Deena--and Perkins!--take your time, the thing is 106 pages in WordPerfect on my machine.

yeah, but I'm greedy

(thunk)

sound of my head hitting my desk. We drove 350 miles today, into the Sierra foothills, all over the place. Must. Sleep.

Alonna is how it's spelled in the shooting scripts.

Also, Steph, I've been thinking about your story. I was wondering about Buffy's voice. It's pretty good for this season, but, this season she's been kind of generic. My eyes glaze over when she starts lecturing. I really liked the point where she got harsh with the SiT because it didn't read monotone. However, I'm thinking specifically of the point where she's telling Faith that they've tried to kill one another in the past but now they have to work together. Faith has already said she's come to help, so Buffy is doing her boring speechifying thing again, at least that's how it read to me.

That's what I intended, though. I don't mean to make her unsympathetic, but she IS having a season of speechifying.

Alonna is how it's spelled in the shooting scripts.

Ouch. Since the name is a feminisation of Alan, I'm curious about their papa.

Deena, just for you:

The album side wound down, the needle skipped to silence and clicked itself off. We made love in the doorway, standing up, me with my back bruising against the doorjamb, half under lamplight, half under starlight.

Better?

ooh, yes. (Even though I'm not Deena.)

Working on big finale right now. It's a writers group night, so I have to cook and clean the place, but I can't do any of that until I get Nic out the door and I wouldn't do it until I've had a second cup of coffee anyway.

Yay.

Thundering down the homestretch. I've taken the reference to Rupert and Amanda's trip to Chilswell Valley out, and put it here:

The album side wound down, the needle skipped to silence and clicked itself off. We made love in the doorway, standing up, me with my back bruising against the doorjamb, half under lamplight, half under starlight. For a while, at least, the foreboding that had settled on me in the Wolvercote churchyard sank to an intensity level no greater than that of a flickering candle. But although it sank, the light from that candle, dark and disturbing, never entirely went out.

• * *

"Amanda? Your young man rang up. And happy birthday, dear - I've made you a bit of cake."

Ms. Gollie, busy in her cheerful kitchen, called me as I came in. It was Sunday, my eighteenth birthday. The day was half-gone and I was battling back something unusual for me: the feeling of ill-use. Nothing from Richard, which was neither surprising nor hurtful, but nothing from anyone else, either. Rupert had promised to ring me up Saturday night, but there'd been nothing, not a word. Sunday morning, I'd gone out early, to the south end of Oxford, taking myself alone to Chilswelll Valley. The sense of jungle drums in the distance, the feeling that something was about to come down hard on me, had pulsed itself back up in noise levels. Today, the town wouldn't do for me.

I'd thought Rupert was going to come with me. We'd made plans to do this together, as I left the Woodstock Road in the small hours of Saturday morning. Nothing; I'd heard no word from him, not all day Saturday. I went past the shop on my bicycle and saw it was locked up tight, with a hand-lettered sign in the window, "Closed Until Tuesday". The sign had not been there the previous night. I rang up, risking that Richard was in fact elsewhere and not at home, and listened to the double tone, first on the shop phone and then on their personal line, shrilling through my head, bringing to my inner eye the uncomfortably clear picture of an empty shop, an empty flat, an empty world. It seemed something had taken Rupert out of Oxford.

So I'd gone alone to the sanctuary of Chilswell Valley, spending the day listening to reed warblers and finches as they argued over territory, crying out in protest as a faster bird beat them to the post and snatched a bit of dried reed here, a puff of seedhead there, all of it housebuilding and nest repair. I walked across the long path of planking called the boardwalk, watching the sun touch the trees; I sat down on a hillside, letting my fingers run through wildflowers, licorice, rock roses. My hands seemed insubstantial, doing no damage; something in me admitted that I was frightened, that fear was a new and very unwelcome experience, that what I seemed to be afraid of was a deep cold knowledge that I was somehow fading away, becoming a ghost.

I stayed there, seeing almost no one, for most of the day. I was eighteen. I was an adult. I was the Slayer, and I really didn't give a damn. I was a witch, a sorcerer, the daughter of a sorcerer. This, I cared about.

The decision made itself, almost without my participation. I was never going to be the Slayer the Council wanted, or the Watcher wanted. They wanted an obedient killing machine, a girl, whose power was potent but completely directed and controlled by those faceless people in London. I wasn't any of that. I was a woman, not a girl, and my power was controlled by myself and my conscience. I was a sorcerer born. This was mine, my birthright, in my blood, undeniable as a second soul. If I was the Chosen, well, they could bloody well choose someone else. I was what I had been born, and that was not the Slayer.

"Amanda?"

"Yes, thanks, Mrs. Gollie. Oh, cake! How lovely!"

She'd been busy at her cooker, making a small birthday cake for me, really not much bigger than a muffin. I felt my heart and stomach move simultaneously, my heart because she had been kind, and warm, and gone to some trouble for me, while my stomach realised that I'd eaten nothing since tea at sunup.

So we sat at the table and each ate half of my birthday cake, after I'd blown out the single candle she'd found and stuck in.

"Cheers, dear, and may your wishes all come true." She looked at the thin curl of smoke from the blown-out candle, and then at me. "You did wish, didn't you?"

"Yes, of course." It was a lie. My wishes were too abstruse, too inchoate, to take any solid form. Besides, it's a dangerous thing, for a sorcerer to make a wish; you never know what you might summon. "Did you say Rupert had rung?"

"He did, about half four. Said he'd just got back, some sort of emergency errand in Cambridge, and could you come around about seven? I'll bet he's got a lovely birthday giftie for you, then."

She winked at me, kind and warm and well-meaning in her vulgarity. I suddenly got up and hugged her, hard.

"Thanks, Mrs. G, for the cake, and for being so kind. What's the time - half past six! I'd better run."

That's lovely, deb.

One stray punctuation mark--

too incohate.

you want comma.