Buffy: the Invitation (an Addergoole Crossover), Part XVI

Buffy: The Invitation

Part I: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1096503.html
Part II: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1100922.html
Part III: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1104619.html#cutid1
Part IV: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1108537.html
Part V: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1112216.html
Part VI: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1124762.html
Part VII: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1134781.html
Part VIII: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1139412.html
Part IX: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1146552.html
Part X: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1155478.html
Part XI: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1164418.html
Part XII: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1173922.html
Part XIII: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1178885.html
Part XIV: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1182860.html
Part XV: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1186127.html

They all turned to look as the angry voice came twisting down the hall.

“Oh, shit,” Xander whispered. Willow thought he might agree with her. The woman coming towards them looked – well, she looked formidable. Tall, willowy, dark-haired- “Beautiful,” Xander whispered. Willow thought she might agree. And clearly furious.

“Magnolia cy’Linden, what exactly do you think you’re doing?”

The smell of flowers in the air grew overpowering. Magnolia took a step forward, putting herself between the visitors and the oncoming storm – not noticing or discounting that Buffy had already stepped in front of Willow and Xander. “This is not exactly a normal situation, Professor Valerian.”

“Turn. It. Off.” The woman – Professor Valerian? She did not look sleepy or calming – bit the words off, and, suddenly, the smell of flowers vanished. “Mask up.”

“But Professor-”

“Now.”

And, just like that, Magnolia looked like an ordinary – luscious, beautiful, but ordinary – woman again. “They’re not exactly ignorant of the whole thing, Professor. But the problem is, they’re all on the dark end of their non-ignorance.”

“Magnolia, you’re not making any sense, and yet, at the same time, you’re making things worse.”

“What she means,” Buffy offered, in the bright voice that meant that she was ready to kill something, “is that we know about the things that go bump in the night. Heck, some people – well, not people, more like creatures – think I am the thing that goes bump in the night. And some of them don’t think anymore, because I bumped into them. In the night. That’s how it works, right, Will?”

“Close enough.” Willow turned her attention on the woman. “So, we encountered – Buffy and Xander encountered – someone here who may or may not be a demon, and we got into comparative, ah, demonology. Because you see – oh, Giles is going to kill me.”

“That’s all right,” Buffy interjected. “I might put him in traction first, so he’ll have trouble killing you. Unless he clubs you with his casts. Is that a thing?”

“Not for normal people, Buff,” Xander interjected, “but, then again…”

“I’m sorry,” the woman, Valerian, cut in, not sounding sorry at all, “you were saying?”

“Oh!” Willow cleared her throat. “We fight demons. Professionally? Well, nobody gets paid. But as a very dedicated hobby. Buffy, Willow, and I. We live in Sunnydale, not sure if you’ve heard of it? But it’s very full of the demony sorts of people. And a gate to, ah, well, Hell. And so we’re not, what did Magnolia say? We’re not in the dark, but the stuff we know is very dark. I don’t know anyone else with a kitty tail. And I’m dating a werewolf.”

“Say that again?”

“I don’t know anyone with a kitty tail?”

“Not that part.” The woman was clearly getting annoyed; her letters grew more and more crisp.

“Oh. Um, I’m dating a werewolf? But he’s quite nice and he only bites people on the full moon and when he’s feeling bitey, well, we lock him in a cage, but it’s a very nice cage and mostly he locks himself in and-”

“Will. The lady is turning green.”

The lady was, indeed, turning green, and her hair was curling with vines. “Have you seen anything like this before?”

“oh! I read about that in a book once. A dryad. they’re said to be very vengeful and be willing to take a very long time to.. oh. Oh, ma’am, nice lady, we didn’t upset you, did we? Only you asked, and then we explained, and–”

“Miss. Miss,” Professor Valerian repeated, cutting Willow off. “What’s your name?”

“Willow, ma’am. Willow Rosenberg.”

“Willow, mmm? You’ve read about dryads?”

“Well, yes, we were looking for something to fight this monster, it was turning everything into, well, it was growing vines everywhere, and a dryad was the first thing I found, and I thought… but anyway, it turned out to be a Tegjiogi demon, not a dryad, but by that time I’d read up on dryads and even found this neat spell and—”

“Will.” Xander hugged her. “It’s okay. You answered the question.”

“I talk too much when I’m nervous,” Willow explained to the woman, from the protection of Xander’s arms.

“I hadn’t guessed,” she answered dryly. “All right, Magnolia. You’re right, they had prior knowledge, in direct contradiction to the agreement. It’s not your fault. But we’re going to have to cut the tour short before things get more complicated.”

“Well, now, about that,” Magnolia began slowly. “See, the blonde one just snuck off while her friend was talking, an’ she’d been saying something about staking a vampire?”

“Dysmas,” Professor Valerian hissed it out. “He can take care of himself.”

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Buffy: the Invitation (an Addergoole Crossover), Part XV

Oct13

“…Not by burning down the gym?” Buffy’s expression managed to be both rueful and hopeful.

“Hard to do in an underground bunker, though I think Ciro tried once or twice Stay away from Ciro, by the by. He looks all sad and lost-geek, but he’s a nasty, nasty piece of work.”

“So I can’t stake the vampire… because he’s a student here?” Buffy frowned. “What kind of place is this, anyway? I mean, I’ve heard of some pretty hinky setups, but this about takes the cake.”

“Look, when you say vampire, what do you think of?” Magnolia had leaned against the wall like she had all the time in the world and, for some reason, Buffy had stopped pacing.

“Vampire? Stake it.”

“Ooh, I know this one,” Willow offered. “So, vampire. Corpse, possessed by a demon. Supernaturally strong, fast, and often they’re really good at fighting. But stick a stake through their chest and they fall to ash.”

“No remorse, no compassion, no soul.” Buffy’s voice was flat, and she ticked the points off on her fingers. “Kill them before they kill you. No point being nice about them – they aren’t going to be nice back.”

Willow did her best to hide her wince. Luckily, Magnolia was being distracting enough.

“Woah. Now those sounds like the kind of monsters Doug and the Thorne Girls fight, all right, but it doesn’t sound like our vampire.”

“Does he drink blood?”

“Well, yes, but…”

“Pale, avoids the sunlight?” Buffy stood up straighter, the calm leaving her once again

“We live in a basement.”

“There you have it. Vampire. Stake it before it tortures your friends and tries to eat you for dinner.”

“You’re skipping the whole demonic possession thing.” Magnolia had gone snappish and annoyed. “Look, I’m not saying there aren’t demons out there – especially if y’all live at a dimensional portal. I hear those can be super nasty. – but we don’t, here. We have our own particular brand of strange here.”

She shook her hair again, and suddenly had jaguar spots up and down her legs and arms. And, Xander noted, a very pettable-looking jaguar tail. “We’re all a little strange here, all right? But none of us are the sort of demons you’re thinking of.”

“Magnolia!”

Next: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1189171.html

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We don’t deal with outsiders very well…

Oct11

This follows You’ll never know the murderer sitting next to you…. in theme and character, but is several years later, very soon after the apocalypse.

This story involves threats of murder, rape, and other violence against women, children, and men. It involves actual murder and violence, mind control, and stone-cold bluffing.

Three people greeted Devin’s gang at the gate: a preteen boy, a twenty-something young man, and a woman not much older than the man.

The woman was carrying a shotgun slung lazily on its strap over her shoulder, a sawed-off baseball bat resting on the other shoulder, and a hunting knife on the other hip. The man was pacing slowly back and forth, clearly itching for a fight.

Devin had twelve fighters, all of them armed to the teeth. There was nothing this rag-tag group could do, and the fence wouldn’t hold for all that long.

The woman raised her eyebrows at him. “Well?”

“Give us your food and blankets and you’ll live.”

“If we give you our food and blankets, we’ll die,” she pointed out calmly. Way too calmly. By this point, she should have been negotiating.

“Not my problem. You fight us, you’ll die.”

That eyebrow quirked. “All of us?”

Oh, she was negotiating. Devin was unimpressed. “You’ve got kids. You cooperate, I’ll leave you enough food for the kids to survive. Otherwise, I’m killing all of you, now.” He could always come back and get the rest of the food when the parents had weakened themselves or starved themselves.

She turned to the man. “Go get the crew. Don’t run.” She turned to the boy. “Get your brother, drill 2. If you find his sister and her kin, tell them the same, but you get your brother and keep him safe.”

The two looked like they wanted to argue. Neither of them did.

The woman turned back to Devin and waited until they were both out of sight. “You threatened my family,” she said, calm and cold. “You’re going to die. If everyone else leaves right now, they might survive.”

She was a single woman, she was barely armed; she was bluffing.

Three of Devin’s crew ran off anyway. He could kill them later.

“You.” She pointed at one of the ones who’d remained; Tabby, a hard-ass fighter, former biker, three-time felon. She said something in some foreign jabber. “You go, and you tell anyone who might be interested, you do not mess with Boom. You do not mess with the Ranch.”

She pointed to one more person, Jimmy, a homicidal little shit even at fifteen. She repeated her jabber. “You, go the opposite direction as her, and do the same.”

They weren’t going to leave. They were Devin’s most loyal fighters. Tabby might be a girl, but she was deadly. Jimmy might be a kid, but he was insane.

“Are you done? Because you know we’ll find the kids, wherever they hid. And you know what my men will do with a pretty girl like you. You might ever survive. Put a leash on you and keep you around the camp, might even give you another baby.”

He leered at her, and she smiled. “You know, I was hoping you’d say that. Smile, asshole, you’re on Candid microphone.”

“…What?” He didn’t even notice when Jimmy and Tabby slunk away in opposite directions.

His words repeated back to him from some hidden loudspeaker. ”Put a leash on you and keep you around the camp. Might even give you another baby.”

Devin shook his head. “What, you think the police are gonna care? The police are gone, bitch. The law is gone, ain’t no law left but us.”

“You’re mistaken,” she smiled. “The law that’s left is us. Boom. Run, bitches.” Her shotgun swung up. A snarl sounded somewhere to Devin’s left. At the last minute, he realized she’d been stalling.

“You fucking bitch, you were buying time!” He aimed his pistol at her head.

He never got a chance to pull the trigger; he never even saw the horns that gored him.

The bodies of his crew fell, gored, beheaded, shot, turning purple and green and chartreuse. Six people fell while Devin bled out, their glassy eyes staring at him. Nobody had time for accusation. They hardly had time to see the whirlwind that attacked them.

As the ground opened up and swallowed him, Devin saw the woman pick up one more of his fighters — Pete, Pete, who’d been loyal even though he hated violence against women. “You’ll live,” she declared, against all sense. “Go. Tell them. You do not fucking mess with Boom.”

The dirt covered Devin, and he died.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1184216.html. You can comment here or there.

Buffy: the Invitation (an Addergoole Crossover), Part XIV

Oct6

Willow frowned at Magnolia, her best glower — which wasn’t very good, maybe, but it was the best she had. “You really wanted to scare us?”

“Everyone gets scared. It’s not like, like you were sayin’, with people dyin’ and real horrible fear, or anything. It’s just, we, well, the way we are, a little fear can jump-start the systems.”

“If anything I had was gonna be jumpstarted by fear, it would’ve been jumpstarted long ago. My engines are dead, dead,” Xander quipped. “Nothing to jump here. Just plain ol’ Xander.”

“Well, there was that one time you turned into…. oh, never mind. Buffy!” Buffy’s whole body language had changed as she slipped down the hall. She was stalking something. Willow could see her reaching for a weapon, looking for something, eying the wood panelling. “Buffy, what are you doing?” She dropped her voice to a whisper.

“Willow, give me a stake. I know you have one hidden somewhere, and I’m not judging or anything, just give it to me.”

“Well, I really would, but, well, Giles said not to.” Willow slunk closer to her friend, clutching her bag closer to herself.

“Giles said not to ‘punch’ anyone. I’m not going to ‘punch’ anyone.” Buffy made the p sounds hard and aggressive. “I’m just going to stake the vampire. Will, come on.”

“Oh, Buff, I don’t think that’s a good idea…”

“Wait. Staking. Vampire? Oh, no, no, darlin, you don’t want to do that.” Magnolia hurried after them.

“You know, I think I really do,”Buffy snarled. She stomped forward down the hallway. “You see, you have your things that you do. I have mine. And one of mine just happens to be, oh, I don’t know… staking vampires”

“All right, all right. So the monsters you were fighting back home, they were vampire-like…”

“No.” Xander’s voice was harsh and raspy. “Not vampire-like. Not like that cute girl in the hot tub was demon-like. We’re talking full-on vampires–”

“Should we be?” Willow cut in nervously. “Talking, I mean. Should we be anything?”

“Ah’m saying, I’m not sure there’s anything here that is that vampire-like as to need staking. Our demons are… well, oh, shit.” Magnolia shook her hair out like an 80’s shampoo commercial. Unbelievably, the scent of flowers seemed to follow the gesture. “Could you just come with me before you stake someone? I’m not sure just how well they’d survive that, you see, and I don’t think you want to be expelled before you even start classes.”

“You have no idea how bad I want to be expelled,” Buffy countered.

“Oh, but, ah, expelling from Addergoole isn’t like ordinary schools. They don’t just kick you out and put a mark on your permanent record.”

“Do they send you to a hell dimension?” Xander offered. “Because I’m pretty sure that’s what our principal would do if he could, but he can’t even manage to expel us.”

“Me.” Buffy had slowed down but not yet stopped. “They weren’t trying to expel you two, Xander, just me.”

“Let’s be honest, Principal Flootie probably would have expelled me after the whole hyena thing, if he hadn’t gotten eaten.”

“I don’t think that anyone gets sent to a hell dimension here, but then again…” Magnolia’s voice had slowed, too, and she was frowning. “The one that I know about, nobody’s heard from him since he, ah, left.”

“Ah, left?” Willow wanted to be worried, but the smell of flowers was heavier and heavier in the air, and she was having trouble getting too worked up. “What sort of ‘ah, left.'”

“Well, the reason I don’t want your friend to go staking someone… aw, heck, ain’t gonna be nothing you three don’t know when you finally get here. Just don’t tell no-one I told you, all right? I don’t want all the upperclassmen getting sore at me.”

“Just explain.” Even Buffy sounded less testy. “We’ll keep the fact that you’re acting like a decent human being a secret, just just… tell us.”

“As far as we can tell, the one way you can get ‘expelled’ from Addergoole is by killin’ another student,” Magnolia answered in a whisper.

“…Not by burning down the gym?”

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In Which Reynard Gets a Bath

Oct3

First: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/753621.html
Previous: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/980691.html

Last posted about a year ago~

Reynard was swaying. He wasn’t sure when it had started, but he realized, as the woman’s — Elle’s — his owner’s hand landed on his shoulder that he had been leaning to one side, muttering.

“When’s the last time you ate?” She sounded angry. Reynard didn’t look up at her; if he had, he was pretty sure he’d have fallen over.

Don’t call her mistress. “I, uh. Sometime before the beatdown, I think. I don’t really remember much of it clearly.”

“Right. So we’ll clean you, and then we’ll feed you, and then we’ll worry about the rest. Can you stand?”

She seemed to ask him that a lot. Reynard considered the question. “Yes?” He levered himself slowly to his feet, surprised to find her arms under his shoulders pulling him up.

And holding him up, and pulling off what remained of his clothes. “Normally,” he offered, before he noticed his words were slurring, “Norm-uh-luh-lee, I’m very ex.. Happy to have a pretty woman taking my clothes off. Norm. Ally.”

“And now?” She slapped his hands away as he tried to help.

“Now, I think you’re taking ad. Taking advan…” He could not come up with a shorter form of the word.

He didn’t need to. She leaned forward and whispered in his ear. “You Belong to me.”

“Ah. Ah, well… yes. You have a very good point.” Reynard swallowed. “Yes, ma’am Elle. You can take ad — take me any way you want to, can’t you?”

“I can,” she agreed. “I don’t have to wait until you’re slurring your words and swaying on your feet, if what I want is you. Interesting, isn’t it?”

“Inter’sing?” That wasn’t the word he’d have normally used. “Terfy’ing?”

She chuckled. He was naked now — when had that happened? And she was moving him, nearly carrying him, towards the tub. “Interesting. I was never all that interested in having Kept, back in school. And I don’t recall you having any, either. But here we are, because you raided the wrong henhouse. Keep your head above water.”

“Keep my…” for a second, Reynard thought she was speaking metaphorically, and then her hands were off of him and he was slipping into the water.

Head above. Head above. He grabbed on to the sides of the tub and forced his shaking arms to hold him there. Head above water. RIght. He could do that.

A moment later, a warm presence slipped in behind him and arms wrapped around his shoulders. “There you go. There. Just relax against me, if you can.”

Reynard was following her order before he realized she was naked. Of course, he thought, it’s a tub. But that was a lot of wet, slick, naked skin — naked Keeper — pressed against him. The Bond liked contact. He remembered that from school. It liked touch. It liked praise. It hated screwing up, running into orders, disappointing your Keeper. He leaned against Elle and let her hold him up.

“I’m Kept,” he muttered groggily. “Shit.”

“Quite astute,” she murmured in his ear. “Stay awake for me, foxboy. Just until we get you clean, at least. Come on.”

The order pricked him into consciousness. “S’hard,” he complained. “There was a lot of, uh…”

“Yes. I think you were staying awake on adrenaline. Now that you’ve decided i’m not going to torture or kill you immediately, you’re crashing. That’s fine.” She lathered a washcloth and ran it over his chest. “Just stay awake long enough to not drown and we’ll be fine. I just want to make sure this is mostly dirt and not blood.”

“Some blood, probably. That big guy was big.” The orders were warring against Reynard’s body’s urges, but he knew about that. He pinched himself surreptitiously on his inner thigh and ran through a few complicated math problems in his head. Her hands were all over him, scrubbing at the dirt covering him, gentle when she found a wound under the filth. He was dirtier than he remembered – and less wounded, too. His memories were fuzzy, but he had clear images of the big guy swinging a broadsword at him.

Reynard was good at ducking – preternaturally good at it, even – but there wasn’t all that much one could do about a big block of muscle and rock swinging a giant blade at you at superman-like speeds. Dodge once of twice, sure, but eventually you were going to get hit. And hit again. And… “Ow.”

her fingers had found bruises he didn’t remember getting. “Oh, hrrm.” She craned her neck over his shoulder to look at his chest. Cleaned of all the dirt, the bruise was clear. “You must have really, really annoyed him.”

Reynard blinked his eyes until they would focus on the bruise. Across his chest, someone had left a mark in the exact shape of a hand.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1181009.html. You can comment here or there.

In Which Amrit & Mieve have a quiet evening – a continuation, much-belated, of BeeKeeper.

Oct3

First: A beginning of a story which obnoxiously cuts off just before the description,
Previous: In Which Mieve Explains Some Things.

Fae Apoc, approx. now.

Content Warnings: This setting, although not this ficlet, contains rape, mind control, and dubious consent situations.

This particular story contains kidnapping and slavery, bondage, violence, and will eventually contain Stockholm Syndrome.

Amrit

He kept expecting her to shove the gag back in his mouth. He’d just told her that she couldn’t trust him, that he wouldn’t promise even to not attack her. She knew he would try to escape given the slightest chance.

But she put the pie in the oven and dried the dishes he’d washed, put away her pottery like it wasn’t the end of the world, like she didn’t have someone chained up in her kitchen, and then she’d led him into her living room. (Floor plan — http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/890220.html )

She had those floor bolts everywhere. Not that Amrit was surprised, not if he wasn’t the first person she’d collared. She led him to a nice soft armchair near the wood stove, locked his chain to the floor, and taken the other chair herself.

“No Workings,” she warned him, “or the gag goes back in.” Amrit waved the warning away with a dismissive hand; he got the point already. He’d have to get the gag out when she wasn’t listening.

He worked his mouth while she picked up her knitting — really? She was going to sit by the fire and knit? Could she be any more homey? — feeling around the edges of his lips. He was starting to heal already. The hawthorn had to be working its way out of his system. Once it was mostly gone — once he could cut himself and have the mark vanish in less than twenty minutes — then he could make his escape.

“This a normal evening for you?” He hadn’t meant to say anything at all, but the silence seemed to ask for it.

She looked up at him, her fingers still working on her knitting. “Most nights. Sometimes I read. Sometimes… well, but that’s not going to happen.”

The room was only dimly lit, two flickering gas lamps and the fire casting everything into ruddy shadows, but it seemed as if she might be blushing. Amrit coughed. “Sometimes…?” he prompted.

“Sometimes I have more cooperative Kept.”

“I’m not your Kept.”

She snorted. That hadn’t been been the response he’d been expecting. “I noticed, trust me. Some day, that slave factor is going to find his pants full of annoyed bees.”

“What, you were expecting a Kept?” He tugged at the chain. You didn’t normally have to tie Kept up.

“…Second one was human,” she explained. “Humans require a bit more, ah, patience. Well, than a Kept.” She smiled crookedly at him. “I’d say you require enough patience for any three humans.”

“Hey!” He glared at her. “It’s not like I asked for this. Any of it. And it’s not like you’re being like the height of patience and tolerance here.” She really was being more patient than he’d thought she’d be… but there was no need to say that.

“It’s not as if the slave markets come with provenance and papers on people. Some of them do volunteer, you know.”

“Who the fuck would volunteer for a collar and a leash and…” Amrit twisted his face up – being owned?“

“Well, let’s see.” She ticked off on her fingers. “People who don’t know how to survive in the world as it’s ended up. People who want to escape the world they’re in – or the people they’re with, or something like it – enough that they’re willing to give up freedom. People who are just that naturally submissive. The Departed Gods made Keeping for a reason, and it wasn’t to sell people in slave markets, you know.”

Amrit blinked at her. “Thorough.” He sneered. “None of that’s me, though.”

“Been Kept before, have you?” She asked it far too casually.

Amrit tugged on the chain on his leg. It was starting to chafe. “For like a month. Something my Mentor set up after he released me. Tricked me into it and everything. I didn’t know,” he added defensively. “If I’d known it’d just be a month, I might’ve…”

She was raising her eyebrows at him. He could tell that even in the flickering gaslight. “Fuck you, lady,” he muttered.

“Mieve,” she corrected, far too serenely. “My name is Mieve. Fuck you, too.”

She made it sound like a benediction. “Amrit,” he offered, in lieu of an amen. “My name is Amrit.”

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Buffy: the Invitation (an Addergoole Crossover), Part XIII

Sep29

Buffy: The Invitation

Magnolia was spending a lot of time staring at them as if they were cheating. Buffy gave the girl her best vapid smile and waited to see what came out this time.

“Y’all are just totally ringers, ain’tcha?” she asked slowly. Her accent thickened the more stressed she was. “Ah mean, you study demons, you have a Mentor…”

“So we know a few things.” WIllow had her stubborn face on. “WHat’s wrong with that? This is a school, right? Learning is important.”

“Learning is important,” Magnolia repeated slowly, like the words were foreign to her. Buffy wondered — not for the first time — if she was a demon, too. “Yeah. But you’re ruinin’ all the fun. Ah mean,” she twisted her lips up. “Well, I suppose if you’re used to demons…”

“You know,” Xander cut in, “we get that. I mean, there’s always that fun moment where you get to watch the new person’s mind break.”

“Exactly!” She looked pleased. Buffy waited. That wasn’t Xander’s friendly tone.

“Yeah, like, Buffy came to town, and you know, somehow Will and Jesse and I had never questioned —”

“Jesse?”

“I’m not there yet. So Will and Jesse and me, we knew a lot of people died. Gangs on PCP, wild animal attacks, barbeque fork accidents — our school paper has an obituary section, you know, and we just never questioned it.”

“…What?” The tall girl was lost, and, more than that, she was worried.

“…And then all of a sudden, the monsters have Jesse. And there we are, trying to figure out what’s wrong with the world while our best friend is dead. Tons of fun, right, for Buff? Showing us the real world?”

Buffy almost felt sorry for Magnolia. Almost. “There was certainly that entertaining look of shock and horror on your faces. And then the way you nearly got yourselves killed.”

“Oh, oh, and then there was that thing where…” Willow trailed off.

“Oh, no, Will, she wants fun, that’s a good place to start.” Buffy waved her hands in encouragement. “Please. Tell her how much fun we’ve had, dealing with the real world.”

“…That time your boyfriend lost his soul and tried to kill us all,” Willow continued, in a much smaller voice. “And—”

Xander took over. “And you did the awful, horrible right thing and killed him. I’m sure that was loads of fun. Right, Buffster? So much fun…”

“…I freaked out and pretended that the fun world didn’t exist for a while, yeah.” Buffy managed something that could have pretended to be a smile once, in a pageant or something. “Loads of fun.”

Magnolia held up her hands. “Ah surrender, ah surrender. Ah’ll even owe you a favor for that one… mebbe one each. By all that’s holy and the Lord’s dirty laundry, you three don’ need this school and it might not survive you.”

“But the thing is,” and all of a sudden Willow was in earnest-research-mode, “don’t you see? You know entirely different sets of information than we do. We look at your friend with the bat wings and we don’t know what sort of demon she is. But I’m betting you, you look at her and think — well, that’s the thing, isn’t it? We don’t know what you think.”

“Ah beg your pardon?” At this point, Magnolia looked lost, confused, and a little bit offended. It was Willow’s turn to hold up her hands.

“Not like that! Well, all right, I’m not sure exactly what you were thinking there, but that’s sort of the point. The point is, you look at your friend, and you’re not seeing demon. So the thing is, there’s a lot we can learn from what you do see when you look at her. And if you’re thinking that people are called demons that aren’t — well, there’s a lot of world we haven’t seen yet. Maybe things are different in Sunnydale. I mean, hellmouth, mouth-into-another-dimension…”

“Breathe, Will.” Xander patted her again. “What Willow’s trying to say is that there’s probably something we could learn here, with sexy naked girls with wings, far from the Hellmouth. Buffy?”

“…We can’t leave the Hellmouth.” It was a weak protest, and, besides, she wasn’t really paying attention anymore. Something had caught her attention, the way that normally only vampires and the occasional demon did. “Well, I can’t leave the Hellmouth.”

“You can and have,” Xander pointed out.

“You know that was an awful idea.” Buffy strode down the hall, chasing the feeling.

“What’s she lookin’ for? Hey, Buffy, where’re you goin’, sweetheart?”

next: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1182860.html

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1178885.html. You can comment here or there.

You’ll never know the murderer sitting next to you….

Sep26

Speculative ficlet of Boom, pre-apocalypse. Not even the ficlet I meant to write.

“Hey, you. Are you still alive?”

Feccrick came to conciousness slowly. There was a redheaded woman leaning over him, seemingly unbothered by the raw gaping sword wound across his chest.

“Alive?” Better to feign fogginess. “Yeah, what…?”

“What’s your name?”

“Fred. Fred Kirk.”

“Good, good.” She stood up, talking into her shoulder radio. He couldn’t make out any of the words, but he thought he heard his name.

Shoulder radio… a cop. Jeans and a jacket – detective? Feccrick tried to shake himself awake while trying to look as vague and uncertain as possible.

“All right, Fred. What happened here?”

“Some guy. Some…” Mara type, hero complex, swinging his sword around… “Freak with a sword. Came in and started plowing through everyone.”

“Why did he leave you alive?”

Alive? The rest were… Feccrick looked around: blood, and body parts, and a broken machete.

“Shit. shit, shit, they’re all dead?” Panic seemed like a good idea. He didn’t even have to fake it. “All of them?”

“Why’d he let you live?” she repeated.

“Shit, I don’t know, I…” Some words came back. You’re not to blame. You’re not like them. The man had sounded sincere. “…I think he maybe thought I was a good guy. Which I am, I mean…” The guy had clearly been a nutjob.

“Thank you.” This time, he heard the Words. They started with Abatu Intinn…

He didn’t have time to panic before he was gone.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1177326.html. You can comment here or there.

Shopping, a noncanon ficlet of Addergole-Postapoc for Rion

Sep25

Exactly what it says on the tin. Decades after the apocalypse. Bracken, a roleplay character, has appeared in several ficlets, here

Slaves, Bracken was finding, were not all that comfortable with being interviewed.

To be fair, she’d known that for quite a while. Even Marius, when she’d Kept him all those years ago, had snarled and growled his way through her initial interview. And all the Kept she’d had before and since then, they’d always had some level of that nervous, uncertain, “what’s the right answer” feel.

She wasn’t helping things any, she knew. But she couldn’t very well not ask, or she’d end up owning half of the fae currently in the slave markets – and that would stretch even her pretty well-off coffers.

“All right. I know it’s not the normal question, but I need to know. Can you tell your Keeper what to do?”

The girl in front of her blanched. “I wouldn’t… no… of course not.”

Bracken sighed. Just one more left at this place, and she really wanted to take this one home and cuddle her. “I’m sorry. I’ll see if I can send someone good your way.”

She gestured to the slave factor. They knew her well enough to indulge her a bit here; her trade was as good as anyone’s. “Last one.”

“You sure about this one?”

“Gotta check ’em all.”

“All right then.” He led out the girl and led in, a moment later, a slender person in a heavy wooden collar. Bracken thought probably male, but she couldn’t be sure.

Either way, the slave bowed before sitting where the slave factor had pointed them. Bracken waited until the factor had left the room and closed the door, taking the moment to look the slave up and down.

Thin, too thin. The collar had chafed; the chains at their wrists had chafed. They hadn’t been well-treated, and yet they responded to the look with a friendly raised eyebrow.

“I’m Bracken. You’re…”

“Remy.” The voice was a mid-alto; the answer punctuated with another little bow.

“I’ve got a few questions for you.” Bracken went through the base questions first: length of time under the collar (five years), age (claimed thirty-five, but they were a little unclear on time), association with Addergoole (never heard of it) and so on.

“Not my skills? Not how well I take orders? Not even my equipment?”

Bracken thought Remy looked amused. “The first is less important than some other things; the second one you’d probably lie about, and the third one is entirely irrelevant right now.”

“Well.” Now Remy definitely looked taken aback. “So what’re the other things?”

“Well, to start with, can you tell your Keeper what to do?”

“Can I…” Remy snorted. “Well, then. That’s a new one. Can I…”

They were definitely stalling. Bracken smiled and waited; stalling was better than any other answer she’d gotten so far.

“Well…” Remy tried again, “I mean, if that’s what my Keeper wanted, yeah… I mean, you said Keeper, didn’t you?” Remy leaned forward. “Not Owner. Man, for a Keeper, yeah, hell yeah. I can do it.”

“Good.” Bracken stood up and called. “I’m taking this one.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1176815.html. You can comment here or there.

Visible Bisexuality: and Addergoole, a ficlet of… well, Addergoole

Sep22

This ficlet focuses on Efrosin, a character in Addergoole Year Nine. The story takes place between years 6 and 7, Efrosin’s first and second years of the school.

Shiva and Nikita are part of Addergoole, the Original Series and their side fics can be found here.

“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.” Shiva patted Efrosin on the head and wandered out of Addergoole. “Or anyone,” she threw over her shoulder.

They’d only known each other a year. Efrosin hadn’t even known he had sisters, and then he’d gotten shanghaied by two of them within a week of showing up at school. That had been strange enough. His sisters’ Kept… that had been weirder. The moment when Shiva had asked him “Hey, do you like guys enough to Keep one?” and then raised her eyebrow when he’d sputtered out some sort of lame denial…

People said they knew Addergoole was different at the reveal, or at the point where they went underground, or at the point where they Changed. Efrosin knew it when his sister looked at him, raspberried, and said, “Look, nobody cares, or at least not anyone that matters. I just want to know if you can keep a collar on him without freaking out over ‘eww boy cooties’.”

Ef had manged something sputtered and unclear that boiled down to “boys are fine, what boy are we talking about again?”

(And that had all ended in a pile of exploding turds, but at least it hadn’t been because Ef had a problem with boy cooties.)

Nikita was following Shiva like a lost puppy, a grapey, adorable lost puppy. When she hopped in the car, loading in her pile of children, Niki turned to the closest available person, eyes wide and expression entirely without artifice.

Efrosin sighed. The boy was entirely too good looking.

“You don’t even like guys,” he pointed out, but Niki was walking back to him, wrists crossed behind his back and his cutest puppy-dog expression on his face. “Oh, departed gods… fine. But only for a couple weeks.”

Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do, Shiva had said. She certainly couldn’t say anything about Niki then, could she?

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1176123.html. You can comment here or there.

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