Late and wrong fandom for the Sunday100. I couldn't get the image out of my head.
- - -
There he is: a darker heap in the dimness of an alleyway, black hair splayed across the dirty cobbles. Lost in a foreign land, beaten by soldiers who think themselves men, for committing no crime against them. Tokyo is open to all, but the army that uses it is not so forgiving.
I kneel by his side, assessing the wounds with an experienced eye. He’ll live, and with a few well-placed stitches there won’t even be scars—outside—but explaining what happened to the people who care about him isn’t going to be easy. Especially when even I don’t understand.
This is for that drabble challenge. I have some questions I'll post in the next post I make here. There are no spoilers in this. If you didn't see last week's Angel, Players and if you live under a rock, there's a casting spoiler for the next new BtVS, so I'll white font.
Guidelines: Two hundred words, motel, gun, note, M/F (rated PG)
Another dead potential. The note reads, "I am devoured."
Their clean up equation, now second nature: One performs a locator spell; three distract the clerk; two hide evidence.
Art.
Gift.
Bane.
Ashes to ashes…
One sheet-wrapped corpse, one dusty truck/hearse.
Warriors wield bleedin' stain remover? No. Blood stain remover. On rugs, it works.
He draws the motel curtains. Waiting, she dims the lights, but stains never disappear.
Like scar tissue, it fades.
She turns on the TV. War. Blood. She's mesmerized -- not by it, by memories, by death. His hand finds a pistol, not cold to his touch. It's compact, hard, lean. Like him.
Like her.
He fondles it.
It's colder than she'd be.
He raises it, cocks it. She doesn't notice, or she's waiting. He aims -- at himself.
Why?
It won't make him colder, there'll just be more stains to hide. He aims at her.
The pain sears soul now, not head - much more effective, really. Besides, this one might not go to Paradise. Can't do that. She's already tasted Hell.
He won't make the world any colder. Spike drops the gun. Faith shuts off the TV. Devoured by darkness long ago, for heat they forsake light.
Love it, Cindy. It's really nice and tight.
Now, what were your LJ questions?
Oh, thank you amych. With 200 words, it has to stay tight. I think that's a good exercise for verbose-me.
Also, what's drabble?
Plei, you evil, wonderful person.
Nice! Good ficcage, there, Cindy.
It's safe to assume that Faith is going to Sunnydale, especially if you're vague enough to not mention any specifics, so it's less spoilery with a warning.
If you are posting it in your LJ, use this tag
t lj-cut text="Title of Fic, Spoilers through AtS 4x15, Orpheus"
and then paste the fic below the cut tag.
There are no cut tags in comments, so when I posted it in Twi's LJ, I just used the subject line for my title and pasted the story into the comments box.
Isn't LJ spoiler font the same as here? Or you could use an lj cut.
That was really nice.
Also, what's drabble?
A drabble is a very short fic, normally (if a challenge) with a specific word count.
LJ has what they call a "cut tag" -- what you see on the main page looks like
blah blah blah ( read more ) blah.
The bold part is a link to the full version of the post on the comments page. It's customary to replace the "read more" part with a one-line header/spoiler warning; something like "PG, S7 casting spoilers" should do the trick.
The code for it is
t lj-cut text="whatever you want to say"
and
t /lj-cut
at the end of what you want to offset.
As for whether what you've posted here is too spoilery, I'm as spoiled as last week's chicken parts, so my spoilometer is out of whack. It doesn't look that way to me, though.
