Ficathon round up, pt....4?

[samsom]

Stayed up past the point of exhaustion last night and hammered out some very short ficlets instead of going to bed, because the writing bug is a sadist and unpredictable beast.


This is from anythingbutgrey's Doomed Ficathon part 1, and it's Giles/Anya based on hidden in closets, that's where we tell the truth from krilymcc.

Title: Unspoken

They both remember the kiss. It's why it's so hard to look at him.

She'll blurt it out, they both know it, the second their eyes meet. So she looks away a lot, even when they're talking about receipts and being overstocked - again - with chicken's feet. And he clears his throat and glances at the floor and she pretends she doesn't feel the force of his rememberance like a brand between her shoulder blades.

When Xander is there, Giles turns his back and goes into Buffy's training room, where he stays.

One day after Xander leaves and Giles' silence gets too loud, she finds a reason to go down into the half-dark basement, and he finds another reason to go down there too, and even though they don't say anything or even really look at each other, their hands grope the space between them and her mouth turns up to his, hot and ready and passionate, telling the truth neither of them will say.

It wasn't the spell.



This is Cordelia and Angel, based on anythingbutgrey's prompt It don't hurt like anything I've ever felt before/This is no broken heart/No familiar scars/This territory goes uncharted.

Title: Uncharted

Cordelia has known the dull thrust of a piece of metal through her body.

It was, she used to think, the worst pain she'd ever experienced.

Which was totally ironic because she'd just been thinking that seeing Willow and Xander and their gross little make out session had been the worst pain she'd ever felt, right before the stairs disintegrated under her feet.

Afterward, when she'd realized the full extent of the damage to her reputation, she had a recurring and incredibly vivid nightmare where Xander and Willow held her caged between them and fed on her, drinking her blood and draining her dry before letting her fall like a discarded hamburger wrapper.

She always woke from those screaming and on fire, the flames charring her flesh. The pain was real, so much that her skin would tint deep pink for hours after, as though she'd fallen asleep under the burning sun.

She'd known pain before, thanks to those loving lessons.

But she's never felt this kind of hurt.

You can't fire me. I'm Vision Girl.

Her box of office knickknacks is on the kitchen table, and the TV is replaying the six o' clock news. It'll be midnight soon. Her body is pulling at her, signaling to her through her gritty eyes that she needs to sleep.

She should sleep because it helps make the vision pain easier, and that makes getting through her day easier.

But there is no work tomorrow. Angel has decided that Cordelia's services - I'm Vision Girl - are no longer required.

She is no longer needed.

You're my link to the Powers now.

Behind her is a year and a half in which she has fought for her own life and for the lives of others. It has given her more satisfaction than the entirety of her life that came before the visions.

She realizes that she has no idea how to come back from that, to live without the map of Angel’s fight to guide her.

Later, as she tries to sleep in the hour before dawn, the pain strikes, as it always does, at the base of her skull, before crawling up along her brain like long talons reaching, and she realizes that she still has a star to steer by –white hot and burning as it ever was.

One door closes, another opens.


This next one surprises the hell out of me. It's Willow/Tara, based on natural_blue_26's prompt of traditions.


Title: Traditions

They will have traditions. It will be eggs on Sunday mornings and dvds on Saturday nights and Tuesdays saving the world.

And they'll hold hands on the beach as the wrinkles go from hands to eyes, and when Giles can't quite make it to their cozy little corner of paradise, they'll go see him twice a year in his Devonshire cottage.

Witchy Woman will be the song they dance to in the dark quiet of their bedroom, even though Willow groaned at the cliche the first time it played during their fifth anniversary party, with Xander grinning at the spin table.

And Tara will make her pancakes star-shaped during the summer, when Dawn comes home to visit.

And they'll take Spike to Buffy's grave, when winter darkens the afternoon sky, every year until they can't. And then he'll visit their grave, at the top of a little hill that overlooks the ocean.

Willow wants to whisper all this to Tara, but there's no time, because Tara is already gone, in between one beat of Willow's heart, and the next.

And all that's left is the promise of other traditions, carved in blood, written in flesh.