Winter Lights Snippet
For anyone waiting for an update to The Soul Lies Down -- I'm sorry. It's been a tough couple of months that culminated in a miscarriage, and so I'm sure you can understand why I need to take a break from baby!fic. In the meantime, I've been working on something that better suits my mood, that I first started talking about here. It's been slow-going, as the IVF meds completely fry my creative brain -- it's not even like writers block, because the ideas are there, just the connection to my fingers/keyboard seems to go awol. Very frustrating. But it does mean that now I've come off the meds, I have notebook full of scribbles and ideas, which I'm slowly starting to piece together as that connection comes back. I'm kinda actually a little bit really excited about this project. I just have a good feeling about it. (Not a happy feeling, but a good one, like I'll feel better for having done it.) So, have a snippet from the evening's endeavours.
The only reason I know what went down with Adam is from the dreams I had after. Not the scary first slayer, random cheese guy dream, but later. There’s always some element of processing after a big fight. Things happen fast and I react on instinct, so it’s like… decompression, sorting through thoughts and feelings, things I didn’t have time for when it was all going down. Except I have no actual memory of that fight once the spell kicked in, so all I know about it is from my sleeping mind which, I’ll be honest, is not exactly the sanest place. But there’s this one image that has come back to me again and again over the years - rising to stand before Adam, completely defenseless, but deflecting his bullets with a wave of my hand. The air shimmers and my eyes feel bright and hot like they have laser beams shining out of them or something, and the bullets turn to doves. Then my voice comes, but it’s amplified, folded back and back on itself like a Jacob’s ladder, and suddenly I can feel them, my sisters, the slayers who came before me, standing at my shoulder in an unbroken line all the way back to the Sartorially-Challenged One. And we speak. You have no idea the source of our power.
Maybe it didn’t exactly happen that way, I don’t know. Bespelled Buffy brain is capable of some serious weirdness. But those words, in that hundred-voice, I can’t shake it. Because I know. It took me another year to realize it, and then another two years to realize it again, but now I finally know what we meant. I feel it. The source of our power: that terrible, burning love. Brighter than the fire.
I’ve heard burning is the most painful way to die. I thought I heard him laughing, even so. Poetic irony or whatever it’s called - he burned, I just self-immolated.
The only reason I know what went down with Adam is from the dreams I had after. Not the scary first slayer, random cheese guy dream, but later. There’s always some element of processing after a big fight. Things happen fast and I react on instinct, so it’s like… decompression, sorting through thoughts and feelings, things I didn’t have time for when it was all going down. Except I have no actual memory of that fight once the spell kicked in, so all I know about it is from my sleeping mind which, I’ll be honest, is not exactly the sanest place. But there’s this one image that has come back to me again and again over the years - rising to stand before Adam, completely defenseless, but deflecting his bullets with a wave of my hand. The air shimmers and my eyes feel bright and hot like they have laser beams shining out of them or something, and the bullets turn to doves. Then my voice comes, but it’s amplified, folded back and back on itself like a Jacob’s ladder, and suddenly I can feel them, my sisters, the slayers who came before me, standing at my shoulder in an unbroken line all the way back to the Sartorially-Challenged One. And we speak. You have no idea the source of our power.
Maybe it didn’t exactly happen that way, I don’t know. Bespelled Buffy brain is capable of some serious weirdness. But those words, in that hundred-voice, I can’t shake it. Because I know. It took me another year to realize it, and then another two years to realize it again, but now I finally know what we meant. I feel it. The source of our power: that terrible, burning love. Brighter than the fire.
I’ve heard burning is the most painful way to die. I thought I heard him laughing, even so. Poetic irony or whatever it’s called - he burned, I just self-immolated.