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May. 6th, 2005 09:56 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fpb“What happens to the world, if all the heroes lose?”
(Jack Kirby – Captain America 211)
Chapter 1 – when the wind started singing
Classical music was one thing Buffy had never given a thought to. She was not particularly a music fan; certainly not as Oz or Giles were – put them together in a room, and you lost any opportunity (except for impending apocalypses or full moons) to get a word in edgeways, they’d be so busy discussing groups and albums she had never heard of. She just liked, from time to time, a dance, a good beat, something to let down her hair to and forget her school and her duties; or something more melodic on the rare occasions when she managed to put on some skates and grab ice.
But classical music… no. I mean, she’d heard a few names – Beethoven, Bach, Brahms, Mozart; who hadn’t? But frankly, she doubted whether she could tell one from the other; and in fact, her idea of classical music owed most to John Williams movie soundtracks. It was just another of those things that she left to others to be interested in; and if ever she needed information, she’d ask Giles, or Willow, or even Mum.
(Mum… she mustn’t think of her. Her throat had suddenly clenched, and tears had sprung to her eyes. She could not go on falling apart every time she thought of her… lying back on the sofa with her eyes open… her eyes open…)
Buffy jumped off the chair and almost ran out of the house. A thin, cutting wind from the north met her and chilled her tears on her skin; and again, in or over the wind, there was that thing she could not place.
Buffy did not have the enhanced senses and magical perceptions of some of the great Slayers of the past. After a few attempts early on, Giles had regretfully concluded that her perceptions were little more than an ordinary human’s, and that they did not have much potential as protection against magic and vampires; and they had concentrated on her fighting skills instead.
But she was not altogether blind and deaf. More than once, she had felt danger coming before anyone else: most memorably, when she had rightly felt the touch of apocalypse in what even Giles had thought no more than an ordinary Southern California earthquake. One could not be touched by the spell and spirit of the Slayer, one of the mightiest enchantments in the world, and not be sensitive to the supernatural. And today she felt it; she knew it all around her; and, maddeningly, it was always beyond the limits of perception – like a conversation whose words you cannot catch.
She raised her eyes to the mountains that surrounded Sunnydale; but it was not the mountains that were… were… speaking? Singing?
Yes, she thought; it is a sound, not anything else. A sound, and I don’t know what it is or where it comes from…
No, wait, I do. It does not come from the earth. I know that I don’t feel it coming from below me. Nor the mountains… Nor the sea.
It is the sky. It is the sky that is singing.
……………………………………………….
Giles hadn’t known what to make of it; and had not even thought of cracking open his books – the notion of music coming out of the sky was too vague to research. Anya had confirmed that it could mean anything – “Last time I heard music coming out of the sky, it was seven winged spirits getting married. (They have seven sexes, you know.) The time before that, it was a lonely balloonist keeping himself company with his radio… and the time before that, I’d just had too much mead.” Giles nodded sadly. “Yes, Buffy. I’m afraid this is really too vague to build on.”
Irrationally, Buffy felt irritated. For days now she had been getting this sense that there was something that needed attending, something that was happening just beyond the edge of her senses – that she should be hearing the things she knew she could not hear. She had managed to get a kind of lock on what had been haunting her; and now the people she always turned to – the people she trusted – told her that it was still no use. They made her feel inadequate and useless; and she resented that. “All right, guys”, she snapped, turning to leave, “but if we end up eaten by giant red ants or unravelled by a mad supernatural seamstress, don’t say I didn’t warn you.” She strode out.
“That was odd?” – said Anya to Giles; and Giles, too, looked puzzled, straightening his glasses in that way that said that his Slayer had just said or done something he did not know how to interpret. Then his expression changed. “She has lost her home, Anya.”
“But…”
“But you lost hundreds of homes in your life, and you did not bite people’s heads off for that – is that what you were going to say?”
“Well… no. Actually, I don’t think I’ve ever personally bitten off a single head.”
“Yes, you were such a merciful little vengeance demon.”
“I never did like the taste of human flesh, Giles. I know some of my colleagues do, but I don’t. I leave that sort of thing to ghouls and vampires… and at any rate, I’ve given vengeance up.”
“Anya, you are more than a thousand years old. Buffy is little more than twenty – as far as you’re concerned, blink and you’ll miss her.
“She’s lost her home, the town where she grew up, the memories of her mother and her friends… so much of her life.”
“But I thought she was glad the Hellmouth was gone?”
“Immediate reaction, yes. But now she is beginning to take in how little she has left… It’s one thing to say, I’m glad the Hellmouth is gone, and another to put up with all the lost memories and dislocation.”
………………………………………………………………………………
Buffy walked through unfamiliar streets. Lee Street, Fourteenth Avenue, Fifteenth Avenue, Washington, Washington and Sixteenth… That was the difference… part of the difference, at least. Giles and Anya weren’t Californian; to them, one Southern California town was exactly like another. They came from ancient countries; she guessed that to them, the long expanses of roads, whitewashed houses and manufactured lawns must have all seemed the same. But to Buffy, this Santa Coleta was as unlike Sunnydale as chalk and cheese. To her, all the houses looked different; and there was a vague menace in the fact that, unlike at Sunnydale, she knew none of them.
She smiled at herself. Vague menace? It was Sunnydale, not Santa Coleta, that was one big bad spell; a favoured demon-and-vampire feeding ground. Santa Coleta was safe – as safe as anywhere, at least. She was just nervous because her surroundings were unfamiliar. She looked at the row of houses – an extravagant one with Moorish overtones, apparently left half-unfinished (it was easy to guess that the owner must have gone bust); a traditional-looking one with a whitewashed wood exterior; and next to it, one that had a definitely English look---
“Buffy! Buffy!”
“Willow! What are you doing here?” And they hugged, smiling. There had never been a time (except for the time of Willow’s madness) when they had not been glad to be with each other; and now, in this unfamiliar town, there was an extra edge of happiness at finding each other again.
“Just passing through. I’m going to college. You?”
“Learning what the place looks like. Look, Wills, you’ve been in England… tell me, does that house look English to you?”
“What? Oh, you mean that one? No… just a very bad imitation, really.”
Buffy’s face fell slightly, and Willow noticed. “Well, I mean, of course there’s plenty that look just like that. In the suburbs.”
Suddenly Buffy wasn’t interested any more. “Tell me, Wills… I mean, you’re a witch, right?”
“Uh, yes – last time I looked, I was.”
“What I mean is, well, if something witchy was going on… could you tell?”
“Tell? How do you mean? Cast a reveal spell? Question the oracles?”
“No, I mean, just… like, you know, feel it? Like distant thunder? Or light?”
Willow looked at her friend keenly. “Is that what’s been bugging you?”
“Yeah…these last few days, I’ve had this thing, like there was something I should pay attention to… And earlier today, I’m positive I heard the sky singing.”
“Singing?”
“Singing.”
“I see… Rather, I don’t, but I can see why you’ve been acting antsy.”
“Antsy? I’ve been perfectly calm and pleasant!”
“Yeah, baby. And the rest of the gag goes: ‘and I’ll thump anyone who says different into next week’!”
“Have I been that bad?”
“Well, Buffy… Anyone who knew you could tell you were tense.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be. It’s not your fault.”
“Well, it’s no big secret. I’ve told Giles and Anya already.”
“I’ll see what I can do. I’ll try the Tarot, Injun stones, and a few reveal spells. I’d rather not try any of the oracles just yet; they tend to make you pay rather dear.”
Buffy could have hugged her friend again. Here was someone who did not file her warnings away, who did not act as though nothing could be done.
“I’m no good at sensing magic myself. There are some really great adepts who can actually sense disturbances in magic as they are taking place. I can’t… even at the height of my powers, I couldn’t feel Giles coming until he almost beat the snot out of me.”
She was speaking of her period of madness, and Buffy looked at her in some concern.
“That’s all right, Buffy”, she said, interpreting her friend’s mood correctly, “I’m okay now. I can look back at it and there’s no danger. See?”, pointing at her face: “no black hair, no veins, no leather. It’s like it happened to a different person.”
“Well, that’s good. What’s that you said about college?”
“Yeah, I’m joining the local campus. I’ve still got a couple of years to graduate, and I really want my degree… What’s that?”
“That” had been a tremendous crash, closely followed by screams and at least two gunshots; and Willow had hardly finished her sentence, before Buffy was racing towards the noise.
What she saw astonished her.
A half-grown teen-age girl, with frizzy mouse-coloured hair, freckles, a snub nose, fat arms and legs, and no make-up, was holding up the wreck of a car with her hands, while in front of her, three or four policemen, ashen-faced, were backing off, guns pointed at her. Beside her, on the road, there was a middle-aged man, with both his legs bent at horribly unnatural angles; and another policeman, unconscious and bleeding heavily from a gash in his arm and shoulders.
“All right,” said Buffy to the young girl, “who are you, and what’s the meaning of this?”
The girl simply ignored her, her eyes on the policemen. Buffy was always annoyed when someone did that. She reached up and, in one move, wrenched the car from her grip and threw it in the middle of the street. The girl looked at her furiously – and suddenly, Buffy understood.
“You’re one of them, aren’t you? One of the new Slayers.”
The girl wasn’t listening. She charged at Buffy like a mad bull. Buffy could see that she knew nothing whatsoever about fighting: she came on with no kind of protection, just grabbing for her face. Buffy punched her once, hard and without holding back, in the diaphragm; then again, as her head came down, on the side of her jaw. The girl fell like a sack of bones.
One of the cops was calling for an ambulance urgently: “Officer down at Washington and Seventeenth! Officer down! And there’s a civilian with both his legs broken!” His colleagues, still terrified, edged towards the Slayer.
“It’s all right, officers”, she said, attempting a smile, and holding out her empty hands, “I’m one of the good guys. Really.”
“Yeah…”, said one of the officers, who seemed to be in charge, “you’ve knocked down that little maniac, and you’re not trying to kill us or anyone… so I guess you must be. All right, ma’am, care to tell us what happened here?”
“No idea. I was just walking down and heard the screams. Who is she anyway?”
“She’s his daughter”, said the officer, pointing at the man with the broken legs. Buffy shivered. “He called us at 0845 this morning, saying that she was going crazy and he feared for their lives – and that’s all we know.”
Buffy bent down to tear out part of the wrecked car’s bumper, and twisted it around the unconscious girl’s elbows, forcing them together behind her back. Another length of bumper went around her wrists, and other pieces of torn metal held her ankles and knees. “I guess”, she told the officers, “she’d be strong enough to break that if she could get leverage – but I’ve set it so she can’t.” Still astonished, they nodded weakly. “Don’t let her out of there, whatever you do, until you’re sure she won’t try to kill anybody.”
“But… we can’t hold her!”
“I know. There’s an agency in Washington that would be very interested in her, however. Just ring the Pentagon and ask for the Initiative, or for agent Riley Finn – R-I-L-E-Y F-I-N-N” – she had noticed that one of the policemen had a palmtop in his hand – “and tell them what happened here, and that you’ve got a Hostile you can’t contain.”
“Is that all you can tell us?”
“For the time being, yes. I’ll get back to you… Anyway, the guys at the Initiative know all about me… though what they’ll tell you is another matter.”
At that moment the ambulance came, causing a distraction. The senior officer, however, had kept his eyes on Buffy – and suddenly they went round with amazement, not untouched with horror.
“Ma’am? Where are you? Where has she gone?”
Buffy was puzzled for a moment; then she understood. Her eyes sought out Willow, small and unnoticed in the crowd that had gathered, and she gave her a thumbs-up. Willow smiled cheerfully and raised her own thumb back.
(Jack Kirby – Captain America 211)
Chapter 1 – when the wind started singing
Classical music was one thing Buffy had never given a thought to. She was not particularly a music fan; certainly not as Oz or Giles were – put them together in a room, and you lost any opportunity (except for impending apocalypses or full moons) to get a word in edgeways, they’d be so busy discussing groups and albums she had never heard of. She just liked, from time to time, a dance, a good beat, something to let down her hair to and forget her school and her duties; or something more melodic on the rare occasions when she managed to put on some skates and grab ice.
But classical music… no. I mean, she’d heard a few names – Beethoven, Bach, Brahms, Mozart; who hadn’t? But frankly, she doubted whether she could tell one from the other; and in fact, her idea of classical music owed most to John Williams movie soundtracks. It was just another of those things that she left to others to be interested in; and if ever she needed information, she’d ask Giles, or Willow, or even Mum.
(Mum… she mustn’t think of her. Her throat had suddenly clenched, and tears had sprung to her eyes. She could not go on falling apart every time she thought of her… lying back on the sofa with her eyes open… her eyes open…)
Buffy jumped off the chair and almost ran out of the house. A thin, cutting wind from the north met her and chilled her tears on her skin; and again, in or over the wind, there was that thing she could not place.
Buffy did not have the enhanced senses and magical perceptions of some of the great Slayers of the past. After a few attempts early on, Giles had regretfully concluded that her perceptions were little more than an ordinary human’s, and that they did not have much potential as protection against magic and vampires; and they had concentrated on her fighting skills instead.
But she was not altogether blind and deaf. More than once, she had felt danger coming before anyone else: most memorably, when she had rightly felt the touch of apocalypse in what even Giles had thought no more than an ordinary Southern California earthquake. One could not be touched by the spell and spirit of the Slayer, one of the mightiest enchantments in the world, and not be sensitive to the supernatural. And today she felt it; she knew it all around her; and, maddeningly, it was always beyond the limits of perception – like a conversation whose words you cannot catch.
She raised her eyes to the mountains that surrounded Sunnydale; but it was not the mountains that were… were… speaking? Singing?
Yes, she thought; it is a sound, not anything else. A sound, and I don’t know what it is or where it comes from…
No, wait, I do. It does not come from the earth. I know that I don’t feel it coming from below me. Nor the mountains… Nor the sea.
It is the sky. It is the sky that is singing.
……………………………………………….
Giles hadn’t known what to make of it; and had not even thought of cracking open his books – the notion of music coming out of the sky was too vague to research. Anya had confirmed that it could mean anything – “Last time I heard music coming out of the sky, it was seven winged spirits getting married. (They have seven sexes, you know.) The time before that, it was a lonely balloonist keeping himself company with his radio… and the time before that, I’d just had too much mead.” Giles nodded sadly. “Yes, Buffy. I’m afraid this is really too vague to build on.”
Irrationally, Buffy felt irritated. For days now she had been getting this sense that there was something that needed attending, something that was happening just beyond the edge of her senses – that she should be hearing the things she knew she could not hear. She had managed to get a kind of lock on what had been haunting her; and now the people she always turned to – the people she trusted – told her that it was still no use. They made her feel inadequate and useless; and she resented that. “All right, guys”, she snapped, turning to leave, “but if we end up eaten by giant red ants or unravelled by a mad supernatural seamstress, don’t say I didn’t warn you.” She strode out.
“That was odd?” – said Anya to Giles; and Giles, too, looked puzzled, straightening his glasses in that way that said that his Slayer had just said or done something he did not know how to interpret. Then his expression changed. “She has lost her home, Anya.”
“But…”
“But you lost hundreds of homes in your life, and you did not bite people’s heads off for that – is that what you were going to say?”
“Well… no. Actually, I don’t think I’ve ever personally bitten off a single head.”
“Yes, you were such a merciful little vengeance demon.”
“I never did like the taste of human flesh, Giles. I know some of my colleagues do, but I don’t. I leave that sort of thing to ghouls and vampires… and at any rate, I’ve given vengeance up.”
“Anya, you are more than a thousand years old. Buffy is little more than twenty – as far as you’re concerned, blink and you’ll miss her.
“She’s lost her home, the town where she grew up, the memories of her mother and her friends… so much of her life.”
“But I thought she was glad the Hellmouth was gone?”
“Immediate reaction, yes. But now she is beginning to take in how little she has left… It’s one thing to say, I’m glad the Hellmouth is gone, and another to put up with all the lost memories and dislocation.”
………………………………………………………………………………
Buffy walked through unfamiliar streets. Lee Street, Fourteenth Avenue, Fifteenth Avenue, Washington, Washington and Sixteenth… That was the difference… part of the difference, at least. Giles and Anya weren’t Californian; to them, one Southern California town was exactly like another. They came from ancient countries; she guessed that to them, the long expanses of roads, whitewashed houses and manufactured lawns must have all seemed the same. But to Buffy, this Santa Coleta was as unlike Sunnydale as chalk and cheese. To her, all the houses looked different; and there was a vague menace in the fact that, unlike at Sunnydale, she knew none of them.
She smiled at herself. Vague menace? It was Sunnydale, not Santa Coleta, that was one big bad spell; a favoured demon-and-vampire feeding ground. Santa Coleta was safe – as safe as anywhere, at least. She was just nervous because her surroundings were unfamiliar. She looked at the row of houses – an extravagant one with Moorish overtones, apparently left half-unfinished (it was easy to guess that the owner must have gone bust); a traditional-looking one with a whitewashed wood exterior; and next to it, one that had a definitely English look---
“Buffy! Buffy!”
“Willow! What are you doing here?” And they hugged, smiling. There had never been a time (except for the time of Willow’s madness) when they had not been glad to be with each other; and now, in this unfamiliar town, there was an extra edge of happiness at finding each other again.
“Just passing through. I’m going to college. You?”
“Learning what the place looks like. Look, Wills, you’ve been in England… tell me, does that house look English to you?”
“What? Oh, you mean that one? No… just a very bad imitation, really.”
Buffy’s face fell slightly, and Willow noticed. “Well, I mean, of course there’s plenty that look just like that. In the suburbs.”
Suddenly Buffy wasn’t interested any more. “Tell me, Wills… I mean, you’re a witch, right?”
“Uh, yes – last time I looked, I was.”
“What I mean is, well, if something witchy was going on… could you tell?”
“Tell? How do you mean? Cast a reveal spell? Question the oracles?”
“No, I mean, just… like, you know, feel it? Like distant thunder? Or light?”
Willow looked at her friend keenly. “Is that what’s been bugging you?”
“Yeah…these last few days, I’ve had this thing, like there was something I should pay attention to… And earlier today, I’m positive I heard the sky singing.”
“Singing?”
“Singing.”
“I see… Rather, I don’t, but I can see why you’ve been acting antsy.”
“Antsy? I’ve been perfectly calm and pleasant!”
“Yeah, baby. And the rest of the gag goes: ‘and I’ll thump anyone who says different into next week’!”
“Have I been that bad?”
“Well, Buffy… Anyone who knew you could tell you were tense.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be. It’s not your fault.”
“Well, it’s no big secret. I’ve told Giles and Anya already.”
“I’ll see what I can do. I’ll try the Tarot, Injun stones, and a few reveal spells. I’d rather not try any of the oracles just yet; they tend to make you pay rather dear.”
Buffy could have hugged her friend again. Here was someone who did not file her warnings away, who did not act as though nothing could be done.
“I’m no good at sensing magic myself. There are some really great adepts who can actually sense disturbances in magic as they are taking place. I can’t… even at the height of my powers, I couldn’t feel Giles coming until he almost beat the snot out of me.”
She was speaking of her period of madness, and Buffy looked at her in some concern.
“That’s all right, Buffy”, she said, interpreting her friend’s mood correctly, “I’m okay now. I can look back at it and there’s no danger. See?”, pointing at her face: “no black hair, no veins, no leather. It’s like it happened to a different person.”
“Well, that’s good. What’s that you said about college?”
“Yeah, I’m joining the local campus. I’ve still got a couple of years to graduate, and I really want my degree… What’s that?”
“That” had been a tremendous crash, closely followed by screams and at least two gunshots; and Willow had hardly finished her sentence, before Buffy was racing towards the noise.
What she saw astonished her.
A half-grown teen-age girl, with frizzy mouse-coloured hair, freckles, a snub nose, fat arms and legs, and no make-up, was holding up the wreck of a car with her hands, while in front of her, three or four policemen, ashen-faced, were backing off, guns pointed at her. Beside her, on the road, there was a middle-aged man, with both his legs bent at horribly unnatural angles; and another policeman, unconscious and bleeding heavily from a gash in his arm and shoulders.
“All right,” said Buffy to the young girl, “who are you, and what’s the meaning of this?”
The girl simply ignored her, her eyes on the policemen. Buffy was always annoyed when someone did that. She reached up and, in one move, wrenched the car from her grip and threw it in the middle of the street. The girl looked at her furiously – and suddenly, Buffy understood.
“You’re one of them, aren’t you? One of the new Slayers.”
The girl wasn’t listening. She charged at Buffy like a mad bull. Buffy could see that she knew nothing whatsoever about fighting: she came on with no kind of protection, just grabbing for her face. Buffy punched her once, hard and without holding back, in the diaphragm; then again, as her head came down, on the side of her jaw. The girl fell like a sack of bones.
One of the cops was calling for an ambulance urgently: “Officer down at Washington and Seventeenth! Officer down! And there’s a civilian with both his legs broken!” His colleagues, still terrified, edged towards the Slayer.
“It’s all right, officers”, she said, attempting a smile, and holding out her empty hands, “I’m one of the good guys. Really.”
“Yeah…”, said one of the officers, who seemed to be in charge, “you’ve knocked down that little maniac, and you’re not trying to kill us or anyone… so I guess you must be. All right, ma’am, care to tell us what happened here?”
“No idea. I was just walking down and heard the screams. Who is she anyway?”
“She’s his daughter”, said the officer, pointing at the man with the broken legs. Buffy shivered. “He called us at 0845 this morning, saying that she was going crazy and he feared for their lives – and that’s all we know.”
Buffy bent down to tear out part of the wrecked car’s bumper, and twisted it around the unconscious girl’s elbows, forcing them together behind her back. Another length of bumper went around her wrists, and other pieces of torn metal held her ankles and knees. “I guess”, she told the officers, “she’d be strong enough to break that if she could get leverage – but I’ve set it so she can’t.” Still astonished, they nodded weakly. “Don’t let her out of there, whatever you do, until you’re sure she won’t try to kill anybody.”
“But… we can’t hold her!”
“I know. There’s an agency in Washington that would be very interested in her, however. Just ring the Pentagon and ask for the Initiative, or for agent Riley Finn – R-I-L-E-Y F-I-N-N” – she had noticed that one of the policemen had a palmtop in his hand – “and tell them what happened here, and that you’ve got a Hostile you can’t contain.”
“Is that all you can tell us?”
“For the time being, yes. I’ll get back to you… Anyway, the guys at the Initiative know all about me… though what they’ll tell you is another matter.”
At that moment the ambulance came, causing a distraction. The senior officer, however, had kept his eyes on Buffy – and suddenly they went round with amazement, not untouched with horror.
“Ma’am? Where are you? Where has she gone?”
Buffy was puzzled for a moment; then she understood. Her eyes sought out Willow, small and unnoticed in the crowd that had gathered, and she gave her a thumbs-up. Willow smiled cheerfully and raised her own thumb back.
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no subject
Date: 2005-05-07 09:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-05-07 02:14 pm (UTC)