Marked.

I can do Dru, but not nearly that well, and only in short spurts; for some reason, Darla is far more comprehensible to me. She has certain qualities that echo some of the archetypal bored power women in some of my favourite lit - Morgause in The Once & Future King comes to mind.

Steph, how's your back this morning?

Oh, I decided to fiddle with the meds -- last week my doc prescribed vicodin, which I was taking with oral steroids. As the steroid dose decreased, I started getting itchy and rashy from the vicodin, so I stopped taking the vicodin and switched to Tylenol 3. I have concluded that Tylenol 3 doesn't do dick for my pain.

I'm back on a much higher dose of oral steroids, so in the middle of the night last night I went back to the vicodin. No itchiness as of yet.

As for my back, it doesn't hurt quite as badly as yesterday, but it's still hurty -- although that's a given. It always hurts. But I think I can manage the grocery store today.

Oh, and I really want to write "Redux" from Faith's POV -- "Redux Redone," if you will -- but these drugs just cloud my brain so badly. I have to wait for a window of unfogginess and write like the wind.

Steph, get this: allergic to ibuprofen. Allergic to demerol (found out the hard way). Allergic to both coke and pot (retired rocker, how sorry-ased is that?) And vicodin might as well be a Snickers bar: no effect on me at all.

OTOH, a 5-mg valium knocks me unconscious for nine hours.

You watch your back. I'm watching your back. Be careful out there (Nic has a bad SI joint, so we know from bad backs)....

blush.

Thank you! And thanks for the catch on mooncalf.

Mooncalf. It's one of my favourites, up there with "cream-faced loon".

I wish there was any way this side of intolerable pretension to call someone a poltroon, but I can't see it happening in this lifetime.

See, I say: embrace the pretention. "Poltroon" is a good word. There are lots of dusty good words languishing unloved, just waiting to be embraced and brought gently back out to play. It's okay if people think you're being eccentric. They'll deal. I went through a period of saying "Egad" a lot, and it still crops up sometimes. And I think "Lawks" is a criminally underused expletive.

(But then, I also swear far too much, say "fuck" far far more often than I do it, and have incorporated the word "cunt" into my "not-that-offensive" mental catagory of curses. My language use is, perhaps, not wholly normal.)

Fay, love your Dru, as always.

This is still out for edits with a couple of people, but I'd like any other comments people might have.

Tomb of the Unknowns

Note: This story is set sometime shortly after the S7 episode "Potential."

Xander always went by himself when he visited the grave.

It wasn't like it would be a big deal or anything if someone saw him or figured out what he was doing, but there was something comforting about keeping these visits quiet. Far too much of his life had been nothing but noise.

Of course there was the noise that constantly filled the home he'd grown up in--slurred voices, shrill arguments, clattering whiskey bottles, and slamming doors. Then there was the noise of school, but most of the time that was nothing more than his own voice as he mouthed off for any one of the million reasons he had. These days, he worked at a job that was almost nothing ~but~ noise, but that was a good thing. In that case, noise meant that things were going smoothly. It reminded him that he was making money and making something of himself.

He followed the familiar not-quite-a-trail through the woods. It had been well worn two summers ago, but everyone had visited the grave back then, and their footsteps had kept the path clear. Someone--Giles, he thought--had gone through with pruning shears at one point to clear away some of the branches that snagged into the path. Now, Xander had to brush past new growth and kick his way through tangles of vines and fallen branches. The grave site up ahead was in just as much disrepair, and not just because of the big honking hole right in the middle of the plot. No one else had been there to clean away the weeds or brush the pile of leaves away from the headstone. In a few years, moss and weather would start to blur the words he'd chiseled into the stone.

BUFFY ANNE SUMMERS
1981-2001
BELOVED SISTER, DEVOTED FRIEND
SHE SAVED THE WORLD
A LOT

The job was harder than he'd expected. He should have realized that working with stone wouldn't be the same as working with wood. Willow had to do some magical editing at one point when one of the Fs in 'Buffy' became an E by mistake. He'd been trying to see the letters as nothing more than lines, angles, and curves, so he wouldn't think about what the words and dates actually meant.