selenak

Turns out I have something new for the anniversary after all. One of my challenge stories originally written for

theatrical_muse, set between season 2 and 3 of Angel.

Title: Fragile

Disclaimer: Moody pregnant vampires owned by Joss Whedon & Mutant Enemy.

Spoilers: Only until Offspring in season 3.

Fragile

The first time someone tells her, she rips out his throat.

After that, she feels sick again, but she didn't drink enough to throw up. She's in a bathroom somewhere in Nicaragua, staring in a mirror which doesn't show her anything at all, and feels it again. That tiny flutter deep inside her. It's impossible, but there it is.

She tries everything. Shamans, fortune tellers, witches, wizards; she even is desperate enough to try some of the old remedies she dimly recalls from a time and a place where her body would, in theory, been capable to produce what is growing inside her. But none of the remedies work, and when she's down to trying some knitting needles, she finds out that anything attacking her womb gets repelled. If she does it herself, she blacks out; if someone else does it, he or she gets thrown across the room.

And all the time, the thing inside her grows and grows.

It's ridiculous. Nothing is more helpless, more fragile than an embryo. Granted, this one should not be possible to begin with, but it is there, a parasite inside her, arrived unwanted and unasked, and so she should be able to do what women were able to do through the centuries. It is a tiny, tiny thing, barely alive, a collection of cells dividing and multiplying; she is a ruthless immortal killer. She has the power.

Except that she doesn't. Her own body betrays her as surely as it did when it was dying.

The worst thing is that it is always with her. There is not a moment she can forget about it, and that makes it worse than the illness of years past. It grows, and she feels it inside, and even in her dreams, she is never alone. The hunger she feels is not just hers anymore. The lives she takes are not just for her anymore. She wakes up sobbing because she felt herself alone in the dark, swimming in an endless black sea, and it's daylight, the sun just kept away from her room through curtains, and she's anything but alone; there is the body of the dead chambermaid right next to her. Those were not her emotions.

This is worse than being human again last year had been. It's worse than being thrown out by Angel, a whore paid with a ring after sex, it's worse than losing him, it's worse than dying for a cheerleader.

"I hate you," she whispers, not knowing whether she is talking to Angel, hundreds of miles away, who has put this thing inside her, or the parasite itself. "I want you to die. Do you hear me? I want you to die."

But it doesn't die; it's far too hungry to, and she finds herself grabbing another girl from the street and sucking her empty before it stops kicking.

Finally, after the last shaman who hasn't been warned about her gets thrown across the room as well and gives her nothing but yet another mystical tirade, she decides to swallow her pride and return to Los Angeles. It's going to be the worst humiliation yet, but she's going to ask Angel for help. True, he has threatened to stake her the very next time he sees her, but that, too, would be a help. At least she would not feel the thing moving inside her anymore, whispering to her, making her stare at windows and mirrors that a still blessedly empty and wonder how it would look like.

Sitting in a bus, she deliberately conjurs up the most gruesome ways to kill a child from her memories and thinks about them in detail, hoping it will catch the images and her hate.

"It's a wonderful thing, giving a new life, isn't it?" an old lady asks. "You must be so happy."

Darla follows her gaze and realizes that her hands, both of them, are cradling her swollen, pregnant belly. Moving over it gently, as if caressing it.

Oh, you little bastard, she thinks. You made me do that. It wasn't me.

But for the first time, there is admiration mixed in the thought as well. Give credit where due. She is an experienced killer, none better, and she has thrown everything against this fragile creature she has. It is still there. So far, it has been winning.

Maybe it is her child after all.