ficlet: "We All Go Down Together" (Fred/Tara)
Title: "We All Go Down Together"
Fandom: The 'verse that contains Angel and Buffy: the Vampire Slayer
Pairing: Fred/Tara
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: Through "Shells" (and thus with warnings for the things that happen to Our Heroes in "Seeing Red" and "A Hole In The World")
Notes: For Settiai in the Tara round of femslash_minis. Apologies for its belatedness.
Words: 761
Summary: New-old knowledge discovered after death.
We All Go Down Together
Tara closed her eyes and tried to breathe, but the sharp, oxygen-free air prickled Tara blind just as much as it did with her eyes open. She couldn't gasp, couldn't struggle, couldn't move. She stood facing the sky, eyes closed, and drowned again and again.
A long time after, she started learning.
She learned the shape of clouds from oxygen molecules on up to huge, white, billowing structures that were paradoxically vaster than the entire sky they filled, and in the learning, knew them. Learning the sky was like learning a woman's body, and you had to start at the beginning and learn downwards, begin with the great luscious curves of space and find for yourself your own niche to lie in, your own raindrop to bathe in, your own sunbeam.
This was neither heaven nor hell but a dimension of skyscape, unique, unreplicated, untraversable by ordinary means. She rode here on a speeding bullet and would live here till she died again. She would be always dying. This caused no fear, for she knew from childhood that things wither and die and are born again with springtime.
She knew the taste of mist.
++
The chances of someone else arriving at the same particular place, the intersection of dozens of axes that mark a single point in an infinite void of space, were astronomical, and Fred calculated them again and again, trying to convince herself it wasn't real, she wasn't living in the world through someone else's body, wasn't living at all, had finally died herself dead and could rest for a minute. The plummet through three-space, four-space, n^7 space should have been familiar, but it still jolted her.
More jarring was the inside of Tara's head, which was full of arcane knowledge. She struggled to the surface and surprised Tara one morning that might have been evening because time in the sky moved oddwardly and backwards, and you could walk through the night from sunrise to sunset, keeping your head in the clouds the whole time. The reason she didn't have her own body became clear when someone looking suspiciously familiar strode all around them and then with a haughty shrug of shoulders that used to be Fred's, left.
"Someone you know?" Tara asked, who'd never seen the outside of Fred and so couldn't recognize it.
"No," Fred told her, honestly enough.
++
First Tara taught Fred the ways of their new body, of breathing air that wasn't meant to be breathed, of moving through stiff clouds and not sinking through them into bottomless fog. Tara itched for privacy and would sometimes retreat into the depths of herself, where even Fred could not penetrate, and let Fred walk them through the world. In this way, they were both free to do as they pleased.
Second Fred taught Tara the metastructures of their world, the arching cloud cover and the inner galaxies, the mishmash of meteorology and astronomy that seemed to blend together according to a mix of science and willpower. They could control things to some extent, though they were still trapped in something like a human form, and they still had no control over their hearts. They fell, quite madly, in love, through the alignment of the stars and through the intimacy of their circumstance.
Third, they taught each other pleasure.
++
The reason they clattered to earth was the old story of star-crossed lovers uncrossing themselves, untangling the mess they'd gotten themselves into purely by happenstance and accident and a misapplication of quantum physics. The means were harder to construct than to describe; the building was left up to Fred, while Tara gave helpful encouragement from the right-brained side of their mind. To implement the fall, they bunched together closely and let Tara's body slide through an empty hole that led to nowhere; their souls were ripped away, and Fred felt the old familiar fear of falling, but when she screamed, Tara held on tightly and hushed her, so. "There's nothing to be afraid of, sweetie. There's nothing left to fear." And finally their souls reconciled with bodies shaped not-quite-like their old bodies, but good enough. They landed gasping in a field, unused to the heaviness of gravity and the necessity of breathable air, and Fred rolled over again and again, away from Tara and the entrapment she symbolized, and found she'd plucked with new hands a bouquet of wildflowers for her love.
++
And somewhere far away, Willow stared out the window of her bungalow and made a wish on a falling star.
Fandom: The 'verse that contains Angel and Buffy: the Vampire Slayer
Pairing: Fred/Tara
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: Through "Shells" (and thus with warnings for the things that happen to Our Heroes in "Seeing Red" and "A Hole In The World")
Notes: For Settiai in the Tara round of femslash_minis. Apologies for its belatedness.
Words: 761
Summary: New-old knowledge discovered after death.
We All Go Down Together
Tara closed her eyes and tried to breathe, but the sharp, oxygen-free air prickled Tara blind just as much as it did with her eyes open. She couldn't gasp, couldn't struggle, couldn't move. She stood facing the sky, eyes closed, and drowned again and again.
A long time after, she started learning.
She learned the shape of clouds from oxygen molecules on up to huge, white, billowing structures that were paradoxically vaster than the entire sky they filled, and in the learning, knew them. Learning the sky was like learning a woman's body, and you had to start at the beginning and learn downwards, begin with the great luscious curves of space and find for yourself your own niche to lie in, your own raindrop to bathe in, your own sunbeam.
This was neither heaven nor hell but a dimension of skyscape, unique, unreplicated, untraversable by ordinary means. She rode here on a speeding bullet and would live here till she died again. She would be always dying. This caused no fear, for she knew from childhood that things wither and die and are born again with springtime.
She knew the taste of mist.
++
The chances of someone else arriving at the same particular place, the intersection of dozens of axes that mark a single point in an infinite void of space, were astronomical, and Fred calculated them again and again, trying to convince herself it wasn't real, she wasn't living in the world through someone else's body, wasn't living at all, had finally died herself dead and could rest for a minute. The plummet through three-space, four-space, n^7 space should have been familiar, but it still jolted her.
More jarring was the inside of Tara's head, which was full of arcane knowledge. She struggled to the surface and surprised Tara one morning that might have been evening because time in the sky moved oddwardly and backwards, and you could walk through the night from sunrise to sunset, keeping your head in the clouds the whole time. The reason she didn't have her own body became clear when someone looking suspiciously familiar strode all around them and then with a haughty shrug of shoulders that used to be Fred's, left.
"Someone you know?" Tara asked, who'd never seen the outside of Fred and so couldn't recognize it.
"No," Fred told her, honestly enough.
++
First Tara taught Fred the ways of their new body, of breathing air that wasn't meant to be breathed, of moving through stiff clouds and not sinking through them into bottomless fog. Tara itched for privacy and would sometimes retreat into the depths of herself, where even Fred could not penetrate, and let Fred walk them through the world. In this way, they were both free to do as they pleased.
Second Fred taught Tara the metastructures of their world, the arching cloud cover and the inner galaxies, the mishmash of meteorology and astronomy that seemed to blend together according to a mix of science and willpower. They could control things to some extent, though they were still trapped in something like a human form, and they still had no control over their hearts. They fell, quite madly, in love, through the alignment of the stars and through the intimacy of their circumstance.
Third, they taught each other pleasure.
++
The reason they clattered to earth was the old story of star-crossed lovers uncrossing themselves, untangling the mess they'd gotten themselves into purely by happenstance and accident and a misapplication of quantum physics. The means were harder to construct than to describe; the building was left up to Fred, while Tara gave helpful encouragement from the right-brained side of their mind. To implement the fall, they bunched together closely and let Tara's body slide through an empty hole that led to nowhere; their souls were ripped away, and Fred felt the old familiar fear of falling, but when she screamed, Tara held on tightly and hushed her, so. "There's nothing to be afraid of, sweetie. There's nothing left to fear." And finally their souls reconciled with bodies shaped not-quite-like their old bodies, but good enough. They landed gasping in a field, unused to the heaviness of gravity and the necessity of breathable air, and Fred rolled over again and again, away from Tara and the entrapment she symbolized, and found she'd plucked with new hands a bouquet of wildflowers for her love.
++
And somewhere far away, Willow stared out the window of her bungalow and made a wish on a falling star.