Fic: Evening star. (Monsters-verse, Ten/Rose AU, PG-13)
Evening star. A brief interlude in the world of Monsters and Calendar. The latter is still ongoing and unfinished, and I'm sorry. Doctor/Rose, slayer and vampire, PG-13ish, and still oh-so-incredibly-AU. As ever, this is for mylittlepwny, the Girl Who Waited. ♥
There was a rumor about this fussy, sleepy little town: a whisper. The slayer in Cincinnati was dead.
The first time she sees him, he is handing out candy at the library, dressed as Edgar Allen Poe. He has a terrible wig on his head, curling in the wrong places and slipping down behind his ears, and an awkward little mustache with the ends peeling off. The legs of his suit pants are too short, but his cravat is impeccably tight. He is digging in the candy bowl for a Cadbury Crunchie.
"Here you are," he says, pulling one free and handing it over to a tiny human dressed as Wolverine. "The last one. No more Crunchies, I'm afraid," he adds, apologetically, to the handful of bedsheet ghosts and corn-syrup zombies who've assembled at his knees. He puts a hand to his chest with theatrical drama. "Nevermore!"
Nobody laughs, except Rose.
He looks up and smiles at her and shakes the candy bowl, while his false mustache flaps and quakes on his lip. "Take something, if you like." He grins and holds it out. "Smarties, those little slices of death." The mustache gives up and flutters to the floor. Rose shakes her head and steps back, slipping between two people dressed as condiment bottles, making her way through the thin crowd. She stands behind a rack of new arrivals and watches him for a minute, as he bends down to talk animatedly at a child swimming in a tablecloth toga. His knees almost touch his elbows; he is all angles and planes, long lines like a signpost, but he is graceful where he ought to be awkward. He should be a stork, a gawky calf, with legs like that. He curls down and back up again like a twist of perfect ironwork, smiling as he does it. It's a dead giveaway, if that's what you're looking for.
Rose walks down the library steps and up the sidewalk, through a little crowd of children with plastic masks and fangs, past a handful of student parties spilling out across porches and lawns. She passes the park and the woods, climbs the gate around the cemetery at the spot of shadows where the streetlights have been busted out.
There is a path through the weeds that goes up the back of the old cathedral, a tunnel hidden under workmen's boards and an overturned wheelbarrow. She pulls them aside and goes underground, flexing her eyes against total darkness, remembering not to trip on the stack of clothes she's just liberated from the donation bin behind the charity shop. She'll sort through them tomorrow, see if there aren't a few things in her size. Right now she just wants to curl up in bed and stare at the ceiling for a while, thinking about nothing. She doesn't want to think about his thin ankles or the creases in his smile, the bright eyes spilling over.
Things that never last.
There was a rumor about this fussy, sleepy little town: a whisper. The slayer in Cincinnati was dead. Pulled apart and eaten, if you believe the rumors. Rose generally does. There was talk of a new hellmouth, something bubbling to the surface, some fun to be had. A new slayer, somebody nondescript and green and edible. But that was six months ago, and he is not dead yet. Rose knows there are bets going, scores, in certain unsavory places. There always are. She wanted to see him with her own eyes. She doesn't exactly know why. It's been a long time since she approached one. Years- almost two decades. It didn't go well. It never does, with slayers.
Right now she is crouched behind a mausoleum in her second-best raincoat, watching him flail a broken stake in his own defense. He windmills and feints left too obviously, and the vampire in front of him punches him square in the face. The slayer goes down backwards, hitting everything possible on the way down.
"Ouch," she hears him say. He lies sprawled on the ground in a million long-limbed directions, like Dippy Dawg, his hat askew. She can almost see the comic-strip balloon floating above him, lifting the word into the air. Except that she can also smell blood now. It's sharp and fresh and hot against the back of her throat, like a taste of raw pepper. The slayer rolls away and springs to his feet about a second too late. The vampire is on him, hands clawing at his throat.
Rose is across the lawn before she even feels herself move, sprinting into a leap. She tackles the vampire and wraps her hands around his skull, pressing over his ears, and twists sharply until she hears the crack. He collapses in a heap, eyes glazed but the spark still burning. He'll have to be staked, but it can wait. She looks down at the slayer, sprawled on his back again, a helpless starfish of a man in red trainers and a hoodie that says BIG READER. She knows he must be feeling what she's feeling- the alien tug of other, the thing that screams in the blood. She wanted to bury her face in his throat from the moment she smelled him. Instead she fists her hands in her pockets and stands still. He squints at her face, and then breaks out in the widest smile imaginable. "Thank you," he says, suddenly. Sincerely. Rose stares at him. "You saved my life." He doesn't even look scared.
"Next time," says Rose, "don't hesitate."
She walks away.
Maybe she's going insane.
It happens, of course. You live long enough and then something shifts and it becomes too long, too much. You break your own rules and lose your mind. Humans go skydiving and have risky affairs. Her kind tends towards the dramatic, in one of two directions: they meet the sun, or they slaughter entire supermarkets full of customers and end up hunted down by the Council and burned in their dens. There's a line in either direction and she's toed well clear of both thus far.
But now-
"-hot chocolate?" he asks, holding out the cup lid from his thermos. "You look like you've been standing here a long time."
It's one in the morning and she's watched him make three kills tonight, with increasing competence. Five minutes ago he used a tombstone like a pommel horse to kick a vampire in the teeth. But his hand is wobbly whenever he delivers the final blow. He holds the stake wrong- like a pencil or a stick, instead of a knife. She stares down at his fingers, curled around the cup. They look warm. The knuckles are scraped and bloody. She wonders what it would be like to lick them clean.
Rose takes the cup from his hands and drinks, because she feels like it. "Cold night," he says, as if they were co-workers, normal people taking a smoke break outside an office. It's ludicrous. He's more insane than she is. It makes her feel light-headed. He glances at her coat. "Bit thin, isn't it," he adds, bluntly. If he's testing her, he's doing an insultingly clumsy job. She shouldn't explain. She should say she's from Barrow, Oslo, Saskatoon. She should tell him cold weather's in her blood. Make a joke out of it. But- skydiving, she thinks. She lets her eyes go yellow and the ridges shift to the surface, lets her canines slip down. It's like stretching out a muscle, flexing the kinks in your back after sitting too long. He says nothing. He doesn't drop the thermos.
"I hardly mind the cold," says Rose.
"I bet you don't," says the slayer.
They look at each other for a long time. Rose pulls the demon back, smoothes her eyebrows and retracts the teeth, so that she can take another sip from the cup. It's still mostly hot, powdery at the bottom where the mix has settled.
"I liked your Poe," she says, after a minute. The cocoa is still sweet on her tongue. "Even your rubbish mustache."
He smiles, faintly.
"Twas noontide of summer, and mid-time of night," he says.
"And stars in their orbits, shone pale through the light." Rose looks up. It's too appropriate, almost silly, to say those words. On a perfectly clear midnight, autumn cold scraping the clouds away and leaving the sky bare and crystalline and vast. There are stars, too many to count. If she opened her mouth she could swallow the night air, the heavy atmosphere that means snow will come soon. There will be flakes and flurries and blankets and a long season underground, waiting like the trees. Bootprints, red cheeks and chapped skin. Winter is a human season: it brings veins to the surface and lights fires inside. It makes her miss a pulse.
"Do you do this a lot?" he asks. "Quote Poe and-"
"No," says Rose. "I don't." She looks at him, in his faded knit cap and fingerless gloves. He's thin and threadbare and he'll need saving again, sometime soon. She can't keep him. She shouldn't even want to. "But I thought I should try something new."
They walk together in the dark.
"There pass'd, as a shroud,
a fleecy cloud,
And I turned away to thee."
-Edgar Allen Poe
There was a rumor about this fussy, sleepy little town: a whisper. The slayer in Cincinnati was dead.
The first time she sees him, he is handing out candy at the library, dressed as Edgar Allen Poe. He has a terrible wig on his head, curling in the wrong places and slipping down behind his ears, and an awkward little mustache with the ends peeling off. The legs of his suit pants are too short, but his cravat is impeccably tight. He is digging in the candy bowl for a Cadbury Crunchie.
"Here you are," he says, pulling one free and handing it over to a tiny human dressed as Wolverine. "The last one. No more Crunchies, I'm afraid," he adds, apologetically, to the handful of bedsheet ghosts and corn-syrup zombies who've assembled at his knees. He puts a hand to his chest with theatrical drama. "Nevermore!"
Nobody laughs, except Rose.
He looks up and smiles at her and shakes the candy bowl, while his false mustache flaps and quakes on his lip. "Take something, if you like." He grins and holds it out. "Smarties, those little slices of death." The mustache gives up and flutters to the floor. Rose shakes her head and steps back, slipping between two people dressed as condiment bottles, making her way through the thin crowd. She stands behind a rack of new arrivals and watches him for a minute, as he bends down to talk animatedly at a child swimming in a tablecloth toga. His knees almost touch his elbows; he is all angles and planes, long lines like a signpost, but he is graceful where he ought to be awkward. He should be a stork, a gawky calf, with legs like that. He curls down and back up again like a twist of perfect ironwork, smiling as he does it. It's a dead giveaway, if that's what you're looking for.
Rose walks down the library steps and up the sidewalk, through a little crowd of children with plastic masks and fangs, past a handful of student parties spilling out across porches and lawns. She passes the park and the woods, climbs the gate around the cemetery at the spot of shadows where the streetlights have been busted out.
There is a path through the weeds that goes up the back of the old cathedral, a tunnel hidden under workmen's boards and an overturned wheelbarrow. She pulls them aside and goes underground, flexing her eyes against total darkness, remembering not to trip on the stack of clothes she's just liberated from the donation bin behind the charity shop. She'll sort through them tomorrow, see if there aren't a few things in her size. Right now she just wants to curl up in bed and stare at the ceiling for a while, thinking about nothing. She doesn't want to think about his thin ankles or the creases in his smile, the bright eyes spilling over.
Things that never last.
There was a rumor about this fussy, sleepy little town: a whisper. The slayer in Cincinnati was dead. Pulled apart and eaten, if you believe the rumors. Rose generally does. There was talk of a new hellmouth, something bubbling to the surface, some fun to be had. A new slayer, somebody nondescript and green and edible. But that was six months ago, and he is not dead yet. Rose knows there are bets going, scores, in certain unsavory places. There always are. She wanted to see him with her own eyes. She doesn't exactly know why. It's been a long time since she approached one. Years- almost two decades. It didn't go well. It never does, with slayers.
Right now she is crouched behind a mausoleum in her second-best raincoat, watching him flail a broken stake in his own defense. He windmills and feints left too obviously, and the vampire in front of him punches him square in the face. The slayer goes down backwards, hitting everything possible on the way down.
"Ouch," she hears him say. He lies sprawled on the ground in a million long-limbed directions, like Dippy Dawg, his hat askew. She can almost see the comic-strip balloon floating above him, lifting the word into the air. Except that she can also smell blood now. It's sharp and fresh and hot against the back of her throat, like a taste of raw pepper. The slayer rolls away and springs to his feet about a second too late. The vampire is on him, hands clawing at his throat.
Rose is across the lawn before she even feels herself move, sprinting into a leap. She tackles the vampire and wraps her hands around his skull, pressing over his ears, and twists sharply until she hears the crack. He collapses in a heap, eyes glazed but the spark still burning. He'll have to be staked, but it can wait. She looks down at the slayer, sprawled on his back again, a helpless starfish of a man in red trainers and a hoodie that says BIG READER. She knows he must be feeling what she's feeling- the alien tug of other, the thing that screams in the blood. She wanted to bury her face in his throat from the moment she smelled him. Instead she fists her hands in her pockets and stands still. He squints at her face, and then breaks out in the widest smile imaginable. "Thank you," he says, suddenly. Sincerely. Rose stares at him. "You saved my life." He doesn't even look scared.
"Next time," says Rose, "don't hesitate."
She walks away.
Maybe she's going insane.
It happens, of course. You live long enough and then something shifts and it becomes too long, too much. You break your own rules and lose your mind. Humans go skydiving and have risky affairs. Her kind tends towards the dramatic, in one of two directions: they meet the sun, or they slaughter entire supermarkets full of customers and end up hunted down by the Council and burned in their dens. There's a line in either direction and she's toed well clear of both thus far.
But now-
"-hot chocolate?" he asks, holding out the cup lid from his thermos. "You look like you've been standing here a long time."
It's one in the morning and she's watched him make three kills tonight, with increasing competence. Five minutes ago he used a tombstone like a pommel horse to kick a vampire in the teeth. But his hand is wobbly whenever he delivers the final blow. He holds the stake wrong- like a pencil or a stick, instead of a knife. She stares down at his fingers, curled around the cup. They look warm. The knuckles are scraped and bloody. She wonders what it would be like to lick them clean.
Rose takes the cup from his hands and drinks, because she feels like it. "Cold night," he says, as if they were co-workers, normal people taking a smoke break outside an office. It's ludicrous. He's more insane than she is. It makes her feel light-headed. He glances at her coat. "Bit thin, isn't it," he adds, bluntly. If he's testing her, he's doing an insultingly clumsy job. She shouldn't explain. She should say she's from Barrow, Oslo, Saskatoon. She should tell him cold weather's in her blood. Make a joke out of it. But- skydiving, she thinks. She lets her eyes go yellow and the ridges shift to the surface, lets her canines slip down. It's like stretching out a muscle, flexing the kinks in your back after sitting too long. He says nothing. He doesn't drop the thermos.
"I hardly mind the cold," says Rose.
"I bet you don't," says the slayer.
They look at each other for a long time. Rose pulls the demon back, smoothes her eyebrows and retracts the teeth, so that she can take another sip from the cup. It's still mostly hot, powdery at the bottom where the mix has settled.
"I liked your Poe," she says, after a minute. The cocoa is still sweet on her tongue. "Even your rubbish mustache."
He smiles, faintly.
"Twas noontide of summer, and mid-time of night," he says.
"And stars in their orbits, shone pale through the light." Rose looks up. It's too appropriate, almost silly, to say those words. On a perfectly clear midnight, autumn cold scraping the clouds away and leaving the sky bare and crystalline and vast. There are stars, too many to count. If she opened her mouth she could swallow the night air, the heavy atmosphere that means snow will come soon. There will be flakes and flurries and blankets and a long season underground, waiting like the trees. Bootprints, red cheeks and chapped skin. Winter is a human season: it brings veins to the surface and lights fires inside. It makes her miss a pulse.
"Do you do this a lot?" he asks. "Quote Poe and-"
"No," says Rose. "I don't." She looks at him, in his faded knit cap and fingerless gloves. He's thin and threadbare and he'll need saving again, sometime soon. She can't keep him. She shouldn't even want to. "But I thought I should try something new."
They walk together in the dark.
"There pass'd, as a shroud,
a fleecy cloud,
And I turned away to thee."
-Edgar Allen Poe