Shameless self-whoring:
Sometime in the last 12 hours my website's main page got it's 10,000th hit. It's been up for almost a year and a half, and 10,000 hits in that time is nothing to make bigtime websites jealous, but, gosh. Yes, I started the counter at 0, because I'm a needy feedback ho who likes to look at the counter and say, "You like me! You really, really like me!"
Oddly enough, the story with the most hits is "Skinny Dipping," the Dawn/Spike improv at the swimming pool. The next one is "Steam." So most folks who read my site like Protecto-Spike in big brother mode. Then they like the hot boy-on-boy action. It's an interesting demographic.
What's another word for strawlike, like, if you were describing hair, and it was all fried and kind of ratty and this-person-never-uses-conditioner and there is this
word
that is
just
what I mean and....
I mean, fried, if you couldn't say fried because you didn't use that kind of language because you were Drusilla. No metaphor-- just that... word.
Which is to say, Jilli, I think I'm going to finish the Gingerbread Coffin fic.
Liz, I was actually quoting one of the single nastiest things I've ever heard said in my life. One very annoying woman when we all worked at Interfinexa in London in the late seventies, asking a very well-bred buddy with an evil sense of humour and no tolerance for suck-ups, what she should do with her hair.
Said the well-bred buddy: "Try scrubbing pots with it."
Needless to say, that line has stayed with me. I've never been bitchy enough about another woman to use it, but perhaps someday a bloke who looks like Art Garfunkle in his prime will piss me off, and I'll let it rip.
Since I have very little authority and did very little research, it's set in an ambiguously non-modern-time somewhere-in-Europe thing. Post-Prauge, pre-Sunnydale, I was thinking early 20th century but did I mention vague.
Dru POV. Here is, actually, the first section of it, to show what kind of style I'm moving in:
There were only a few hours of night left when they rode up to the house, and the sky was already beginning to lighten. Rain was still drizzling half-heartedly down from the sky. Making the grass squish under her feet as she went from the carriage to the door, the dirt slowly washing off the roots of trees, the little worms sobbing to their drowning deaths. Spike held out the door for her and she got mud on the floor when she walked in, but it didn't matter, it was their house now.
Two stories tall, full of rooms and rooms like a mouth full of teeth, heavy and dark and damp in the wet night air. Paint peeling. Spike had paid for it, entirely, with a pile of bloodstained bills and a threat that no one should disturb them for as long as they stayed there. "Vacationing," he had said to the property-dealer. "We feel we've got to get away from the crowd. You do understand me?" The man turned his eyes away from her own self, sitting in a chair and staring ahead very quietly like a good girl, and gave a little hiccough of fear. "We're settled, then," Spike said, and rose to collect her into the carriage.
Now, he looked into the front room, and gave out a quiet curse. All of the rooms were bare.
"Squatters, huh," he said, and turned around back into the hall to watch the minions get settled. "Must have sold the furniture, or burned it. Probably that. It gets cold here," he called, as an afterthought. The rooms were dark and smoky in the corners. The newest minion, a short, dark girl named Anise who had been their waitress at a tavern in the last town, gave a delicate cough as she passed Spike in the hall with an armload of clothes.
"You don't have to breathe, pet," he reminded her, and she murmured unhappily.
Spike moved their things into the bedroom at the end of the long hall. The bed they'd been expecting was gone, but there was a squashed pallet mattress on the floor. After the last weapons were taken in from the carriage and stored in their cases, and the windows without curtains were nailed over with black boards a minion had fetched from the shed in the back of the yard, he helped her take her shoes off, laid her down upon the pallet, and tucked his arm around her waist. It hadn't taken long for them to finish unpacking-- they were travelling light, he had told her, no room for chests of dresses or china for tea. Just the weapons. Didn't intend to be staying here long enough for any tea parties, at any rate: they had a mission. Get in, bag the prize, do the magic, get back out. And so they unpacked their bags. To bed they went, and lay down on their beds like toy soldiers felled in a pretend battle.
After a time Spike's hand slowed its gentle circling motion against her side, and she knew he was sleeping. She twisted away and looked at the black face of the window, glass cracked and gone, wooden board a little warped from its tenure in the leaky shed. From the other rooms, the noises of brief, soft scuffle and muffled moans quieted as the minions readied for bed. The sun had risen, and they had been driving in the carriages all night. Everyone should have been tired.
But she wasn't. She couldn't sleep. A tiny sliver of sunlight had wormed through a crack in the board, and it was travelling slowly across the floor. The house was dark and shuttered but outside the light beat down on its walls, warming the flaking plaster, squirming into every little crevice it could reach. She could feel it, tickling and burning, filling the great large world with its light.
If she let it, it'd make her into ashes. Fire, great and terrible, brushing against the insides of her skin. A sound like a thousand bees humming. It would break into her body and cut through her, clean and fine.
She let that thought fill her mind. The thread of light on the floor started to creep up the edge of the pallet, to where her long, white toes were waiting motionless.
A cloud slipped across the sun, and the noise for a moment lessened. Spike beside her stirred, and she shifted her legs, twisted back around to look at him.
"What a fine knife," she said. "Spike? It left."
He rolled over, and wrapped an arm around her. Blinked to clear his eyes. "You want a knife, Dru? I'll get you one."
She stroked his arm, scored it lightly with one fingernail, for emphasis. "The best one. Only the brightest one."
And he said, affably, "Right, only the best for my queen," and took her fingertips and kissed them, and stroked the cool little indent in her wrist where the pulse used to beat. But later he was all business again, flint and hard edges, standing by the front door talking to Anise who frowned with concentration.
"I'm going out. A man will come, soon, with a book for me. Get him in here and eat him, share him with the others. He's a nobody-- won't be missed. Make sure you get the book from him first, I don't want to be seeing any bloodstains if they're new." He took his coat from the hook by the door. "Oh, and Dru wants a knife. Get her one, will you? Don't let her cut her own head off, I'd kill you." Anise froze, and shook her head imperceptibly.
Spike threw the coat over his head and stalked outside. Drusilla drew back the curtain, and watched him from the front-room window, going out into the carriage. He started away from the house, off down the road that stretched along under the bright blue sky, until it came to the edge of the field and into the forest. The carriage dwindling to one tiny black dot moving rapidly among the green shadows of the trees.
