title: Chaboulure
author: argante
rating: G
x-over: BtVS/X-Men
challenge: ‘heat’
disclaimer: Not mine, not mine, not mine. Anything else?
Chaboulure
french cajun: prickly heat
The heat’s sunny and pretentious in California, and she’d practically baked inside the hot stone walls of the prison. She burnt her hands on cell bars countless times; puckered lines of darkened skin criss-cross her palms to prove it.
Louisiana-heat is heavy, and it settles over your skin like a blanket the moment you go outside. In New Orleans it was even heavier than the other cities, the usual swelter combining with the fever large cities seem to generate on their own. Jazz, liquor, smoke; she’d breathed that city in. It was the smell that kept her there so long, and the smell of other Slayers on the breeze that drove her away.
B called from Milwaukee. She remembered the winter she spent there about a year back and commiserated over the under-the-collar cold-heat of the place.
“So, you don’t like California-heat, Louisiana-heat, Milwaukee-heat… what sort of heat do you like? Can you even like heat?”
Faith hadn’t answered, just considered the question in a careful way she developed inside, and later she decided that yeh, you can like the heat, and the one she likes is that prickly-heat, like needles and fire, she gets whenever he’s near.
Logan-heat.