Fred/Tara: Heads/Tails
Apr. 6th, 2005 11:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
doyleTitle: Heads/Tails
Author: Doyle
Pairing: Fred/Tara
Rating: PG
Notes: For![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
wisdomeagle for the femslash ficathon. Request was Fred/Tara with Wes or Xander, brushing her hair, vanilla ice cream, and a dollop of angst, with no explicit sex.
Summary: Two looks at A Hole in the World.
i.
She counts the strokes of the brush through her hair because they’re integers, rational numbers, and they remind her that this is real.
Ten, she thinks, multiple of one, two, five and itself, ten green bottles, square root of a hundred, ten fingers and toes which is why people count in base ten even though hexidecimal’s more fun.
Tara says, “Sweetie, don’t scratch your wrists, you’ll hurt them.”
She remembers Tara’s name today. It’s a good day.
“They itch,” she mumbles, and almost misses eleven. Eleven’s a prime number. To multiply a two-digit number by eleven you add the digits together and make that the middle one.
“Oh,” Tara says, and she knows she must have said this out loud, and that Tara is playing along, pretending Fred never told her about elevens before, “so thirty-five by eleven is three hundred eighty five?”
Thirty-five, product of two primes. It’s like a magic trick, only magic isn’t real.
She holds on a long time, all the way to forty before the numbers fall together, tumbling down like the card houses she built when she was a little girl, and then Cordelia’s in the corner of her (cell) room.
“Fred. Trance-girl. I said, we’re getting takeout, do you want anything?”
Cordelia’s sweater is blue. She forces herself to think about this, to remember the blue. It’s not pink and stained with blood and she doesn’t have maggots crawling from her eyes; she’s holding Connor, not a baby blanket caked with dirt and gore.
If she concentrates, doesn’t let herself forget where she is, it’s okay.
*
Something changes about her treatment, enough that for the first time in three years she’s lucid for whole hours at a time. She starts to remember better, recognizing the doctors and her parents and Tara, Tara who never left even when she didn’t know her name or that she ever had a girlfriend. People talk over her head – they do that a lot, never knowing if she’s in the hospital or her own world - about miracle and breakthrough and a couple of times the doctors mention something called a Summers case.
When she’s in (the dream) LA she doesn’t remember the hospital. She knows that Wolfram & Hart makes her uneasy. She gets lost in the maze of hallways, so much she has to ask Angel whether the rooms move around. Late at night in the labs she sometimes thinks she can hear people whispering, like there’s a radio turned down low somewhere cycling through the frequencies, picking voices out of the static.
She doesn’t remember, but in the instant when she looks down at the sarcophagus, as the marking opens, she knows it’s the end. Her boys, her heroes, promise they’ll save her and she thinks goodbye.
Wesley reads to her from A Little Princess. She tries to listen but it’s hard when she’s so tired. She keeps falling asleep and dreaming that someone else, a woman, is reading the same story.
“Why can’t I stay?” she whispers.
Wes’s arms are around her
Tara is holding her hand tight
and Wesley is crying
and she has tears in her eyes –
and he isn’t real –
“Because that world’s not real,” Tara says. “And I love you, so much, and you have to wake up.”
And then she dies.
*
*
*
And then she wakes up.
ii.
Death-the-abstract is a desert with white sand and a burning blue sky, and maybe Death-the-person is the girl walking to her, the only other person in sight. Maybe not, though, ‘cause she doesn’t have a robe or a scythe, and she’s not on a pale horse; she’s all golden hair and bare feet, pink sari sweeping at her ankles.
Fred waves, feeling shy. “Hi.”
“Fred. I’m glad you’re here.” She has a nice voice. Fred listens for an accent, sure that Death would talk like in Ingmar Bergman, but there’s just California.
“Thanks,” she says. “Only… I’m kinda not. With being dead and all. It was sorta sudden.”
“It always is.” Empathy in her voice, soft as a blanket. “Are you ready to go?”
“Oh, I’m not staying here?” Truth is, she’s relieved. Pretty as the desert is, it might get boring after forever there.
Fred knows there’s a hell – lots of them, places that make five years as a cow look like maple syrup and ice cream – and there’s a heaven, because Spike told her one time that a girl he loved had been there and come back. She should be worried, she thinks, which one she’s headed for, because she hasn’t always been good. Spent most of Sunday school doing her math homework in her head and thinking about scientific inaccuracies in Genesis instead of listening, but she remembers Thou Shalt Not Kill as clear as the snap of Professor Seidel’s neck.
“Should I be scared?”
“No.” The girl smiles, takes her hand. Fred could swear the sun above them gets brighter. “You couldn’t be scared here. And I’ll be with you.”
She looks behind her at the slope of the hill, the sky beyond that. She already knows there’s no way back. No way to tell Wesley not to worry about her, that it’s peaceful here, or to tell her parents not to be sad. It makes her think of black holes, no information escaping, and she holds back from dropping on her knees and writing the equations in the sand. It’s rude, doing that in front of company. “You’ll be with me? You promise?”
She draws an X across her heart, right over the small, black hole.
Fred squeezes her hand and takes a breath she doesn’t need any more. “Okay. I’m ready. Where do we go?”
“Where do you want to go?”
She thinks about her answer, taking her time; not like they can’t stand to wait. “The restaurant at the end of the universe,” she says. “I want to find Cordy and eat tacos and listen to Richard Feynman play the bongos and ask Einstein about the universal constant and tell Galileo it does move and I’m so rude, I don’t even know your name.”
“Tara,” she says, laughing, and Fred swings their joined hands between them. “Wow. Is there any of that you want to do first?”
“Cordelia. She’s here somewhere, right?”
“We can look.”
She was right, Fred realizes, as they walk across the sand to the door that wasn’t there before - it’s the door of the wardrobe that leads to Narnia, the plane of light Al stepped through in Quantum Leap, it’s from Alice in Wonderland and Star Trek and Monty Hall and Earthsea, it’s the door of her bedroom at home and her room at the Hyperion – it’s not possible to be scared here. She just wants to know what’s behind the door.
And when it opens, it’s far, far more than she ever could have imagined.
Author: Doyle
Pairing: Fred/Tara
Rating: PG
Notes: For
wisdomeagle for the femslash ficathon. Request was Fred/Tara with Wes or Xander, brushing her hair, vanilla ice cream, and a dollop of angst, with no explicit sex. Summary: Two looks at A Hole in the World.
i.
She counts the strokes of the brush through her hair because they’re integers, rational numbers, and they remind her that this is real.
Ten, she thinks, multiple of one, two, five and itself, ten green bottles, square root of a hundred, ten fingers and toes which is why people count in base ten even though hexidecimal’s more fun.
Tara says, “Sweetie, don’t scratch your wrists, you’ll hurt them.”
She remembers Tara’s name today. It’s a good day.
“They itch,” she mumbles, and almost misses eleven. Eleven’s a prime number. To multiply a two-digit number by eleven you add the digits together and make that the middle one.
“Oh,” Tara says, and she knows she must have said this out loud, and that Tara is playing along, pretending Fred never told her about elevens before, “so thirty-five by eleven is three hundred eighty five?”
Thirty-five, product of two primes. It’s like a magic trick, only magic isn’t real.
She holds on a long time, all the way to forty before the numbers fall together, tumbling down like the card houses she built when she was a little girl, and then Cordelia’s in the corner of her (cell) room.
“Fred. Trance-girl. I said, we’re getting takeout, do you want anything?”
Cordelia’s sweater is blue. She forces herself to think about this, to remember the blue. It’s not pink and stained with blood and she doesn’t have maggots crawling from her eyes; she’s holding Connor, not a baby blanket caked with dirt and gore.
If she concentrates, doesn’t let herself forget where she is, it’s okay.
*
Something changes about her treatment, enough that for the first time in three years she’s lucid for whole hours at a time. She starts to remember better, recognizing the doctors and her parents and Tara, Tara who never left even when she didn’t know her name or that she ever had a girlfriend. People talk over her head – they do that a lot, never knowing if she’s in the hospital or her own world - about miracle and breakthrough and a couple of times the doctors mention something called a Summers case.
When she’s in (the dream) LA she doesn’t remember the hospital. She knows that Wolfram & Hart makes her uneasy. She gets lost in the maze of hallways, so much she has to ask Angel whether the rooms move around. Late at night in the labs she sometimes thinks she can hear people whispering, like there’s a radio turned down low somewhere cycling through the frequencies, picking voices out of the static.
She doesn’t remember, but in the instant when she looks down at the sarcophagus, as the marking opens, she knows it’s the end. Her boys, her heroes, promise they’ll save her and she thinks goodbye.
Wesley reads to her from A Little Princess. She tries to listen but it’s hard when she’s so tired. She keeps falling asleep and dreaming that someone else, a woman, is reading the same story.
“Why can’t I stay?” she whispers.
Wes’s arms are around her
Tara is holding her hand tight
and Wesley is crying
and she has tears in her eyes –
and he isn’t real –
“Because that world’s not real,” Tara says. “And I love you, so much, and you have to wake up.”
And then she dies.
*
*
*
And then she wakes up.
ii.
Death-the-abstract is a desert with white sand and a burning blue sky, and maybe Death-the-person is the girl walking to her, the only other person in sight. Maybe not, though, ‘cause she doesn’t have a robe or a scythe, and she’s not on a pale horse; she’s all golden hair and bare feet, pink sari sweeping at her ankles.
Fred waves, feeling shy. “Hi.”
“Fred. I’m glad you’re here.” She has a nice voice. Fred listens for an accent, sure that Death would talk like in Ingmar Bergman, but there’s just California.
“Thanks,” she says. “Only… I’m kinda not. With being dead and all. It was sorta sudden.”
“It always is.” Empathy in her voice, soft as a blanket. “Are you ready to go?”
“Oh, I’m not staying here?” Truth is, she’s relieved. Pretty as the desert is, it might get boring after forever there.
Fred knows there’s a hell – lots of them, places that make five years as a cow look like maple syrup and ice cream – and there’s a heaven, because Spike told her one time that a girl he loved had been there and come back. She should be worried, she thinks, which one she’s headed for, because she hasn’t always been good. Spent most of Sunday school doing her math homework in her head and thinking about scientific inaccuracies in Genesis instead of listening, but she remembers Thou Shalt Not Kill as clear as the snap of Professor Seidel’s neck.
“Should I be scared?”
“No.” The girl smiles, takes her hand. Fred could swear the sun above them gets brighter. “You couldn’t be scared here. And I’ll be with you.”
She looks behind her at the slope of the hill, the sky beyond that. She already knows there’s no way back. No way to tell Wesley not to worry about her, that it’s peaceful here, or to tell her parents not to be sad. It makes her think of black holes, no information escaping, and she holds back from dropping on her knees and writing the equations in the sand. It’s rude, doing that in front of company. “You’ll be with me? You promise?”
She draws an X across her heart, right over the small, black hole.
Fred squeezes her hand and takes a breath she doesn’t need any more. “Okay. I’m ready. Where do we go?”
“Where do you want to go?”
She thinks about her answer, taking her time; not like they can’t stand to wait. “The restaurant at the end of the universe,” she says. “I want to find Cordy and eat tacos and listen to Richard Feynman play the bongos and ask Einstein about the universal constant and tell Galileo it does move and I’m so rude, I don’t even know your name.”
“Tara,” she says, laughing, and Fred swings their joined hands between them. “Wow. Is there any of that you want to do first?”
“Cordelia. She’s here somewhere, right?”
“We can look.”
She was right, Fred realizes, as they walk across the sand to the door that wasn’t there before - it’s the door of the wardrobe that leads to Narnia, the plane of light Al stepped through in Quantum Leap, it’s from Alice in Wonderland and Star Trek and Monty Hall and Earthsea, it’s the door of her bedroom at home and her room at the Hyperion – it’s not possible to be scared here. She just wants to know what’s behind the door.
And when it opens, it’s far, far more than she ever could have imagined.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
on 2005-04-06 10:21 am (UTC)no subject
on 2005-04-06 10:28 am (UTC)“I want to find Cordy and eat tacos and listen to Richard Feynman play the bongos and ask Einstein about the universal constant and tell Galileo it does move and I’m so rude, I don’t even know your name.”
I love Fred. She breaks my heart and this is her happily ever after and *oh*.
a couple of times the doctors mention something called a Summers case.
Loved this. LOVED.
Thank you so much, Doyle.
no subject
on 2005-04-06 11:01 am (UTC)no subject
on 2005-04-06 11:55 am (UTC)Oh that's so lovely. You've got such a perfect Fred-voice.
Nice little ficlet. Well done!
no subject
on 2005-04-06 12:29 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2005-04-06 02:09 pm (UTC)Beautiful story! I loved the parallels to "Normal Again" and the ethereal, dream-like quality!
no subject
on 2005-04-06 03:48 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2005-04-06 04:27 pm (UTC)“I want to find Cordy and eat tacos and listen to Richard Feynman play the bongos and ask Einstein about the universal constant and tell Galileo it does move and I’m so rude, I don’t even know your name.” *sniff* I love how you write Fred. I love the Fred on the show, but they way you write her makes me like her even more.
It makes her think of black holes, no information escaping, and she holds back from dropping on her knees and writing the equations in the sand. It’s rude, doing that in front of company. Perfect Fred. Just wonderful.
And thank you so much for contributing to the femslash ficathon!
no subject
on 2005-04-06 05:24 pm (UTC)so...wow.
no subject
on 2005-04-06 05:29 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2005-04-06 09:35 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2005-04-06 10:57 pm (UTC)::gets teary, like I do every time I think about A Hole In The World::
Definitely one for the memories.
no subject
on 2005-04-06 11:12 pm (UTC)Feynman playing the bongoes.
I love these voices.
terrific!
no subject
on 2005-04-07 04:19 am (UTC)no subject
on 2005-04-07 11:19 am (UTC)no subject
on 2005-04-12 01:43 am (UTC)*rumblypurr*
no subject
on 2005-04-19 09:40 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2005-04-24 12:34 am (UTC)I really like the "Restless"-esque one, 'cause i heart Restless!Speaker!Tara, and the desert.
And i like Fred's thought processes about where she might be ending up.
"She draws an X across her heart, right over the small, black hole."
*shivers at the end of that sentence*
"It makes her think of black holes, no information escaping"
That's such an interesting idea about death. (And then i giggled at "she holds back from dropping on her knees and writing the equations in the sand. It’s rude, doing that in front of company.")
And then the doors, which is just such a wonderful image. And what a wonderful ending.
no subject
on 2005-05-19 07:03 pm (UTC)That was bloody brilliant. I loved the "Normal Again"-ness of the first one, but the second one I love even more. It's like all the good parts of Angel put together and squared.
no subject
on 2006-01-08 06:48 am (UTC)