Fic: Fairy Tale (Devils & Dust Remix) [Buffy; Faith/Wesley; R]
Title: Fairy Tale (Devils & Dust Remix)
Author: obsessedmuch
Summary: Once upon a time there was light and hope.
Fandom: Buffy(tv show)
Pairing: Faith/Wesley
Rating: R
Disclaimer: It belongs to M.E., not me.
Original story: Fairy Tale by Nikitangel
Once upon a time…
There was light. There were heroes. There was hope.
Then the darkness came and there were none of those things any more.
-----
It didn't take so long for the humans to lose their edge and the things that belonged to the darkness to take over. It would be comforting to think that the battle raged for months or years, but in the end it was only weeks before the war was over. Here and there, pockets of rebels managed to dig in and take a stand. Five outside of Toledo, twenty in Texas somewhere north of Dallas, a decently sized group holed up between LA and Sunnydale.
Communication between the groups was impossible. Each of them thought they might be the only ones. It was this sense of futility that did as much damage as the demons themselves. Few could summon the reserves needed to carry on in the face of hopelessness; some just lay down and died without a struggle.
Faith dreams about them, the survivors who think they are alone out there with no one ever coming. She struggles in her sleep, shouting and swearing at them to get up, to fight, to stop fucking giving up. She wakes whenever Wesley can bring her out of it, his methods evolving from shouting her name to shaking her roughly, paying the price if he's too close when she strikes out.
She denies that there are tears on her face, streaking through the dirt there. It's sweat, that's all it is, doesn't he know the fucking difference?
Wesley, nursing a black eye and bruised cheekbone, agrees he should know the fucking difference by now. When she comes to find him later, her apology is all wrapped up in sweating for another reason, no less desperate despite the fact that they both come before she stops. Wesley calls her by another name. Faith doesn't mind; she calls him something else as well. Fair is fair, even now. Maybe especially now when there seems little sense in pretending that the person you want to be fucking is ever going to be there for you again.
They aren't the only ones who take refuge in sex. Xander makes grunting sounds loud enough for everyone to hear, no longer embarrassed about the volume. Anya, oddly enough, is entirely silent. Dawn is not. Dawn seems to be making up for all the time she thought she would have ahead of her, and no one in the group has not turned to find her standing naked, waiting, at some time or another. Wesley sends her away. The others don't.
There's not much food, even less water. Trips to scavenge the nearby houses and stores are getting longer as they exhaust the supplies in the surrounding blocks and have to go further each time. They can't afford to risk the noise that motorcycles or cars would create. Bad enough that the things out there are getting more aggressive as they kill off the humans and each other, decreasing their food supplies and the population in each attack; creating any more noise than footsteps on the sidewalks is just asking to be the latest blue plate special on the menu.
Wesley has pointed out that eventually, the cycle will end with the demons killing each other off and then starving to death. Faith asks if that's going to take long, and Wes shrugs, gives his best guess based on his own observations of their tiny little plot in Hell. She seems pleased to hear that their deaths will be slow and probably painful. If she can't kill the bastards herself, she likes knowing that they'll suffer.
Xander rations out the food and water that they bring back with them from their latest excursion. Everyone gets something to eat; everyone gets water, that's the rule. On days when they come back empty-handed, Wesley hands out his own supplies, ignoring Faith's swearing and complaining that he's making a mistake, making them weaker with his stupid martyred sacrifices. No one else argues and no one refuses to take what he gives them except for Faith. She goes without eating, and when Wesley points out that she's doing the same thing as he is by not taking the food, she slams him against the wall before she walks out of the room.
One night -- or one day, no one can tell anymore and no one bothers to try and figure it out - two vampires break through the back window where the boards are weak. They manage to kill Dave, Ben and Rose who were sleeping in the room closest to the back. Wesley kills one, Faith takes out the other, the dust from the kill settling over the bodies of their victims. Dawn watches it all silently, wanders off without making a sound. Anya starts talking and can't stop - alternate universes and worlds, the power of the wish, vengeance she had wreaked at the whim of those scorned. The stories alternate between the bloody and the bizarre until she finally just runs out of words, trailing off with wistful sounding phrases that make no sense.
With their world now reduced to only the survivors of Sunnydale, the outsiders of the group dead and gone, Faith's dreams become more and more intense. She wakes screaming most nights, Wesley's hand over her mouth to silence her before she stirs up something outside and incites it to attacking them. They've been getting bolder, the things out there coming for attacks more frequently. They've been lucky so far that the demons here now are not quite clever enough to organize anything. It's all very much directly rushing for the door or window, attempting to break through with brute strength, testing the limits of the survivors in the house each time they do it. They're running out of disposable supplies like bullets and fuel for the flame throwers, having to rely on the blades instead. Hand to hand combat is more dangerous of course, but they hardly have a huge range of choices available to them.
Sooner or later, they'll run out of food and water. Sooner or later there will be an attack that gets past them, because they are tired and getting weaker. Someone will slip, someone will go down and that will be the beginning of the end for them. Faith knows this, but she's always been one to see the truth of the matter. Even without the dreams, she knows the human race is becoming a vague memory, a blip on the timeline of this planet and this universe, something for the other dimensions to make a brief note of in their records and move on to the next. She's a realist even here where reality no longer holds any hope of the things that it used to - light, warmth, hope.
She tells Wesley as she lies beside him, her hand on the stark white skin of his belly, her eyes closed against the sight of his body gone from muscle to skin and bone. He doesn't argue with her or tell her that she's wrong. Instead he puts his hand on her cheek, turning to look at her, his eyes glittering in the flicker of the candle that burns there in the corner of the room. She watches him as he tries to remember how to smile.
Somewhere, she knows, there's a world like this one used to be. Somewhere, in one of those other dimensions that Anya couldn't stop talking about, there must be good things that aren't about to go out like the candle that's starting to gutter in its own wax.
Somewhere, Faith believes, it all ends happily ever after.
-end-
Author: obsessedmuch
Summary: Once upon a time there was light and hope.
Fandom: Buffy(tv show)
Pairing: Faith/Wesley
Rating: R
Disclaimer: It belongs to M.E., not me.
Original story: Fairy Tale by Nikitangel
Once upon a time…
There was light. There were heroes. There was hope.
Then the darkness came and there were none of those things any more.
-----
It didn't take so long for the humans to lose their edge and the things that belonged to the darkness to take over. It would be comforting to think that the battle raged for months or years, but in the end it was only weeks before the war was over. Here and there, pockets of rebels managed to dig in and take a stand. Five outside of Toledo, twenty in Texas somewhere north of Dallas, a decently sized group holed up between LA and Sunnydale.
Communication between the groups was impossible. Each of them thought they might be the only ones. It was this sense of futility that did as much damage as the demons themselves. Few could summon the reserves needed to carry on in the face of hopelessness; some just lay down and died without a struggle.
Faith dreams about them, the survivors who think they are alone out there with no one ever coming. She struggles in her sleep, shouting and swearing at them to get up, to fight, to stop fucking giving up. She wakes whenever Wesley can bring her out of it, his methods evolving from shouting her name to shaking her roughly, paying the price if he's too close when she strikes out.
She denies that there are tears on her face, streaking through the dirt there. It's sweat, that's all it is, doesn't he know the fucking difference?
Wesley, nursing a black eye and bruised cheekbone, agrees he should know the fucking difference by now. When she comes to find him later, her apology is all wrapped up in sweating for another reason, no less desperate despite the fact that they both come before she stops. Wesley calls her by another name. Faith doesn't mind; she calls him something else as well. Fair is fair, even now. Maybe especially now when there seems little sense in pretending that the person you want to be fucking is ever going to be there for you again.
They aren't the only ones who take refuge in sex. Xander makes grunting sounds loud enough for everyone to hear, no longer embarrassed about the volume. Anya, oddly enough, is entirely silent. Dawn is not. Dawn seems to be making up for all the time she thought she would have ahead of her, and no one in the group has not turned to find her standing naked, waiting, at some time or another. Wesley sends her away. The others don't.
There's not much food, even less water. Trips to scavenge the nearby houses and stores are getting longer as they exhaust the supplies in the surrounding blocks and have to go further each time. They can't afford to risk the noise that motorcycles or cars would create. Bad enough that the things out there are getting more aggressive as they kill off the humans and each other, decreasing their food supplies and the population in each attack; creating any more noise than footsteps on the sidewalks is just asking to be the latest blue plate special on the menu.
Wesley has pointed out that eventually, the cycle will end with the demons killing each other off and then starving to death. Faith asks if that's going to take long, and Wes shrugs, gives his best guess based on his own observations of their tiny little plot in Hell. She seems pleased to hear that their deaths will be slow and probably painful. If she can't kill the bastards herself, she likes knowing that they'll suffer.
Xander rations out the food and water that they bring back with them from their latest excursion. Everyone gets something to eat; everyone gets water, that's the rule. On days when they come back empty-handed, Wesley hands out his own supplies, ignoring Faith's swearing and complaining that he's making a mistake, making them weaker with his stupid martyred sacrifices. No one else argues and no one refuses to take what he gives them except for Faith. She goes without eating, and when Wesley points out that she's doing the same thing as he is by not taking the food, she slams him against the wall before she walks out of the room.
One night -- or one day, no one can tell anymore and no one bothers to try and figure it out - two vampires break through the back window where the boards are weak. They manage to kill Dave, Ben and Rose who were sleeping in the room closest to the back. Wesley kills one, Faith takes out the other, the dust from the kill settling over the bodies of their victims. Dawn watches it all silently, wanders off without making a sound. Anya starts talking and can't stop - alternate universes and worlds, the power of the wish, vengeance she had wreaked at the whim of those scorned. The stories alternate between the bloody and the bizarre until she finally just runs out of words, trailing off with wistful sounding phrases that make no sense.
With their world now reduced to only the survivors of Sunnydale, the outsiders of the group dead and gone, Faith's dreams become more and more intense. She wakes screaming most nights, Wesley's hand over her mouth to silence her before she stirs up something outside and incites it to attacking them. They've been getting bolder, the things out there coming for attacks more frequently. They've been lucky so far that the demons here now are not quite clever enough to organize anything. It's all very much directly rushing for the door or window, attempting to break through with brute strength, testing the limits of the survivors in the house each time they do it. They're running out of disposable supplies like bullets and fuel for the flame throwers, having to rely on the blades instead. Hand to hand combat is more dangerous of course, but they hardly have a huge range of choices available to them.
Sooner or later, they'll run out of food and water. Sooner or later there will be an attack that gets past them, because they are tired and getting weaker. Someone will slip, someone will go down and that will be the beginning of the end for them. Faith knows this, but she's always been one to see the truth of the matter. Even without the dreams, she knows the human race is becoming a vague memory, a blip on the timeline of this planet and this universe, something for the other dimensions to make a brief note of in their records and move on to the next. She's a realist even here where reality no longer holds any hope of the things that it used to - light, warmth, hope.
She tells Wesley as she lies beside him, her hand on the stark white skin of his belly, her eyes closed against the sight of his body gone from muscle to skin and bone. He doesn't argue with her or tell her that she's wrong. Instead he puts his hand on her cheek, turning to look at her, his eyes glittering in the flicker of the candle that burns there in the corner of the room. She watches him as he tries to remember how to smile.
Somewhere, she knows, there's a world like this one used to be. Somewhere, in one of those other dimensions that Anya couldn't stop talking about, there must be good things that aren't about to go out like the candle that's starting to gutter in its own wax.
Somewhere, Faith believes, it all ends happily ever after.
-end-