comes of course.
If white cotton, and tight jeans and black powerful leather are not the last things she feels before everything ends.
he paints // the originals, klaus, freeverse // written for the multi_genfic bingo fill for “poetry”. Don’t judge it too hard. also, Klaus, how did I end up writing poetry about you?
He paints.
He paints with dark colors, the red made of other people’s blood.
(You think this is a metaphor. It isn’t.)
He paints, the brush strokes soothing to those who watch. The brush strokes offering him control.
And that is all he craves-
all he has ever craved
-control.
The world outside is nothing it should be.
Pieces of it slide through his hands like sand,
they cut him like glass.
His paintings are different.
They depict the same things,
show the same things,
the same world
the same everything,
right down to the lighting.
But it’s different when he stares at them.
He is different when he makes them.
The landscapes, cityscapes, the world outside him is different
Different on his canvases.
See, he controls the world in the canvases
Even the things you cannot see.
He knows the people, the creatures, what they are doing and how they move
(there are no people in the paintings
no human life
only bare streets and bare woods and empty windows.)
He knows the things you cannot see.
He knows the life he lives in these paintings.
It is the life he desires.
(they say art is about passion
they say art is about truth
he says art is about want.)
He paints with dark colors and other people’s blood,
(You this this is a metaphor. It isn’t.)
It is not the life he wants
It is the life that was chosen for him.
There are canvases in his mind
deep and buried
in places that no one will ever see.
Those hold the life he wants.
Those hold the life he needs.
No one will ever see them.
He paints.
The paintbrush between his fingers is familiar
and the brush strokes soothing to those who watch, who listen.
To him they are none of these things.
Still he paints.
(art is about what you want.
and he wants what he deserves, what is rightfully his, what he loves.
in his paintings, even the ones devoid of life, he can see the life that others cannot.
they are not landscapes or cityscapes, they are portraits of a life that is not.)
He paints.
It is a nightmare she thinks as the hole in the ground opens up, appears from thin air.
It is a nightmare, she thinks as she goes tumbling down it.
(there is no white rabbit when she lands.)
It is a nightmare she thinks, but she cannot wake up, and waking nightmares are not nightmares at all. No, waking nightmares are horrors dressed up to look like something else. A waking nightmare is just your brain trying to make sense of something there is no sense of.
Someone appears (something appears), as she lies on the cold hard ground, curled into herself. Tries to make herself smaller, tries to make herself invisible to those around her.
They laugh and it is a terrible laugh, a mad laugh, she thinks, and one day this will become ironic, even to her. They take her, put a collar around her neck, and lead her away.
“How did I get here?” She asks and she feels so very very small.
No one answers her.
They give her things to do instead, call her slave, call her a cow, they call her theirs. (She is something to collect now, you see.)
She tries to talk to the other slaves, to get answers.
Fred gets hushed whispers in return. Told to be quiet and behave. She does as she’s told.
She watches as the slaves around her die. Broken and dirty, their collars tearing them apart.
Its magic she thinks once, while she is eating slowly. Something like stale bread (she closes her eyes and pretends that it is cake) It’s magic, she thinks, and magic is just science that people don’t understand and science she knows.
Science is everything she is.
She disables her collar.
Not on the first try of course, but she does.
She picks the right wire and walks through the door to freedom.
Only there is no such thing as freedom, not in this world, maybe in none of them at all. She fell and fell and fell (and there was no white rabbit to in the end) and she became a part of that world, she became a slave, a cow.
Fred became someone without freedom.
She runs anyways.
She hides in caves and behind trees and she eats the berries and she does not grow bigger or taller or anything at all, but she survives.
There was a hole in the world, you see, and it only appeared to some, but when it did it chased you down, you did not go chasing after it. Fred did not get a choice to do anything but fall.
there is an empty space next to you // haven, audrey-centric (mentions of others) // written for the multi_genfic bingo fill “pathetic fallacy” which I hope I figured out correctly…
Audrey changes (again) after everything happens. After in some ways it ends. After Mara is put back into the bottle and Audrey is all that is left.
(That is the lie of course.)
It’s slow at first. Or maybe that’s just how it seems because no one wants to notice, wants to ask. Because one Audrey and no Mara seems like the solution to everything
(Another lie.)
But the dark circles under her eyes are hard to miss and she moves for her gun too quickly when she hears a noise and she stays at the bar until closing times not wanting to go upstairs, to go home. She mentions names that neither Duke nor Nathan have heard her mention before.
It becomes hard not to notice.
It becomes hard to pretend.
For all of them.
She’s a walking diary, she tells one of them, too much liquor on her lips.
She is a newspaper entry, page after page of them, she says when no one is listening. When she is alone.
She has five hundred years of memories in her head (some of them of other people, of people claimed and formed into someone who once looked like her, she has memories of Haven, of her, of them, of troubles, of horrors and death spread out before her), five hundred years of memories and sometimes it’s hard to pick through the pages and find the happy ones.
There are happy ones of course, there is laughter and smiles and friendship and love and a little baby boy who only Lucy really knew.
She flips through the memories in her mind, turns the pages when they get to rough. When she sees the barn, she turns away.
There are things she does not want to remember.
There are memories in her head that do not belong to her and yet-
Ink has formed, written into her mind in calligraphy of what had happened to those who came before her. Of those who had formed who she was.
Her mind is a diary filled with five hundred years of memories and terror and confusion and Audrey wants nothing more than to lock it away.
(This diary has no lock. It spills its secrets while she is busy trying to save the town until her head starts to throb. Until her mind is in the eighteen hundreds and her body is on a bar stool.)
I miss dreaming, she tells someone.
I miss knowing who I am, she says to herself, quietly when she is sure no one else is around.
I miss being a person, she says, and not a record book.
I miss, she says.
She doesn’t finish the sentence.
Five hundred years. There were so many things she missed. Even the things that did not belong to her, even the things, the people, that Audrey Parker had never known.
I know that I’m damned (all the dead seem to know where I am)) // btvs, buffy-centric // written for the multi_genfic bingo fill for “sensual description”. note I never said I was good at it.
She picks her clothes out carefully. Her hands running down different items, different textures under her hands.
She does it slowly, picks each piece carefully.
(There are reasons, there are always reasons for this, but she does not think of them. Of the whys. She just moves her hands slowly over the clothing and the textures underneath her fingers. Of the way they feel against her skin.)
Buffy puts them on slowly, white against light skin, smooth fabric against her. Dark jeans, tight against her legs, and boots that she strings with ease.
She has done this all before.
It feels similar every time, but not the same. Never the same.
There is something dangerous in it, in picking out and changing clothes. Of choosing white and not red, of sliding on a leather jacket and feeling different.
Feeling powerful.
It feels powerful under her hands, as she runs them against the jacket, as she buttons it. Something about it makes her feel powerful too.
Buffy leaves the room and the rest of her clothes behind and does not think of anything.
She runs her hands down her jacket instead, her tight jeans and fingers her white blouse.
(There is something that draws Buffy to each one, something she cannot define. Something she cannot explain, not that she ever would.
There would be no one else to understand.)
Tomorrow she will go through the same movements, the same time spent before her closet, before her dresser, before her bed as she looks at the things, the colors, the textures, the softness, the hardness that she has picked out.
Tomorrow her hands will glide and her mouth with have a touch of a smile and she will sigh as she feels leather underneath her hands.
That is if tomorrow comes of course.
If white cotton, and tight jeans and black powerful leather are not the last things she feels before everything ends.
he paints // the originals, klaus, freeverse // written for the multi_genfic bingo fill for “poetry”. Don’t judge it too hard. also, Klaus, how did I end up writing poetry about you?
He paints.
He paints with dark colors, the red made of other people’s blood.
(You think this is a metaphor. It isn’t.)
He paints, the brush strokes soothing to those who watch. The brush strokes offering him control.
And that is all he craves-
all he has ever craved
-control.
The world outside is nothing it should be.
Pieces of it slide through his hands like sand,
they cut him like glass.
His paintings are different.
They depict the same things,
show the same things,
the same world
the same everything,
right down to the lighting.
But it’s different when he stares at them.
He is different when he makes them.
The landscapes, cityscapes, the world outside him is different
Different on his canvases.
See, he controls the world in the canvases
Even the things you cannot see.
He knows the people, the creatures, what they are doing and how they move
(there are no people in the paintings
no human life
only bare streets and bare woods and empty windows.)
He knows the things you cannot see.
He knows the life he lives in these paintings.
It is the life he desires.
(they say art is about passion
they say art is about truth
he says art is about want.)
He paints with dark colors and other people’s blood,
(You this this is a metaphor. It isn’t.)
It is not the life he wants
It is the life that was chosen for him.
There are canvases in his mind
deep and buried
in places that no one will ever see.
Those hold the life he wants.
Those hold the life he needs.
No one will ever see them.
He paints.
The paintbrush between his fingers is familiar
and the brush strokes soothing to those who watch, who listen.
To him they are none of these things.
Still he paints.
(art is about what you want.
and he wants what he deserves, what is rightfully his, what he loves.
in his paintings, even the ones devoid of life, he can see the life that others cannot.
they are not landscapes or cityscapes, they are portraits of a life that is not.)
He paints.