Buffy fanfic
Feb. 3rd, 2004 10:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakThe email is working again; let's hope it remains this way. Thanks everyone for their sympathy. Meanwhile, Damage inspired my Jossverse Muse to return. In a roundabout way. You see, I couldn't get the image of Buffy and Dawn in Rome out of my way, so... here we go. It doesn't actually have a plot and is more a series of impressions, I suppose. But it is for ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
honorh, who through this cunning device is pledged to beta it now. *g*
There were a lot of reasons why Buffy chose Rome. It was easy to get from there to anywhere else in Europe, thanks to the airport, so whenever new reports of girls with extraordinary strength showed up and none of the others could deal with them, she could go. And it was warm there, not rainy as in London, plus the food was much better. But the main reason why she and Dawn settled down in Rome was the lack of memories.
Angel had never mentioned Rome. Neither had Spike, or Riley. Dad had not been there with his stupid secretary, which had been the major drawback Spain offered; Mom hadn't wished herself there in a single conversation that either Buffy or Dawn could remember. Giles knew nothing more of it than any other tourist. Okay, any other tourist who could tell you the history of every second building, but still. He had never lived in Rome. It could be theirs. Their city.
"Many cities," said Dawn, correcting Buffy, while they sat on the Spanish Stairs and indulged in lots of gelati. "So many different cities in one."
Buffy shrugged. "Sounds like the perfect place for a Key and a Slayer to me," she replied, grinning at Dawn, and Dawn smiled back. Dawn wore her hair in braids that day, and had complained repeatedly about how young this made her look, but really, with the hottest summer in a century, there wasn't much choice.
After letting some more strawberry ice cream melt into her mouth, Buffy sighed.
"Italy must be where ice cream ends up when it dies and goes to heaven," she said, but then she heard the sound of her own voice, those two syllables, hea-ven, and suddenly the memories were back. Telling him, the warmth of the sun which she could not feel enveloping her. Feeling the fire, nearly two years later, when their hands both burned. She looked at her hand, stretching her fingers. Slayer healing had done its usual trick, but there were still some tiny scars. She had an inkling they would not fade, just as the scar on her neck had never done.
Dawn watched her, blue eyes attentive and burdened with a knowledge that she shouldn't have. Buffy opened her mouth to say something distracting, then stopped. She had promised herself she wouldn't do this anymore. Instead, she took Dawn's left braid and let it run through her scarred fingers.
"Hey," she said.
"Hey," Dawn replied, and they remained silent, watching the tourists being pursued by immigrants from Algeria who tried to sell them everything from postcards to condoms. It was a comfortable silence.
Dawn liked the school there, and she adored the scooter Buffy bought soon after they arrived, appropriating it whenever she could, which was rarely. The traffic in Rome was crazy, with everybody and their dog pressing on horns and nobody paying any attention to signs and traffic lights. Buffy wasn't about to let Dawn drive unattended at all at first.
"Like you're such a great biker," Dawn said, which was true, but Buffy was learning. Lots of kids from Dawn's school had rich parents who were worried about their offspring, so Buffy took to teaching martial arts and self defence. It was good to earn money with something that was actually fun, instead of living of the money all those dead Watchers had left, but she really needed the scooter to get to the various homes. For the slaying, she mostly went on foot.
It was something to run in the Via Veneto after a guy who so dated himself with the Marcello look, or to feel the millennia under her bare feet when she tracked down a nest in a desecrated catacomb near the Via Appia. Sometimes it felt like she had been there before, breathing the heat and dust mingled with ashes, cleaning her face afterwards with the water that had something of the coppery taste of blood because of all the coins people kept throwing into each and every fountain. But that was alright, because she could guess where those memories came from. Dawn, who didn't intend to give up her Watcher education just because Giles was nowhere nearby, had the CD Roms with the copies of his chronicles Willow had painstakingly made way back when in Sunnydale. One evening, she told Buffy all about the previous Slayers who had lived in Rome, her face glowing. Buffy was torn between fascination, amusement and being disturbed as Dawn recounted some battle between a Gorgon and the Slayer Lucilla and included every gory detail.
"Maybe you can find a Gorgon, too?" Dawn asked hopefully.
It wasn't a passing phase for Dawn, by no means. They were all together in London for Christmas, and Andrew took them to see "Return of the King". The entire way back in the Underground he and Dawn couldn't stop arguing whether a Gorgon could have beaten Shelob.
"You two are so married," Buffy said.
"Please," Dawn shot back. "I'm not a lesbian." She reconsidered. "Well, I don't know yet. But not with Andrew."
To Dawn's disappointment, Gorgons remained elusive, but she made Buffy tell her all about Buffy's showdown with a Lamia and typed the report in what Dawn called her chronicles. Fighting with Roman vampires was odd, at first. They didn't pretend not to understand her quips, as the French ones had done, but they were all either frightfully snobbish or trying to make passes, even the younger ones. To her surprise, Buffy picked up Italian pretty quickly. It just made trading insults easier, and she didn't have to feel patronized by some fledgling who thought she was a cute American abroad. The Lamia, though, was something else.
"Am I supposed to be impressed, little girl?" she said, rolling her r's in what was obviously a mocking parody of an Italian accent, and afterwards continued with a flawless British pronounciation Giles would have envied: "There are dozens of Slayers now."
"Hundreds," Buffy confirmed, and if it hadn't been for the fact the Lamia held some stupid British kid named Richard hostage who went to the same school like Dawn did, they would have gone on like this all night. As it was, she didn't come home until four anyway.
Still, for such a huge city, there were surprisingly few vampires and demons around. She could cover the ground just as well as she had done for Sunnydale, which at first just felt wrong.
"Maybe it's all the crosses," Dawn said. "I don't think they have that many churches anywhere else in the world. Well, maybe in Utah."
Buffy had a somewhat nastier suspicion; maybe many of the vampires here simply were smarter and richer and didn't have to find their prey in the streets. Maybe they could just order victims to be brought into their palazzos, possibly through a law firm.
She didn't know what Angel thought he was doing with Wolfram and Hart, but it freaked her a little out every time something brought it up. Back when Willow and Cordy had emailed info back and forth, Willow had filled her in on the whole Wolfram and Hart deal. "As if the Mayor had branched out," she had said. Faith, in her Faith way of switching between teasing with knowledge she knew Buffy wanted to have and genuine desire to share troubles, had told her even more during those first nights after the Hellmouth had closed, when neither of them could sleep. And now Angel worked for them. Or they worked for him. Either way…
It reminded her of her suspicion that Faith might have started to work for the Mayor with some half-baked idea of infiltrating the enemy stronghold, before going totally Dark Side, but she never asked Faith about that. The truce between them was tender and new, and Faith had loved Snake Guy, who, when all was said and done, had died because he had loved Faith.
With Dawn, though, there was no need to hold back.
"What is it with guys and big organisations?" Dawn asked. "I never got why Riley went back to the Initiative, either."
"Hey, there's a certain equal opportunity kick in ordering people around," Buffy said ruefully. "I should know."
"But Princess Leia didn't become Empress to finish off the Evil Empire," Dawn began, then stopped, horrified. "Gah! Star Wars! That's all Andrew's fault!"
"Told you you were married," Buffy returned, and Dawn stuck out her tongue.
During their time in England Giles and Willow had guilt-tripped Buffy into a promise of visiting the Vatican museums. So she finally went in January, on a went, windy day, when any self-respecting demon was at probably at home, roasting victims. It was a school day, so the queue wasn't that long. Dawn, who had already been here with her class, had told had given her a map with big red crosses on the rooms she said Buffy absolutely had to visit, but Buffy found herself wandering aimlessly from floor to floor, following snatches of English conversations.
Some of the paintings she actually recognised from her brief time in college. She felt an unexpected pang at the thought. There was no way they'd let her study here with her qualifications, or lack of same, and she had thought that this particular dream had long been consigned to the dust.
Buffy found herself standing in front of a painting that showed some guy who cut into the skin of another guy. She looked at the title, written in three languages on a small sign on the wall. The Flaying of Marsyas. People brushed against her, trying to get to the next room, and she smelled cold smoke in their clothes. That was the thing about Europe, Italy in particular; everybody smoked. Years ago, she'd have wrinkled her nose at it; now the smell was oddly familiar. She had tasted it on him, after all.
Quickly, she turned away from the painting and let herself be pushed into the next room. The big attraction there was completely invisible thanks to all the people standing around it, so she looked at a smaller painting somewhere in the corner that nobody seemed to be interested in. Not hard to guess why. Even a college dropout like her could see it looked clumsy in comparison to most of the other stuff here. Yet another Mary with child. Still, there was something about this one that was almost…
She stood still. Looked at the face, tried to imagine the curls flattened into a straight hairdo, and the rather pretty lacy dress replaced by some horrid school girl outfit. Remembered the eyes, looking at her, and the mocking smile.
Darla. It was Darla, looking at her from a painting she must have commissioned as a big joke. Virgin Mary indeed.
"Okay," Buffy said out loud. "I get it. There is no place where one of you wasn't first. But you know what? It's still my city."
When she was outside again, where the rain had stopped enough for some sun beams to get in between clouds, she breathed in deeply, and promptly started to hiccup. Some guard asked her whether she was alright, and she nodded and quickly went to the small German cemetery, which was apparently the only place inside the Vatican walls nobody was interested in. Sat down on a tomb. The cats who had been there first hissed at her, but she ignored them, and after a while, one of them wandered over to her and started purring. Buffy stroked her and wondered how screwed up one had to be when being in a cemetery was one's idea of homey comfort.
Then the rain returned, and the cats rushed away. Buffy stood up. After a glance at her wrist, she decided it was time to pick up Dawn from school.
"Hey Miss," one of the Algerians yelled at her in English as soon as she had left the Vatican, "how about an umbrella?"
"No thanks," she replied in Italian, and began to jog a little. She hadn't come by scooter, but the next Metro station wasn't that far. It was just that she wanted to walk, rain or no rain.
After a while, she felt the ground beneath her feet again. The streets she had walked before. She, and no one else. She recognised the shop where she had spent entirely too much on absolutely gorgeous Sandro Vicari shoes, and the bistro where two cute guys had flirted with her and Dawn when they had dinner there.
Maybe it was many cities in one, and maybe it wasn't so free of memories, after all. But for now, it was hers.
honorh, who through this cunning device is pledged to beta it now. *g*There were a lot of reasons why Buffy chose Rome. It was easy to get from there to anywhere else in Europe, thanks to the airport, so whenever new reports of girls with extraordinary strength showed up and none of the others could deal with them, she could go. And it was warm there, not rainy as in London, plus the food was much better. But the main reason why she and Dawn settled down in Rome was the lack of memories.
Angel had never mentioned Rome. Neither had Spike, or Riley. Dad had not been there with his stupid secretary, which had been the major drawback Spain offered; Mom hadn't wished herself there in a single conversation that either Buffy or Dawn could remember. Giles knew nothing more of it than any other tourist. Okay, any other tourist who could tell you the history of every second building, but still. He had never lived in Rome. It could be theirs. Their city.
"Many cities," said Dawn, correcting Buffy, while they sat on the Spanish Stairs and indulged in lots of gelati. "So many different cities in one."
Buffy shrugged. "Sounds like the perfect place for a Key and a Slayer to me," she replied, grinning at Dawn, and Dawn smiled back. Dawn wore her hair in braids that day, and had complained repeatedly about how young this made her look, but really, with the hottest summer in a century, there wasn't much choice.
After letting some more strawberry ice cream melt into her mouth, Buffy sighed.
"Italy must be where ice cream ends up when it dies and goes to heaven," she said, but then she heard the sound of her own voice, those two syllables, hea-ven, and suddenly the memories were back. Telling him, the warmth of the sun which she could not feel enveloping her. Feeling the fire, nearly two years later, when their hands both burned. She looked at her hand, stretching her fingers. Slayer healing had done its usual trick, but there were still some tiny scars. She had an inkling they would not fade, just as the scar on her neck had never done.
Dawn watched her, blue eyes attentive and burdened with a knowledge that she shouldn't have. Buffy opened her mouth to say something distracting, then stopped. She had promised herself she wouldn't do this anymore. Instead, she took Dawn's left braid and let it run through her scarred fingers.
"Hey," she said.
"Hey," Dawn replied, and they remained silent, watching the tourists being pursued by immigrants from Algeria who tried to sell them everything from postcards to condoms. It was a comfortable silence.
Dawn liked the school there, and she adored the scooter Buffy bought soon after they arrived, appropriating it whenever she could, which was rarely. The traffic in Rome was crazy, with everybody and their dog pressing on horns and nobody paying any attention to signs and traffic lights. Buffy wasn't about to let Dawn drive unattended at all at first.
"Like you're such a great biker," Dawn said, which was true, but Buffy was learning. Lots of kids from Dawn's school had rich parents who were worried about their offspring, so Buffy took to teaching martial arts and self defence. It was good to earn money with something that was actually fun, instead of living of the money all those dead Watchers had left, but she really needed the scooter to get to the various homes. For the slaying, she mostly went on foot.
It was something to run in the Via Veneto after a guy who so dated himself with the Marcello look, or to feel the millennia under her bare feet when she tracked down a nest in a desecrated catacomb near the Via Appia. Sometimes it felt like she had been there before, breathing the heat and dust mingled with ashes, cleaning her face afterwards with the water that had something of the coppery taste of blood because of all the coins people kept throwing into each and every fountain. But that was alright, because she could guess where those memories came from. Dawn, who didn't intend to give up her Watcher education just because Giles was nowhere nearby, had the CD Roms with the copies of his chronicles Willow had painstakingly made way back when in Sunnydale. One evening, she told Buffy all about the previous Slayers who had lived in Rome, her face glowing. Buffy was torn between fascination, amusement and being disturbed as Dawn recounted some battle between a Gorgon and the Slayer Lucilla and included every gory detail.
"Maybe you can find a Gorgon, too?" Dawn asked hopefully.
It wasn't a passing phase for Dawn, by no means. They were all together in London for Christmas, and Andrew took them to see "Return of the King". The entire way back in the Underground he and Dawn couldn't stop arguing whether a Gorgon could have beaten Shelob.
"You two are so married," Buffy said.
"Please," Dawn shot back. "I'm not a lesbian." She reconsidered. "Well, I don't know yet. But not with Andrew."
To Dawn's disappointment, Gorgons remained elusive, but she made Buffy tell her all about Buffy's showdown with a Lamia and typed the report in what Dawn called her chronicles. Fighting with Roman vampires was odd, at first. They didn't pretend not to understand her quips, as the French ones had done, but they were all either frightfully snobbish or trying to make passes, even the younger ones. To her surprise, Buffy picked up Italian pretty quickly. It just made trading insults easier, and she didn't have to feel patronized by some fledgling who thought she was a cute American abroad. The Lamia, though, was something else.
"Am I supposed to be impressed, little girl?" she said, rolling her r's in what was obviously a mocking parody of an Italian accent, and afterwards continued with a flawless British pronounciation Giles would have envied: "There are dozens of Slayers now."
"Hundreds," Buffy confirmed, and if it hadn't been for the fact the Lamia held some stupid British kid named Richard hostage who went to the same school like Dawn did, they would have gone on like this all night. As it was, she didn't come home until four anyway.
Still, for such a huge city, there were surprisingly few vampires and demons around. She could cover the ground just as well as she had done for Sunnydale, which at first just felt wrong.
"Maybe it's all the crosses," Dawn said. "I don't think they have that many churches anywhere else in the world. Well, maybe in Utah."
Buffy had a somewhat nastier suspicion; maybe many of the vampires here simply were smarter and richer and didn't have to find their prey in the streets. Maybe they could just order victims to be brought into their palazzos, possibly through a law firm.
She didn't know what Angel thought he was doing with Wolfram and Hart, but it freaked her a little out every time something brought it up. Back when Willow and Cordy had emailed info back and forth, Willow had filled her in on the whole Wolfram and Hart deal. "As if the Mayor had branched out," she had said. Faith, in her Faith way of switching between teasing with knowledge she knew Buffy wanted to have and genuine desire to share troubles, had told her even more during those first nights after the Hellmouth had closed, when neither of them could sleep. And now Angel worked for them. Or they worked for him. Either way…
It reminded her of her suspicion that Faith might have started to work for the Mayor with some half-baked idea of infiltrating the enemy stronghold, before going totally Dark Side, but she never asked Faith about that. The truce between them was tender and new, and Faith had loved Snake Guy, who, when all was said and done, had died because he had loved Faith.
With Dawn, though, there was no need to hold back.
"What is it with guys and big organisations?" Dawn asked. "I never got why Riley went back to the Initiative, either."
"Hey, there's a certain equal opportunity kick in ordering people around," Buffy said ruefully. "I should know."
"But Princess Leia didn't become Empress to finish off the Evil Empire," Dawn began, then stopped, horrified. "Gah! Star Wars! That's all Andrew's fault!"
"Told you you were married," Buffy returned, and Dawn stuck out her tongue.
During their time in England Giles and Willow had guilt-tripped Buffy into a promise of visiting the Vatican museums. So she finally went in January, on a went, windy day, when any self-respecting demon was at probably at home, roasting victims. It was a school day, so the queue wasn't that long. Dawn, who had already been here with her class, had told had given her a map with big red crosses on the rooms she said Buffy absolutely had to visit, but Buffy found herself wandering aimlessly from floor to floor, following snatches of English conversations.
Some of the paintings she actually recognised from her brief time in college. She felt an unexpected pang at the thought. There was no way they'd let her study here with her qualifications, or lack of same, and she had thought that this particular dream had long been consigned to the dust.
Buffy found herself standing in front of a painting that showed some guy who cut into the skin of another guy. She looked at the title, written in three languages on a small sign on the wall. The Flaying of Marsyas. People brushed against her, trying to get to the next room, and she smelled cold smoke in their clothes. That was the thing about Europe, Italy in particular; everybody smoked. Years ago, she'd have wrinkled her nose at it; now the smell was oddly familiar. She had tasted it on him, after all.
Quickly, she turned away from the painting and let herself be pushed into the next room. The big attraction there was completely invisible thanks to all the people standing around it, so she looked at a smaller painting somewhere in the corner that nobody seemed to be interested in. Not hard to guess why. Even a college dropout like her could see it looked clumsy in comparison to most of the other stuff here. Yet another Mary with child. Still, there was something about this one that was almost…
She stood still. Looked at the face, tried to imagine the curls flattened into a straight hairdo, and the rather pretty lacy dress replaced by some horrid school girl outfit. Remembered the eyes, looking at her, and the mocking smile.
Darla. It was Darla, looking at her from a painting she must have commissioned as a big joke. Virgin Mary indeed.
"Okay," Buffy said out loud. "I get it. There is no place where one of you wasn't first. But you know what? It's still my city."
When she was outside again, where the rain had stopped enough for some sun beams to get in between clouds, she breathed in deeply, and promptly started to hiccup. Some guard asked her whether she was alright, and she nodded and quickly went to the small German cemetery, which was apparently the only place inside the Vatican walls nobody was interested in. Sat down on a tomb. The cats who had been there first hissed at her, but she ignored them, and after a while, one of them wandered over to her and started purring. Buffy stroked her and wondered how screwed up one had to be when being in a cemetery was one's idea of homey comfort.
Then the rain returned, and the cats rushed away. Buffy stood up. After a glance at her wrist, she decided it was time to pick up Dawn from school.
"Hey Miss," one of the Algerians yelled at her in English as soon as she had left the Vatican, "how about an umbrella?"
"No thanks," she replied in Italian, and began to jog a little. She hadn't come by scooter, but the next Metro station wasn't that far. It was just that she wanted to walk, rain or no rain.
After a while, she felt the ground beneath her feet again. The streets she had walked before. She, and no one else. She recognised the shop where she had spent entirely too much on absolutely gorgeous Sandro Vicari shoes, and the bistro where two cute guys had flirted with her and Dawn when they had dinner there.
Maybe it was many cities in one, and maybe it wasn't so free of memories, after all. But for now, it was hers.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2004-02-03 01:41 pm (UTC)Re:
Date: 2004-02-03 10:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-02-03 01:53 pm (UTC)Fighting with Roman vampires was odd, at first. They didn't pretend not to understand her quips, as the French ones had done, but they were all either frightfully snobbish or trying to make passes, even the younger ones.
Thanks!
Date: 2004-02-03 10:03 pm (UTC)As Darla put it: what we were informs what we become. Vampires share the vices of us living Europeans. *g*
no subject
Date: 2004-02-03 02:09 pm (UTC)Grazie!
Date: 2004-02-03 10:12 pm (UTC)And the Darla painting is an idea I had ever since Holtz asked Angelus why they were in Rome and he said Darla wanted to see the paintings. It seems like such a Darla thing to do...
no subject
Date: 2004-02-03 02:34 pm (UTC)Re:
Date: 2004-02-03 10:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-02-03 02:41 pm (UTC)Re:
Date: 2004-02-03 10:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-02-03 03:02 pm (UTC)Scary idea that Roman vampires could order victims like pizza.
no subject
Date: 2004-02-03 04:36 pm (UTC)Re:
Date: 2004-02-03 10:19 pm (UTC)Ever since then, I have been munching on the idea that during that time, they had the painting of Darla as the Madonna done for Holtz, because the baby would have been meant to be his child, the one they killed. Also because the blasphemy would have appealed Darla as well as Angelus. But that's an idea which keeps changing, so I like your alternative of Dru putting Darla up to it because of her visions just as well.
Re:
Date: 2004-02-04 02:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-02-03 05:03 pm (UTC)Thank you!
Date: 2004-02-03 10:20 pm (UTC)(And that was my show-off Byron quote for the day.*g*)
no subject
Date: 2004-02-03 08:27 pm (UTC)Re:
Date: 2004-02-03 10:06 pm (UTC)The friendship between Dawn and Andrew, offscreen though it was, also warmed my heart.
I loved those "thanks, you're a peach" moments between them on the show, and couldn't help but noticing Andrew went into more detail about Buffy and Dawn than about the other Scoobies in Damage, so I think I have canon to back me up there. *g*
no subject
Date: 2004-02-04 04:27 am (UTC)Lovely. This feels like Buffy is whole at last in her own person, at peace with who and what she is, with what Dawn is. Alone to be themselves with no one to tell them what they should be.
Very good visual and tactile sense, as well.
typo
was actually fun, instead of living of </>the money all those dead Watchers had left
no subject
Date: 2004-02-04 05:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-02-04 06:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-02-04 07:46 pm (UTC)thanks, and...
Date: 2004-02-05 07:54 am (UTC)