Barb's Journal

Once more with sparkles

rahirah@cox.net — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 03:58:31 GMT

I think it was Anne Rice who popularized (if she didn’t outright invent) the concept of vampires as cold white marble statues, but the concept has influenced many subsequent vampire stories, and even spread its stony tendrils, via fanfic, into vampire mythoi which don’t use it. Jossverse vampires are in many ways a subversion of the Anne Rice model - they’re pale and they’re room-temperature, but in other respects they’re relentlessly down-to-earth. They can have sex, with all its attendant messiness. They have to shave (cf. Angelus’s various regrettable forays into facial hair through the centuries). If they don’t bathe, they get stinky, and if they eat people food, my bet is they have to dispose of it somehow. Even when they bite their victims, it’s not a couple of neat pinpricks, it’s a big messy ragged wound.

Moreover, while they gain immortality and strength, Jossverse vampires are presented as hideous monsters, who grow more monstrous with age. The loss of one’s soul in the Jossverse is not simply something for the vampire characters to angst about; it turns them into something indisputably evil and unfailingly horrific. Becoming a vampire is never presented as something to be desired in the Jossverse.

Fans, of course, often have other ideas. The vast majority of shippy fanfic dealing with one of the vampire characters emphasizes the marvelous advantages of vampires - erections of infinite duration! No body odor! Perfect, flawless marble-statue musculature! Etc. Traits such as paleness and lack of warmth, which were intended to remind the viewer that this is an animated corpse, become eroticized, and much of the vampire character’s attractiveness arises from their lack of squishy, stinky, human imperfections. (Some of these things are only dubiously canonical; we have, for example, Anya’s word that Spike smells good, and several characters mentioning that unwashed vampires smell bad, though it might be possible to argue that it’s the clothes rather than the vampires smelling in either case.)

On the other end of the spectrum, traits such as game face, or growling, which were intended to be animalistic and horrifying, are likewise eroticized by some writers. And again, these traits are often expanded into areas of dubious canonicity, as witness the myriad stories featuring vampires purring, or having a social structure which models that of a ~~fantasy BDSM club~~ predatory animal.

While I haven’t made any systematic study of this, I am mildly curious as to what extent the writers and readers who tend to go for the marble statue version overlap with the writers and readers who go for the grr!argh! version. I know that the former doesn’t do much for me, whereas I enjoy many but not all of the features of the latter. One of my writerly kinks is the intersection of the fantastic and the mundane. I always want to know that the plumbing is like in the magic castle. If vampires don’t smell, why don’t they? If they do smell, what do they smell like, and why? How many situps a day does it take to maintain those washboard abs, and does pig’s blood really go straight to your hips? So for me, the marble-statue vampire is a useful concept, if only because I take a perverse pleasure in subverting it. But in the end, it’s the growly stuff for me. Purring? Totally canon.

It strikes me that in some ways, this kind of thing is a way for readers and writers to have their Exotic Other cake and eat it too. There may come a time when fetishizing dark skin or epicanthic folds carries as little cultural baggage as fetishing blue eyes or freckles, but that day is not yet. But there’s no Undead American lobby to object to writers rhapsodizing over the perfection of Angel’s cold, marble-hard, chiseled white/ivory/ecru/whatever chest, or the salutary effect of Spike’s growl on Buffy’s [insert euphemism here.] We can safely dehumanize vampires, reduce them to a collection of things that make us tingly in our naughty places, because they’re already inhuman.

Originally published at Barb C's Journal. You can comment here or there.

Blah

rahirah@cox.net — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 03:45:45 GMT

I worked on “Little Sister” over the weekend, and got a reasonable amount done on the next chapter, considering that Kathy came down sick and I mooched around all Sunday feeling groggy and headachy. I’m in a “I’m going to finish all my fic and disappear from the face of the internet” sort of mood, which I know will pass, because, let’s face it, the odds of me finishing all my fic in anything less than a couple of years is tiny indeed. I also printed up invitations for the dozen or so people we want to send snail-mail copied to - I stopped by a Hallmark store on Friday and found some blank, printable invitations I liked. I need to print off envelopes, and we should be able to mail them off this week. So the weekend wasn’t a total loss, work-wise, even it the laundry is still mocking me, and the lawn needs mowing again after all the rain.

tiirz is starting up her V:TM game again after a long hiatus, and I dug up my character sheet and dusted her off. The last time we ran a game, AtS was still on the air. Yeeks.

My back went out last night for no particular reason, and I could hardly walk this morning. Better now, but can we cancel September? Because so far, it sucks.</lj>

Originally published at Barb C's Journal. You can comment here or there.

The Care and Feeding of Plot Bunnies

rahirah@cox.net — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 17:14:01 GMT

There have been many posts lately about ideas, and how you get them. This post is about the next step: once you have an idea, what do you do with it?

Some time back, I got some feedback on “The Lesser of Two Evils” (the story where Spike kills Warren) which brought up, among other things, the fact that Warren had family in Sunnydale. And that gave me an idea. What if Warren’s mother came to Buffy and asked her to investigate her son’s disappearance?

The first thing to do when you get an idea is to figure out what your main conflict is going to be. In this case, I have several options. I could make the story about Buffy’s conflict between protecting Spike and following her calling. This is the obvious way to go. However, I already have several stories written or in progress about that, and most of the ground that I would cover in a story like that is ground that I’ve already covered, or will cover, in “Lesser of Two Evils,” “In A Yellow Wood,” and “To Grandmother’s House.” I don’t want to repeat myself too much. So in this story, I decided I wanted to focus more on Spike’s reactions.

Once you have a conflict, you need a resolution. In my case, since I’m writing a series, and often writing out of sequence, there are some resolutions which, while perfectly good in and of themselves, I can’t use because they would contradict already-established future events.

There are several options: A) Buffy kills Spike. B) Buffy puts Mrs. Mears off and hushes the whole thing up. C) Spike puts Mrs. Mears off and hushes the whole thing up. A) is one of the resolutions which future events constrain me from using. I know Spike has to survive this story. B) and C) would both fit into the existing timeline, but B) would be nothing more than a re-hash of LoTE, and C) doesn’t mesh well with the emotional arc spanning LoTE and IAYW, in which full disclosure plays an important part.

Since I don’t want to repeat myself thematically, I took a look at the stories that come before and after this one in the timeline. In LoTE, Spike does something awful, and Buffy ties to play the “If I didn’t see it, it didn’t happen” card. In IAYW, (the events of which take place during and after LoTE) Buffy decides that’s a bad idea, but, not without deep reservations, takes no action against Spike. There’s then a gap of six months or so in which Buffy’s doubts fester, culminating in the events of “To Grandmother’s House,” in which she settles in her own mind that Spike really is worthy of the second chances she’s given him. All this is simultaneous with Buffy’s pregnancy with Bill, which is a metaphor for her fears about her increasing involvement in things demony, and her resolution to change the system from within, and her radical revisioning of what it means to be a Slayer.

So ideally, I’d want this story to provide support for Buffy’s ultimate decision not to kill Spike in TGH. This fits in with my desire to keep the focus on Spike for this story: what if I make this one about Spike trying to use what he’s learned in LoTE and IYW to do better this time? Keeping in mind, of course, that this is Spike, and he doesn’t have a soul, and he’s essentially flying blind with all this morality stuff. So, I asked myself, how would Spike feel about Mrs. Mears’ request?

Barbverse Spike may be shaky on concepts like “two wrongs don’t make a right,” but he does understand the idea of tit for tat. While he doesn’t feel the slightest bit guilty about killing Warren, he does feel that he probably shouldn’t have done it, because in the long run, it’s made Buffy and Willow unhappy, and may lead to further problems for Buffy, jeopardizing her shaky rapprochement with the Sunnydale police if Mrs. Mears gets suspicious and decides to kick up a fuss. (Next time some berk messes with his family, he resolves, he’ll just keep the hypothetical berk in the basement indefinitely, or till he gets bored, and make them wish they were dead. Hey, for a soulless vampire, that’s a big improvement.) So it seems reasonable to me that Spike might decide that since he’s the one who killed Warren, the right thing to do would be to compensate Mrs. Mears for that loss - to pay her weregild, in other words.

The question then became “What would Spike have to offer, and what, if anything, would Mrs. Mears accept?” Much depends on what kind of character Mrs. Mears is. Is she aware of the fact that her son was, at best, a borderline sociopath? If she was aware, would that change her reaction to finding out he was dead, or how he died? Is she herself a not very nice person? I rejected that last option, because if she’s an evil old bitca, it makes things too easy. Mrs. Mears should be a sympathetic character, and repaying her should be a task which would cause Spike some serious trouble, pain, and inconvenience to accomplish.

The fanfic cliche would be for Spike to allow Mrs. Mears to take some form of physical revenge - whale on him with a baseball bat, or whatever. There was a certain subversive appeal to the idea of doing a blundering and completely unsexy torture scene featuring a middle-aged housewife who’s not really sure what to do and a bored vampire who’s lying there thinking of England. But it didn’t feel right, and there wasn’t any obvious emotional resolution - Spike wouldn’t learn anything from an experience like that. (And I am a little wary of the ‘vampires must pay for their sins by enduring torture’ trope that pervades the Jossverse, because I don’t really think it works that way.)

I tried looking at it from Mrs. Mears’ POV: what would she want? What if Mrs. Mears didn’t want anything, and an irritated Spike hung around pestering her to come up with something, until one day he realizes he feels sorry for her? Virtue is its own punishment: he gets to know her and care about her, and now he feels a bit cruddy about killing her son. I liked this better, but it still didn’t seem to have quite enough zing to it, and to be honest, I thought it would probably be a bit dull to write, not to mention to read.

As I was writing up this very essay, I had another idea: what if Mrs. Mears says, “All I want is my boy back?” Spike (after at a token effort to dissuade her), sucks it up and helps her get her boy back – maybe using the spell Doc gave Dawn. This scenario offers several possible resolutions, of varying creepiness: It could end with Mrs. Mears sending Spike away so she can live creepily ever after with her rotting zombie son, or with Rotting Zombie Warren attacking Spike and/or his mom, and Spike being forced to kill him again. Or maybe some combination of the two. Either way, Spike would end up forging some kind of emotional bond with Mrs. Mears, much to his own annoyance. Plus there are opportunities to draw parallels between Warren and his mother and Spike and Anne Pratt.

If/when I get the chance to write it, that last option is probably the way I’ll go, because action sequences = good. The story has informed me that it ought to be written in Spike’s first person POV. Which should be interesting – I haven’t written first-person SPike often, and I like stories in which I have to work out a way for Spike to sorta-kinda do the right thing, but not because it’s the right thing – it has to be for pragmatic (or, if you like, selfish) vampire reasons.

While I’ve written this up as if it all occurred in neat, logical order, it really didn’t. Bits and pieces came to me off and on over the course of a couple of years, or however long it’s been since I got that feedback which gave me the initial inspiration. Many of the pieces didn’t fall into place until I wrote this article, and there are still some plot holes to be dealt with – how, for example, does Spike present his compensation idea to Mrs. Mears in a way that will not get him and Buffy in trouble with the police? But there you go: How to turn an idea into a full-blown story concept. Now all you have to do is write it. *g*

Originally published at Barb C's Journal. You can comment here or there.

I Caved, So You Have To Too!

rahirah@cox.net — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 04:25:22 GMT

I just signed up for seasonal_spuffy, dammit. Go thou and do likewise.

Yes, you! Don’t slink away from the monitor, I can see you! Click on that link! Now! Go!</lj>

Originally published at Barb C's Journal. You can comment here or there.

No longer in need of smelling salts

rahirah@cox.net — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 04:45:08 GMT

I made a pretty with all the relevant wedding/reception info - I think I’ve sent a copy to everyone who requested it, and quite a few who didn’t, but if I missed you out and you would like a copy, let me know. There are a couple of you for whom I only have snail mail addresses, and so you will get an actual paper invite shortly.

Why yes, I am approaching this whole wedding thing in a completely haphazard, “Whee! I have a barn! I have a trombone! Let’s put on a show!” way. Why do you ask?

I nerved myself to talk to my supervisor about the job issues today, and she was very enthusiastic about the idea of me applying for one of the new positions, providing they’re approved, which we’ll know by the end of the week. I keep forgetting that for some unaccountable reason my employers are a great deal more impressed with me than I am with myself. Part of me is still convinced that someday they’ll discover the Awful Truth, but until then… MWHAHAHAHA! World domination!

Anyway, thanks for the back-patting. I know that compared to many people I know, my problems amount to a hill of beans, and so I tend to downplay them to myself, and then when I write them all out like that it suddenly hits me than maybe one or two of them are worth being upset about.

And Kathy likes the salsa, so all is, I guess, not entirely lost.

Originally published at Barb C's Journal. You can comment here or there.

In which I stress

rahirah@cox.net — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 04:51:10 GMT

I keep starting posts and erasing them because they’re all so catastrophically boring. So, bullet points:

Re: Seasonal_Spuffy, torn between obligation to represent for ship, yo, and desire never to enter another ficathon again. Re: shiny other ficathons, ditto.
Made salsa. Did not turn out nearly as well as last time. Think I used wrong kind of vinegar. And yet my thumbs are all stingy with jalapeno juice. Stingy thumbs + mediocre salsa = WOE.
Massive changes coming at work - new database they’ve been begging for for years finally in production, departmental expansion featuring new quasi-managerial positions, me stressing out about whether or not I will qualify to apply for same, much less get them, much less succeed at them if I do get them. Much stressing over conversation I had with manager last quarterly evaluation, in which I blithely said I didn’t want to go into management - maybe reporting or something. However, quasi-managerial positions here, now, & paying more, putting possessors of same in line for Brighter & Better Things. Whereas nebulous non-managerial jobs in other departments not so much. Fingernails: I gnaw them.
I owe Kathy a birthday cake and a present. Also WOE.
Did not finish weeding the garden this weekend.
Mom is waffling about coming to the wedding. I understand that travel is difficult for her, at her age and with her health problems, and if she’d just come out and say “I don’t feel well enough to go,” or “It would exhaust me and I wouldn’t enjoy it,” I would be sad, but I’d understand. But she keeps coming up with stuff like “I can’t leave the cats alone” or “It would be too difficult to get handicapped access at the smaller airport,” and it makes me crazy. The last time we talked she seemed to be leaning back towards going, but it kind of hurts that she’s willing to travel to Portland for a week by herself to see my sister and the grandkids, but trying to duck out of this.
My sister’s on her last round of chemotherapy. Since her cancer had spread to so many lymph nodes, the chances of recurrence are high, so she’ll be going in for CT scans every six months for… pretty much the rest of her life, I guess. She still needs to consult with her surgeon on when or if they’re going to reverse her illiostomy. It’s good news as far as it goes, but she was saying the other day that the odds of her living to collect Social Security weren’t good. Not being depressed, just… factual.

Huh. Perhaps my salsa woe is displacement.

Originally published at Barb C's Journal. You can comment here or there.

Fic: Every Silver Lining Has a Touch Of Gray

rahirah@cox.net — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 22:34:05 GMT

This is the revised and beta’d version of my lynnevitational fic. There have not been any major changes, but it’s been polished a fair bit, and some things have been clarified just a tad.

Every Silver Lining’s Got a Touch of Gray
By Barb C

Disclaimers: The usual. All belongs to Joss and Mutant Enemy, and naught to me.
Rating: R. A mean nasty verging on NC-17 R. An R with ATTITUDE, baby!
Pairing: Buffy/Spike
Synopsis: After Angel convinces Spike to go undercover in an attempt to find out where Wesley Wyndam-Pryce, the vampire CEO of Wolfram & Hart, has hidden the muo-ping containing his soul, Angel and Buffy must rescue Spike before it’s too late. But Buffy and Spike have unfinished business of their own…
Author’s notes: Written for the 2008 </lj>lynnevitational. This story takes place in the same universe as “Raising In the Sun,” “Necessary Evils,” and “A Parliament of Monsters.” It’s set about eighteen years after POM, and is the third part of a three-part series of stories, the first two parts of which haven’t been written yet. I know, I know, I’m a terrible person. But it just came out that way! Many thanks to betas </lj>slaymesftly. </lj>kehf, </lj>deborahc, and </lj>shipperx!

“Come on, you guys!” Harmony hissed from the doorway, bouncing up and down on her toes like she had to pee.

Buffy yanked the belt tight around Wesley Wyndam-Pryce’s wrists, and stuffed one of his very expensive socks into his mouth. He vamped out with a strangled snarl, his fangs shredding the Italian silk. Buffy shrugged and crammed the sock’s mate in to keep it company. Not like Wesley needed to breathe. Amazing the licking a vampire’s body could take and keep on ticking. Why, if she wanted to, she could reach into the gaping red pit of Wesley’s chest, past the raw stubs of shattered ribs, and poke the business end of Mr. Pointy right into his pruny, shriveled-up heart.

But no. Still in the hero biz. A little regretfully, she let Wesley thump to the floor and glanced across the austerely furnished office. Spike was still slumped against the oak-paneled wall, staring at his left hand. He kept flexing his bloodstained fingers curiously, as if he’d forgotten how they worked. His right hand cradled the muo-ping, still sticky with Wesley-gore. Angel stepped over the prone body of Wolfram & Hart’s CEO, careful to avoid the spreading pool of blood soaking into the sinfully thick Turkish carpet, and pried the tiny, ornate jar out of Spike’s unresisting grasp. He tucked it into his pocket and straightened. “Harm’s right.” He sounded as though he couldn’t quite believe he’d just said those two words in conjunction. “Let’s go.”

Spike looked up, blue eyes exhausted behind a veil of tangled curls. There were a million things Buffy wanted to say to him. The only one that made it past her teeth was, “Can you walk?”

The words came out crisp and businesslike. Not what she intended, not at all. The muscles of his jaw twitched beneath the scruff of beard, and Spike levered himself to his feet and stood unsteadily, rail-thin in the grey cotton fatigues that Wolfram & Hart provided its special guests. He was running on fumes, but he was running. One hand rose to the studded leather collar around his neck.

“Not yet,” Buffy whispered. The words felt like a betrayal. Spike’s shoulders slumped, and his hand fell. He took a deep, rattling breath (things inside him broken and not yet mended) and with a resigned nod, extended the handle of the short chain to her. Her smile was almost as unsteady as his legs, and she hoped he could read her heart in it as she took hold of the leash and followed Angel out into the hallway.

Well, we can take this off the list of good clean spanky fun.

For the first hundred yards, Spike stumbled along on his own, kept upright by sheer bloody-mindedness. Buffy walked two steps behind him, her eyes fixed on the precise center of his back, as if she could keep him going by the power of her gaze alone. Angel took point, and Harmony sashayed along self-importantly beside him, clipboard prominently displayed. Infiltration, she claimed, worked better with a clipboard. Maybe she was right.

Their footsteps echoed through the marble-tiled halls, past plush offices, executive restrooms, and spacious conference rooms. A legal secretary peeked out of a copy room doorway, and popped back in like he’d just seen his own shadow, or maybe something else’s. Otherwise they didn’t get a second glance. Apparently it was no big deal for a group of bald, blue demons to parade a gaunt, unshaven captive on a leash down the hallowed halls of Wolfram & Hart. The leash was purely ornamental, anyway - the collar was all the restraint Wesley had thought Spike needed. He just hadn’t counted on a subject who’d once lived through three years of involuntary electroshock therapy.

“Just keep walking,” Angel muttered. Underneath the illusion of bluishness, he was sweating. Which she shouldn’t be able to see, should she? Willow had warned them that the kind of rudimentary illusion she could still manage wouldn’t last long, especially under the kind of anti-magic wards Wolfram & Hart’s corporate wizards could deploy. “Harmony. How much time do we have?”

“Fifteen minutes,” Harmony said decisively. A tiny wrinkle appeared between the flawless arches of her forever-eighteen brows. “Or maybe it was five. The security guy was kind of, like, drunk when he told me how to work the override.”

“You got him drunk?” Buffy couldn’t actually come up with a reason why this method of grilling was any worse than any other, but Harmony’s blithe was getting on her nerves. “Way to get accurate information.”

“No, silly.” Harmony favored her with a tolerant smile, the kind you gave to cute old people who were losing it. “I drank him.”

A pair of junior partners halted their low-voiced conversation to squint at them suspiciously. Buffy caught a glimpse of their reflections in a glass-walled office - the glamor was definitely fading, the Blue Man Group look flaking away like a bad paint job, to reveal bits and pieces of their real selves. Crap. She’d hoped they’d have a little more time before the great blind hydra of a law firm woke up and thrashed to awareness of the fact that its nastiest head had just been lopped off.

“Plan B?” she whispered.

Angel’s fingers tightened on the muo-ping in his pocket. “Not yet.”

Alarms didn’t sound, and steel doors didn’t slam shut, but Gavin Park was waiting for them at the elevators. A pair of corporate security guards with mile-wide shoulders stood at his back. He’d aged well. Maybe even better than Angel, in some ways, but he probably had a portrait in the board room or something. He smiled, perfectly charming and perfectly ruthless, and drew a Bersa .22 from his jacket - at a classy place like Wolfram & Hart you didn’t want to spoil the cut of your Armani. He leveled it at Angel’s skull.

“Um, hello?” Harmony waggled her fingers. “Mr. Park? I’ve just handed in my resignation, and Mr. Wyndam-Pryce was kind of tied up, so I was wondering? Any chance I can get a letter of recommendation?”

Gavin ignored her. “I can understand the impulse to help out an old girlfriend, Angel,” he said. “Though helping her rescue the current husband…that’s admirable, it really is. But surely you realize that we can’t just let you walk out with the Duke’s property.”

Buffy’s hand tightened on Spike’s leash. They didn’t know, then. They still thought this was just a rescue mission. Either Wesley hadn’t been found yet, or…maybe he had, and just didn’t want to let his employees in on exactly what it was they’d stolen from him today. “I’m thinking this is more a situation where ‘finders keepers’ applies,” she said lightly. “And if Sebassis doesn’t like it, he knows where to find me.”

“Don’t be foolish.” Gavin’s attention was still on Angel. Really kinda annoying, when she was the one with superpowers. “Why do you think your champion friend here’s never thought about taking Sebassis down? If the Duke fell, the power vacuum would plunge the demons of Los Angeles into chaos, and that’s the last thing any of us want.” He gestured with the barrel of his pistol. “We’ve already alerted the Duke. Even if you make it outside, his minions will hunt you down inside a day. So let’s be reasonable. Angel hands over the vampire. Duke Sebassis gets what he wants. The old girlfriend walks out of here alive, and for old time’s sake Mr. Wyndam-Pryce will let her.”

Beside, her, Spike growled - maybe he wasn’t quite as out of it as he seemed. Buffy gripped his elbow, half-holding him upright. Why did you volunteer for this, you stupid vampire? You never even knew Wesley when he was human.

Angel’s make-my-day grin widened. “Aw, Gavin, I’m disappointed. After all these years I figured you’d know I’m just not a reasonable kind of guy.”

How far was Angel going to take the macho posturing? He could just break the muo-ping here and now and figure he’d come out ahead, but Buffy had a much narrower definition of ’success’ than he did these days. Spike was about to collapse, and she didn’t know if they trust Harmony not to change sides again if the fight went against them. If Angel could take Gavin down, she could deal with the guards. She hoped. Times like this, she wished to heck that Angel and Spike were still immune to bullets.

“On the contrary.” Gavin took a step forward, motioning Buffy to step away. “The fact that you’re still alive argues otherwise.” He took Spike’s jaw in one hand, turning his head this way and that, as if Spike were a horse he was considering buying. “Fascinating. A vampire who lives and breathes… and even procreates, I’m told. Aside from the personal inconveniences the Duke’s suffered, I can see why he’s interested.” He nodded at the flecks of grey at Spike’s temples - a lot more grey, Buffy was sure, than had been there two months ago. “Of course, the aging and dying are a disadvantage. Our research department tried to replicate the incident with the Mohra blood, did you know? The results were rather… messy, but - ”

Spike vamped out and lunged. No chest-beating grr!-intimidation thing, just lightning-fast, cobra-deadly, Me vampire, you lunch. Gavin got off one shot before he went down screaming with Spike’s fangs in his throat. Spike jerked as the bullet tore into his shoulder and Buffy’s heart stopped, but Spike scarcely seemed to notice. He looked up: tawny eyes, horned brow, and bloody snarl - yuck, no wonder most vampires went clean-shaven. AB-Pos in the beard not a good look. The security team froze, weapons half-drawn; Spike licked his chops and they broke and ran. Even when you were pretty much evil yourself, there was something stomach-churning horrible about a guy who wanted to eat you.

Buffy didn’t wait to find out how much in control Spike wasn’t - before he could turn on Gavin again, she slammed a fist into his jaw, hard. He went down like a pile of jackstraws, which? Scary, considering how well Spike could usually take a punch. Buffy joined Harmony in trying to pry the elevator doors open, but it was useless; they were budgeless. And now blast doors were clanging shut and alarms wailing behind them.

Angel scooped up Gavin’s Bersa. “OK, Plan B. Run!”

Buffy hoisted Spike’s limp, bony frame over one shoulder, and took off after him, leaving Gavin to do a great Wesley impersonation on the floor. If he was lucky, the corporate medics would get to him before some of his more ambitious co-workers decided that this was a great opportunity to promote themselves. She overtook Angel quickly, his only-human legs no longer a match for even middle-aged Slayer speed. “Stairwell!” he bellowed, and Buffy straight-armed the door into the service hallway, leaving a three-inch dent in the door-frame and wrenching the locking bar into a moebius of twisted metal. Angel spared a moment to look impressed.

Six floors down, the trap door into the sewers was open. Bill’s pale face peered up at them from the bottom of the ladder, game-faced and trembling as if the tension in his muscles was all that was keeping him from bolting. He wasn’t made for this kind of thing - but neither had she been, at fifteen. His golden eyes widened when he saw his father, and he scrambled half-way up the ladder to help her before she could hiss at him to stay back, stay down.

“Is Dad -?” Bill gasped, but Buffy shook her head - no time.

She handed Spike down to their son, who grunted and took his father’s too-slight weight on his shoulders. She followed him down into the darkness and stench, fingers slipping on slick cold metal. Harmony past her, squeaking “Ew, ew, ew!” Buffy looked up - Angel was still topside, the stupid heroic lug, making sure they all got clear. Was she going to have to knock him cold and drag him down, too?

A flash and a boom - the tunnel shook, and Angel swarmed down the ladder yelling “Go, go, go!” The moment his boots hit the tunnel floor Buffy ripped the ladder free of its moorings, and they ran, Bill on one side, her on the other, Spike a vampire rag-doll between them.

The sewer tunnels were a stinky dark blur of racing feet and pounding hearts. Willow had the van’s engine already running when they burst out of the grate and into the windblown, rain-swept October night. The alley smelled of car exhaust, wet cement and vomit. “Let us in!” Harmony squealed, yanking at the handle of the side door. Buffy would have bet Harm was more worried about the effects of rain on her hairdo than about her companions’ safety, but she was still with them, and that, she supposed, was something. She caught Bill surreptitiously checking out the vampire’s ass as she wriggled into the van. OK, he couldn’t be too traumatized.

They piled into the back, soaked and filthy, and Bill heaved the door shut. Angel bumped Willow out of the driver’s seat and floored it, while Buffy crouched in the back, jammed in between Harmony’s cold shoulder and the hardly less chilly bodies of her husband and son.

“Is Spike OK?” Willow asked, with an anxious look at her sire over the back of the front seat. Like Bill, she was game-faced with nerves. “Did you get it?”

Buffy made a note of the order in which she’d asked the questions and awarded her a Yay Willow! point on the spot. Angel tossed her the muo-ping in response. It spun in mid-air, glistening red. Startled, Willow fumbled before catching it. “Where was it?” She sniffed her fingers and looked up, her pupils flashing copper in the darkness. “This is vampire blood.”

“It’s been right under our noses all along. Wesley had it surgically implanted in his chest. The last place anyone would think to look.” Angel pounded a fist on the steering wheel in disbelief. “Except Spike, apparently.”

The bitterness in his voice was for the years he’d wasted searching, Buffy knew, but it rankled anyway. “That’s why you sent him in there, isn’t it?” she snapped.

“We’ve got it now,” Willow said, with an anxious peace-making gesture. “That’s the important thing. We can do the ritual as soon as we get back to the shelter.” Her voice was afire with that burning joy in going where no ex-witch vampire-with-a-soul had gone before. “It shouldn’t take more than an hour. Anne’s getting the Orb all set up now.”

Buffy bit her tongue on all the questions she didn’t want to know the answers to - whether a vampire could pull off the Ritual of Restoration, and what effect it might have on her own soul. Not her department, not any more. Willow was older if not always much wiser and she’d just have to hope that this time all the i’s were dotted and all the t’s were crossed.

Bill hadn’t quite abandoned teenage cool to the point of reaching for her hand, but he pressed closer, fingers plucking hesitantly at his father’s shoulder, where dark blood spread across the coarse grey cotton. “Will he be OK?”

“Define OK.” Too much Slayer, not enough Mom, but what else could she say? “Here. Put your hand on his shoulder - right where the bullet wound is. Just like that. Press hard.” Bill bit his lip and nodded, the anxious look in his eyes easing a bit at being given something useful to do. Hallelujah, she’d done something right. “Hold him steady. I’m going to get this thing off.”

Which would have been easier if Spike hadn’t smashed the remote earlier. She studied the collar with a frown. It looked like an unbroken circle of leather, sans seam or buckle, but whatever it was made of was tougher than your average dead cow. When you looked closely, the studs weren’t studs at all, but tiny transceivers, tuned in to the electrical field of Spike’s brain. Odds were good that removing it without the right security codes would be oogy.

Willow hung wide-eyed over the back of the front seat, gnawing her lower lip. “I could probably hack the control sequence and turn it off,” she offered. “Once we’re done with Wesley. It’s probably just a cross-phased neuronal net with - ”

She remembered the look in Spike’s eyes when she’d told him he couldn’t take it off yet. “Not waiting,” Buffy replied. She rummaged through her purse for the serrated hunting knife and slid the blade underneath the collar’s edge. She felt the shock all the way up her arm as Slayer-powered steel ripped through silicon and optical fiber. Spike’s eyes flew open. He convulsed with a hoarse scream, muscles drawn like piano wire across a scaffolding of bone. The collar tore free with a velcro hiss, trailing a gossamer fringe of bloody nanowires. The flesh beneath was raw and seeping. Buffy flung the collar away. Spike’s eyes rolled back in his head, and he went limp.

Bill stared down at his father. In profile you could see the planes and angles of adulthood lurking just below the soft boyish curves of cheek and jaw. “Is he going to die?”

Buffy straightened, shuddering, and smoothed the matted curls back from Spike’s forehead. “No.” She was sure of that. Not at all sure what effect sixty zillion volts would have on a no-longer-undead brain, but hey, vegetable isn’t dead! “We just have to get him some blood and let him rest.”

Her son shivered. “It’s my fault. I was so mad at him when he left - ” He looked up, his huge amber eyes tragic, and only a son of Spike’s could look so absolutely miserable in game face. “Mom, I don’t want him to die!”

At fifteen, she’d been positive that her parents splitting up was all because of her. “He came back, didn’t he?” Bill nodded reluctantly. “Your father’s not that easy to get rid of. He left because he wanted to, and he came back because he wanted to. And he wanted to do this. It’s not your fault.” She stroked a thumb along the line of Spike’s cheekbone, so sharp beneath the skin. “And he won’t die. Your dad’s almost as stubborn as you are.”

The windshield wipers flicked back and forth, flinging sheets of dirty water aside as they barreled through the L.A. night. If Buffy looked in the rear view mirror, she could see the disbelieving grin on Angel’s face, illuminated by rain-washed neon. Finally sinking in that they’d won the battle, if not (yet) the war. How long had it been since she’d seen him smile like that? Even all these years later, a part of her froze in terror at the thought of Angel happy, even as another part glowed and warmed. She just hoped that all this would be worth it. She was long past the point of believing that souls made everything better, but God knew having one couldn’t make Wesley any worse, and she owed Wolfram & Hart a black eye on her own account.

Headlights loomed out of the darkness, blinding them for an instant, and Buffy tensed - what if they got stopped, if they got a ticket? Maybe only one cop in fifty was on Sebassis’s payroll, but that would be the one on the lookout for a nondescript primer-splashed van carrying the not-quite-vampire most urgently desired by the demon lord of Los Angeles.

“Mom?” Bill whispered. “I think Dad’s waking up.”

She looked down. Spike was twitching and moaning, features slipping from man to demon and back again as he fought for consciousness - the demon strength was there, but his muscles were too wasted to endure its use for long. His sooty lashes fluttered above the brand new purple bruise blooming beneath the rough curls of beard. It was almost lost among the yellow-brown mottlings of older ones, but this one was her bruise, laid down with love, a distinction only a vampire could appreciate.

Harmony squirmed as far over on the seat as she could. “Buffy?” she said earnestly. “I just though I should tell you, I’m totally over Spike now. And I really mean it this time. I mean, the getting all old and wrinkly was bad enough, but - ”

“Harm?” Willow interrupted, in her best bored-now tones. “Shut up. Or I’ll make clackers out of your eyeballs.”

“Geez, try to do a good deed…” Harmony tucked herself sulkily into the corner.

When exactly, Buffy wondered, had all her friends ended up vampires? The van lurched as Angel took a sharp turn and hydroplaned for a few yards. OK, be fair, some of them were ex-vampires. That was completely not right. Probably there was a fundamental flaw to her approach to slayage. “Harm?” she said. “Thanks for not selling us out to Gavin.”

Harmony beamed. “And I totally could have, too!”

Angel maneuvered the van into a parking spot by sheer force of personality, and killed the engine. The street sign said Hollywood Boulevard. “Here?” he asked.

He was giving her a chance to change her mind and come along, and Buffy considered it. There was safety in numbers. She looked at Bill - it was his choice, too. Her son folded in on himself for a moment, then nodded. Buffy muscled the side door open and clambered out into the rain, hauling Spike after her. Willow handed out a bright magenta duffle bag. Buffy slung the bag over her shoulder (it clanked alarmingly) and took her purse from Harmony. She glanced at Angel, whose fingers tightened on the steering wheel, eager to be away.

“Oi!” Spike coughed, struggling in her grip. “Bill - ”

Their son crouched in the gaping side door of the van, shivering in the rain. He shook his head. “I have to stay.”

Spike swayed beside her, a low growl of anger and confusion building in his chest. “It’s just for awhile,” Buffy said, with an urgent tug at his sleeve. “To confuse the location spell, if they try to track us. Bill’s the only one like you. Blood of your blood.”

She rounded the van and gripped Angel’s forearm tightly through the open window. It was reassuringly meaty, but she could leave bruises there, too, if she tried. Maybe even if she didn’t. “Take care of him,” she said. “You take care of our boy.” It was an order, it was a plea. All she could give him now was this trust, to make up for all the other things they could never give one another, but it was the most precious gift she had to offer.

Angel’s hands remained on the wheel, but his dark eyes met hers, eyes in which the shadow of that other boy, the one he had failed to save, was never far gone. He nodded. “Of course.” And if he realized what a joke it was that she should make such a demand, after what had happened last year, he mercifully didn’t say. “And…thanks.”

Spike looked from Angel to her, and back to Bill, who swallowed hard and repeated, “I gotta stay, Dad.”

For a moment two pairs of golden eyes reflected nothing into nothing as father and son traded stares. Bill climbed out and stood rangy and awkward beside the van, sandy curls matted with rain, taped-up glasses sliding down his nose. Buffy noted with a pang that he was almost as tall as Spike now; he was going to beat his father out by an inch or two, maybe, when he was done growing. Spike straightened with visible effort, pulling his firstborn into a ferocious embrace. A beat, and Bill was hugging his father back, eyes squeezed tight shut, babbling, “Dad, I’m sorry, I - ”

“Hush,” Spike said, voice like gravel. “It’s all right.” His hand cupped the back of Bill’s skull, and they were both human-faced again. He gave his son a rough back-thump and stepped away, mindful of teenaged pride; if manly tears were involved, on either side, they were lost in the rain. “Go on, then,” he said. “You’ve work to do.”

Bill said nothing, but his eyes lit up with that flame she’d seen so often in Spike’s - the I’ll walk through burning holy water for you look. The door slammed shut and the van roared away in a cascade of filthy water, and she and Spike were standing on the corner of Hollywood and Vine at four A.M, on a Thursday morning.

****

It was one of those irony things, Buffy reflected, that ten years ago she’d been on the run from the very demons who were going to save her and Spike’s respective asses in another twenty-four hours. Even His Grace Duke Sebassis, Lord of the City and County of Los Angeles, would think twice about invading the territory of a hive of Ix’tlkzx demons. Such as the ones currently lairing in the old Hellmouth tunnels beneath Sunnydale. You could kill an Ix’tlkzx, but it usually required running them over with a bus. Occasions like this made all the negotiating she and Spike had done over the years between the hive queen and the rest of Sunnydale’s human and demon communities over who got to lay eggs in whose heads at what season worthwhile.

But asylum, whatever weird form it took, depended on getting home to Sunnydale, and they weren’t there yet.

The desk clerk at the Motel 6 (in Buffy’s opinion, closer to a Motel 3 1/2) smirked at them knowingly. He probably thought they were a seen-better-days hooker and her homeless, strung-out john. Buffy restrained the urge to grab a fistful of his thinning hair and slam his face repeatedly into the scarred formica of the registration desk. The computer was about a million years old, still running Vista, for God’s sake. Bonus - less chance of a W & H hacker ferreting into such an antiquated OS. Buffy paid cash anyway.

“Where’s the nearest butcher’s?” she asked. Spike was starting to focus on the clerk in a way that suggested he was seeing a giant dancing T-bone steak.

“The nearest what??”

“I need to buy pig’s blood,” Buffy said, slowly and carefully. “Or my husband might try to eat the maid. Assuming you have maids, which? I’m not. In which case he might try eating you. He’d probably kinda regret it later, but trust me, that’s small consolation.”

The clerk looked like he’d worked night shift long enough to be vamp-smart. His smirk widened. Great. Now he’d pegged her for a suck junkie. He pointed at a rack of dog-eared flyers in front of the desk, advertising local attractions. “There’s a couple of all-night carnicerias up in Studio City,” he said, handing over the key-cards. “About ten miles. They deliver. If you and your…’husband’… want to - ”

Practically next door, for Los Angeles. “Fan-freaking-tabulous.” Buffy grabbed a flyer and hustled Spike out into the parking lot - not because he was dangerously close to eating the clerk, but because she was dangerously close to letting him.

The room, at least, was cleaner than the lobby. It was a clone of every other crappy hotel room in every other crappy hotel in every other crappy American city, which was a definite plus if someone was scrying for them. She tossed the overnight bag onto the bed, unzipped it, and found the handful of warding fetishes Willow had put together for them, stinky herbs bound to polished chicken bones with red twine. Yay advance planning. She had to hand it to Angel, being human had done wonders for weaning him off the ‘get ‘em!’ school of caper planning.

Spike stood dripping in the middle of the threadbare carpet, head down, arms wrapped around himself, while Buffy placed the wards. One on the windowsill and one on each side of the door, and after a moment’s thought, one under the bed. She put the last one on the bathroom sink. Who knew, maybe they’d ward against were-cockroaches. It wasn’t a powerful spell, but as Angel had emphasized over and over, Wolfram & Hart weren’t omnipotent - they just tried to make you think they were.

A laminated card beside the antiquated land-line phone warned her that all calls would be added to her bill, but Buffy didn’t want to chance using her cell just now. She called one of the carnicerias at random - “No delivery before dawn? OK, fine, just get it here andale arriba, OK? Um, tres - no, quatro pints of, uh, sangre del puerco? And beef liver. Beef liver - toro… um…. rats, I don’t know the word for liver! No, no! No rats!”

While she went two falls out of three with the language of Cervantes, Spike roused himself to strip off his prison fatigues. The drab cotton was soaked through, hanging on his gaunt frame. Underneath he was painfully thin, ribs showing under bruises and welts that would have healed days or weeks ago if he’d been feeding properly. He was still favoring his right shoulder, but the bullet wound had stopped bleeding - Spike might have a working circulatory system these days, but by human standards, its workings were pretty weird.

She hung up the phone, and reached up to stroke the scruff of beard along his jaw, threading her fingers through his wild hair. Spike had lived forty-five mortal years out of the hundred and almost-seventy he’d spent on Earth, and he’d stopped bleaching his hair for good on the day he started to go grey, flaunting his anomalous mortality like a badge of honor. This was the first time she’d ever thought he looked his age, and more. He was shaking, and for the first time she realized that she was shaking too, and the only way to stop it was to grab each other and hold on tight.

Buffy pulled him into the postage-stamp-sized bathroom, and fed a twenty into the water meter on the shower. The pipes rattled and banged at the unreasonable request, and for a minute she was afraid that the machine was going to spit the bill back at her. Rust-red water belched out of the faucet and swirled Psycho-style down the drain before running clear. Spike gasped when she herded him into the shower and the lukewarm needles of water hit his shoulders, and then he slumped against the mildewy tile, face upturned to catch the spray. He let her empty a whole bottle of cheap hotel shampoo into his hair, leaning into her scrubbing with an almost orgasmic moan as the filth sluiced away.

She’d only meant to help him wash and feed and rest, but somehow they were kissing, deep, frantic, punishing kisses as soap ran into their eyes. The bones of his shoulders rose and fell like knife-blades beneath her palms as hands skimmed feverishly over bodies, shoulder to hip and back again, re-asserting lapsed claims, re-marking old territory.

The shower sputtered to a halt. They stumbled out of the bathroom and fell back onto the bed, wrestling ungracefully with her wet clothes. Buffy whipped the hair from her eyes and moved to roll him over, but Spike growled and vamped out, resisting. Greying temples weren’t the only sign of vampiric middle age - tiny horns budded along his brow ridges when he changed now, and scales gleamed along the backs of his arms when the amber light hit just so. His nostrils flared as he breathed her in, snuffling Buffy-scent deep into his lungs, letting it out in a deep slow rumble that shook the bed beneath them. Tawny eyes studied her, and his fanged head dropped, nipping along the line of her collarbone.

The swelling curve of his cock bumped at the juncture of her thighs, almost obscenely sleek and full in comparison to the rest of him. She wriggled till she could hook her knees over his shoulders - after almost twenty years and three kids they were thankfully far past the ow-too-much! stage, but it was still better for both of them if Spike could thrust on a good deep angle.

He sank in with a sound that was half growl and half sob, and he fucked her then, long and hard and slow, right hand pinning her wrists to the pillow above her head, left hand tormenting her clit. They were wet and cold. The ceiling was stained with God knows what and the sheets smelled funky and Spike’s bitten-short fingernails were still crusted with Wesley’s blood and she Did. Not. Care. Spike’s poetry might suck, but his fingers were laureates, inscribing sonnets in flesh. She gave herself over to it, to him. Tenderness wasn’t what he needed from her now, but this willingness to let him drive, this compliance, this trust, this, this, oh please yes more there harder fuck me Spike fuck me yes yes yes oh

When she reached her third shattering climax he finally let himself come, or come undone, shuddering spasmodically, his eyes wide and blank and blue as the rain-washed dawn outside. He collapsed against her, panting, exhausted - they were neither of them twenty-something or immortal any longer, and it had been a really rough night. Hell, a really rough couple of months. She cradled Spike’s head between her breasts, stroking his tangled hair, playing with the tight little ram-curls of his beard where it was streaked with grey on each side of his chin. His breath - and the beard - tickled her nipple, still standing pert and attentive. She kind of liked it, but she knew he hated the curls with a passion. She whispered, “I brought a razor.”

“I love you.” He gave her a squeeze. “You’ve got so thin, love,” he said with a sort of surprised disapproval. “Haven’t you been taking care of yourself proper?”

Considering the source, all she could do was poke accusingly at his all-too-prominent ribs, and dissolve into the kind of weak, silly laughter that was only a hop, skip, and a jump from tears. “It will be all right,” she said, not really sure what it was, and promptly fell asleep.

***

A pounding on the door wakened Buffy out of uneasy dreams. There’d been a tower - or was it a bridge? - and she’d been looking for someone, calling frantically as the high winds tore at her limbs, knowing, somehow, that it was already far too late. She was alone on the bed, and water was running in the bathroom. “Just a minute!” she yelled, and rolled groggily to her feet. She threw on a t-shirt and gym shorts and staggered over to the door, rubbing eyes fuzzy with not nearly enough sleep. If it was the Big Bad Wolfram & Hart, she could just knock them dead with morning breath.

It was the delivery guy from the carniceria, a small, dark, wiry man with a buzz-cut and prison tattoos. Daylight delivery or not, he was decked out in enough crosses to ward off an entire army of darkness, and Buffy was pretty sure that was a stake in his pocket. He set a half-gallon milk jug full of suspicious-looking dark red fluid on the doorstep, alongside a squishy-looking parcel wrapped up in butcher’s paper and string. “That’s sixty-three seventy-five,” he announced, dancing several wary steps back into full sunlight. “Just put it on the sidewalk.”

“Isn’t that a little steep?” Buffy asked. She’d brought enough cash for an escape to Argentina, but that didn’t mean she wanted to blow it all on Spike’s breakfast.

“Delivery, plus thirty bucks surcharge for blood orders,” the man replied. “Hazard pay.”

Fair enough. “Keep the change.” She tossed him four twenties, snatched the packages, and slammed the door. She set the packages on the nightstand. After all these years, the blood-smell was, well, still revolting, but her stomach growled anyway. She realized with a start that she was hungry - really hungry; had she eaten anything since that power bar yesterday?

When she got back from the taco stand across the street, Buffy was the proud possessor of a large orange juice and a sausage, egg, and cheddar breakfast burrito approximately the size of her head. Spike was emerging from the bathroom, naked and scrubbed and clean-shaven. He’d made a mostly-futile effort to slick his hair back, but best of all he was moving like Spike again, shedding that half-defeated shuffle. His eyes glittered at the scent of the blood.

He didn’t exactly rip the jug out of her hands, but he inhaled half the contents with such wolfish greed Buffy was afraid he was just going to barf it all up again. He sat down on the bed, ripped the twine off the package and tore into the liver with a joyous growl, cramming handfuls of bloody, oozing red goo into his mouth.

“Careful,” she said, curling up beside him on the bed and taking a more demure bite of her own breakfast. Mmm, greasy, cholesterol-laden heaven. There were probably enough calories in the thing to power the California National Guard for a week. Maybe she’d only eat half.

“Fuck careful,” Spike replied indistinctly. “Bit of a mix-up twixt Wes the Wanker and the security team on the care an’ feeding of yours truly, or so they claimed. Slipped someone’s mind that I can starve to death.”

Buffy doubted it had been a slip; Sebassis hadn’t requested that his present be kept pretty. Nonetheless Spike drank the third pint a bit more slowly, and the last more slowly yet. When the liver was gone, and both the wrapping paper and his fingers licked cleaner than anything else in the room, he flopped back against the headboard with a happy groan. Maybe it was her imagination, but she thought he looked better already; the older bruises and welts were starting to fade. “I’ll likely pay for that,” he sighed, massaging his distended belly. “But I don’t care.” He belched, yawned, and settled deeper into the lumpy pillows. “Bill’s all right? And the others?”

“Connie and Alex are staying with Xander and Anya. Willow’s going to call when Angel’s got Wesley… secured, and it’s safe for us to pick up Bill and head home.” If everything had gone according to plan, Wesley would have his soul back by now, and the law firm of Wolfram & Hart would be in chaos. Whatever. L.A. was Angel’s town; she and Spike were only hired guns here.

Buffy settled into the curve of his arm, resting her head against his shoulder and slurping on the last of her orange juice. She’d scold him for eating too fast, but somehow or other the whole burrito had done a vanishing act, and she had the feeling she was too deep into pot/kettle territory to pull it off. His hand wandered up to stroke her hair, and she felt, in that more moment, more purely happy than she could remember feeling since…

Spike squeezed his eyes shut. “Pryce,” he whispered. “He knew about last year. About you losing the baby, me running out, all of it.”

She might have known the real scars wouldn’t be on the outside. Angelus was an artist in pain; Wesley Wyndam-Pryce was a clinician. Buffy kept her voice steady. “He doesn’t know about anything.”

“Said forgiving me my trespasses was the ruin of you. Said you’d see it, sooner or later. Hate me for it. ”

“What did you tell him?”

“Laughed in the berk’s face. As if the likes of me could ruin you.” His eyes opened, serene and blue. “He tried to convince me that - that what happened to Christopher was consequence of that. That’s when I knew it was bollocks. You might hate me, at that. But I know. You wouldn’t have hated the mite.” He laid a hand upon her belly, reverent, like a man laying hands upon a tomb.

How unfair was it, that Spike could say that name out loud, when she could creep no nearer to the memory than What Happened Last Year? “It was my fault,” she whispered. “What happened. You knew that all along.”

“Oh, love.” His arm tightened around her, and there was more pain in his voice than Wesley could have inflicted in the entire last two months. “No. I’d cut my sodding tongue out if I could take that back.”

And there was nothing more she could say, no words she hadn’t said already, about what happened last year - only a huge aching void in her chest that threatened to well up and choke her, and she wanted to tell him that if she hated him for the choices she had made, she’d be a piss-poor Buffy and a pretty rotten Slayer as well, but words were not her friend. And she hated - not him, but the thought of that void always lying between them. It would take a running leap to cross it, and there was always the chance she’d break an ankle on the dismount. But the choice, as always, was hers.

“It’s been good today, hasn’t it?” she said timidly. “I mean, yeah, with the running and the screaming and the hitting and the fear of sudden death, but between us, it’s been…” Good. Better than it had been in a long time. Since before Spike had left, and come back. Since before…

He smiled, drowsy. “It has that.”

She slipped the t-shirt off her shoulder, and ran a fingernail along one of the deeper scratches left by Mad Sewer Dash #3412. Bright blood welled up against lightly tanned skin. Scab-picking as a romantic gesture: Buffy Summers-Pratt, This Is Your Life. Buffy took her vampire’s dumbstruck face in both hands, and drew his head down to the wound, and hoped she wouldn’t have to say the words, because the words would be cheesy and stupid. “So I thought… maybe it could be better?”

Spike stiffened, incredulous, offended. “Not hungry.”

Mood of tender, romantic reconciliation, officially shattered. “Who said you were?” Buffy snapped. Between them, the bite had never been about that kind of hunger - she’d been many things to him over the years, but never, ever, food, and if that was all he thought she was offering…

Then no wonder he was offended. Crap. She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, fingers fluttering down her neck, and arched up to brush her lips along the taut cords of muscle on his. It was really hard to look sultry when you were swimming in a Finding Nemo t-shirt. “Maybe I’m hungry. You ever think about that?”

Hah. Little Spike was starting to display a friendly interest in the proceedings, even if his lord and so-called master was thick as a post. She bent to kiss the slick, satiny head, just starting to poke out of his foreskin. Spike’s eyes were blazing gold now, wary, hopeful, confused. He shivered as her tongue traced the slit of his cock. “You said,” he choked out. “Last year. If you let me come back. No more of that. No more - no chance of going through that again!”

Forget sultry. Buffy sat bolt upright, fists clenched. “I was stupid, OK?” she yelled. “Thinking if I could have you back and keep you out somehow I’d be safe! But you always get in - that’s why I love you, you big stupid jerk! And nothing’s ever safe! And - and I’ve changed my mind!” She really didn’t want to cry. She hadn’t brought any makeup along. And she wasn’t exactly sure what it was she’d just said, anyway, so not really much point in bursting into tears.

Spike, fortunately, had a lot of experience in translating from Buffy to English. The gold in his eyes darkened, smoky and dangerous. “Don’t have any - ” He made an all-inclusive gesture in the direction of Little Spike, which she took to encompass their current lack of any latex products manufactured by the fine people of Trojan, Inc. Obviously the next time she rescued him from durance vile, she was going to have to update her packing list.

“Don’t care.”

“Been off your pills for a good bit. I can smell it.”

“Don’t care.”

“If we do this,” he breathed, muscles bunching predatory in his shoulders, one finger catching the waistband of her shorts, “there’s a bloody good chance I’ll knock you up again. You’ll care then.”

She didn’t want to drag it all out in the open like that. She’d imagined this as symbolic and numinous, with neither of them needing to speak a word. It struck her, suddenly, that maybe it was Spike who needed reassurance now - she wasn’t the only one who’d lost something (someone) last year, not the only one who’d mourned. “Spike, I’m almost forty. The warranty on the girly bits is probably about to lapse. The chances aren’t all that good. But if something happens? It happens.”

Spike inhaled. “Oh, your warranty’s in fine shape, love.”

He struck. Or she did. Hard to tell, when they were grappling together in the entangling sheets, when she was as greedy for him as he was for her, when their last bout had just been appetizers, barely enough to take the edge off a hunger that had built, unsated, for a year and more. When she pressed close against him as fangs and cock sank home together, thrashing and snarling as violently as any demon, demanding harder, deeper, faster! Blood sang in her veins, rising to the pain of the bite - she’d felt the killing bite in her day, more than once, and this was no languorous, swooning anguish, spiraling down into darkness. This was pain as sharp and glorious as trumpets, as bright as morning. No surrender, but a gift - from her to him, and back again.

And, oh, he was giving back, moving impossibly huge and hard within her, hitting every sweet spot she possessed with the cunning of twenty years’ experience. Pushing till she wept and whimpered and strove against him, and came, and came, and came again, aching for more, more, more. Not holding himself in this time, either, no, already come twice, and she could feel the slap of his balls against her ass, high and tight and eager again. They shouted together when he spent, a wordless yell of triumph, though what foe they had defeated Buffy hardly knew.

His fangs were still fastened lightly in her shoulder (he never bit her neck during sex, except in play - neck bites were for killing). “Just a minute, and I’m gonna fuck you again, Slayer,” he mumbled. Tonguing the wounds, little silver-sharp jabs of rapture. “Gonna fuck you long and hard. Gonna be so good to you, you’ll see - ”

“You’re being pretty good now,” she gasped, fingers clutching the sheets as cool lips worked their way down her sweat-drenched torso. He’d be ready again soon - Spike really had a nice sturdy cock, a cock with heft to it, a cock that stood up to some handling. Or for some handling. Not quite as quick on the draw alive and pushing fifty as he had been when he was undead and pushing thirty, but with the proper encouragement, the flesh was still very, very willing. And she was all about the encouragement.

“I thought about it,” she whispered, so low only vampire ears could hear. “Ever since you came home. Every time we made love, I thought about letting you. Do this.”

“Did you, now?” His voice dropped to a subterranean rumble, rich as Aztec chocolate. She could feel the throb and shiver through her clit as he devoured her, her hips jerking helplessly in the relentless grip of his hands. He was definitely trying to kill her, maybe by dehydration - she couldn’t possibly get any wetter, could she? Apparently she could.

“I thought about your cock inside me while your fangs - oh God!” He’d suited action to word, pushing inside her again - “I thought about - oh! how good it would feel, how - how big, how hard - ” He started to move, slow and controlled - had to be slow, she was so swollen with heat and desire. “How much you like it when there’s a chance - ”

“Oh, you like it too,” Spike purred. It drove her wild when he did that, thrumming all through her secret places. Her nipples were aching, her clit pulsing, her breath coming in little whistling gasps - she was one great vibrating skein of Buffy-fiber for Spike to play arpeggios of pleasure on. His fangs pierced her shoulder again, and the bed shook as he slammed into her, wham, wham, WHAM! against the wall. Buffy clawed the glossy trail of scales that ran down his spine now when he changed, and Spike convulsed within her. “That’s your dirty little secret, isn’t it, pet? You make out it’s been all accidental, but the truth is, you like it. Being a mum. An’ well you should, you’re good at it.”

She wanted to deny it. Shut his mouth with blood and kisses. But her body was on fire, and his was too, the biological alchemy that his bite worked on her system, and her blood on his, sparking through them both. Fred Burkle had explained it once, something about hormones and sperm capacitation and zona pellucida glycoproteins, but it boiled down to a simple formula: bitey + boinking = baby. Was that what she wanted, really? Or was it just that she was tired of fearing the possibility?

Spike looked down and her and laughed, his eyes alight with the joy of Slayer-baiting. “Admit it. You love being up the duff. You love gettin’ round and ripe and rosy, lettin’ Spike feed you up an’ cosset you.” His fingers slipped between her thighs, to toy with the slick, pouting flesh. “You love it when the little ‘un’s asleep at your breast,” he crooned, rocking against her. “When they’re cryin’ their eyes out in the middle of the night. You love raisin’ ‘em up to be good. You love it because it’s so fucking hard, an’ for all you complain, you’d pine away if your life was easy. And you’d have denied all that to yourself, for memory of our poor lost boy? If he’d lived to tell you so, he wouldn’t have wanted that.”

“I want you,” she said. She was liquid sex, melting and re-forming around the rock-solid foundation of Spike’s cock, and that void was filling, filling, full to overflowing. She rolled him over and bore down, thighs scissored around his narrow waist till he fountained into her, golden-eyed, blue-eyed, roaring in ecstasy. The whole universe reduced to the intersection of flesh and flesh, to the circuit of blood and jizz. Riding him till his eyes crossed, squeezing the promise of life from his loins. Again, and again, and again. Life is pain, Your Highness. No shit. Wrong Wesley altogether, but the Dread Pirate William had a ring to it.

***

“Probably nothing happened,” Buffy said, one thoroughly trashed hotel room later. Spike chuckled and looked insufferably smug - in some ways, he was very much a guy. And he probably thought their unprotected-bitey-sex track record could speak for itself, and he was probably right. But they were both older now, and… she wasn’t sure if she should finish the sentence ‘they shouldn’t get their hopes up’ or not. “I mean, even if it did, it wouldn’t…” Be a replacement, be a solution. Only more problems. But weren’t problems what they did best? “It wouldn’t be the same.”

“Never is,” Spike replied equably, taking an enormous bite of pizza (extra cheese for her, extra pepperoni for him). He was definitely looking better - it was going to take a lot more liver to keep his jeans from sliding off his hips, but he was starting to heal up nicely. She coiled a lock of his hair around her finger - best enjoy the curls before he buzzed it all off again. She thought she could get to like the new grey.

Buffy shifted to find a spot on the bed that wasn’t so wet, and a spot on herself that wasn’t so agreeably sore. “Spike, why did you - I mean, Angel asked you to find Wesley’s soul. I get that. The puppy eyes are hard to resist. But you never even knew Wesley. Souled Wesley, anyway. When it all went so bad, why didn’t you just…”

“Kill him when I had the chance?” Spike chewed thoughtfully. “Thought about it, believe me. You’re the hero, pet. I’m just the monster who loves you. But after last year… not my finest hour. Had to show you even a monster can act the hero sometimes. You and our Bill.”

She wasn’t sure whether she wanted to kiss him or hit him. Knowing Spike, he’d appreciate either. “You big jerk,” she muttered. And trusted he was fluent enough in Buffy-to-English to know it meant, “I love you.”

END</lj>

Originally published at Barb C's Journal. You can comment here or there.

It’s another episode of Barb!Brain Theater!

rahirah@cox.net — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 05:27:37 GMT

So I was having this Very Serious Discussion with my betas about the sex scenes in ESLHATOG (revised version should be up tomorrow, btw) and somehow or other, this was the result…

INT. BARB’S BRAIN

SPIKE is lounging in bed, perusing the latest issue of WSC. BUFFY is dressed in comfy PJs and sitting at her desk, reading e-mail.

SPIKE: Sodding Czechs…sodding defense… bloody, sodding Portsmouth…

BUFFY: [with a frown] Look at this!

SPIKE: [absorbed in the footy] Wossat?

BUFFY: Just look!

[She turns her laptop so SPIKE can see the following piece of SPAM}

Shipping Wars are Hell When You’re the Main Character!</p>
After a long day of PWP with phenomenally endowed partners, do you feel less than virginally tight? Is your Golden Vagina in need of a polish? Then try Doctor Bombay’s Patented Miracle Cootch Tightener! Guaranteed to maintain your assets in prime condition under the assault of even the most massive of throbbing members!

BUFFY: Apparently along with saving the world on a regular basis, I’m supposed to have the hoo-hah of a sixteen-year-old. [She crosses her arms.] In perpetuity!

SPIKE: Christ, I hope not. Done a virgin or two in my time. Highly over-rated.

BUFFY: [ominous look]

SPIKE: [hastily] Just saying, I prefer a bird who knows what she’s about.

BUFFY: I mean, Slayer healing’s good, but it’s not that good. Especially when you combine that with the baby fic - one minute you’re supposed to be popping out a Miracle Baby, or God help us Miracle Twins, and two weeks later? “Ooh, Slayer, you’re so tight!” A girl could get a complex.

SPIKE: Yeh, well, you’re not the only one who’s got unrealistic expectations to live up to. I’m s’posed to be hung like a mule… [looks down, smirks] Oh, wait.

BUFFY: So it’s not just that I have to be a perpetual virgin, I’m supposed to be ElastiGirl on top of that! Though that could be useful in the case of a Miracle Baby who inherits his father’s GIANT HEAD!

SPIKE: [considers taking offense at this, but decides against it]

BUFFY: [She’s on a roll now] I mean, what is it with guys and the virgin fetish? Is it marking your territory? Because excuse me, not the Louisiana Purchase here! Does a non-virgin have sperm cooties? Inquiring minds want to know! Does it honestly matter that much that Angel had sex with me first?

SPIKE: Well… bit of a pisser that it was Angel… [shielding his bits with the magazine, off BUFFY’S look] Not a jot! Don’t give a toss who had you first, love, long as I get you last!

BUFFY: [glowering] That’s better. [She hits the Delete key and opens the next e-mail] Ooh, here’s one for you. “Is your trouser snake a python or a garter? Feeling inadequate? If you’re not ABSOLUTELY SURE your man-meat is more manly than your arch-rival’s - ”

SPIKE: [growls] Inade - Right, you’re turning that thing off and coming to bed.

BUFFY: [demurely] Sounds like a plan.

END

Originally published at Barb C's Journal. You can comment here or there.

To the love of my life

rahirah@cox.net — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 14:51:59 GMT

Originally published at Barb C's Journal. You can comment here or there.

Drabble: Looks Like Fun

rahirah@cox.net — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 14:38:48 GMT

A drabble in belated honor of JM’s birthday:

Looks Like Fun

by Barb C
Disclaimers: The usual. All belongs to Joss and Mutant Enemy, and naught to me.
Rating: PG-13
Setting: Post-Gift AU
Pairing: B/S
Distribution: Ask and you shall receive, I’d just like to know where it ends up.
Synopsis: Happy birthday to you!
Author’s notes: This story takes place in the same universe as “A Raising in the Sun” et. al.

“But I didn’t mean to!” Connie wailed.

“What you meant doesn’t matter!” Buffy snapped. “Honey, think about - ” She glared at Spike, whose rapt gaze lacked something in the parental reprimand line. “Back me up here!”

Spike tore his eyes away from the flames. “No more playing with lighters, sweetness.”

Buffy handed over the baby with an eyeroll. “Hold Alex. I’ve got to call our insurance agent. Bill! Stop pestering the firemen!”

Connie sniffled, clinging to Spike’s leg. “I’m sorry, Daddy. Your birthday cake needed all its candles.”

“So it did.” Spike looked down and grinned. “Best birthday prezzie ever!“

Originally published at Barb C's Journal. You can comment here or there.

Life doesn’t suck

rahirah@cox.net — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 03:42:02 GMT

We’ve been having more router problems (the fix turned out to be something really simple, which I should have thought of myself, and I’m ashamed to have called miertam up in a panic about it, but I did. I admit my weenieness.) so I haven’t been online at home much this week. Thus I’m even more behind than usual with comments, and I haven’t read my flist since Friday. Sorry! (she said, cringing) I’ve also realized that whenever I post from work, I’ve forgotten to post from my WordPress site, so I’m going to have to go back and do some housekeeping, and make sure everything matches up.

This weekend we got up bright and early Saturday morning and tamed the wilderness, i.e. mowed the front yard and hauled all the deadfall grapefruit out to the alley. Why, it almost looks like a civilized dwelling! In the next couple of weeks I need to get serious about cleaning the bermuda grass out of the garden, so we can plant fall flowers. We later went over to </lj>framefolly’s for yummy lasagna and a 10th Kingdom marathon, and today we did Mom’s grocery shopping and had her over for dinner.

And in between times, I worked like a mad thing trying to finish something for the </lj>lynnevitational, and I succeeded, sort of. In a manner of speaking. It’s finished in the sense of having a beginning, a middle, and an end, but it’s really rough, and I have an awful feeling that the ending dissolved into treacly goo when I was trying more for restrained ray of hope. I posted a link to the rough draft, but I’m not pretending it’s anything but a rough draft. I think I need to let it sit for a week or so and then go at it with a meat cleaver. But later. Just reaching ‘The End’ was exhausting enough for today.

I read a couple of the other </lj>lynnevitational stories, which are excellent as always - more will be posted over the next week. So if you don’t have the comm friended (and why don’t you?) do so now! There’s genres and pairings for all tastes, and you won’t find better BtVS/AtS fic out there anywhere.

Sleep now. Happy, happy sleep…</lj>

Originally published at Barb C's Journal. You can comment here or there.

Fic: The Road to Byzantium, Part IIIa

rahirah@cox.net — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 04:46:19 GMT

In theory, Dawn was staying with the Rosenbergs until Giles could get hold of her dad. In practice, for the last two weeks she’d she crept out of Willow’s bedroom and snuck over to Spike’s crypt, where she stayed up till three A.M., eating Cheetos and watching Theatre of Blood on Channel 21. Last week there’d been one where the heroes fed a skeletonized vampire some blood. And OK, Dawn couldn’t talk because she’d accidentally invited Harmony into her house once, but new levels of stupid, right there. Much to Spike’s scorn, the vampire had swelled up like Ballpark franks, back to normal in an instant, and promptly proceeded to wreak mayhem.

In the real world, Dawn knew, it didn’t work like that. Vampires gained and lost weight about the same way people did, and for pretty much the same reasons. Putting some meat back on Spike’s bones would take a few weeks of feeding right and working out.

So she didn’t expect miracles. She didn’t expect anything, really. It was just a mouthful of blood. Which was why the way Spike was staring at her was so freaky. Beneath the jutting ridges of his demon brow his eyes were aflame with unnatural elation, blazing like miniature suns. He stretched out a hand and flexed his fingers, marveling at the smooth white skin where angry burns had been only minutes ago.

“Spike, are you OK?”

Spike gave a loopy giggle. “Fine! Better ‘n fine! I’m bloody brilliant! What are we waiting for, then? Time’s wasting!” He leaped to his feet, practically vibrating with energy, and swaggered out of the thicket. His pale hair glowed in the moonlight; he might as well have had a neon bullseye on his chest.

Dawn had a sudden flash of memory: Angel, freaky-strong after he’d drunk Buffy’s blood, lurching down the hospital corridor like he could barely control his super-charged body. But this was different, and Angel had practically drained Buffy dry - Spike had barely had a taste. “What’s wrong with him?”

“Apparently Key blood is vampire crack.” Anya got to her feet and brushed the dead leaves off her skirt. “I think we should start working on Plan B.”

“Daaaaaaagobert! Ally ally oxen free!” Spike yelled, cupping both hands to his mouth. “Oi! Tin Man! Send General Pinhead up here toot sweet, you nickel-plated oaf! I want a heart-to-heart!”

“It’s the demon!” Dagobert bellowed. “Byzantium, to me!”

Crap. Spike did sound high. Or drunk. More drunk than he sounded when he actually was drunk. Dawn could hear shouts and the sounds of running feet splashing through the creek as the rest of the troop rallied to Dagobert’s call. Shouts of, “Remember, he can’t strike you without pain!” and “Crossbows at the ready!” echoed back and forth across the canyon. The metallic snik of crossbows cocking filled the air.

“Fire!”

Spike vanished, moving too fast for the human eye to follow. He reappeared in midst of Dagobert’s men. Pale, spidery hands shot out, wrenching the weapons from the hands of the two closest knights before their fingers could tighten on the triggers. Both crossbows spun off into the darkness, to land in the creek with a splash and a clatter, and both men yelped in pain and surprise. Dawn saw Spike stagger and drop to his knees as the chip fired, then pop to his feet again with a manic grin. Three more knights spun and fired wildly as he blurred out of sight again.

Two bolts went wide, while the third caught one of the disarmed knights in the thigh. The wounded man crumpled with a curse and Spike dropped out of bullet time just as Dagobert swung his shotgun around and emptied both barrels point-blank into the vampire’s middle. Spike jerked with the impact and toppled backwards, the black leather wings of his duster unfurling around the pale, infernal halo of his hair. He sprawled motionless on the stones, his skinny, jeans-clad legs splayed wide.

Heart pounding wildly, Dawn leaped out of the bushes. “Dawn! No!” Anya hissed, but Dawn was off and running. A healthy vampire could laugh off a bullet, or even a lot of bullets, from most handguns, but high-caliber shotguns could do real damage. And Spike wasn’t exactly a healthy vampire right now.

Stones rolled and shifted under her flying feet - what, was every rock and root in the canyon conspiring against her? General Aethelred was storming up the slope from the creek, flanked by a dozen archers and as many knights brandishing swords and spears. Torches bobbed overhead, painting the oncoming horde a lurid red. Trust Spike to be the first vampire in a century to actually be hunted down by a torch-waving mob. Dawn stumbled, skidded, found her balance, stumbled again. A wave of dizziness washed over her. She must have lost more blood than she’d thought, which was weird, because she could feel it circling inside, throb, throb, throb, a cord of fire knotted in her middle. Huh. Well, live and learn. Or go into shock and die.

The world did a slow, lazy revolution and she saw the ground rushing up to meet her. That’s really going to hurt.

“Whoops-a-daisy!” Strong hands caught her and swept her effortlessly upright. Spike’s arm hooked around her waist, and Dawn sagged gratefully against his side. He held up a leather pouch stamped with the insignia of Byzantium and shook it, sending a brass rain of shotgun shells to the ground. “William the Bloody one, Byzantium nought!” he caroled.

“Spike,” Dawn croaked, “what’s the plan?” He was still wearing that lunatic grin, and his pupils were enormous black wells in his amber eyes - well, they would be in the dark, wouldn’t they? His body radiated an un-vampire-like warmth. “There is a plan, right?”

“‘Course I’ve got a plan.” Spike sounded offended. “Got lots of plans. Oodles of plans! Plenty of plans, all of them cracking good plans, too! What demon girl said, yeh? Shush, it’s General Wossface, with enough arrows in his quiver to re-enact the martyrdom of St. Sebastian. Oooh, not sporting, not sporting at all!”

Aethelred halted at a safe distance and folded his arms across his chest. “Vampire! This charade is pointless. You cannot hurt us, and you would no more harm the Key than her sister would. Until Brother Selwin can examine her, I’m loath to chance the girl’s death - but I will kill both of you rather than let her escape.” He waved at the bristling arc of bowmen. “Turn the Key over to me, and we will allow you and the demon woman to leave.”

“Aren’t we ever so manly? P’raps you’ve noticed…” Spike tugged the front of his t-shirt up. The cloth was a shredded mess, and the pale, concave belly underneath it was peppered with the tiny black dots of buckshot wounds, but there was no blood. “You can’t hurt me, either. Seems our Dawn’s blood puts Lydia Pinkham to shame. Could be it’ll work on headaches, too. Want to find out?”

Dagobert’s jaw clenched, causing his mustache to bristle like a belligerent hedgehog. He took a step forward, and the General laid a restraining hand on his arm. Dawn could see him working out the odds. Unless they hit Spike’s heart dead on, the bolts wouldn’t stop him any more than the shotgun had. She knew that Spike couldn’t keep up the super-speed indefinitely, and the pain from the chip would get worse the more damage Spike tried to inflict, but the knights’ briefing might not have been that thorough.

“Thought not,” Spike purred. “Now. Let’s us have a chat. You’d kill her, yeh, you’ve stones enough for that. But it’ll eat at you. Every night, for the rest of your days, you’ll wake, and you’ll see her eyes staring back at you out of the dark.” His hand cupped her cheek, dry and strangely warm. Dawn thought it trembled a little. “So bloody beautiful…” He blinked and shook himself, lapsing in and out of game face like he couldn’t remember which was which. “Wages of being a good man. ‘Course,” his grin grew sharper, more predatory. “I’m makin’ the assumption that you are a good man.”

Aethelred said nothing. Dawn hoped that was a good sign. Spike couldn’t lie to Buffy to save his life, but put him in a situation like this and he turned into Gielgud. Or at least Matt Damon.

“Things have changed since you and your band of merry men last took the Sunnydale tour.” Spike held Dawn’s bleeding wrist up for all to see and ran his tongue along the length of her forearm, starting slick and human-soft, ending demon-rough. “Delicious,” he drawled, stretching the word out like warm taffy. “You say I won’t kill her, and you’re right. But you’ve got the whys of it all wrong. Slayer’s rotting in the ground - what’s a promise to her, now? You want the Key neutralized. And for me it’s all about the blood. Seems to me we can both get what we want, without you losing sleep of nights.”

“And how do you propose to… neutralize her?” Aethelred demanded, in a voice as stiff as his spine.

Spike’s chuckle was possibly the filthiest thing Dawn had ever heard. “Already done, Prince Valiant. Key’s supposed to be pure, yeh?” His hand slipped upwards from her waist. “An’ she’s anything but, now that I’m in the picture.”

“Spike!” Dawn hissed. “You’re touching my boob!”

“Blimey, Sherlock, I hadn’t noticed!” Spike hissed back. “Try an’ look debauched here!”

Dawn dropped her voice to a Penthouse moan. “Oh, Spike!” She tossed her head back in her best impersonation of a romance-novel cover painting. Why should Spike have all the good lines? “My purity is totally sullied! Bite me harder! You make it hurt soooooo good!”

The millisecond of absolute horror that flashed across Spike’s face was pretty much worth the admission for the whole night. He recovered fast, though. “There, you’ve heard it from her lips. Impure as I am. Her power’s no use to anyone any longer. ‘Cept me.”

“So you would suggest, then,” Dagobert said with an icy sneer, “That as good men, we hand over a girl scarcely more than a child to a creature as loathsome as you, to be used for your pleasure?”

Spike snorted. “There’s consistency for you. You’re willing to have murder on your conscience, but you balk at a spot of pandering?”

“Maynard! Aelfric!” the General snapped.

A pair of dark-robed clerics pushed through the line of bowmen and hastened to their leader’s side. Maynard folded his hands into his sleeves and bowed deeply. “Your will, my lord?”

“The vampire claims,” the General said tersely, “To have made the girl his… doxy.” His lip curled with distaste.

“Doxy’s such a nasty word,” Spike murmured. “I prefer ‘box lunch.’”

“Be that as it may,” Aethelred said. “The undead are vile creatures. What chance is there his… association with the girl has corrupted her essence?”

The clerics frowned, putting their heads together - Spike could probably hear every word, but to Dawn it was only indecipherable mumbling. Her head was pounding, and the torches were surrounded by pulsing haloes of light. What was wrong with her?

“We have not the means to be certain, my lord,” Maynard said at last. “But there is one infallible test we can put her to.”

“What, are you going to see if I weigh the same as a duck?” Dawn muttered.

Maynard shot her a dirty look. “Fetch Orlando here. Where the Key is concerned, a madman may speak a truth the rest of us have too much wit to see.”

TBC…

Originally published at Barb C's Journal. You can comment here or there.

Woof

rahirah@cox.net — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 04:52:16 GMT

Back in business, thanks to the awesome miertam!

(salaams in your general direction)</lj>

Originally published at Barb C's Journal. You can comment here or there.

Name that narrative tic!

rahirah@cox.net — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 15:58:48 GMT

jamalov29 has been doing an S/B fanfic “Name that quote” thing recently, and it got me thinking: in both the ones I saw, I couldn’t identify the exact story, but I knew immediately who the writer was.

So, question for the day: which fic writers (in any fandom) have distinctive voices for you? Are there writers whose styles you’d know anywhere? Share!</lj>

Originally published at Barb C's Journal. You can comment here or there.

Mid-week madness

rahirah@cox.net — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 04:03:02 GMT

I was quite overwhelmed at the response to my announcement last week - thanks for all your well-wishes, everyone! ljs enquired if we were registered anywhere, and no, we aren’t - we’ve been together for twenty-plus years, and we don’t really need more stuff.

However, as you may or may not know, I work for the American Cancer Society, and my sister was recently diagnosed with colon cancer. If anyone is absolutely driven to commemorate the occasion, once we figure out exactly when the occasion will be, a donation to ACS is of more use than getting us a toaster. *g* You can go to the national website, www.cancer.org to donate online, or send it to your local ACS office.

I’m also walking in our local Strides Against Breast Cancer event again this year, and you can donate to that here:

Making Strides Against Breast Cancer - 2008-2009

I suppose it says terrible things about me that the current kerfuffle about outing fans has raised in me a terrible desire to do a “Wait… you mean Ben is Glory?” type parody. The funny thing (for me) is, I found my page on the Wiki That Must Not Be Named a long time ago, briefly considered updating it, and then decided I couldn’t be arsed. I didn’t find out about the owner’s idiosyncracies until much later.

In short, huh.

I don’t think I’ll be able to post part III of “Road to Byzantium” this weekend, but I might be able to get the last few scenes beaten into good enough order to send to the betas.

Kathy made peanut butter chocolate chip cookies OF THE GODS. Probably luckily, she’s taking them to work.

</lj>

Originally published at Barb C's Journal. You can comment here or there.

Cake!

rahirah@cox.net — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 01:33:57 GMT

Happy birthday, sillymagpie!</lj>

Originally published at Barb C's Journal. You can comment here or there.

As you’ve probably noticed…

rahirah@cox.net — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 05:37:36 GMT

…I did not get part III posted today. I’ve been working on it, and I’m about halfway done, but I still have the Big Climactic Scene to write, the characters are mocking me, and and it’s gonna be a bit longer. My deepest apologies.

Originally published at Barb C's Journal. You can comment here or there.

Deeply important question

rahirah@cox.net — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 03:31:03 GMT

So as I may or may not have mentioned Kathy and I are giving serious thought to nipping over to California and getting married, because we want to destroy the moral and social fabric of America JUST THAT MUCH, and Kathy brought up the question of the ages: Cummings-Coleman or Coleman-Cummings? Or just leave it as is and forego the hassle of changing all our paperwork?

I suggested that we go the shipper route and smush them together, but neither Cumman nor Colmings seemed to appeal…

Originally published at Barb C's Journal. You can comment here or there.

IT’S FIG-O-RAMA!!!!!

rahirah@cox.net — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 03:24:29 GMT

How many times have you opened your refrigerator or perused the produce section of your local supermarket and said to yourself, “Self, why are there not more sources of fresh figs in the greater Phoenix Metropolitan Area?” AND ANSWER CAME THERE NONE? A whole lot of times, I bet!

Well, now your problems are OVER! Never again will you wake to those midnight cravings for fig pie, fig tart, figs stuffed with cheese, dried figs, fig newtons, fig jam, figgy pudding, and roast rack of lamb with brandied fig sauce, only to slink back to your lonely, hungry bed unsated! Yes, your fig-free days are numbered, because I have figs, and I want to give them to YOU!

And not just any figs! No, these are 100% certified home-grown organic Arizona figs! No artificial pesticides or fertilizers have been used in the production of these figs, and although there are ugly rumors that the fig tree snuck some of the rose food when we weren’t looking, we categorically deny that we fertilize the roses often enough to make any difference, and we’ve spoken to the fig tree VERY sternly about it and it promises never to do it again.

You may ask how to distinguish 100% organic figs from ordinary, everyday, commercial figs, given that Arizona has no laws, enforced or otherwise, governing the labeling of organic produce. Simple! Look at my face! Would I lie to you?

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE! Some of our lucky fig recipients will receive SPECIAL BONUS FIGS

Nibbled by 100% organic bugs!
Pecked by 100% organic birds!
Slightly shriveled by 100% organic sunlight!

You may be asking yourself, “Self, how do I take advantage of this fantabulous offer?” It couldn’t be easier! Merely go to Barb’s house, knock on the front door, and say, “Hey, Barb said I could have some figs!” And then we give you figs! YES, IT’S THAT SIMPLE!

DON’T WAIT! ACT NOW!! SUPPLIES ARE LIMITED!!! BONUS OVER-RIPE GRAPEFRUIT TO FIRST FIVE CUSTOMERS!!

Originally published at Barb C's Journal. You can comment here or there.

Fic: The Road to Byzantium

rahirah@cox.net — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 14:39:12 GMT

Here’s my CYA story. It got a bit longer that anticipated. The second part will be posted shortly, and the third and final part will be posted on Sunday.

The Road to Byzantium
by Barb C.

Disclaimers: The usual. All belongs to Joss and Mutant Enemy, and naught to me.
Rating: PG-13 for violence and naughty, naughty words
Characters: Spike, Dawn, Anya
Distribution: Ask and you shall receive, I’d just like to know where it ends up.
Synopsis: The Knights of Byzantium have returned to Sunnydale. Spike, Dawn and Anya take to the road to avoid them, but when they run into a mysterious hitchhiker, their plans go awry. Can a neutered vampire, an ex-vengeance demon, and the Key to the Universe evade a very human foe?
Author’s notes: This story takes place in the same universe as “Raising In the Sun,” “Necessary Evils,” and “A Parliament of Monsters.” Many thanks to my betas, slaymesoftly, </lj>bruttimabuoni, </lj>rainkatt, </lj>shipperx, and </lj>kehf. It was written for the 2008 </lj>cya_ficathon, and the request was as follows:

Characters/Pairings you want the story to focus in: Dawn&Spike
Characters/Pairings you want in the story too: Anya! Even if only because D&S are speaking about her.
Things you want: post-Gift but *before* Buffy comes back. Spike takes Dawn out of town for several days - to distract her, to protect her from a demon (a parallel ‘OMWF’?), on a whim… whichever reason works best. I really want the story to focus on D&S, and the firmer their friendship is, the better. Banter is love, lol!
Things you don’t want: No LA, and as few B/S as possible, please.
Extras: hitchhiking back home (either they do it, or they pick someone up at some point in the journey). I would love for Spike to tell Dawn *his* version of Lover’s Lane (S3), and maybe Dawn can add her own ‘memories’ around those events?

Spike was on fire again.

The dusting of curly light-brown hair on his left wrist was starting to singe and fizzle in the filtered sunlight. Wisps of smoke curled upwards and whipped away out the window. The first time it had happened, sitting at a red light in Ventura, Dawn had panicked and thrown her Diet Sprite at him. By now, fifteen miles out of Ojai, it was starting to get old.

“Fucking hell,” the vampire muttered, slapping the flames out before his skin could catch. He examined the red spot with a scowl. Dawn fished an ice cube out of her cup and handed it over to him solemnly.

In the back seat, Anya looked up from her magazine and heaved an exasperated sigh. “You know, if we’d just waited until it was dark…”

Spike took a drag on his cigarette and flicked the butt out the window. It bounced off a Fire Danger: HIGH sign and tumbled to the shoulder in a shower of orange sparks. “Not a chance. We want to be well out of Sunnydale before those Byzantium wankers roll in.”

“Because running away from them worked so well the last time,” Dawn muttered, so low that no one could hear it.

No one except the vampire with super-sensitive ears, anyway. A muscle in Spike’s jaw twitched, and his knuckles went whiter-than-white on the wheel. “Not going to be like the last time,” he said flatly.

“I didn’t mean it like…” Dawn trailed off unhappily. Of course it wasn’t going to be like last time. Last time her sister had been with them. Not that it had made any difference, in the end. But Buffy was gone now. My sister is dead, Dawn thought, rolling the words around in her brain, testing the weight of them. It wasn’t fair. She hadn’t even had time to get used to My mother is dead yet. Buffy’d died a hero, saving the world - saving her - one last time. But dead was still dead.

It didn’t help the way the others looked at her - pitying, sure, but she was positive that behind the pity was Why are you still here? Dawn couldn’t blame them. Sometimes she asked herself the same thing.

“It’s all right.” Anya reached out with the hand that wasn’t still encased in a neon-purple wrist brace, and patted Spike’s shoulder. “We realize that it must be emasculating for you to be sent away with the non-combatants, but - ”

Spike’s scowl was just a hair short of game face. “”m not a sodding non-combatant!” he snarled, leaning over to fiddle with the radio.

The car swerved. Anya hopped up and finger-flicked the back of his head. “Ten and two, Spike!”

Reflexively, Spike swung around and batted back, only to double over in agony as the chip fired. Dawn dropped her soda and grabbed the steering wheel, ice cubes cascading across the floor as the DeSoto slewed across both lanes and leaped the shoulder onto rough ground. The gnarled trunk of a live oak reared up before them, and then Spike’s long fingers covered hers, his lips skinned back in a terrified snarl as he wrestled his pain and the black steel monster of a car into submission. Tires thundered over gravel, a spray of prickly leaves clawed the hood, and with a bump and a jounce they were back on the highway. Spike brought the DeSoto to a halt and sat there, head bowed, shoulders shaking, hands welded to the steering wheel.

“Violence is never the answer,” Anya observed placidly. She sat back and gave the pages of her Modern Bride a crisp snap. “Extremely satisfying, but never the answer.”

Spike growled low in his chest, and one hand left the wheel and crept towards the inside pocket of his duster, where Dawn knew he kept a flask of whiskey. Sweat beaded his brow above the rims of his day-driving goggles - nothing to do with the heat; it was a stress thing for vampires. Halfway there his fingers clenched, and his fist dropped to one knee. Timidly, Dawn laid a hand on his arm, feeling muscle and tendon tense as steel cable to her touch. “Are you OK?” she asked.

“Fine, Bit.” The harshness in his voice was the kind that kept it from shaking. He cast a longing look in the direction of his duster pocket, and then his mouth firmed. “Promised Buffy I’d take care of you, ‘n I will. Whatever it takes.”

Dawn picked a melting ice cube off her shirt as they pulled out onto the highway again. Spike didn’t look OK. He looked exhausted and hung over and scared. And thin. Spike had never been a big guy, but he’d always had a solid sort of leanness to him. Now every ounce of extra weight (and there hadn’t been all that many ounces to begin with) was burnt away, and then some. You could lose yourself in the hollows of his eyes, draw blood on the cathedral arches of his cheekbones.

She’d have to get some pig’s blood to keep around for when he came over, Dawn decided, and make sure he was feeding right. She could tell Mr. and Mrs. Rosenberg it was a science project. Still, this was about a million times better than the condition she’d found him in when she’d first braved his crypt a couple of weeks after Buffy’s death.

For the next fifteen minutes they drove in silence. State Route 33 spooled away ahead of them, snaking up into the foothills of the Santa Ynez Mountains. The July sun beat down on the dusty green armies of scrub oak and manzanita marching uphill and down alongside the road. Dawn propped her knees up and laid her head against the grease-smudged windowpane, watching the chaparral roll by. That was one of the cool things about driving with Spike: he didn’t care about stuff like sneakers on the dashboard. It was probably the only cool thing about this trip, though. The DeSoto’s air conditioning, if it had ever had any, had given out years ago, and Spike, of course, didn’t need it. If he’d been by himself, he’d have had all the windows rolled up tight, the blacked-out panes protecting him from the sun. But his passengers needed air, especially if he planned on chain-smoking all the way down the Cuyama River.

“I’m bored,” she announced. “We should play a game or something.”

“You can help me pick out bridesmaid’s dresses,” Anya offered. “I’m thinking green.”

A wicked light sparkled in Spike’s eyes, and the barest hint of a grin quirked his lips. “Think Harris would appreciate the traditional burlap and blood larva, myself.”

Dawn shuddered. “Speaking as a potential larva wearer? I vote green.” Obviously a subject change was in order. “I know. Spike could tell us a story.”

Spike raked a hand through his platinum-blond curls - in the last couple of weeks, he’d started touching up his roots again, which was an encouraging sign. “Dunno as I’ve got anything entertaining to hand,” he said.

Dawn was conversant enough in Spike-speak to know that meant, Come on, flatter me into it. “Aw, but you’re so good at it,” she wheedled, batting her eyelashes.

“Laying it on a bit thick, Snack-size,” Spike growled, but it was his good-humored growl this time. “Lessee. I ever tell you about the time Angel and I were trapped in a submarine?”

Dawn slouched down in the cracked black leather seat and slurped at her Sprite till the ice cubes rattled, letting Spike’s voice and the summer heat lull her into a half-doze.

A vampire, an ex-vengeance demon, and the Key to the Universe were driving down the highway… And that was the really annoying thing about all this, Dawn decided. She’d never, ever felt like the Key to the Universe. In the last year she’d discovered that her whole life was a magically-manufactured lie, that she was really some vast cosmic force squished into human form. And that everyone who was anyone, mystically speaking, was out to either destroy or control her. And none of it mattered. She still felt exactly like Dawn Summers, desperately ordinary fourteen-year-old girl.

Ever since she’d found out that her older sister was the Slayer, the Chosen One, the one girl in all the world who’d inherited the mystic strength and skill to fight the demons and vampires of the world, she’d gone to bed every night wishing desperately for something just as special to happen to her. And now, surprise, she was even more special than the Slayer. And Buffy was dead and Mom was dead and Dad wasn’t answering Mr. Giles’s calls, and every single one of those jealous memories was fake, fake, fake, and she knew exactly why Buffy had always complained that being special sucked major ass.

At least Buffy had helped people. All she was good for was to be the key to a door no one wanted to open. And that wasn’t anything she wanted to think about, here in a getaway car driven by a vampire with a behavior-modification chip in his head that meant he couldn’t fight humans without giving himself a migraine, chaperoned by an ex-vengeance demon who still hadn’t completely recovered from the injuries she’d gotten the last time someone had tried to capture the Key.

“…so I decided I’d win Dru’s black heart back, and your Will was just the witch to help me do it…”

Dawn shook herself. Spike had segued out of one tale and into another.

“…made the colossal cock-up of thinking the best way to keep the Slayer off my back was kidnapping her bratty little sis…”

“Hey!” Dawn said, indignant. “I wasn’t bratty! I was… spunky!”

“Worst mistake I ever made,” Spike went on, with a mock-doleful shake of his head. “‘course, I was plastered at the time. Dunno why the experience didn’t put me off the drink for good.” Dawn stuck her tongue out, and he continued with a grin, “What I hadn’t taken into account was, the Slayer might not have been home, but your mum was, and let me tell you, I’d rather the Slayer come at me with a stake than Joyce Summers take the sharp edge of her tongue to me. Gave me a proper hiding, your mum did.” He chuckled reminiscently. “If your sis hadn’t barged in, all huffy and righteous, I give it even odds Joyce could have talked me into heading back to South America then and there.”

“Do you ever think that maybe it didn’t really happen that way?” Anya asked, intrigued. “Maybe all of that was inserted into your memory when the monks created Dawn. I mean, it’s not very plausible, is it? Two years ago, Willow was barely able to make a pencil float, and it’s not as if there aren’t plenty of competent witches in South America. So why would you have decided she was the one to cast the love spell for you? And how likely is it that as notoriously vicious a vampire as William the Bloody would end up drinking hot chocolate and blubbering about his ex-girlfriend to his victims?”

“Didn’t blub,” Spike replied with great dignity. “I was expressing my grief in a restrained n’ manly fashion.” He shrugged and lit another cigarette, with a little smile at Dawn. “Whatever happened before Half-pint here come to us doesn’t signify, does it? ‘Sides, it was bloody good hot chocolate.”

“Mom was always - ” Dawn stopped, hoping Spike would attribute the catch in her voice to a sudden case of Sprite poisoning. “Wait. What’s that?”

Anya leaned over and pressed her nose to the cloudy glass. “What’s what?”

Dawn pointed. “Up there on the shoulder, at the top of that next hill - it’s moving!”

All three of them squinted out into the bright afternoon. The shadows were still crawling out from beneath the rocks and bushes where they’d hidden from the noon sun, but on the next rise limped a shadow torn free of its moorings. The scarecrow figure took a swaying step out onto the asphalt, waving its ragged arms in some arcane semaphore. Spike immediately applied foot to accelerator.

“Wait!” Dawn shrieked, as the DeSoto roared past the hitchhiker. “Stop! That’s a person!”

“Right,” said Spike. “An’ coincidentally enough, people are exactly what we’re trying to avoid at the moment.”

“But he’s hurt!”

“He looks hurt,” Anya pointed out. “But is he? It could be a trap. If any of the Knights who were here last spring bothered to phone home to headquarters before Glory slaughtered them, the rest of the order probably has dossiers on all of us. The Lower Beings know Spike’s car’s not exactly inconspicuous, not to mention Spike.”

It made sense - and yet… Dawn’s shoulders hunched mutinously. Was she going to let this Key business turn her into a hermit? Someone afraid to risk talking to any random stranger because they might be a member of some wackazoid Key-stealing cult? She was gripped with the sudden conviction that unless she wanted to spend the rest of her life holed up behind tinfoil windows, ordering all her food and clothes over the internet, they absolutely had to stop the car. “And what if it’s not a trap?” she demanded. “This is practically the middle of the desert. He could die if we leave him here.”

The complete disinterest in Spike’s face was… well, inhuman. “So?”

Vampires just didn’t get this stuff, she reminded herself. She wished she could see Spike’s eyes behind the insectile lenses of his goggles. “Look, if you do good things for people, they’ll do good things for you.” Honesty compelled her to add, “Sometimes.”

“That so?” Spike cocked a skeptical eyebrow. “Question is, then, what could that bloke possibly do for me that’s worth riskin’ your life if it is a trap? Not a lot.”

“Maybe he’s a brilliant brain surgeon who could take your chip out so - never mind, he totally isn’t.” Dawn played her trump card. “It’s what Buffy would do.”

For a second she thought it wasn’t going to work. Then, “Bugger,” the vampire muttered, hit the brakes, and punched the car into reverse.

They rolled to a stop about fifty feet from the hitchhiker, who’d collapsed into a desolate heap of rags on the side of the road when they’d driven past. The man, whoever he was, scrambled to his feet again and broke into a lop-sided run, gesturing wildly. The dusty rags of his clothing fluttered wildly in the breeze. He was brown-haired and nondescript, younger than Dawn had thought at first - it was his clothes, and the ragged growth of beard he was sporting, that made him look older.

Spike watched his approach in the rear-view mirror. “Right, we’re stopped,” he said. “Now you want to tell me who’s going to hop out and talk to the violent lunatic - the fourteen-year-old girl, the bird with the broken wrist, or the bloke who bursts into flame?”

Dawn bit her lip and frowned, unease overtaking her burst of altruism. Something about the hitchhiker’s face was awfully familiar. The man was banging a fist on Spike’s window now, and Dawn could see his lank hair swinging over a very familiar forehead tattoo - the sigil of the Knights of Byzantium. “Turnabout, turnabout!” he croaked. “Carry the lass who’s born to be king!”

Dawn’s belly went cold. Behind the scruffy beard… “I know him,” she whispered. “He’s one of those crazy guys from the hospital. The one I tried to talk to first, last winter, back when I was trying to find out what it meant, being the Key.” It had never occurred to her to wonder what had happened to all the people Glory had brainsucked - they’d just seemed to disappear after Glory died. “What do you want?” she said, voice quavering.

“Green girl, shining girl, so beautiful - mine eyes have seen the Glory,” the man whispered earnestly, drawing aside his rags to reveal an ugly red scar across his belly. “And all the king’s horses, and all the king’s men! Et tu, Brute?” He eyed Spike, and bared yellowing teeth in a sudden mad grin. “He hath a lean and hungry look. Such men are dangerous.”

“Too right,” Spike growled. “So you’d best be on your way, and we’ll be on ours.”

The man slammed his fist down on the hood of the car with a frustrated howl. “My way your way wrong way wrong wrong wrong! Full fathom five my father lies, into the cradle endlessly rocking!”

“Bugger this for a game of soldiers.” Spike revved the engine, and the man leaped back with a little yelp. “He’s barmier than Dru.”

“Can’t you figure out what he means?” asked Dawn. “It seems awfully important.”

Spike shook his head. “He’s just rabbiting on about the ocean.”

The man’s face lit up. “It is an Ancient Mariner - ”

“‘He stoppeth one in three,’ yeh, yeh, I know,” Spike interrupted. “Look, mate, if - ” he stopped abruptly, eyes going wide as the crazy quilt of literary references clicked together into something that apparently made sense to him. “Oh, bloody hell.”

“What? What?” Dawn shrieked. The ragged man was pounding on the door again, fear distorting his drawn face. “Spike, we have to let him in! He’s been hurt, maybe someone’s still after him - ”

Spike was already slamming on the gas, cursing a blue streak. “Not him, you bog-ignorant chit! You! He’s trying to warn us - ” One look at her adamant face and he braked again. “Anya, open the fucking door! Get in, you cheese-brained berk!”

Anya scooted over, forgoing the color commentary for a grimace of distaste, and the ragged man broke into an elated grin. “Backwards, turn backwards, and a star to steer her by!” he cried.

But he was only halfway into the back seat when Dawn saw the riders crest the hill in front of them. Men on horseback, their foreheads tattooed with the same mark that their hitchhiker bore, and wearing the black surcoats of the Order of Byzantium. The ragged man saw them too, and gave a wordless wail of defeat and anguish. The mounted troop galloped through the brush on either side of the highway, flinging handfuls of glittering metal at the road as they swept past the car. The rear door slammed behind their new passenger, and the DeSoto swung around with a roar, only to lurch to an explosive halt as both front tires blew out on the scattered caltrops.

Half a dozen knights leaped from their horses and rushed the car, wrenching the passenger-side door open. Gloved hands grabbed Dawn’s shoulders, dragging her out of the car. No, oh no, it’s all happening again! “Let me go!” she hollered, kicking and squirming. In the back seat, Anya was thwapping anyone who came near with her bridal magazine, and the ragged man was striking out with blind, hopeless fury. Dawn sank her teeth into the nearest thumb and was rewarded with a yell of pain.

Spike shrugged his duster over his head and lunged across the front seat with a roar of his own, grabbing her ankles. He flinched as full sunlight slapped him across the face, then bared his teeth and held on. For a moment the whole bizarre tug-of-war teetered in precarious balance, one vampire against six men, and then fire licked along the backs of Spike’s exposed hands. Blue flame leaped up on each separate knuckle and tendon, charring the already-scorched flesh and spreading upwards along thin, steely wrists towards the straining curve of his shoulders.

“No!” Dawn screamed. “Don’t you die! Don’t - ”

He wasn’t letting go. He wasn’t letting go! Sheer panic drove Dawn’s heel into Spike’s face. The unexpected boot to the head broke his grip where the pain of fire hadn’t, and Spike, still aflame, tumbled backwards into the dark interior of the car. She caught one last glimpse of his pale, stricken face as they hauled her away. She’d seen that look in his eyes just before he’d toppled from Glory’s tower, on the night when he’d almost saved her, almost saved Buffy. It was a million times worse now.

The ragged man was already sprawled face-down and moaning in the scrub, while more knights pulled a very uncooperative Anya from the back seat. Dawn twisted wildly in the knights’ grasp, trying to see if Spike had gotten back into the car safely, but all she could see was the faces of her captors, and above them, the gnarled branches of live oaks, reaching up into a blue, blue sky. The knights threw her down, pinning her spread-eagled to the ground. Rocks dug into her shoulder blades, and every thorn and twig on the West Coast was trying to work its way into her clothes.

“We have Orlando, General!” someone shouted.

“You traitorous bastard!” a second voice snarled. There was the meaty thud of boot connecting with ribcage, hard. “You almost lost us the Key!”

An older man with a grey-streaked goatee and more elaborate forehead tattoos strode up, leading his lathered horse behind him. “Hold, Dagobert! Our brother cannot be held responsible for his actions. You know this. And he has been an invaluable aid in bringing us this far.” He shot Dawn a look of weary disgust, like she was some icky but necessary household task he had to complete - taking out the garbage, or cleaning the toilets. “Did you think we would simply give up?” he said. “We are Byzantium. Kill one, and we send a hundred. Kill a hundred, and we send a thousand.”

“I didn’t kill anyone!” Dawn spat.

“No?” Goatee’s eyes were flinty. “But how many have died for your sake?” He waved at the nearest of his men. “Dagobert, Neville, search the vehicle and dispose of the demon. Brother Maynard, take charge of Orlando, if you will. And Alauno… bring the knife.”

A knight with a shaggy blond mustache clapped a fist to his chest and trotted off, while two more headed back towards the DeSoto. A cleric in black robes took the arm of the man in rags - Orlando, then - and drew him to his feet. “No!” Orlando cried, as Maynard led him away, out of Dawn’s line of sight. “The great work has yet to be completed! The shining ones are coming, the harriers of Heaven!” he shouted back at her. “The Key is the link, the link must be restored!”

“General Aethelred,” the taller of the two knights who’d gone to inspect the car said, “The demon is gone. This is all that was left.” He held out one gloved palm to display a small heap of grey ash. If Dawn’s heart had faltered before, it stopped now. Curiously, she didn’t scream or cry or even feel sad. It was almost like she’d stepped outside herself, leaving the fear and sorrow behind, because right now, she just couldn’t deal with it. Mom, Buffy, Spike… she’d hit overload.

The knight turned his hand over, and ashes drifted down, sprinkling the front of her shirt with grey-white flecks that…

That smelled an awful lot like the contents of the DeSoto’s ash tray.

She was pretty certain her heart hadn’t really stopped beating, but it sure felt like it had just started again. She was the Slayer’s sister, and she’d seen a lot of vampire ash in the last few years. It was gritty and grey-brown, not flaky and grey-white, and it sure as heck didn’t smell like the butt-end of an unfiltered Marlboro. Something had happened in that car, something other than Spike burning to death. But even if he was still in one piece, the sun was still high, and Spike still had a chip in his head. He wasn’t going to leap to the rescue, at least not right this minute.

Somewhat to her surprise, she found herself talking. “You know Glory’s dead,” she said. “My sister killed her. So she can’t use me to open all the other worlds into this one any longer. It’s all over. You don’t need to be doing any of this.”

General Aethelred stared down at her for a long moment. “Before we lost contact with General Gregor in the spring, he informed us that those accursed monks had made the Key flesh. You engendered in him grave doubts - he did not join the Order to slaughter children. He spoke of it as a test of his devotion.” He sighed. “I regret this, girl, more than I can say. But while the Beast is indeed dead, there can be no assurance that another will not rise in her place some day, when once more the stars wheel round to the proper configuration. Another who will complete the task at which she failed. I regret that you must die. But die you must.”

Alauno returned, sweating, and handed over a dagger with a short, triangular blade - similar to the athame Dawn had seen Willow and Tara use for some spells, but slimmer and more deadly-looking. Aethelred took it, clasping the leather-wrapped hilt in both hands. He looked briefly upwards as if in prayer, and -

“WAIT!”

The knights turned. “You’re planning on cutting her throat, aren’t you?” Anya continued, as if she were discussing whether she wanted brie or Camembert to accompany dinner. “You’re forgetting something very important.”

Aethelred glared for a moment. “Bring the woman here,” he said at last, and a pair of knights frog-marched the rumpled but unfazed Anya through the brush to face him. “And what, pray tell, escapes us?”

“Just this,” she said. “Glory’s dead, yes. But before she died, she shed Dawn’s blood, at the proper place and the proper time. The doors of the universe were opened. I’m sure your adepts sensed something rotten in the State of California about then.”

Aethelred glanced at Brother Maynard, who nodded. “And?”

“And those same doors were closed again, by her sister’s blood. Neat trick, exploiting the laws of similarity like that. But the universe, in my experience, doesn’t like having neat tricks played on it.” Anya tossed her hair and smiled, and it wasn’t a very nice smile. “If you shed the blood of the true Key here and now, so soon after and close to the Hellmouth… well, I don’t know about you, but personally? I’d rather be very far away when you try it.”

“And who are you? What qualifies you to speak of such things?” Dagobert demanded.

Anya straightened, and all of a sudden her eyes were as ancient and unyielding as the stone of distant mountains. “Who am I? I’m Anya Christina Emmanuella Jenkens soon-to-be-Harris, who was Anyanka of Arashmahaar, born Aud of Sjornjost. I was cursing men with suppurating boils when your Order was a gleam in some out-of-work Templar’s eye, and I’ve prudently run away from more apocalypses than you have hairs in your chinny-chin-chin, so if I were you? I’d listen to me. And set us both free with abject apologies, and possibly chocolate.”

Go Anya. Dawn held her breath. Athelred’s frown screwed his forehead tattoo into grotesque inky patterns. “Is this true?” he asked Brother Maynard.

The cleric spread his hands and made a small distressed tch. “It’s not an impossible scenario. We would have to make greater study of the local aether to determine if it’s truly the case.” He looked unhappy. “I should prefer that someone with a more thorough grounding in aetheric disturbances - Brother Edric, perhaps, or Brother Selwin - conduct any such investigation. It is not my field of expertise.”

Aethelred’s face was red from more than the heat, but after a moment he gave a short nod. “Very well. Maynard, send a summons to the chapterhouse and bid Edric attend us with all speed. Until then,” he shot a sour look at Anya, “you are our guests.” He waved. “Bring the horses. We shall return to camp.”

To Be Continued…</lj>

Originally published at Barb C's Journal. You can comment here or there.

:/

rahirah@cox.net — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 13:45:20 GMT

Well, problem solved - Dog was gone when I got up this morning. Possibly she’ll come back since she knows she can get food here, and if so, I’ll try to find and stop up whatever hole she’s using. Sigh.

Originally published at Barb C's Journal. You can comment here or there.

Well, that was unexpected

rahirah@cox.net — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 03:18:40 GMT

When Kathy got home from work today, we’d acquired another dog. Kathy had seen her wandering around the neighborhood a day or so ago, with the remains of a rope around her neck, but she wouldn’t come near. Some time today, it looks like, she squeezed through a gap in our fence, and decided to stay here. Sam was ignoring her completely, until I got them some food, and then he did his “I am alpha dog, and taller than you! Hear me growl!” thing when she tried to get near his dish, but she cowered away immediately and no scuffling ensued.

The poor thing is half starved and has a lot of bite scars - some are recent enough I suppose Sam could have given them to her when she first came in, although with him missing half his lower jaw, I don’t think he’s capable of getting a good bite in very easily. She’s had puppies, though it doesn’t look like she’s currently nursing - she’s too thin to be able to feed puppies, anyway. She’s not at all aggressive, so far anyway, but I don’t think she’s been socialized much - she doesn’t run from me in fear, but she won’t come up to me, either, and though she obviously wanted food and water very badly, she tried to sneak around behind me to get them, and did the whole subservient belly-crawl thing up to the food dish. I suspect that someone was keeping her in a low-grade puppy mill, and she was neglected if not outright abused, so I don’t plan on advertising that we’ve got her. Sometimes I want to kick the human race in the shins.

We can’t afford another dog at the moment, especially one who may have behavioral problems that I don’t have the expertise to deal with. I’m going to see if I can contact some local pit bull rescue places this weekend. She’s too wary for me to get close enough to put a collar on her, so I’m not sure how we’d get her to a rescue place or the vet any time soon. I’m hoping that she won’t just crawl out through whatever hole she got in by, but I’ve left food out there and put Sam in his crate inside - they seem to be getting along all right, but I figured she could probably use some peace and quiet.

Dog:

Originally published at Barb C's Journal. You can comment here or there.

In which I ramble on at great length

rahirah@cox.net — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 05:19:17 GMT

So there are several ways of doing it:

1. A character leads a basically fulfilling life (I’m not going to say happy, because too many people think of happiness as inconsequential), and in the course of that life, things happen which threaten the character with the loss of some or all of the things that make their lives worth living. The character must fight to regain or maintain their way of life.

2. A character leads a life which may be somewhat fulfilling or unfulfilling, and in the course of that life, things happen that make the character aware that they or their society are missing something necessary for true fulfillment. The character must fight to build a new way of life.

3. A character leads a basically unfulfilling life. In the course of that life, the character must fight to achieve brief moments of fulfillment.

You can mix and match these, of course. I think I tend to go with mixtures of 1 & 2 because characters live in my head for a long time, and it’s really, really difficult to live with a character who’s well and truly miserable all the time. I can only deal with Angel because he visits rarely, and I’m generally writing him during times when Spike is around to piss him off and he’s exasperated rather than depressed.

****

Someone asked me what I wanted to say with my writing. And someone mentioned Enterprising Women on seperis’s LJ recently, and it brought back memories.

A long time ago, back in the late 80’s, I read a book called Enterprising Women by Camille Bacon-Smith. It was one of the first serious academic studies of fan fiction, and as such I found it a pretty exciting book, even though, as I read it, I found myself disagreeing with many of the author’s conclusions. One of Bacon-Smith’s central premises was that hurt/comfort fic was the bleeding heart of fandom. Fic writers, she argued, were women who used hurt/comfort fic to achieve catharsis from their own unhappy lives or socially unacceptable emotions, and to deconstruct and process male violence and patriarchal oppression. (And it was not in ANY WAY a sexual kink, or if it was, it was confined to a small group of weirdos off in the corner. Which, to anyone who’d read Price of the Phoenix et al., was arrant nonsense - but I digress.)

I didn’t realize it at the time, but the book was mainly about the first generation of media fandom and fic, whereas I was solidly a member of the second or possibly even the third generation. It was an alien world in more ways than one. Not to mention that ElfQuest comics fandom of the 1980s, with which I was involved, was an enormously different environment than 70’s TV show fandom - probably about a quarter male, vastly slanted towards original characters, vastly less tolerant of explicit smut, but vastly more tolerant of things like same-sex relationships between characters, which were part of the comic canon. Weirdly, many EQ fan writers expressed scorn for h/c, which scorn I had to some degree absorbed, despite fact that the fandom was absolutely rife with it - or possibly because the fandom was rife with it, most of it painfully bad.

In any case, I read the book going O_o all the way, because I couldn’t recognize myself in the author’s depiction of the average fan writer. For one thing, at the time I was a twenty-something lesbian in a happy relationship with another fannish woman rather than middle-aged, patriarchally-oppressed and hiding my fic under a pseudonym; I didn’t feel that my life was so painful that I needed fictional catharsis. I’d read some hurt/comfort, and written a little, because it’s one of many useful tools in the writer’s kit bag, and who hasn’t wanted to take out their bad moods on their characters occasionally? But h/c in its more extreme forms was, and still is, more likely to make me angry or squick me out than to provide any kind of catharsis.

For some writers, emotional catharsis is a major motivation. I have known writers whom Bacon-Smith’s thesis fits to a T, and not all of them are fan writers by any means, or women, for that matter. But I really don’t think I’m one of them. If I’m just feeling kind of down, I tend to produce light-hearted fluff in an attempt to cheer myself up. The only darkish story I can recall writing in the throes of the woe-is-mes is “In the Forests of The Night,” and despite the fact that I devote two whole sentences to Buffy splinting Spike’s leg at the end, I’m doubtful that it counts as hurt/comfort, any more than PMS counts as real authorial angst, because Spike brings all his pain on himself through being a reckless, vicious-drunk idiot. When I’m in serious emotional or physical pain, I can’t write for beans. I don’t think I’ve ever produced anything which I could conclusively tie to a specific unhappy incident in my own life. I can think of stories that caused unpleasant incidents, but that’s another matter. I didn’t, and still don’t, see the attempt to exorcize my own pain as being the mainspring for my writing.

Most of all, it irritated me that the author seemed to be saying that that women need some special, pathological impetus to write, rather than just, you know, wanting to tell a story. The book was almost entirely concerned with fan fiction as a sociological phenomenon rather than a creative phenomenon - or perhaps it was more like “Here’s a creative phenomenon; what’s the sociological explanation? There must be one, because God knows women don’t just up and write.” Which I found more than a bit patronizing.

But it left me, for the first time, questioning why I did write. It was a question I’d never asked myself before; it made as much sense as “Why do you breathe?” I just did. And when I got into BtVS fandom, many years later, I found myself asking that question again, not because some academic authority figure was saying “Fanfic: UR DOIN IT WRONG” but because internet media fandom is fourth or fifth generation media fandom, yo, and I could observe a lot of other writers who were obviously doing very different things than I was doing, and likely doing them for very different reasons. To me, story is always going to be paramount. And in a lot of later-generation fic, story is subservient to some other thing: craft for craft’s sake, or kink, or what have you. (I’m talking about competently-written fic here, of whatever type; obviously at any point in the history of fandom the crap will outweigh the good stuff by a terrifying amount.)

I decided, after a lot of thought, that what I ‘just did’ was tell stories. The medium through which I told them has shifted around over the years, but in some form or another, I’d been telling stories since I was old enough to understand what a story was. Sometimes I made up my own characters. Sometimes I used characters from books or movies or TV shows. Sometimes I smushed the two together. I was driven to tell stories long, long before I had any pain to cathart. And the only reason I’ve ever come up with that makes sense is that I want to show people how the world looks to me. I want to let other people into my head. I want to connect. I want to communicate. I want to say “My cool ideas: let me show you them!” My impetus to write is not inward, but outward.

And in that context, it makes complete sense that one of the big things that gives me story ideas is reading or seeing something and thinking to myself, “No! It’s not like that! It’s like this instead!” Which is one of the things that fanfic is very well-suited to doing. All fanfic is in constant discourse with both the source material and with other fanfic.

So what I want to say in my writing - and when I say that, I don’t mean just my fanfic; if ever I write any original stuff, these are themes I’m sure I’ll be returning to - is… a lot of stuff. I want to talk about the conflict between personal fulfillment and social obligation. I want to talk about balance, and how, to achieve balance, you have to keep moving, because the world is always moving around you. I want to talk about facing and understanding your own dark side, and the challenge of harnessing destructive energy for constructive ends. I want to talk about how we define good and evil, and what makes a given action one or the other, and how sometimes maybe there is no right choice. I want to talk about how trying is sometimes more important than succeeding. I want to talk about whether conflicts can or should end in synthesis rather than the complete destruction of one side or the other.

I want to talk about love, and how a bird and a fish go about building a house once they’ve fallen in it. I want to talk about compromise, and about standing your ground. I want to talk about what happens when the young rebels grow up and become the authority figures they rebelled against. I want to talk about how decisions have consequences that can echo across years, or decades. I want to talk about how loving someone can be hard, and living with them can be harder, and how the hardest things are sometimes the ones most worth having. I want to talk about how heroes, especially female heroes, don’t always have to be young, hot, and single. I want to talk about how heroes who become parents, especially female heroes, do not cease to be heroes, nor does their story come to an end. I want to talk about passing the torch. I want to talk about pain, but I want to talk about joy even more, because lots of people write about pain, but hardly anyone writes about joy. I want to talk about living, and change, and eventually, about death.

And sometimes I want to talk about the fact that Spike and Buffy are hot.

Do I get all that across? I don’t know. You’d have to ask my readers, probably when I’m not around, because in fan circles, it’s really difficult to get honest critique because everyone’s afraid of hurting everyone else’s feelings. But a lot of times, I think, I want to raise questions more than I want to provide answers, because one of the things I want to talk about is how if you ask the same question on Thursday that you asked on Sunday, you may get a different answer.</lj>

Originally published at Barb C's Journal. You can comment here or there.

Musings on Journey’s End

rahirah@cox.net — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 05:02:13 GMT

An awful lot of this has been said better and smarter and faster elsewhere. But…

As finales go, I think it was one of RTD’s better ones. It beat the heck out of last season’s, anyway. Yes, the science was ludicrous, and there were enough dei ex machinae to choke Aristophanes, but this is Doctor Who, not Masterpiece Theater. Overall I liked it a lot. Keep that in mind as you read this. But that said… I got some issues.

One the one hand, it’s entirely in character for the Doctor to decide he knows best, and never mind what anyone else says about it. That’s what he’s been doing to companions, and everyone else in the universe, for the last forty-plus years. As someone on my flist pointed out, he did exactly the same thing to Susan that he did to Rose. On the other hand, in those forty-plus years, stuff has changed. The connotations of an older/more powerful male taking important life decisions out of the hands of a younger/less powerful female in 2008 are very different from the connotations that the same thing had in 1963.

I am in no way a Doctor/Rose shipper - I don’t watch DW for the ships, and there have been many times when I’ve praised RTD with faint damns for kicking romance out of the subtext and into the text. Not because I object to the idea of the Doctor as a sexual being, but because so many New Who shippers, of any stripe, are scary, scary people. I think the Doctor and Rose had an interesting relationship, and I have no problem with the idea that they loved each other. But at the same time, the nature of DW is that companions, and Doctors, come and go. And Rose remaining an untied loose end forever simply isn’t an option in a show like that.

So was Journey’s End intended to give Rose a happy ending? Maybe. All I can say is that to me, the ending is, at best, an equivocal one. Rose may choose to make her own happy ending out of it eventually, but basically, she’s had someone whom she obviously considers a cheap copy of the man she loves foisted on her, and has been more or less ordered to rehabilitate him as a charity project. This is not exactly the best start. Not to mention that human!Doctor (despite his weirdly meek compliance with Gallifreyan!Doctor’s plans - we get absolutely no clue how he feels about G!Doctor’s writing him off as damaged goods) is probably going to feel some degree of resentment towards Rose at being thought a cheap copy, and may not agree that he needs to be rehabilitated. Plus I can’t see him being all happy happy joy joy at being planetbound and (much more) mortal under any circumstances. The two of them may end up making a go of it, but if they do, it will be because both of them decided that a relationship is worth working for, not because G!Doctor graciously patted them on their respective heads and told them to go forth and multiply.

And from a storytelling standpoint, I actually like that a lot better than a ‘happy’ ending. It’s got enormous possibilities. If I were the type to write DW fic, I would be far, far more interested in writing about human!Doctor, because, quite frankly, he’s got far more potential for growth that Gallifreyan!Doctor, who’s pretty much stuck in a rut. As several people have pointed out, G!Doctor’s completely ignoring the fact that Rose herself is not the same person he met way back when, and I have to wonder if his own emotional stasis prevents him from realizing just how much she’s changed.

I’ve seen people saying that it would be better if Donna had died, and other people indignantly countering that if she’s alive, at least there’s a chance for her to realize her own capabilities again. Logically speaking, the latter view is, well, logical - but the visceral squick a lot of people (and to a great degree, I’m one of them) feel at the idea of loss of identity, loss of self, is not logical. Death is tragic, but what happened to Donna is horrifying. Particularly because it’s not what Donna wanted; she explicitly told the Doctor she didn’t want to go back, the strong implication being that she would have preferred to die whole than live on truncated. An argument can be made that Donna wasn’t in any condition to make a rational choice. But still, it was her choice to make, and the Doctor abrogated it.

And one has to wonder if that was really the only solution - Rose, after all, channeled the whole of the Time Vortex, and there was no suggestion that she needed to lose all her memories, just those of the event itself. jmatonak brought up a very good point: Why doesn’t human!Doctor burn out his brain as well? From a storytelling perspective, of course, we can’t keep someone (or two someones) who’s as smart or even smarter than the Doctor around indefinitely; it’s hard enough to keep the plot devices under control with one erratic supergenius in the cast. But when the male version is able to live out his life, while the female version gets a forced lobotomy, the subtext carries a suspicious whiff of “It’s OK for a man to retain that knowledge, but not a woman.” I’ve got no beef with the idea that victory is bought at a price. But in this case, Donna doesn’t make a sacrifice. Donna IS a sacrifice.

Possibly because I’ve reached the point where emo manpain is no longer terribly interesting to me (dear god, I’m agreeing with Jennyo about something, shoot me now) I am not terribly sympathetic to the Doctor in his take-up-the-Time-Lord’s-burden mode. It’s easy to see why he did as he did; Davros played him like a harp. But the Doctor’s angst is born of his own hubris, and his conviction that he’s personally responsible for everything. In his eyes, the choices his companions make, good or bad, cowardly or heroic, are merely reflections of him. (In Donna’s case, this is made eerily literal: in the end, her specialness is not due to her own capabilities, but to her becoming a reflection of the Doctor.) In the Doctor’s mind, River and Astrid and Harriet Jones could never possibly have made the decision to die - or to kill - so that others might live on their own. Oh, no. They’re only human.

I had a half-serious argument with Kita once about why the Doctor was not Buffy. Thinking about it, this version of the Doctor is definitely Angel - forever angsting about the terrible things he’s done, and pushing away everyone whom he loves and who loves him ‘for their own good,’ so he’s better able to wallow. It’s laudable to be against violence. I am all for heroes who get the job done without resorting to big guns. But unless you can offer a viable alternative to violence, and more, unless you can teach those viable alternatives to others so they can use them on the day when you don’t show up in your shiny blue box… well, then, sneering at those who pull out the big guns when the Daleks are about to destroy the entire cosmos is a tad hypocritical. When Four agonized over whether or not to connect those wires, there was some real moral anguish, because it acknowledged that while genocide is an unforgivable sin, the Daleks themselves have committed genocide many times over. Ten’s easy contempt for anyone who comes up with a solution he doesn’t approve of, even when he has no alternatives to offer, seems pat in comparison.

That, I think, is one of the niggling problems I have with New Who: the Jesus!Doctor stuff goes way beyond silly stuff like having him borne upwards by robotic angels, or turning into Dobby!Tinkerbell. The underlying message of the show is very often that we poor dumb humans should just stand aside and have faith that the Doctor will save us. Trying to save ourselves doesn’t just result in failure (failure’s pretty much a given, since the Doctor is, after all, the hero) it incurs the Doctor’s wrath, and subsequent authorial punishment.

The Lonely God stuff was fun for awhile. But infinite repeats of the same old angst gets kinda dull. Sometimes I miss the days when the Doctor was just a cranky quasi-immortal in a time machine, on the run from his own people. I’m not one of those who think RTD is Satan and Moffat is the Second Coming, or vice versa. I think both Moffat and RTD are pretty good writers, and like all pretty good writers, they each have flaws and crotchets which can, in too great a concentration, get really annoying. I’m about ready for a new batch of crotchets.

Still, looking at this with the cool, cruel eye of someone who’s written a deal of serial fiction herself, I shall be extremely surprised if, should the opportunity arise in the future of obtaining Catherine Tate for a guest shot in a Very Special Episode, whoever is running the show is so foolish as to fail to take advantage of it. I’m moderately certain we haven’t seen the last of Donna Noble. And I hope that the next time they meet, Donna smacks the Doctor a good one and tells him to get over himself.

Originally published at Barb C's Journal. You can comment here or there.

On this day nothing much happens

rahirah@cox.net — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 15:27:26 GMT

I had this chatty post about my everyday life half-finished, and then thought, “You know, who cares?” Let me sum up: We finished watching Carnivale. I liked it. Saturday we found some neat stemware on deep discount at Pier One. Sunday we took my mom to lunch, and then I made apricot-banana bread, which I took to work Monday morning. I figured out how to unstick my CYA story and got 500 words written last night.

I will be scarce for awhile. I need to work on my CYA and lynnevitational stories, and reading LJ is not conducive to writing.

Originally published at Barb C's Journal. You can comment here or there.