to be human like me (buffy/faith; au) →

• I try really hard not to smash the bathroom mirror. I try harder to pretend it wouldn't be easy. ❡ It was her that did it. Made me want out.
• I know her world is harsher, I know it's full of monsters, but so's this one. And I know, when we're crying, clutching warm skin close to our own that the monsters don't matter. ❡ Call me crazy, but the catatonia you let the other girls slip into seems a warmer place than this one. ❡ So when you find us, curled together, hands clasped, faces drawn, know that we're somewhere better. ❡ Know that we're home.

only human (tara/willow; s6) →

• She knows Willow imagines surgical precision, but down in her gut, Tara knows better - they're going to rend and tear and thrust a hand into the wound they've made, grabbing blindly.
• This is a thing beyond loyalty, beyond love, beyond reason - this is the thing they agreed to do. She watches red hair, flushed skin, pale lip caught between teeth. She can't reget. She can't question. Willow needs to do this - not wants, needs. Somewhere between soft kisses and madness, Willow has become the one law of her dark and tilting universe.
• There is the first trickle of doubt, the bitter taste of self-hatred at the back of her tongue. This is wrong. But she swallows it down - it's not unfamiliar. There is demon in the women of her family.

kings of nothing (joyce, ted, giles, spike, hank) →

• He kisses her, feels her up a little, thinks maybe he could put up with a few daisies and rainbows and Seals and Crofts. Even that Juice Newton coat isn't bad.
• At the restaurant, he asks about Buffy and Dawn. He can tell she worries, even now she's out of the woods. ❡ The next day, he sends flowers and a card. ❡ Later, there are different flowers and he addresses the card to her daughters.
• He needs something pretty, but he spent his last wad on smokes and she wouldn't want him to kill a florist. He steals some from a garden. Hopes they're good enough.

far down within the dim west (anya, tara, spike; au s6) →

• They stare, for minutes, and Spike breaks first. "Bugger. Are you drunk?" he asks. ❡ Tara shakes her head, absently. She's still a little fuzzy, but she can feel old ghosts stirring at the back of her mind. "No. I think. Listen," she says, licking her lips. Glancing around, she notices the party has all but wound down. "Listen, do you wanna go someplace else?" Her heart races.
• "I thought you didn't like men. Didn't really think of us blokes that way." He doesn't mention muscle cramps or birthday parties, because certain names no longer pass his lips and it doesn't matter anyway.
• Tara, sometimes, is just another obstacle in Anya's way. But Anya took care of her when she was a blubbering, drooling idiot, and that does something to a person that even despair can't kill. Most of the time, they prop one another up, anyway. Take one away, and they both topple over. ❡ Anya likes to think Tara thinks it's love. Of course, she knows enough to know she's wrong. Tara doesn't love anymore.
• It happens like that, in the space between her breaths. She cries out half an instant before he does. But Spike does not let go. He's in love with the pain, maybe more than he's ever loved anything. Or anyone. And Spike knows how to love. ❡ It starts deep in his brain, buzzing, and then flares into something bright and hot that shoots down his nerve endings all the way to his toes. After that initial explosion, a deep, steady ache settles in, pooling around his still heart, his limbs, his groin, in his throat. It's like an orgasm in reverse.
• "You think this is better than what Red was doing?" he sneers. ❡ Tara's expression hardens, her head snaps up, brief fire flares in her eyes. "Don't talk about Willow," she says, low and dangerous. "Don't."
• "Are you the fallen angels?" he manages to rasp, as she comes closer still. He doesn't think he's ever felt so much like prey in his undead life. She shows him no fear, and somehow, from her, that is frightening.
• She can still see Dawn's eyes, big and trying to be brave. "Tara, I can't stop it now. You have to. You have to take it." The knife Dawn used to slice her wrists clattering to the floor. Falling weakly to her knees at Tara's feet. Offering up her blood and her little body and her enormous life force, offering it into Tara's hands, because that elemental energy was the only way anyone would be able to stop Willow. She'd already killed Buffy, and killed Giles, and Dawn was the one who saved them all, really. Tara was only her vessel.
• Dawn found Buffy in her bed one morning with a kitchen knife through her chest, and Willow broke down and cried that she was just trying to fix her mistakes, wouldn't they please let her fix her mistakes?
• Anya's jaw tightens just enough to prove that she cares; humans always care, whatever they may tell themselves. She nods, fastens the emerald around her neck. ❡ And is gone.

radio silence (welcome to night vale crossover) →

• We've received a letter from Old Woman Josie, Out Near The Car Lot. I love hearing from Josie, don't you, listeners? Anyway, she writes that ... let's see, terrible danger, omens and portents, nightmarish visions of - ah, there's a poem! Isn't that nice? Let's see: ❡ Can't even shout, can't even cry. / The Gentlemen are coming by. / Looking in windows, knocking on doors / They need to take seven and they might take yours / Can't call to mom, can't say a word / You're gonna die screaming but you won't be heard.
• I tried using ❡ Morse ❡ Code ❡ But apparently ❡ That is now ❡ The exclusive and sacred privilege ❡ Of ❡ The eternal scouts
• There is someone ❡ At the door ❡ Intern ❡ Gil- ❡ -Bert ❡ Has gone ❡ To answer ❡ ❡ Oh god ❡ Oh god ❡ Oh god
• Smiling ❡ Well dressed ❡ Unfailingly polite ❡ Their hands ❡ Dripping with the blood of the innocent
• Cecil? Are you there? It's me, Dana. Please answer me. I don't know how much longer I will be able to - There are things here, Cecil. Things that move. Things that are here, but at the same time, are not. I think they – Cecil, I - No! Get away from me! No! NOOOOOOOOOOOOO! *dial tone*
• Once again, Night Vale, we have shown the value of being a community, and remaining calm under pressure. Everything is, or will soon be, or will soon be remembered as, perfectly normal.

foreign devils (the chinese slayer; s5) →

• She's silent for a long moment, so he looks up and reads her face. He moves to take her hands in his and forces her to look in his eyes. ❡ "We work for the Manchu," he says. "We work for the ocean men. We work for the Han. We work for every living thing against every unliving thing. Do you you understand me?" She nods. ❡ "I know these times are troubling. There may be war. But those wars are for other warriors, we have other battles to fight. If civil unrest breaks out, then the demons will come. They seek out the fear and lawlessness of such situations. The Slayer – she kills them. That is her mission, her only mission." ❡ She whispers, "I understand." She hopes she does.
• Does he know what she is? Can he tell? She thinks so – he was offhand in killing the man, but he's being more careful of his movements now that she's here. He seems to be sizing her up. He's starting to smile. ❡ And she knows that there is nothing she can do to make right what she has done wrong tonight, but she knows that her duty still needs to be done. She must still try to kill the demon in front of her. ❡ She thinks, "Try? Why am I thinking 'try'?", but then the demon is upon her, and she has no time left to think and no remaining sense of self. She is motion and she is fury: she is the warrior of the people.

umad learns sumerian (dawn; s7) →

• She thought of him going from store to store, searching for books for her. Deciding which ones would work best, poring through stacks of dusty volumes in used bookstores. She smiled slightly, glancing up at him. "Thanks, Giles."
• ittalak, tattalak, tattalka, attalak, ittalku, ittalka, tattalka, nittalak. He went away, you (masculine singular) went away, you (feminine singular) went away, I went away, they (masculine plural) went away, they (feminine plural) went away, you (common plural) went away, we went away. ❡ Sunu kalama ittalku. All of them went away.
• Dawn dreams that night that Buffy and Xander are married and it was always just the three of them, a little family. There never was a Watcher or a sex-toy pet vampire or favorite lesbian aunt types or an ex-ex-vengeance-demon-ex-fiancee. Or a deadbeat dad, or a mom with a brain tumor. She dreams that she was always a real girl, that she had existed for exactly 16 years, not for all of time or for a year and a half, whichever way you wanted to look at it. That she was born because a mommy and daddy loved each other very much.
• They did not create whatever she is going to do next.
• She has no past, but she has a future (probably), and no one will take it away. Not Willow, not anyone, and these dead languages are her talisman against dissolution, against bleeding away into nothing.

the down below (dawn, spike, buffy; s7) →

• She wets his hair perfunctorily and then assaults it, lathering up unruly curls while water drips down his face like tears. As if. As if.
• Spike's emotions had never been hard to fathom; he wore them openly, proudly. ❡ Except that there is no pride now. He is bent under the weight of his sins. Which is exactly how it should be, Dawn tells herself.
• "That moment, when you realize — you don't belong, you'll never belong and they don't understand because they're real, and you're not — that's when the awful blackness fills you up until you just have to let it out." She shakes her head violently. ❡ "It doesn't work. The blackness — it stays with you, inside of you. Because that's all you are." She's taking great gasps of air, too fast; she wonders dimly if she is hyperventilating.
• Understand. That a lifetime of artificial memories can't be forgotten in one sisterly season; that she's afraid of what other ugly surprises may be lurking under her skin; that doing this to him, day after day, is a new and scary kind of suffering to which she cannot help returning.
• "Did you hear me?" he rails. "A soul! I went out and got myself a fucking soul!" ❡ She folds her arms. "What, is that supposed to impress me or something?" ❡ He frowns. "Well, yeah." ❡ "Well, it doesn't. Warren had a soul, and look what he did. Willow has a soul, and she tried to turn me back into a ball of energy." Her eyes flicker briefly as she finishes, "I don't even know if I have a soul."
• "You love too hard," she whispers. "It's going to kill you someday." ❡ He closes his eyes. "Sure," he murmurs back. "But what a way to go."