The Body

 

spoilers: s6, from Seeing Red onwards

Dedicated to Kate Bolin and insomnia, my muses for this piece.

improv # 49 - Stephen King title

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That horrible day still haunts her.

It haunts her during waking hours, and the scent of meat cooking turns to that of burning flesh, incinerated in the blink of an eye.

It haunts her in her dreams, with soulless eyes and terrible silence and the blood OH THE BLOOD just comes and comes and becomes an ocean to drown her. She wakes just before she is dragged under, gasping for breath she never lost.

She wakes screaming, and for a moment they are /his/ screams, as a tiny piece of metal forces its way through, painfully, slowly. Then reality sets in and with it, loneliness. She knows now how it can drive someone to change their true nature, cover it with hair dye and leather and all in black of course, because it screams danger and dangerous people don't get hurt, they do the hurting.

She thinks of her, sad eyes and pillowy lips all done in black, and wonders briefly if kissing her would have felt like kissing Tara. She's certain the taste would have been different, cigarettes and old pizza instead of summer fruits, but delicious and female all the same.

Her thoughts shift and, for a moment, their faces overlap, black and brown and blonde and blue, chiseled and cherubic, hard/soft eyes but always soft soft lips. It dissolves, like a cheap television effect, and her love's face remains, imprinted into her mind's eye for all eternity.

The image is all she has left now. Soon, too soon, she will no longer be able to remember the details. Even now, the smooth honey of her voice is harder to hear, too nasal to be right and sounding in turns like Buffy and Dawn. She barely recalls the exquisiteness of her skin, silken and scented with Craft and love. But she recalls how it felt to hold her, soft curves filling her arms, pressing against her, covering her with femininity her body lacked.

Another thought shift, and she remembers the last time she held her beloved, eyes vacant, lips slightly parted as if awaiting a kiss. She begged for her life, and was rebuked; "human death by human means," she was told, and unable to accept. Anger was all she had left, and she became vengeance.

Now, she does not even have that. But she has her memories, and her nightmares, and they keep her alive. She will not become yet another corpse rotting away beneath this cursed town.

~end~

8/21/02