ethrosdemon ||| Buffy & Angel

Biding Time
by ethrosdemon

Email: naturallycalm@yahoo.com
Distribution: You don't want this
Disclaimer: Joss made it up, too bad he is an incompetent ninny. Mutant Enemy and others own the rights. No suing please.
Rating: PG-13
Notes: This was written for another CIAC, but the mood I got didn't come out here. Darla and lotion definitely came from that, however. Another in my now copious list of writer's block fics. I am working back to the groove.
Dedication: Lar and Rabbit, neither of whom I get to talk to much anymore.
Spoilers: When Darla was living with Lin after the whole Angel setting her on fire thing.

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Raspberry, lemon verbena, magnolia, cinnamon, Darla has more lotion than she can lob a severed arm at. All of it cloying and sweet or crisp and fresh enough to remind her every second of every day of Being Human. The smell is overwhelming for her, and most have some memory attached. The sense memory of too many centuries, and when she pays attention to her skin in the shadow of the long, silent days, most of the memories cause her pain of one sort or another. In her past life, the one that ended on a stake, she'd been cutting a swath through the world so long, she couldn't remember what human meant, besides dinner. Now it seems she can't get past it, that the years of being anything but human is tinged with her so recent humanity.

The lotion's for the burns. The red, scaly patches, and the raw, plasma weeping stretches. He keeps buying new ones, a couple, a few each day. He keeps trying to find something that doesn't repel her, and she doesn't bother to tell him that he's on a Grail quest.

"How about lavender?"

"Smells like Victorian grandmothers."

"Eucalyptus?"

"Doesn't some horrible desert creature eat that?"

Such a tireless seeker, he keeps plugging on, no matter what she says. But she knows about the honey and the flies. She lets him choose what he likes, never floral, always fruit, to rub over her wounds. She closes her eyes and doesn't frown, not really a smile, more neutral, but she knows it's all he's looking for, acceptance of his touch.

Lindsey's not her first slave. Far from it. She used to keep a beautiful Persian boy in shackles at the foot of her bed. Starved him so long that he learnt to eat scraps of almost carbonised, human flesh she'd roast for him in the fire, before she started forgetting to feed him at all. Got him at a brothel in Paris, the only one she spared. Heard his prayers and liked the melody to the strange words, the burnished tint to his skin, the way he reached for his knife when she came towards him. She can remember all those details, even the robin-egg blue of his satin vest, but she can't remember if she knew his name, if he told her, or how he died. The last one was Angelus most likely.

She often wonders, while he soothes her pocked skin, if Lindsey knows she owns him. If he admits to himself that he's alive at her whim. Not even a whim, he's alive because he's not worth killing. So easy, and that has never been her style, in none of her three lives. There's no pleasure in enslaving someone who bears their belly at the first opportunity, no savouring the offered throat. He knows he's being used, that much she's sure of, but he's conditioned to that. His job, she supposes, maybe something more fundamental to him, a need to be used.

She doesn't care what Lindsey's motivations are or if he truly believes her placid or indebted to him. It's passed through her mind during her convalescence, but not as anything more than random thoughts. No, she's nursing more than the wounds he can see. Most of her mental energy is focused on rekniting the hole in her inner fabric, a massive rip that Lindsey can't touch, has no idea exists. And sometimes her passive face fails, and her grimace manifests, she knows it, but he chooses to ignore it or is smart enough not to mention it. But, she really wishes he would, just one opening for her to tell him everything. What it feels like to still feel humanity clinging to her internally, the panic of betrayal that Angel has put her through, the fear of meeting her end when she's only just begun again. It's all his fault after all, and she owns him. He owes her that chance to get it out, to say it in words before it it's all lost again, gone to the place where the Persian boy's name lives. All those memories from her before life are lost to her, her parents or lack thereof, her youth, the color of the sky at dawn over the ocean, what the air smelled like before industry. All of those she knows were robbed from her through time; she can remember remembering, but not the actuality of them. She's heard of the magic of words, and even though she's as jaded as a former prostitute, a twice dead one at that, can be, she knows that some magic exists, wonders if the magic of speaking a thing making it true is real. No one would have to know beyond she and her new boy. And she could kill him after she confesses, drink the knowing right out of him and bring it back into herself doubly. After he finishes with the lotion maybe.

end



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