(Fic) Dancing the Carmagnole

[stormwreath]

It's about two years since I posted anything Buffyverse-related; but this is a fic I wrote a long time ago but never actually posted. I found it and thought I should do something with it!

While it is a Buffyverse story, it doesn't feature any of the characters from the show. It's set 200 years earlier, at the height of the French Revolution.

Comments

[igenlode]

Ah. I made the Jean-Paul connection, and Robespierre is obvious, but I certainly hadn't placed Charlotte in that light :-)
I assume, according to the rules of improbable historical significance, that Charlotte's conversational captain is not a random character but Bonaparte himself...

(I would have thought that any of the leading figures in the Committee of Public Safety would have had more than enough daily bloodshed at their command without needing to dispatch units of soldiers to be slaughtered; I was actually expecting a tie-in with the events of the Terror, but unless I'm missing something those 'ordinary' deaths are unrelated to this demon-summoning plotline.)

[stormwreath]

Glad you liked it, and that I was able to preserve the surprise of Charlotte's identity so long!

And yes, you're right about Bonaparte. Though I slightly tweaked the writing of the pamphlet, which was actually read by Robespierre's brother a couple of weeks later. It seemed too much of an almost-coincidence to miss.

My idea was that the soldiers had to be killed in a specific, ritual method (and at a fixed time and place) to summon the demons. Hence luring them away. The Terror was more 'background cover', with the idea that among so much death a few more deaths wouldn't be noticed. (Except they were.)

I also wanted to show Charlotte as being a much more hardened and ruthless Slayer than, say, Buffy - she has no problem killing humans - and demonstrate how her everyday surroundings might make her that way.