(no subject)

[doyle]

Am babysitting the next door neighbour's kids (and doing my best to turn them into Spider-Man geeks). Rushing back to grab my computer, start another Fifth Doctor torrent, and post this...

Title: Grandmother's House
Author: Doyle
Pairing: Buffy/Illyria
Rating: PG-13
Notes: for flurblewig for the Buffy round of the femslash_minis. Request was for post-NFA, violence, no appearance by Spike and Angel. Apologies for parentheses abuse.
Length: 668
Summary: Times change, and she is death now.


You were called death once, when the world still belonged to demons, and the darkness to your kind. Illyria meant destruction, written across a thousand dimensions in the blood of those who displeased you (and so many did) and you were so distracted by the lights of your sacrificial pyres that you barely noticed the humans clawing their way from the primordial muck. You slept too long and woke to find yourself diminished and the humans everywhere, your temple and your army crushed to dust by time.

And now you are weakened, trapped in one of their barely-evolved husks and bound to one time, one place. The Qwa'ha'zahn is dead, Wesley is dead, the half-breeds and the human are dead (and when you could move you looked for the Guardian but he was nowhere and you think perhaps Angel killed him, unless that was a dream) and you are (dead) (alive) (you are Illyria).

When you return to the Deeper Well, it is as Guardian. There is no-one else, and you have nowhere to go.

**

You were called death once.

Times change, and she is death now, this human (is she?) child who walks into the Well beneath the world with her head high. The sleepers howl at the violation, screaming through your mind like the North wind (how did Drogyn stand it?) You throw her against the wall of the antechamber, hear her ribs crack, but then she's standing, running at you -

You spit blood onto the dirt. Regard it curiously. Wesley told you of Slayers. Wesley told you about humans and demons and time and seasons and oceans and dreams, dictated it in a detached, passionless way that you found soothing in your new world; he told you of yourself. You made the world, so the myth goes, from the bones of your eldest son, or the flayed skin of your youngest daughter, or the eyeteeth and hair of your hermaphrodite child which had two bodies, male and female, joined together at their spines. Wesley read you all the stories he could find and then he looked at you with a smile you didn't, don't, understand and said quite a nice piece of propaganda, but I assume you didn't really make this world?

No. You never cared to share your power, and you have no children.

And then the Slayer walks into your kingdom, and you realize what was taken from you while you slept. Part of you, part of all the gods, sliced away by grave-thief shamans and put into a human body, caged in a shell as you were. The girl clutches her sword, steps into the light of the torches and you see the thousands that went before her, all the way back to your first daughter, the nameless creature chained to the earth, screaming with the pain and glory of her new power.

You have never quite understood beauty or belief or faith (although they all worked to your advantage and you can recognize their absence, and you look up at her and you think of love). She lifts her sword and says a lot of meaningless human words about power and evil and you think yes, this would be a good death.

“I’m sorry,” she says, seeming surprised at her own words, “but we know what you did in LA, we know what you are, what you’ll do…”

Wait them out, wait for them to destroy themselves. Seal yourself in the earth and wait for the humans to die. She thinks you killed (her lover? Lovers?) Angel’s people. She looks at you as if you are equals.

You bow your head and say none of this. You don’t warn her that without a Guardian the sleepers will rise; she will discover it. She will do well in your place, endless and never-dying, the human part of her stripped away and only the god remaining.

You close your eyes as the blade comes down, soft and brutal as a kiss.

Comments

[yhlee.livejournal.com]

Here by way of grimorie--this has lovely language, lovely parallels--I especially liked the brief evocations of Wesley--and ruthlessly, wonderfully logical. Thank you.