bones; a lonely ghost burning down

rgruch@gmail.com — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 17:12:48 GMT

title: Pale Princess of a Castle Cracked
author: biggrstaffbunch
rating: PG
word count: 3565
characters/pairing(s): Lucy/Edmund, Lucy/Peter, Edmund/Lucy/Peter undertones, Lucy/Susan undertones
warning(s): Incest, and a hint of femmeslash (!) Spoilers for LWW, PC, DT, and The Last Battle.
summary: The Pevensie children try to adjust, but life rarely goes how one would expect, and things never happen the same way twice. Lucy through the years, until the very end.
a/n: This was borne after a marathon viewing of Prince Caspian and the stunned decision to reread the books. I could not help but fall in love with the idea of a Lucy who does not adjust so well after the events of the third book. Hope you all enjoy!

Six years left.

Life after Narnia goes a bit differently than Lucy Pevensie thought it might.

Expect the unexpected, Mr. Tumnus once said, but it was a thousands of years before and worlds away, and in the end, Lucy isn't quite certain that normal is the sort of unexpected her old friend really meant.

Lucy has always been rather terrible at normal.

|Edmund.|

There is still a war going on, all three times Lucy spills back into Great Britain, fresh from a sprawling land of fantasy and possibility and wonder beyond the telling of it. There is still a war going on, and though he is just a boy and this is a home he has long forgotten how to defend, Lucy wonders if Edmund misses the weight of a weapon on his hip.

She swings her legs from her perch atop his bed, and she asks, "Edmund, do you ever wish you could fight again?"

Edmund casts her a withering glare; sometimes, she knows how to poke at the worst spots of him, like a needle into an inflamed wound. "Lu," he says, "I am twelve."

"Oh shut it," she says serenely, and lies down next to him, her arm fitting snugly across his chest. His heart beats steadily against her hand. "I am only ten, and I do miss my dagger." She closes her eyes and smiles slightly when Edmund's hand moves hesitantly through her hair, as if mimicking movements he only vaguely remembers. "When I was Queen, you wove ribbons through my crown. You were an excellent handmaiden, Ed. Once."

He growls as she giggles, and she kicks her small feet against his vulnerable shins. They squirm and they wrestle and she almost does not hear when he whispers, heartbreakingly sincere, "You will always be Queen, Lucy, and I shall always be King."

As the afternoon sun wanes and she nestles deeper into his warm sheets, Lucy can hear Edmund move softly across the wooden floor, an intricate sequence of ducking and weaving and jumping, and she knows he is testing his body to see if it remembers as well as his mind.

1943.

Bit by bit, after Eustace and Caspian and the journey across the sea to the end of the world, Lucy comes to realize that she is in England now, and roaming lions are not exactly the most common of happenstances. She tries not to search the shadows for things that are not there.

Names have power, after all (Archenland, Aravis, Reepicheep, Caspian, all that she cannot forget) and if she isn't to call Aslan by the name she has always known, than perhaps the point is that she does not know him any longer.

And anyway, her old friend and saviour escapes her sight in ways he never did, before. Always in that year before she and Edmund went back, Lucy caught the lightning swish of his tail. Now though, any such reminders get lost amidst the falling leaves. Seasons turn and the distant crash of thunder soon swallows the memory of his roar. The brilliance of his teeth is dimmed by the endless grey of relentless rain. Spring comes and the sun blots out the shape of his silhouette. The summer breeze carries with it not the whisper of his bravery and goodness, but a warning of coming autumn.

A year passes. Eventually, she learns to stop looking altogether.

(Her eyes still trip along wardrobes and lamp-posts for a second too long, but no one would fault her that, she thinks.)

Unfortunately, she does not learn to stop hoping.

|Susan.|

Once when Lucy is eleven, in an eerily prescient vision of years to come, Susan walks breezily into their room with a fixed smile upon her face and a skirt swirling above her legs in a not-entirely-decent sort of manner.

"Another letter in the post for you and Edmund, Lu," Susan says, and her tone is so overly-kind that Lucy hates her and forgives her in an instant. She knows that Susan, practical and sentimental in equal doses, is not trying to erase the past; rather, she's only trying to explain it in ways that will allow her to live with the present and the future.

"Who's written to us this time?" Lucy asks, though the unnatural stillness at the corner of Susan's lips tells her the answer better than actual words. Lucy's fingers used to know the curves of Susan's lips quite well, but time has moved backwards and the faithful lines of laughter are gone from their usual places. She misses them acutely, but never says a word.

"Cousin Eustace again," Susan answers, and even if her voice is vague, there is a sheen of yearning over her eyes, like finely-spun glass. "I do wonder where his imagination comes from all of a sudden!"

"Oh, here and there, I imagine," Lucy responds, her voice just as vague. There are tales she could tell, but Susan doesn't seem all too keen on hearing them.

After, though, when she's in the garden reading the letter with Edmund and Peter listening along, Lucy sees Susan at the window, a shadow behind the curtains. Once, with a girlish abandon long lost to her, Susan trailed kisses along Lucy's collarbones till the freckled skin turned pink. Once, Susan danced with her among the flowers. Once, they both linked hands and counted the spring blossoms and swore with indecorous vehemence that they would always be true.

Now, Lucy does not beckon Susan to come outside and Susan does not join Lucy of her own volition.

This is probably the cruelest thing that either girl will ever do to one another.

Another year passes. The letters stop coming. Susan keeps checking the post.

1945.

All of twelve now, Lucy finds that anything out of the ordinary in her behaviour is automatically and authoritatively labeled 'adolescence' by those who prove infinitely more infuriating than she.

Such is the nature of growing up, if one is to believe the gentle wisdom of her parents and her older sister. Oh, how grand they make the slow progression of time--twists and turns and fun to be had, a pathway unforseen, small victories and immense tragedies, and amazement in even the most everyday things. Humanity and an Earth that keeps turning, lessons which one keeps learning!

Lucy tries. Dipping into a pot of rouge, she fills all the colorless lines on the pale heart of her face. Perfume dotted against the vulnerable curve of her neck, and something like soot darkening her lashes, she makes her eyes stand out, large and unblinking. Susan does this too, a nightly ritual before dancing and parties, and sometimes the emptiness in her smile looks as startling as it is on Lucy's lips right now.

She looks at her reflection and asks, what good is beauty when she is doomed to sit on chairs instead of a throne? What good is this city when all she can do is draw castles in the air, her fingers skipping restlessly over the ghostly lines of Cair Paravel?

And though they don't say a word, later when Edmund is wringing out damp washcloths and Peter is wiping her face free of age and adornments, both of them with hands strong and reassuring, both of them with mouths full and trembling with feeling, Lucy can tell that they agree.

She keeps forgetting that they are older. That if anyone can understand the odd feeling of displacement rooting in her bones, the itch crawling up her lungs and through her throat, they can.

It does not make her feel better, but it makes her feel less alone.

|Peter.|

On her thirteenth birthday, she comes to Peter as she usually does. Traditions have meaning in every life she has ever known, and though she is not five, or seven, or even ten anymore, it is comforting to think that she will always be Lu to some people.

Lounging cross-legged before Peter as he sits in a rocking chair and cards his fingers through her hair, Lucy looks up at him through half-opened eyes. He is still so straight-backed and noble, his face shrouded in the muted glow of candle-light as he loosens her tight braids. He cradles her skull carefully, and somewhere in the distant curve of his smile, she sees the man he was and will one day become.

"You're getting quite tall, aren't you?" he muses. His voice is so low it is mostly to himself, but she hears him because she is the heart of him, one-fourth of each contraction that rocks his ribcage. "Growing like a vine."

She mutters a thanks ever so much, Peter, because it seems she will always be a weed among roses, the sister who spent countless years wearing breeches under her skirt, the sister who comes home with a smudged nose and bleeding knees. No fretting over torn seams or smudged lipstick, only birds that don't sing their secrets to her any longer.

Peter places one hand on her shoulder, reaching the other hand to wind around her skinny wrist. He bends and his lips skim her temple, soft against her translucent skin, his breath parting the wispy hair rioting along her hairline. A finger traces the blue veins at the base of her palm.

Fleeting contact, for just one moment. But he wouldn't be Peter if even an instant of his benediction--his understanding--didn't drag a low, almost painful shudder through the trembling depths of her belly.

"We all change perspective some day, Lu," he whispers, and he sounds so sad that she tilts her head back, gives him a quick, impulsive kiss against his throat. He catches her chin, lets his thumbs flicker against the angle of her jaw. "Every year, you can see just a bit deeper, just a bit more. Sometimes, you begin to see through the things that made sense at one time. You begin to see truth."

She regards him for a moment, her legs folded to her chest, his hands hot against her neck. He looks as shattered as she feels, as shaken that he might actually believe this possibility that he has just uttered.

"It could be, Peter," she offers, "That we are all simply looking in the wrong direction."

He does not answer for a long time, but when she finally rises to go to bed, she curtsies primly, and the echo of his laughter is a little less hollow than it has been in ever so many years.

1947.

There are milestones, of course, the standard rites-of-passage and important events. Birthdays and anniversaries. Christmas and Easter, a holy quiet descending on the church and Lucy's heart beating out of her chest in a scattered recollection of effusive devotion, of pure trust, of belonging somewhere so utterly and completely.

Before Narnia, sitting on the wooden pews amidst bent heads and solemn vows, she was never quite sure what she was supposed to say. Usually it was for something laughably simple but truly honest, such as her family's safety and for her heart to always remain true.

On her sixth Christmas Eve since Narnia, however, she wakes up to find a red stain on her sheets and a sympathetic smile on Susan's face.

"No worries, Lu, it's quite normal. I started right after we got back from--" Susan stops, looks stricken. "I mean, I started when I was fourteen," she corrects. "Just like you."

And so that day as she stands on sacred ground, Lucy--who has changed from girl to woman twice in one lifetime already--asks for something entirely different.

Please, she pleads, and regardless of the fact that even now, she can only see a golden mane in the cracks and angles of the stained glass windows, she is praying to a nameless, faceless figure, Please, let me always believe. Please let me always remember.

There is no answer, but Edmund's arm is warm around her shoulder when he finds her later, inexplicably outside and staring up at the snowfall, shivering with cold. Peter joins them, and even Susan is there, blessedly silent as Peter points to each constellation in the curiously clear sky, naming them in an ancient tongue. There was a solarium once, in the towers and turrets of their royal home, and the night she turned twenty, they drank sweet wine and laughingly told stories of the stars.

She will turn twenty again, but burrowing closer to her brothers and listening to her sister try not to cry, Lucy decides that there are things that are still quite impossible to forget.

Some days, this knowledge is comfort. Most days, it is not.

|Edmund and Peter.|

One night, Susan does not come home.

Parents away visiting friends in Cornwall, and Peter finally old enough to take care of the family on his own, Susan decides to flout the rules in a way that's so uncharacteristic it's almost laughable.

Peter waits until half past two before he flings himself off the rocking chair in the sitting room, rips his coat from the rack near the door, and instructs Edmund to lock the door and keep Lucy safe.

"Where has he gone, do you think?" Edmund asks, and gathers Lucy close as she begins to tremble.

"To bring Susan home," Lucy sighs. "I wonder if she will break Peter's heart tonight." She slips her hand under the warmth of Edmund's jumper; her skin is so cold and Ed is always warm.

He makes an indelicate sound against Lucy's hair, and for a wild, careening moment, she forgets all about Susan and the yelling that is sure to ensue when the older Pevensie siblings come home. For a wild, careening moment, all that exists is that noise from the back of Edmund's throat, the way his hand clenches at her shoulder, the gasp of recognition and the quiet swear as he realizes what he's given away.

Lucy is the curious sort, and she can be brave about some things.

She flattens her palm against Edmund's stomach and slides it up, rests it above his heart. The chill of her skin fades as Edmund breathes, an unsteady rise of his chest under her loosely-curled palm. She chances a look up. In the scattered light from the street-lamps outside, he is impossibly beautiful. Silvers and blacks, dark hair and pale skin and a throat that is working over a strained intake of air.

She has always loved beauty. She has always loved Edmund. There is no other reason she needs to raise her face and kiss him, and he meets her halfway, his mouth moving tenderly over hers, hungrily. He looks dazed when they finally part, his lips swollen and his hair more than a bit mussed. But he smiles, a proper Edmund smile that is a hint of a smirk and a hint of such seriousness that Lucy wants to pinch his nose to make him laugh. Instead, she bites her lip and looks to the stairs.

He takes the hint quite well.

They kiss atop the covers, chaste as children but easy as lovers, his arms around her shoulders and her arms around his waist, and Lucy thinks distantly that perhaps this was meant to happen. A decade and change in Narnia without a real thought as to marriage or children or even romance, and now Lucy understands:

It is because her family has always been enough.

The door below slams sometime around half past three, and Lucy can hear indistinct shouting for a split second before thundering footsteps and another slam of a door. Lucy wonders if she should sneak back to her room, if she might soothe Susan by going back or spook Peter by being here, but Edmund's hand at her hip makes her stay.

And anyway, Lucy supposes that Peter, more than Susan, will need she and Edmund tonight.

The door to the room opens slowly, as if there is no will behind the move. For a moment, Peter stands there, his shoulders slumped and his breathing ragged, and it occurs to Lucy that she has not seen her brother so unerringly human in a very long time. It endears him to her, even as it makes her anxious to set him to rights once more.

"Oh," Peter intones, and there is a wealth of meaning in the word. There is nothing out of sorts about their clothing nor their hair, but Lucy knows that if there were ever anyone from who she and Edmund could not hide, it would be Peter.

"Peter--" Edmund begins, but Peter only holds up a hand. He staggers, as if wounded, and Lucy rises from the bed, suddenly worried.

"Did you get into it with some of the boys at the party?" she asks, and cannot keep the disapproval from her voice. "That would only have made Susan more angry, Peter! You can't just--"

"Apparently," Peter interrupts, and closes the door, "I can't do anything where her highness Susan the gentle is concerned." He spits out the word gentle, and this is not the Peter she knows. Lucy reaches out. Peter takes Lucy's hand, but looks at Edmund, his eyes almost unseeing.

He chokes then, stumbles closer and bends to his knees in front of them, a supplicant who was once a king. He lays his head on Lucy's lap, and she runs an uncertain hand over the planes of his back. Edmund is a comforting weight against her shoulder, and Lucy leans into him as he adds his hand to the curve of Peter's spine.

"She's forgotten, Lu." Peter takes a deep breath, raises his head. His eyes are wet, and Lucy sighs against the ache between her ribs. "She's forgotten when all I can do is remember, and for the first time in ages, when I look into her eyes, I can't see myself--"

It is Edmund who cuts Peter off, with a hand to his mouth.

It is Lucy who kisses him.

"She's never coming back with us," Peter whispers when Lucy tilts his chin up, and he sounds so scared.

"Perhaps," Lucy allows, and then she touches her lips to his. "But we are not gone yet."

The dawn streaks pink across the sky some hours later, and still, no one sleeps.

1949.

On the surface, Lucy is as well-adjusted as the lot of them. She makes friends who gossip about boys and music and the dangerous thrill of pilfered wine. She wears her school uniform and learns about history and science and math and literature. She hugs her mum and dad, and teases her siblings when she sees fit. She no longer stops to chat to a random squirrel, nor does she stroke the trees lining the neighbour's yard. No one speaks of her with worry, not anymore.

But she knows Peter watches her, gaze intent and heart noble, just as surely as she knows that Edmund gets into terrible rows with Susan when she calls Lucy 'a bit too whimsical' for her own good. They are all protecting her, in their own ways. Peter the eternal king, and Edmund of a learned loyalty, and Susan. Susan, the gateway who beckons Lucy into a world of nylons and hairspray and skirts that flounce. Susan, who presses a kiss to each eyelid of Lucy's when the moon is fat and full in the sky, and then slips out to the dance-halls until dawn. Susan who loves them but leaves them, and who feels just as much sorrow as they do for the chasm that continues to divide.

Lucy supposes that they're all of them the same, surface-shiny and inside, full of cracks and faulty parts. A quartet of broken soveriegns, because once a King or Queen of Narnia--

It should worry her that she isn't sure how that sentence ends anymore. Instead, she closes her eyes and tries not to dream.

|Lucy.|

The train is moving so fast that Lucy hardly feels it when it happens. Truth be told, she moves seamlessly from the drowning darkness of sleep into the endless sky above her. There is a scream, and a jarring crash, and then something almost like pain flashing through her. And just underneath it all, there is the melodious crash of seafoam to shore.

With a roar, the hills shake. With a cry of happiness, Lucy lets go.

The water is warm, and she is home.

-

"We don't have to fight anymore, do we?" Peter asks, and though he looks weary, Edmund only looks hopeful. (He has missed his sword quite a bit, Lucy is sure.)

Aslan bares his teeth, an approximation of a smile. "No," he rumbles, "The time for fighting has long past. These are days of rest, dear ones."

Perhaps Susan was the strongest of all four, to live when they have died. Perhaps she was simply the unluckiest. Or the most practical. Lucy does not know, but she is patient. She strings spring blossoms into a garland, and leaves it on a sun-warmed rock, waiting for the day that Susan will be called home one last time.

Things begin when they end, another wise adage courtesy of Mr. Tumnus. This time, though, perhaps things are turning out exactly how he meant.

Linking one hand with Peter and one hand with Edmund, and humming softly to herself, Lucy walks ever East.

-finis-

rgruch@gmail.com — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 03:41:53 GMT

Does anyone want to beta-read a Chronicles of Narnia ficlet? Pevensie-cest abounds, and YES I AM BASTARDIZING C.S. LEWIS'S CHILDHOOD EPICS.

...I need someone to reassure me that this is okay.

BULLETED POST 'CAUSE I NEED STRUCTURE

rgruch@gmail.com — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 02:45:49 GMT

x THEYOUKNOWILOVEYOUMEME

DO IT. I wish I could've put my entire f-list on there. But it's a lovely meme. I am somewhere on page 12, I think...and other lovelies on my flist are on there as well! SPREAD THE LOVE.

x Okay, so. Why are you all so good to me? WHY? That Anonymeme broke my heart with how wonderful the comments were. I love you all so much, and while SOME were less anony than others (kikos_ai and fireworkfiasco I AM NOT LOOKING AT YOU AM I?) they were all so characteristic of how supportive and just...fantastic all of you are. Thank you I wish I could give back all the happiness and lub I get from you all!

x Against my better judgment, and inspired by a recent fic by inksplotched I watched Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian. Here are my thoughts other than

and then

So basically, I was like. Full of shame for how I was sort of enthralled by this sixteen year old boy. Edmund was always one of my favorite characters (what, you thought I was going to say Susan? Pish posh. That is like saying Hermione is my favorite character in Harry Potter. Lucy and Edmund FTW) but the movies were always just sort of like...okay, yay CGI and sweet semi-attractive British people. Plus James McAvoy as a woodland creature!

But THIS. This was like--omg. Aside from WillMo being so much hotter (and MY AGE. HE IS 21, EVERYONE. JUST LIKE ME. NOT ILLEGAL AT ALL.) Skandar blew me away. He was electric onscreen. Who else thinks that he would've been a great Harry? I think DanRad isn't awful, he's quite endearing in fact, but he doesn't quite do it for me. But Skandar Keynes is very much the Harry I see in my head. This will help me write fic MUCH better(I feel so baddirtywrong) I am sure.

The movie itself? Sheer fun. Edmund kicking ass, Peter being a whiny boyking and then totally PWNING Miraz in that fight. Caspian being a lovely, bumbling sort of roaring sword-wielding lunatic guy. Lucy being SO MUCH SMARTER THAN EVERYONE. Reepicheep and his tail being a total penis metaphor. And and and...boy. Just, the guys are fit. I still have major problems with how OBVIOUS the story is, but I can't help but not care...it was so very pretty. And that song at the end?

I love Regina Spektor, and The Call playing at the end, and you know WillMo and Anna Poppafugs (I am being harsh, perhaps, but eeek, really.) are never gonna be in Narnia again (unless Disney hurries up and makes The Last Battle super fast, skipping all the rest of the story) and then omg, the tears. I LOVE the song. I have a Harry/Ginny piece that unfolded in my head after that song. It's just...woo, a lovely end. And Skandar with his line! *pinches cheek, makes obscene 'flashlight' joke*

But! The Call. Which leads me to my next point, but before I go there...

Never let it be said that I don't do anything for you all. :p

x Songs! I have been writing to playlists for awhile. Been feeling the Regina Spektor, Kate Nash, Ingrid Michaelson, Fefe Dobson. All the Rowboats and Apres Moi as well as Samson are my favorite Spektor songs right now to write fic to...I made a playlist for my Rose Falls Into the Void trilogy (YEAH I SAID TRILOGY JUST YOU WAIT) and I can't wait to unveil it...any recs song-wise? I like me some Depeche Mode, Smashing Pumpkins, Death Cab, Muse, Bright Eyes, Okkervil River, and Apples in Stereo, too, so that's a bit of my stylistic choice...give me some suggestions, o' peeps!

x I have no other pertinent points except that life continues to be overwhelming in so many ways, but I finally have convinced myself to just keep my eyes on what matters, and that is the love and the positivity that I find around me. I still get bogged down in negativity, but perhaps that is all the better for my muse? A healthy release, one hopes!

x I started a piece of original fiction. WE SHALL SEE WHERE THIS GOES.

x

HAH. JUST BECAUSE.

rgruch@gmail.com — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 13:34:42 GMT

Be brutally honest. I have been lately, with myself!

THEANONYMOUSMEME

rgruch@gmail.com — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 16:19:58 GMT

LAPTOP BACK. LET US ALL REJOICE.

also: HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY, INDIA! <3

also: HAPPY RAKHI, to all the brothers and sisters out there.

also: I CAN'T WAIT TO WRITE ME SOME FIC. Linkies, babies...what have I missed?

also: last but not least, thank you, flist, for being so amazing. Your messages really heartened me. <3

rgruch@gmail.com — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 23:58:49 GMT

So, I was tinkering around with Photoshop, trying my hand at the digital painting thing. I don't know, I wanted a cartoon-y style, but not blatantly so, yeah? Tell me what you think!

rgruch@gmail.com — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 09:25:34 GMT

I missed my annual post calling for picspam, so here it is:

I know my F-list is generous, funny, talented, and all-around amazing. I also know they are all sexy sexy sexy individuals. But now I want, like, picture-proof. Comment with a picture/pictures of yourself (if you so desire) and tell me what your favorite feature/thing about yourself is. Call it a lovespam.

I like my smile. I feel like a smile can transform a face.

I like my eyes. This was earlier this year after a VERY drastic haircut so I got my eyebrows shaped to make myself feel better.

Ok, this is for orange_crushed. I took this after I watched Candy Mountain like a year ago, and I LOVE IT. Because it showcases how dorky I am, and I love that about myself.

I like my heritage...and that I can feel comfortable in those clothes and that environment. This is my mom and me at my cousin's wedding...note the drink tightly clutched in my hand?

And lastly? I like my hair.

LOL. I am allowed to be shallow, flist.

NOW YOUR TURN. SPREAD THE LOVE/PICS. I will screen comments if you so desire!

rgruch@gmail.com — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 04:25:03 GMT

here is why the people i know online are so much cooler than in RL:

[discussing the logistics of possible new fic]

[00:20] fireworkfiasco: because the world is recoiling from all the strange people
[00:20] fireworkfiasco: like, it's attempting to reject them
[00:20] b u f faith 05: yeeeeeep
[00:20] b u f faith 05: O I THOUGHT YOU MEANT LITERALLY
[00:20] b u f faith 05: LULZ.
[00:21] fireworkfiasco: ahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahaha

...probably you had to be there. i might have laughed so hard i farted, however.

in other news, I am editing papers and my peers are all functionally illiterate. it makes my heart hurt.

WHAT'S NEW? (also, i was gonna do that meme where it's like 5 people you'd have sex with, no questions asked, and i was like...BUT DAVID TENNANT AND BILLIE PIPER WILL MAKE ALL THE REST OF MY FANTASY LOVERS FEEL INADEQUATE. still, though. picspam, later.)

rgruch@gmail.com — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 06:08:38 GMT

so even though i work a ten hour shift starting at 6 am, i am pondering this:

will i ever be able to write dark post Journey's End fic again?

i mean, i was really big on darkfic before s4, darkfic AU and the storm tossed tempest of a possible reunion. see: the she falls through holes/ghost stories bit (OF WHICH THERE IS A SEQUEL ON THE WAY FOR, OMFG DID I LET THAT SLIP?) and the ours is not a love song/remix bit. butttttt.

but now, i am so destroyed by the ending rose got, that i feel like writing dark fic would be a disservice to her. like, i can write ANGST, but it must have happy endings! and mutant bananas, apparently.

is anyone else this neurotic? are they fearing their darkfic abilities in the wake of just trying to balance out an apropos reaction to journey's end?

fireworkfiasco wrote the brilliant Blackout, which really terrifyingly and wonderfully painted a picture of what darksnarlysex would be like, post-JE. i also read this fic on darkthorn that didn't do it for me cause it relied on an image of the doctor basically being rampantly abusive BUT anyway

what say you, flist? anyone want to give me some darkfic thoughts? what darkness might rose have, she who is so often the light? Kat has a good theory about ten 2 being the rose to rose's nine...what do YOU all think?

rgruch@gmail.com — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 10:21:21 GMT

title: Storyteller
author: biggrstaffbunch
rating: PG
pairing(s): Rose/Ten, Rose/Ten II, implied Rose/Jack
summary: A tale is all in the telling of it. Rose spins the story until the truth is a complex thing.
a/n: This is for fireworkfiasco because she is the Death Ray to my Dr. Horrible. ILU, sweets, thank you for inspiring me to no end with your brilliancy.

once upon a time,

The truth is, Rose doesn't dream of the old life anymore.

When she closes her eyes and sinks into the black tangle of sleep, she doesn't tilt on the edge of some spinning Earth, clinging to questions that will never be answered, reaching for galaxies that will never be strung through a sky she will never explore.

Instead, Rose curls her fingers around her pillow, and

(there are five ways this story could go)

i.

maybe she lets herself wonder if the Doctor who left her behind so long ago ever thinks of her now. If moments move in the same way for him that they do for her, skipping in starts and stops, barrelling through seconds that ought to be stretches and slowing through minutes that ought to be glimpses. If perhaps, just perhaps, he gave her the Doctor with one heart because she was the TARDIS to his Time Lord, a link to the vortex in a way that lies like a sleeping wolf in the restlessness of her belly.

Did he think that putting her hand over the product of a human/Time Lord metacrisis would be like plunging her fingers into soil, planting a seed and forcing a second heart to take root? She angers at his presumption, and her skin ripples around the memory of a song.

One day, she wakes up to find the Doctor of this world has stopped breathing. She thumps him awake, and he tells her he doesn't need the breath. His body is changing, and the space between her fingers is the distance that remains uncharted, unmapped. Her hands are the tools, the carver and caliper, and for once, she gets to wield the power she's always had.

Oh--

i(a).
--when she laughs, the black space behind her teeth glows a crackling gold.

ii.

what Rose discovers is that she has forgotten his smell. His smile. The subtle changes of his every expression. It's all lost in a drowning crash of blue, blue sea, blue suit, blue veins threading through the chambers of a heart that is so human it hurts.

Behind it all, though, beneath it, buried in the long ago and the deep, there is an insubstantial shape of a man in a swinging overcoat, running along the hills of a futuristic New York. Shadows and smoke, and the word impossible glimmering in a horizon shot with twilight. Applegrass and cats and the terrible, whimsical ways the universes move.

She thinks that he has probably done his share of forgetting as well, forgotten the slope of her cheeks and the tenderness in her touch, the way her fingers slipped into his. He's had to have done, because if every tick of the clock is infitismally closer to the day she will die, it's still too much, too long to breathe while still remembering everything she's lost. All she's got is forty or fifty more years, if she's lucky.

Him, he's got forever.

iii.

actually, she tells herself that she doesn't have much time to spare for the same old stars sleeping in her soul. That there are adventures to be had and people to meet and spaceships to try and build from scraps of the microwave and salvaged alien tech. She tells herself that she's already got a hand to hold and that the Doctor in brown lurks in her past, in the lines around her eyes, long-gone in the way of bone-felt pains that come with the rain.

Life has to be liveable, somehow, and so Rose learns not to dream.

iii(a).
There was that one about Jack, though.

iii(b).
Jack and a can of whipped cream, to be fair.

iii(c).
For some reason, the Captain Harkness is as vivid as a picture, swimming in the dark. Blue-eyed and grinning, flyboy with a heart of gold and a clever sleight of hand, the sky to her sun and the orbit to the Doctor's moon. Always yearning, trying to pull them a little closer, merge them a little bit more with himself. But she and the Doctor never really shared beyond time and space and travel, did they? The pieces of themselves, the things that kept them whole. They gave so much to one another that there was nothing left over and then they left him behind, and so here Jack stands now, every night, broad-shouldered and smiling, and he doesn't ask for a single bloody thing and maybe that's what hurts most. All that she never knew to give. Everything she never had the chance to say.

She and Jack dance with goodbyes and ghosts between their bodies, his hand on her hip the only thing keeping her from tipping into the past.

"This here is something special," he whispers, and his breath is hot against her hair. He sings a little bit of Glenn Miller into her ear, and she whispers an apology into the everbeat of his heart.

iv.

it's pointless to pretend that there aren't a thousand conversations that she stores away, systematically in the places where even telepathy can't touch, those doors that remain closed except when she needs solace within herself. And then there's just the way she arranges each scenario, just she and him, sitting side by side in a garden or a park or somewhere there's green, because green means life (unless you're Superman, but the Doctor was always a Batman sort of bloke anyway, the gadgets and the tortured past and the innate desire to be a bit of a playboy)

but the point is, they're on a patch of land and they're saying things to each other, things that matter, things that she thinks of during random points of the day and then absently scribbles on a piece of paper, and then the Doctor in her bedroom will find the fluttering scraps and he will look so sad for just a flash before giving her that space inside her own head, because he has all the rest of her, doesn't he?

In her head, in every exchange, she twines a daisy-chain around his wrist and asks him to stay.

iv(a).
"I missed you when you died," he admits, and she answers, "Well, you died, too, once."

"Yeah, but I came back," he protests, and she smiles, touches his chin with the tips of her fingers. "So did I," she whispers, like it's a secret to be swallowed by the hitch of their shared laughter.

He winds his hand through her hair, and says, eyes shining, "So you did."

iv(b).
She doesn't tell him about the worlds where he was gone, either killed by his own hand or by someone else's or never existing at all. Nor does she speak of the worlds where he turned into something ugly and dark, something worse than vengeance and sharper than pride. She doesn't tell him about the taste in her mouth when he bit her tongue, kissing her in a dimension where he asked her to watch entire countries fall at their feet.

"I jumped through fourteen different parallel worlds, and you said you loved me in each one," she tells him instead. He leans close, and in this tendril of reality, this tender offshoot of a tree that looms full of branches, he says the words that have never really mattered anyway.

Still, she does like to hear them.

iv(c).
"Be seeing you," he mutters against her neck. The next morning, all she can do is hum the theme from The Prisoner and muse over when exactly she'll be getting out of her own village by the sea.

iv(d).
He cradles her like a child, like a father and a brother and a best friend and a lover, and even with all these faces, all these titles, all these names, he is still just the Doctor. She misses his singularity, the surety of him. The security and insecurity and incongruity.

She misses his pinstripes and his specs and his longer hair. The big ears, the leather coat, the eyes like melting ice.

"Let go, Rose," he urges, and he's split into two again, even here in this safe spot, the grass growing to snarl around her ankles as she struggles to make sense of what is going on. "Let me go." A hand steers her away and another hand pull her close and she cries because the hands feel the same but aren't and she isn't stupid, she knows that they're--

"I can't," she shouts, "I can't let you go, I've never done, not since I met you, don't ask me to now," but he's pushing at her elbows even as she pulls at his collar, and she breaks through the haze of a daydream with all the elegance of an elephant crashing through a room full of china.

There is silence in her head for a very long while.

v.

the truth is, all Rose does is dream of the old life, and her head is full of all the things she has yet to realize.

Like the fact that learning how to live like a human being again is harder than she thought it would be. The Doctor's not the only one figuring it all out. She needs to synchronize her body to a sleep schedule, needs to breathe around the burst inside that urges her to run, needs to look up at night and see what everyone else sees instead of what she thinks she knows. The solar system here is different, and the planets are like strangers. She needs to learn how to live with strangers. She needs to learn how to not call him a stranger.

There are books she could write, an autobiography that has yet to play out in words, and all she has to do is finally take hold of the pen with an honest sort of grip.

"New world," he says, wildness in his eyes, in his hair, in his smile. "New world, new life, new stories to to hear. New stories to tell!"

He holds out his hand.

"What do you say, Rose Tyler?" he asks, and there are possibilities at his fingertips, waiting on his tongue.

and happily ever after,

she watches as the Doctor's eyelashes fall over his cheek, as he dozes fitfully next to her, stubble darkening his jaw and the vulnerable jut of his throat working as he whispers in his sleep.

"No spoilers," she says softly, brushing her hand over his lips. "New endings."

But more importantly, new beginnings.

Rose smiles.

rgruch@gmail.com — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 05:39:01 GMT

title: emotional landslide in physical terms
author: biggrstaffbunch
rating: hard R
summary: This never happened, but it could've. Four kisses Spike never kissed with women who never loved him. (Mostly.)
pairing(s): Spike/Cordelia, Spike/Faith, Spike/Willow, Spike/Buffy
a/n: spoilers for seasons 2, 3, 4, and then season 8, but you don't need to have read the comics to read this. this one is for crackers4jenn 'cause it's been awhile since I wrote in BtVS fandom again, and it's all for her.

i. of miniskirts and mercedes: cordelia chase (season 2, halloween)

Cordelia Chase likes older men. It's a fact--something about their more refined good looks, their better manners, their wealth of experience. Their wealth, in general. And their propensity to spend said wealth on her. Also, their nice, not-second hand cars.

Yes, there's a lot to like about older men.

Except when the older men are not so much older as creepy, in which case she freaks the hell out and wonders where loser Buffy and her loser friends are when she needs them!

It's Halloween tomorrow, and the new costume place in town is on her way home. Well, okay, it's not, but everyone who's anyone has been visiting the place, and she wants to see why Party City is suddenly so passe. Except the shopkeeper is looking at her the exact same way she looks at clearance sales in boutiques, with a strange mix of curiosity, apathy (who buys clearance, after all) and--ugh, or possibly, ooh--unmistakeable desire.

Cordelia sighs. There's nothing wrong with putting on some extra lipstick and maybe showing some leg, but ew, standards, much? She's Queen freaking C, and she does not stoop down to flirting with--retail. Even sort-of-hot-in-a-goth-way retail, like this looming weirdo guy, Mr. Spike.

"Like the railroad?" she asks disinterestedly, when he tells her his name, and she hopes her tone will tell him what's what. She's totally done the college guy scene before, anyway, and this guy's just a little bit too pale for her tastes. It screams 'basement-dweller' and hello! Car or not, Cordelia so does not need that. She gives him the cold shoulder and decides that there's nothing here for her, after all, prepares to leave.

But he just raises one of his dark eyebrows and stops her from leaving with a casual arm against the silver circular rack. He looks at her, continues to look at her, rifling through the aisles in search of a costume that, in his next, half-muttered words, would be 'just perfect for a bit of alright like her'.

Cordelia makes a face; like she'd wear off-the-rack anything.

"Look, Mr. Spoke," she says, "It's nice that your parents were hippies and all liberal with your education and made you believe that names like that don't encourage all kinds of beatings for the rest of your life, but I have a costume already and also, I am very attached."

The man blinks at her for a second, then arches an eyebrow again. His fingers twitch, and Cordelia gets the unpleasant feeling that he's sort of just humoring her, not wringing her neck. Serious serial killer vibes for a minute, but then he smiles, and it's sort of sexy, and maybe she's shallow enough for that to make her shakes it off; he's just another aimless twenty-something with badly-dyed hair, working--again, there's that word--retail. Soooo not insidious.

"Attached, 'course," he says mildly. He touches a particularly gruesome mask with a dark sort of laugh, and Cordelia shudders again. "And why wouldn't you be attached," he continues, "young beauty that you are."

Okay, so she can't help it, it's ingrained in her blood: She preens. The man sort of leers at her when she's done fluffing up her hair, though, and suddenly he's gazing at her with a really intense look in his eyes and it is ten times of not cool the way he's like--prowling--moving with slinky steps with that Batman-reject duster trailing after him.

Cordelia frowns, backing away. "I'm going to be a cat," she announces, fingering the sleeve of a robe that's hanging from the silver rack. "I'm going to be a cat, and I see no cat costumes here. So I'm starting to see exactly what kind of people shop at this institution and why I totally didn't."

She folds her arms, glares. The man waits. "Because I have good taste," she says, "Obviously."

And with that, she spins on her heel and turns to leave. Only now there's a hand circling her upper arm, and for someone so skinny and pale and who looks like he doesn't get out so much, he's got a wicked grip, and okay--

He noses her hair--

Yes, her outfit just screams female and fearless, but Cordelia's sort of peeing in her pants a little at the thought of dying in a very uncool costume store at the hands of a pervert with no concept of how she's just too pretty to die and oh my god, he's leaning in and is he going to kiss her and ugh but again, ooh--

"I just want to show you my costumes," Mr. Spock whispers, all silk over steel. "Buy one." He hesitates. "Please?"

His lips ghost over hers, and it's weird, there's no hot breath or smelly breath or even--breath at all--but she still gets the shivers again, and suddenly Cordelia's thinking maybe him kissing her isn't such a bad thing, and then--

Buffy walks in. Of all the freaking times in the world, the new girl and her JC Penney rags waltz into the store as easy as you please.

The shopkeeper's eyes zero in on her with a disturbing glint, and all of a sudden, Cordelia gets the feeling that it's all, 'bit of alright' who?

Scowling, she watches as Mr. Spot follows Buffy's every movement with increasingly stalkerish attention, and that's when the decision is made. Cordelia Chase is second fiddle to exactly no one, and she will totally not lower herself to fighting over some demented Halloween junkie's pervings like a dog with a bone. She shoulders past Buffy and the wonder-losers and throws the doors open, stalks out.

He doesn't know what he's missing.

ii. boots on your feet and blood on your hands: faith lehane (season 3, wishverse)

Spike loves sneak attacks.

It's the demon inside him, that hunter inclined to trick. Nothing better than catching prey off guard, after all. They get startled-like, turn to face him instead of running and then--

Knife in the gut.

"The fuck?!" The girl with the midnight eyes swears and smears a bloody handprint across her tank-top, white material stretching over her substantial tits in a way that makes Spike leer appreciatively.

The blood in the air, the metallic smell of it...well, that helps, too.

He smiles ferally. His hand is still tight around the handle of the knife currently stuck in the girl's side. The blood leaking out of her wound is slick and smells so tangy that he licks his lips in anticipation. He slides the knife out, the blade catching on muscle and tissue, and the sound of steel scraping across skin is almost as good as the girl's throaty gasps.

He brings the knife to his lips and licks the flat of the blade, blood touching his tongue in a thick, sharp-tasting burst. His face morphs as he vamps out, vision and smell intensifying, teeth elongating. The girl's eyes don't widen in surprise, not even a bit, confirming what he had only been speculating before.

Slayer.

"Gotta love the taste of dying Chosen One," Spike drawls, smirking as the curvy girl--young, barely seventeen, named Faith Lehane, from what his sources say--presses her hand against the wound in her side and staggers back.

"Like the taste of ashes on the breeze a little better, gotta say." The girl manages a defiant sneer, fisting her tank-top in her hands, biting her lip against a groan as she hits the brick wall of the alley behind her.

"Nasty surprise on a routine patrol, yeah, pet?" Spike cleans the blade even more, savoring the richness of the blood. "Two weeks is a short run even for a Slayer, though, y'know? Sort of...I dunno. Pathetic."

"I'm not done yet, asswipe," Faith says, her hands shaking. "Not so new that I don't know what to do with vampires when they get all uppity--" Her fingers wrap around the stake she'd dropped on the ground, but Spike gives a tsk and kicks it away.

"Big talk," Spike says conversationally, squatting down as Faith slumps to the ground. "Forgive me if I'm a little disinclined to be threatened by it. Killed two Slayers in my time, and you're halfway there already." He reaches out to tap her cheek gently. "I could just take a little nip--" he moves her curls out of the way and nudges her warm, fluttering pulse with his nose. "--and you'd hardly ever notice, innit?"

A sweaty hand encases his wrist, the bone splintering slightly under a vise-like grip. "I'd notice," Faith says, voice hoarse. "In fact, I'd stop you." Her eyebrows arch, as if to say, Try me.

Spike swears, clutching his broken wrist for a moment, amused in spite of himself. The girl's got spunk, he'll give her that. Her pretty red lips are curled in an angry snarl, and her legs, long and slim in leather pants, are strong against his hips. He could have a lot of fun with this one, he wagers. She's got the look of a slag, all tight clothes and heaving bosom and neck arching up...

Face that says no, body that says yes. Mmm, he'd like to take her right in this alley, feel her muscles clamp around his dick, watch her eyes slam shut at her own depravity. A Slayer fucking a vampire, there's something poetic about that. And he's always liked poetic. Yeah, he'd enjoy giving Faith a look at why some of the books really called him Spike--

If he didn't loathe Slayers with every fucking cell and bit in his body, that is.

"You'd stop me, is that so?" he asks slowly, indulgently. He leans in, laughing softly. "Go for it, bitch." He grabs her neck and hoists her up, enjoying the apprehension flash across Faith's face. "Now, way I see it, you've got it coming. You Chosen Ones and your fucking destinies. We were well enough on our own, Dru and I," he seethes, punching the girl hard. She cries out and her head snaps back, but her body is already sweeping low, trying to catch him off guard. He jumps over her leg and catches Faith with a hard elbow to her head, fisting her hair and twisting just hard enough so she grunts in fear. "Had it all, me and my girl. 'Till Prague. And even after then, all we needed was my bleedin' grandsire and we'd be on our way. Wouldn't have bothered you white-hats for a soddin' cup of sugar!" He kicks Faith's hands out of the way, brings her up and against his chest, locks her arms between their bodies so she can't move.

"But the girl who came before you--not the Jamaican twit, the other--the blonde bitch from Cleveland?" Faith's eyes widen and her lips form the name Buffy. Spike's eyes darken. "Yeah, that's the one. She managed to get old 'Liam killed. Played the cards a little too risky and ruined the only way I had for my princess to be strong again. No rituals, no magic--only thing left is to make her better the hard way." His smile turns casual. "Killed a Master vampire to get to Angel again. Almost got my own head cut off. But he's dead now, so the Slayer's dead now, only fitting. So is the one who followed--Kendra. Only this time it was by my hand, just like yours'll be. 'Cause, you see, Faith, I swore on Dru's sweet, mad, undead heart---I made a promise to my baby, and I keep promises--that every Slayer who will ever be, they're finished. If it takes a hundred of you stupid cows, I will feed her a hundred. Until your blood restores her to who she was."

Faith shakes her head, frozen in fear now. The blood is pumping slower, Spike can feel it. The gritty Boston streets are so different than the island breezes of Jamaica, so different than the hopeless, bloody playground that the Master has made of Sunnydale. The moon speaks of second chances, and he can hear his sweetling's voice in his ear in tandem with Faith's pulse.

He leans in and kisses the vein slowly, reverently.

He'll take this one to Dru, and then another, and another, until his woman is whole again. A Slayer's life for the life of his beloved. An even trade.

Dimly, as Faith faints from blood-loss and Spike carries her back to the flat where Dru is waiting, as Dru's fangs sink into Faith's body and the girl dies, Spike wonders if there will ever be a world better than this one.

He doesn't rightly know, but then, he doesn't rightly care, either. Nothing matters more than his baby, this world or the next.

iii. wide eyes and white tights: willow rosenburg (season 4, the initiative)

First thing he thinks is, Now why the bloody fuck'd you go and do that?

He could be cheeky and say it's the stupid pink number she wore a year ago--he wasn't lying, it really did inspire the worst sort of lust once upon a time, watching her play the lost little lamb, all fuzzy and frightened and cute as a bloody button.

Popular opinion'd be coz he's an impetuous idiot, though, a fact that he's been uncomfortably reminded of at every bleeding turn since he's come back to this miserable black hole of a town.

Truth of the matter is, simply put, he just can't help himself. Not this time. Not when he's being reminded of another uncomfortable fact--

His own... impotence. Those army blokes, stickin' their noses where noses don't rightly belong--and now he can't even flex his fingers tight enough to bruise Red's pretty white skin, else his brains'll decorate the walls. The same walls that feel like they're closing in around him, and he's never been good with tight spaces, has he? Always lashed out when he felt cornered. Fucking hell, and he's never felt more cornered than now, with the witch looking at him with those expectant, faintly scornful doe-eyes and him not being able to deliver.

So he does something else that's gonna prove he's not as tame as the puppy-Spike the Slayer's chit seems to think he is. He does something else guaranteed to hurt her in a way that won't set off the ticker in his head. He does something else that feels almost as good as ripping out her buttery-soft neck.

Kisses her.

Startled, disbelieving look in her eyes is as good as if he'd ripped out her jugular, blood spilling down his throat all rich and hot and tangy the way he likes it. Her skinny body is tense under his hands, and he squeezes just hard enough to let her know who's boss. She squeaks like the mouse she is, and slams her eyes shut, pushing at his shoulders. Might not be able to bite, but he'll bloody well not let her push him around. He growls and pushes back, letting his body pin her to the bed as he slants his mouth over hers again, a different angle. He can taste the blood rise to the surface of her lips, pumping behind the ripe, soft skin. Traces a tongue over the dip of her top lip and at her sudden moan, his lips tighten in a vicious grin.

This is how retribution feels, he thinks, a mite savagely. No matter that the Slayer won't be bursting in on her lovely little sidekick's dying, gasping breaths. Knowing the sanctimonious bitch's devastation when she finds out that her sweet, innocent witchy-witch has been tainted willingly--Christ, he loves the puns--well. It'll be revenge enough.

For awhile.

The witch's hot little tongue touches his before she bites down on his lip, and he's abruptly disturbed from his vengeful musings. "Well, well," he mutters, jerking away. He looks at the young woman speculatively. "Looks like kitten's gotten a bit saucier since we've seen her last, hasn't she?"

The little girl is shaking, fear and arousal making her breath come all stuttery, just the way he likes it in his prey. What's that he always used to say? "Prey can come anyway it pleases, so long as it does. Come, that is." He's always liked a little poke in the sack before the grand finale, taking his sweet time so that when the moment finally arrived, his meals either looked damned sorry to go or were begging him to finish them off. No lackluster kills for him, no--

--kills at all, not anymore, innit? His eyes harden and his grip tightens as he remembers the pity and careful laughter in Red's voice when they earlier discussed his...problem. So maybe there won't be any blood spilled the hard way, coz he quite values his noggin and all that's inside, really. But doesn't mean there won't be any blood spilled at all. He's gonna make her ask for it. Gonna make her beg for it.

And then the Slayer is really gonna be sorry.

"Spike," the girl gasps when he finally lets her up for air. Her hands are propped on his shoulders now, 'stead of pushing him away. She pulls him closer by his jacket, then, one hand fisted in his lapel, the other reaching behind her. Surprisingly strong, this one, though her eyes are almost shy. Demure. "W-w-why'd you stop?"

He raises an eyebrow and traces the bruised outline of her mouth. Playing her is proving to be a bit sad, really. Is this actually supposed to be the intelligent half of the Slayer's crack team of bloody avengers? Lifetime of maths and woolly jumpers and the massive stick wedged up the Slayer's bum must have given her absolutely zero chance to be as dirty as he thinks she could be...it's pathetic, is what it is.

He's about to give her a sodding boon and a half, then, isn't he? Get the Slayer where it hurts and pick up a new playmate along the way--there are worse ways to end a night like this one. Things are finally starting to look up for William the Bloody...

Last thing he thinks before the lamp crashes down on his head is, Oh, yeah. This is going to be fun.

iv. blonde hair and a busy bar: buffy summers (season 8, pre-Long Way Home)

Buffy sees him again by chance, and it's all she can do to keep from hitting him.

Figures--luck and violence, it's pretty much the only thing that's ever sustained her in life, why should it change now? Visiting New York with Willow, stopping by to check out how the overseas Slay team is doing and dutifully leaving Kennedy and Wills to their bordering-on-icky smooches, she walks the streets and the place she finds him is the one place she never thought to look. The one place it seems that he'll always belong, amidst the shadows and the smoke and the gyrating bodies of humans and demons and the secrets they all keep.

A bar. Ironically enough, one of the most crowded underworld bars in New York City, and he's nursing a shot of something vile and puffing away at a cigarette like he hasn't got a care in the world.

"Fancy meeting you here," she says when she's close enough to him, and if her voice is less than steady, she thinks it's not really fair to come down on her for it. Not now.

Not when she's staring at someone she's spent an entire year thinking of as just a little bit deader than usual.

"As greetings go, Slayer, that's a bit weak." Spike looks at her for a long instant, in his eyes the same dark, unwavering challenge that she remembers. He quirks his eyebrow when she flounders, flicks the ash from his cigarette, brings the Marlboro back to his lips and inhales.

"Oh, sorry," Buffy finally says in disbelief, rubbing trembling fingers over her collarbone. "Maybe it's all the shock from your recent fiery death that contributed to my overall verbal cluelessness, you think?"

She thwaps him hard on the back of his head, dislodging his cigarette. Spike curses, mumbles something that sounds suspiciously like "Maybe it was that bug you've got lodged so firmly up your tight little behind, you mean," but Buffy is nothing if not well-practiced in hearing from Spike only what she wants to hear and so she ignores him.

And hits him again. Just because she wants to. And also because there's a no-smoking rule in bars and seeing him flagrantly defy it just itches at her neck in that way that used to make her think she had some weird do-gooder sensor or something, but now just makes her think it's probably just that she sort of hates when Spike gets away with being a jackass.

"Bloody fucking--" Spike fumbles with his salvaged cigarette, burning himself slightly as he guides it back to his mouth. "What the hell was that for, you big, honking loon?"

He rubs his head gingerly, speaking around the ever-familiar, loosely dangling cigarette, and Buffy tries not to flash back to the early days after Sunnydale collapsed, roaming around greater America and inexplicably buying packs and packs of his favorite brand. Faith utilized them well enough when Buffy brought them back to the old battered schoolbus, but for awhile there, everyone was convinced Buffy herself had turned into a chain-smoker.

Maybe for awhile there, Buffy sort of thought about becoming one.

"For making me drop three-hundred dollars and sixty-five cents on the most disgusting habit since nose-picking, jerk!" Or for dying in a blaze of glory instead of at the business end of her stake, like she always thought would happen. For making her miss him. For being her arch-nemesis for so long that he was just that much lamer when he couldn't arch-nemesis himself out of a paperbag so that her only choice was to fall completely and bewilderingly in lust with him. For making her question that lust and turn it into something weirdly, possibly, scarily like...love.

"Three-hundred dollars and sixty-five cents," she whispers again. "God, what a... freaking waste. It was all just a waste." Her hand comes out again, only instead of hitting him, she touches the side of his face, runs her fingers down the hollow of his cheek, waits for the involuntary way his eyelashes slip shut, the way they used to whenever she brushed against him.

He blinks, and she figures she'll take what she can get, these days. "Waste," she whispers again, fiercely. "All of it, a big, stupid waste!"

Then, because he is looking at her with those wary, dark eyes she remembers so well, she plucks the cigarette out of his mouth, tugs his collar so that his face falls closer, and kisses all the snarkiness out of his curled lips and arched brow. He tastes stale and new, sort of tingly, and it strikes her that it's been a long while since she's done this, kissed someone so cold, loved someone in a way that is so deep she won't ever even admit it to herself, and he's not lying in the bottom of a Hellmouth hole, oh wow, is he not lying in the bottom of a Hellmouth hole...

His arms wind around her waist and he's laughing into her mouth, and she's sort of laughing too, in between the kissing, and happiness swells somewhere long-forgotten in her chest. She thinks maybe this is what it feels like to end a story, or to begin a story, or to not be telling stories at all and to be living again and--

"Buffy?"

And then she wakes up.

Willow looks worried the whole next morning, but Buffy doesn't say a word.

The TV says that LA will be hot today.

-finis-

rgruch@gmail.com — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 04:15:48 GMT

11 minutes in and

WHY JOSS WHY WHY WHY WHY

edited to add

-HAHA FANGIRLS/FANBOY WITH A LISP. "We have a problem with her!" "...This is his hair."

-The songs were so much better this time around! Loved the first one, and NPH's moment of glory in the end...perfectly haunting. GUH.

-NATHAN FILLION. WTF. SO SLIMY SO FUNNY SO HOT BUT GOD. I hate Captain Hammer. Oh god. I'm so heartbroken at the height of his douchebaggery.

-There's no happy endings, indeed. Penny and her final line--so much more heartbreaking than anything I could have dreamt. delicfd EAT YOUR WORDS.

-That ending. I just.

JOSS. WHY. WHY. WTF. WHY.

Also? O hai, David Greenwalt and Marti Noxon. Anyone else I missed, cameo-wise?

In conclusion. Best internet show ever.

rgruch@gmail.com — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 05:07:25 GMT

title: Drink Your Wine Away Instead
author: biggrstaffbunch
rating: pg
pairing: Ten/Rose, Alt!Ten/Rose
spoilers: Up to Journey's End!
summary: Life moves on in the parallel universe, with or without Rose Tyler's good-will and well-wishes. Three lonely celebration in an alternate world, and one with company.
author's note: This is for my quad of late-night AIM support: katrina87, salienne, mylittlepwny, and fireworkfiasco. I am so lucky to have such talented and lovely friends, and I hope that they break open some boxed wine and get a little tipsy with me while they read!

|drink your wine away instead|

-
only hope will remember
burning flame in december
-

London in the wintertime is always a hit or miss: either its dirty and wet and too populated by half, or it's a beautiful mess of sounds and sights and places to be. Right this moment, it's gorgeous and for that--Rose Tyler is grateful.

Because lately, loneliness has a way of dimming all the laughter and color from her life.

Tonight, though, the moon in the sky hangs fat and yellow and full, its nebula of stars blinking in time with the red and green lights strung up from rooftop to rooftop. The windows are dewy with melting frost, stickers of dancing candy-canes peeling off the glass. There's the muffled silence of snow steadily falling, layering stairs and streets with thick drifts of fresh, glittering white. And then the earthy smell of ham and turkey cooking, the bright flash of ornaments swinging precariously between fringes of tinsel, the gentle strains of laughter and music from Mr. and Mrs. Next Door's--

It's Christmas Eve at Powell Estates and Rose knows each detail with a clarity that stuns her.

The coming-together of sense memory haunts her in a way that's encompassed in the horizon line where black sky and white ground meet: there in the shimmering, hazy grey of it, where everything tilts just so, it's as if nothing is real. As if everything of this silent stillness is only a dream.

"Dreams are wishes your heart makes," Rose breathes to herself, voice brittle. Her bones ache and her words vanish into the air like puffs of smoke. She is tired of how fragile things are. She is tired of how quickly things disappear.

The city sounds are muted here. Nothing reaches these parts but the rise and fall of beeping car horns and tyres crunching gravel. Maybe the occasional carol lifting high and sweet in the air, joyous and bright in that way of songs about miracles and hope and goodwill towards man. Rose closes her eyes and breathes in through her nose; the crisp December air burns a little, freezes in the back of her throat and in the pit of her lungs, makes her chest seize. For the endless beat of an endless second, her heart stutters to a stop and everything narrows down to just the darkness, just the cold, just the easy quiet of this winter's night.

The low drone of a zepplin floating overhead rips slowly through the moment. A knife cutting further into time, the progressive unwinding of a clock. Rose opens her eyes and looks up at an unfamiliar spread of space.

It's Christmas Eve and this is not home.

A snowflake catches on her lashes; when she blinks, it melts, runs a chilled, wet stripe down her cheek. It's the closest she's come to crying since the day she collapsed into herself on a windswept beach. The closest she's come to mourning since being told she was dead.

Bullocks. Rose blows gently on her fingers, the wool warming her skin only slightly--she's not quite sure she'll ever get warm again, really. Not quite sure what she was hoping to see, either, coming here. A reminder of home? Something of her old life, perhaps. Something to remind herself where she's really from-- not Rose Tyler, Vitex heiress, but Rose Tyler of the skinned knees and crap dye jobs. Rose Tyler, with the eyes wide and full of the stars, with a head for galaxies and years, with feet itching to run on dusty planets and fingers skipping over uncharted maps.

Rose Tyler, who's currently standing outside a building she has no business being near, instead of at home with her family. Because--surprise--it turns out she might just be a wee bit of a basket-case.

Rose snorts; she imagines Dr. Lee, Torchwood's grief counselor, writing in her notebook: Rose has abandonment issues. Also, attachment issues. A wide variance of issues, to be fair. The girl is a few Daleks short of a fleet.

Well. Maybe she might be crackers. In any case, whatever it is she was looking to find here, she hasn't. Not tonight, maybe not ever again. Bottom line is, she can paint the picture of a Grande Olde Powell Estates Christmas all she wants, that postcard idyll of burnt casserole and her mum in a truly horrid Santa hat, but it'll never exist for her again. When the void closed between two worlds, Rose lost a hell of a lot more than just all of time and space at her fingertips.

She lost her roots.

Now she's cast adrift in a sea she has no idea how to navigate, and the alternate-world version of her childhood home is a buoy that's long been cast farther than she can see. It's time, Rose supposes, to learn how to swim. If only it weren't so damn difficult to catch her breath in the deep waters of her new life.

She turns to begin the long walk back to Tyler mansion, her boots sinking into the snow with a curious sense of defeat. In the watery glow of the wavering starlight, every empty street corner is another glaring reminder of all that's gone for her now.

This universe has no big blue police boxes.

"Happy bloody Christmas," Rose mutters, wiping her face with a shaky, mitten-covered hand. "And to all a good night."

-
i will begin again, i will begin again
oh, and maybe the time is right
oh maybe tonight
-

"Buggering hell," Mickey says, and he is as eloquent now as he has always been. Rose slips her hand through his; just because she's masochistic enough to keep coming back to this spot doesn't mean she's masochistic enough to come alone.

"Buggering hell," Rose agrees. Her eyes follow Mickey's. In the sporadic flash of the fireworks overhead, the building in front of them looks even more run-down than it did almost a week ago. So, more authentic, at any rate. She sighs and shoves a hand through her hair.

"'S this why you've been actin' the way you have, then?" Mickey rolls his eyes at the confusion on Rose's face. "Well, you've been mad, Rose. Blowin' up at Jackie all the time, leavin' Christmas dinner halfway through, makin' me leave the New Year's party early--is this why? 'Coz of this?"

Rose sighs again, looking away at the incredulity in Mickey's voice. "Can't help it," she says shortly. "Mickey, I know I've been a cow, it's just--look." Her eyes when they meet Mickey's again are pleading. "Doesn't it look like home?"

A little blonde thing chooses that moment to follow her boyfriend out onto the balcony, confetti raining down around the teens as they share a laugh. The man is tall and skinny and dark and the girl is tiny and loud and bright, and they duck their heads together like they're sharing the secrets of the universe, beer bottles knocking together as their giggles filter into the clean night air. Rose feels something harden in her belly. Exactly a year ago, that was her. Her and the Doctor, watching the sky on New Year's Day. Relearning one another. Standing still in a world they were already leaving behind.

She reckons it's a healthy dose of irony that all she has left of her old life are the parts she never really appreciated at all.

"It's not home, Rose." Mickey's voice is hard, and it pulls Rose from her musings. It's been so long she's heard that tone. She almost doesn't know what to do. "Rose, listen to me." Mickey's hand squeezes hers, an urgency she's not used to feeling from him. "This place only looks like the Estates. Only looks like our past. It ain't, and it don't do you any good to keep coming here so you can wish on ghosts." His breath is like a ghost itself, rising sorrowfully in the air as he exhales. "Let it go, Rose. What's done is done an' we gotta start making a new way."

"I don't want a new way, Mickey," and there's no heat to her words, just sadness. "I want the way I had. I wanna see the stars and meet new species and watch history as it's happening and fight revolutions." She shakes her head, self-pity pressing against her eyes. "I wasn't made for standing still."

Mickey's hand jerks out of hers. "And what, everyone else is? You're the only one who's got an itch to do some traveling? Here's a bit of news, Rose. No one's happy with their own sorry lives. Haven't you learned that by now? Think your mum wants to putter 'round the mansion, waitin' for you to finally join the land of the living? Think Pete likes directing Torchwood but never seein' beyond his own planet? We move on, though, Rose. We make do, 'cause we all have stars in our eyes, but not all of us have the chance to escape in a big blue box."

Rose steps back as if she's been slapped. The air is suddenly sharp. "You did," she breathes accusingly. "You were lucky enough."

Mickey touches her elbow and his expression is almost compassionate now. "Yeah, Rose, I was. I was lucky. I had my go with the universe, got to see a thing or two. I'll never forget that. But everything ends, Rose. Everything has it's time. And now, Rose, it's time for you to make a decision about where you'd rather be--livin' in a past that's impossible to get back to, or here, moving on with your family, with people who love you an' always will. Always."

It's the way Mickey keeps saying her name that finally pierces the teary frustration building up all cold and thick in the back of her throat. His voice is cajoling and stern, soft and steely, and even though somewhere along the way, Mickey Smith grew up to be a man, he's still the boy Rose has always known. He only wants the best for her. He only wants happiness for her. He only wants to remind her that she is still Rose, Doctor or not.

And Rose stands there, huddled in the cold, wondering if she is still that Rose, the sort of Rose to whom he would promise 'always.'

She finds herself split down the middle with a curious disjunction. One half of her is straining to make a place here, her eyes wistful and large, skyscrapers looming in the reflection of her irises, the wind at her back as she turns towards a future that she could build, if she tried. But the other half is weightless and longing, tilting towards another dimension, memories too deeply ingrained in the beats of her heart to be remade into anything else. Rose feels the way her path diverges into a winding road, how her journey splits into branches of could-be's and what-if's and if-you'd-only-try's.

And she knows what her choice is, what her choice has always been, what her choice always will be, because one day, a Time Lord showed her everything and now everything is exactly what she wants. No less, no matter what.

"I'm gonna make the decision you don't want me to make," she whispers, and Mickey's shoulders slump the way they always do when she says the inevitable.

"I figured," Mickey says evenly, and Rose loves him more in that moment than she ever has. "It just matters that you make it, yeah?"

Rose looks back to the shadow of this world's Powell Estates, and she knows that chasing ghosts--or gingerbread houses--is a slippery slope. Especially because she still believes (still has to believe) that one day, however far in the future, she will have the real thing again.

"Yeah," she echoes, and takes Mickey's hand, lets him lead her away. A new year, a new start. She hopes. For the first time in a long while, she hopes.

Above her, constellations begin to blink out.

-
some say things worth having take some time
as they get older, they get better
-

The world is ending and the Tylers are having a party.

Rose supposes she shouldn't be surprised--her mum always did enjoy a good time, and Pete's a bit of big news--can always be counted on to throw the smashing sort of celebrations that only the very rich can afford. And even though the skies outside are filled with planets that shouldn't be in this star system, let alone in Earth's orbit, there's loads of fancy dress and chattering people and the occasional couple snogging in the corner. Life, Rose decides, stops for no one and nothing.

Not even for the bloody apocalypse.

Even now, her fingers ache for the familiar holster of the dimension blasters, for the smooth curve of the dimension cannons, for the circle of the dimension transports. She wants to be amidst all the tech and the tools of what she knows, the madcap efforts to get back to where her feet feel right, where her legs feel sure. The basements of Torchwood Institute hold the only key to the salvation of this reality (and all realities, if Rose's suspicions are correct) and instead of getting that last calculation, instead of testing one more prototype, she's toasting to a couple that shouldn't even be.

Tonight is the anniversary of Jackie and Pete Tyler. The twenty-second, if they were going by Rose's internal clock. Or the twenty-seventh, because time here moves differently and it's this world's calculations they've all got to abide by. Her mum doesn't mind, even if it makes her seem older, because really, it's a sign of the most lasting relationship she's ever had, isn't it? Twenty-six years, and Jackie Tyler couldn't be happier, if the smile on her face and the ring on her finger is any indication.

Against all odds, two misfit halves have cleaved together into something quite whole, and even in the midst of the way everything is breaking down, Rose looks to them as an anchor.

It makes her head hurt, the improbability of it, and her heart, and so she just toasts to an old love grown new, to something lost found once again, and she tries not to think of what they had to give up to get one another.

Tries not to think of what she's giving up, tries only to think of what she's getting. A second chance.

Her palm curves against her thigh, and not for the first time, Rose is at a loss as to what the hell she's doing here. Even Mickey's back at the labs now, working his magic, tinkering with the same sort of grim determination that makes Rose think there'll never be another man quite like him. He understands her in ways no one else will, and right now, he's the only one who want to go back home the same way she does.

His gran is dead, and he has nowhere left to turn but up and over and above and through, straight on through all the walls. With her, with Rose. Because neither of them belong anymore, do they, and just like back home, they'll link arms and forge their own way.

There's a side of her now that's buried in the silky folds of this long, black dress, more expensive than a month's worth of wages at Henriks back home. It's the side of her that's got on wobbly heels and glistening pearls, French manicure and a finger full of rings, the part of her that is twenty one years old and living, because by instinct, that is what she does.

And then there's the side of her that's watching this party unfold, and instead of champagne, her lips taste like time and space and the electricity crackling through the void, something old and brilliant and so inexplicable that it can't be anything but the recollection of a left-behind life. There's the side of her with dark roots and bold brows, the birthmark on her left arm and the crooked toe on her right foot. It's the pieces of herself that were born in another universe and belong in that universe, the pieces that she can't compartmentalize to fit into this place the way everyone wants her to try and do.

It's like she's a puzzle piece that's warped around the edges, and it's strange how even now, in the microseconds before she blinks, Rose can see a waver, a wobble, and she knows it's the world around her rearranging itself to explain her very existence.

"You do that a lot, you know," Pete says, and he's holding the squirmy little bundle of her brother in his arms. Tony is too young yet to have definite features, but she sees the Tyler jaw, there in the muddle. The round of his nose, the pink of his cheeks. It's weird to glimpse the ways in which her universe comes together with this universe in a perfectly harmonious manner, whereas she's like an orchestra with half the string section missing.

"What do I do?" Rose asks, distracted by the metaphors and the analogies floating around in her head. She finds that putting all the wordless emotions into syllables and sentences has made things a bit easier. A bit more solid, something tangible to process. And poetic, at any rate. A bit Doctorish, if she does say so--taking something complicated and making it so paltry human brains can understand. She smiles.

The world shimmers again; she blinks.

"That, the blinking," Pete comments, shifting Tony in his arms. Rose longs to touch the man who's become a father to her, to the baby who is her blood, but it's better to start cutting away at connections, she knows. Better to start shrinking back, because the barrier between worlds is loosening, falling away, and the moment her fingers brush that downy skin, she could just blink into another reality, easy as pie. It's better to keep saying goodbye with every breath, rather than miss out on any last words she might get this time around.

Pete looks at her shrewdly. "You're leaving soon," he comments, "aren't you?" The baby stirs, and Rose looks into her drink, into the dark, swirling depths. Somewhere, she hears her mother laughing, and she knows with pained certainty that this might be the last time she ever hears it again.

But tonight is their night, they've worked so hard to get here. And so, wordlessly raising her glass, Rose leaves his question unanswered and her gift to them is what she doesn't say: that really, in her heart, she left a long time ago.

-
one number older, another year younger
i'll go to your party, you'll come to mine
-

Once everything is said and done, Rose isn't sure whether fifteen years have passed or five. The Doctor--the Doctor in the blue suit--tells her it's been more like a year, and she believes him because he's clever like that, but also because she'd hate to think she's really as old as she feels.

A circular journey if there ever was one, life in the parallel world feels a bit--well, infuriating, at first. The only solace is the Doctor's shoulder against her own, the fact that of all the goals that occupied all her thoughts every single moment from the first day on that beach to the very last, at least she got one of the things--the most important of the things-- she was searching for:

A hand to hold.

It's not perfect, because nothing ever is. She's finding out more and more about that sort of truth, because she sort of has to--stuck here, now. For the foreseeable future, but for just one moment when she grabbed the Doctor by the collar and kissed him like she'd never before dared to, the future was more than just a tangle of lines, of things left undone. The future was this: madcap adventures and stories to tell, adjustments to make and things to learn. Curiosity and pain and incredulity and laughter and everything bubbling over until Rose is sure that her human body can't contain all these human emotions.

But then there are also days when truths hit too close to home and the scope of her vision includes a life that looms ever closer. Gray hairs, bad hips, birthdays, mortality--it's not exactly the stuff of legends, and Rose hates that she's always surprised now when confronted with the fact of her own limitations, of his.

The Doctor falls sick exactly one year after he first crosses over into this world with her. Exactly one year, and because there's been a lot of everyone making allowances since the whole of existence almost ended, Rose lets her mum throw a rager of a bash just in his honor.

Late at night, after the birthday cake and the presents and the mini-pony, he cuddles up to her in bed, so young, in such a young body, but with such old eyes, and he thanks her for giving him the first--best--birthday he's ever had. She passes her hand over his cheek and feels his skin burning with fever. His eyes shine with heat, and his temperature is so high when Rose finally insists he lets her check it that they have no choice but to bundle him up and take him to the emergency room, and it's an entire night of bated breath before the attending physician declares the fever has broken and that it's alright to see him.

Rose walks into the room and flinches, unnerved by the sight of the Doctor buried under linens and dwarfed by a massive hospital bed. She ties her balloon to the bedpost, and then takes a seat, quietly noting that he's conned a nurse into giving him a birthday lolly as well. Her smile does not let the anxiety in her stomach abate.

She takes his hand as he blinks blearily awake, a glad sort of warmth touching the clammy features of his face as he looks at her.

"Hello," he says quietly. "Sorry to give you a scare." She gives him a soft sort of smile, winds her fingers more securely through his.

"Half human," she finally muses, her voice thin."You're half human." It feels like the first time she's ever said it out loud, despite being faced with it every day since coming back. It's strange, how finally naming a thing gives it power over a person, she thinks.

She gazes down at the easy fit of closely-clasped palms. It's the same as it's ever been, the way her hand looks in his, but it's impossible all of a sudden to forget what's changed. His hospital bracelet winds around his wrist, and she plucks against the plastic, runs her fingers across the seam of their fingers joined together. Is this what she fought so hard for, this shaky life, this wibbly-wobbly dangerous game of never knowing what's next? It's what she had in the other world, but this--this living as humans do, as people do, it's as new to her all of a sudden as it must be to him.

Uncertainty carves its mark on her face, deepening a delicate line between her brows, hardening the soft angle of her jaw.

He looks up at her, amused. Reaches his hand to smooth the shadows from under her eyes, a slow, deliberate touch. His thumb trips across her cheek, following the curve of her ear, pressing gently against the hot, soft skin of her neck. He feels her pulse, and his eyes go dark.

"One heart now, yeah," he murmers easily. "But! Half Time Lord, too," and then there is a tickle in her mind, a teasing sort of push at the doors right behind the bridge of her nose, where if she closes her eyes, all her secrets seem to fall.

A memory pops up in the dark of her mind, an image like a flash of light: the Doctor in his blue suit, his hair falling messily over his forehead, his eyes bright with some wild joy. She'd watched him while flying the TARDIS, his face illuminated in the gentle glow of the interior, and for a moment, she hadn't wondered who he was or who he wasn't. For a moment, she'd just known that this was a part of the Doctor, her Doctor, clever and impossible and wonderful and just the slightest bit of terrible under all that benevolence. Nothing had felt more right in that instant than sliding her hand over the panel, interlinking her fingers with his, and smiling as wide as she could.

The pressure in her head decreases as suddenly as it began, and she blinks at him, feeling unaccountably shaken.

The Doctor speaks haltingly, looks unspeakably tired from even that amount of psychic exertion. "More than anything, I want to be that man you see in your mind, Rose. Indomitable, intense, very good-looking. Infallible by the common cold. But I'm not, am I?" His voice fades a bit. "I'm something different, and we're still only just learning that." He touches her hair, and the way he moves, like his bones are brittle and his breath is gone, is such a chilling foreshadow of the future that Rose buries her face in his shoulder.

"Don't you ever think," he says, and even now there is that familiar sense of awe in his voice, "Only one year old, and already such new wonders to be seen! What else might there be to discover about this body?"

She doesn't know, but as she kisses him on the cheek, bristly skin under her lips, Rose promises him that they will find out together.

finis.

rgruch@gmail.com — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 03:14:12 GMT

I'm deleting that last post, just because it makes me sort of sick to look at it and be reminded constantly, and it really strikes me that this is the internet and you can't always moderate what sort of reaction others will have to the bits and pieces you choose to share. So for my own sake, buhleeted! But I'm making this post to thank all of you who left me hugs and such good advice, thank you all so much and I'm really grateful for it!

<3

rgruch@gmail.com — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 04:28:58 GMT

So basically I just ran screaming from the living room because there is a wasp zooming around quite merrily, trying to figure out which bit of succulent human flesh it wants to BURY ITS STINGER INTO.

Well, not really, but ew. My mum is sleeping downstairs, is it rude of me to leave her to the wasp's mercy? I am too frightened to go back downstairs and go mano a mano with this giant spawn of insect hell, though.

Then I stupidly Googled wasps to figure out whether it was one, and now I AM HAUNTED by the images. Haunted.

In other news. Dr. Horrible does it again. Nathan Fillion is still doing weird things to my ovaries, but what a jerk! AND OH NEIL PATRICK HARRIS, how I love thee. Felicia has a nice voice as well. It's all shaping up nicely, but I LOVELOVELOVE Bad Horse. WATCH IT, PEEPS.

Also, re: Hamlet pics? Who else gets nostalgic looking at how long David's hair is? I miss S2, when it was longer and he looked more carefree...I'm starting to think the shorter hair was to make him look older/skinner, 'cause to me, it does, and I DON'T LIKE IT. Bring back the luxurious strands. Mmm.

Nothing of substance to say, bbs, I apologize!

rgruch@gmail.com — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 20:05:01 GMT

Okay, I just need to get this out.

ROBERT PATTINSON. RPATTZ. ON WHAT OPIUM-DEN PLANET DO YOU LIVE, WHERE STEPHANIE MEYER WRITES "so much more...based in the real world than the fantasy world." I WOULD REALLY LIKE TO KNOW THIS, BECAUSE WHEN I WAS FINALLY COMPELLED TO PICK UP THE BOOKS, AND THEN I READ THEM AND THEN WANTED TO KILL MYSELF BECAUSE THE FLASHBACKS TO MY TWELVE YEAR OLD SELF WERE JUST TOO MUCH, I DISCOVERED THAT THE TWILIGHT SERIES ARE FLOATING OFF IN FANTASY LAND EVEN MORE THAN THE FANS WHO READ THE BOOK AND THINK BELLA SWAN IS SO UTTERLY COOL AND LIKE, OMG, THE BEST EVAR.

I AM SORRY TO USE CAPSLOCK ON YOU, RPATTZ, 'COZ I LOVED YOU AS CEDRIC. BUT YOU TRIED TO GIVE TWILIGHT MORE SUBSTANCE (THAT IT WILL NEVER HAVE) AT THE EXPENSE OF HARRY POTTER, WHICH WAS LOADS BETTER AND MORE ENTERTAINING AND YES, REALISTIC, THAN TWILIGHT COULD EVER HOPE TO BE. PLZ TO BE GOING BACK TO LOOKING PRETTY AND 'DAZZLING' BECAUSE ANYTHING MORE AND I MAY HAVE TO RENOUNCE YOUR SMIRKING ASS FOREVER.

Okay, so. That craziness aside. Seriously? I can see getting into the Twilight movie/books for all the pretty, and for the trashy romance novel aspect, but you know what? Trashy romance novels have more weight than Twilight. Stephanie Meyer depresses me on a continual basis, because I'm like, WOW, I use adjectives as much as she does, DO I SOUND LIKE THAT? OMFG.

ALSO?

Her vampire lore sucks, just saying.

Oh Rpattz. I see how you can get pissed that the HP movies shafted you a bit, but Cedric Diggory was a character rife with possibilities, and that ending scene where you're dead? THAT CORPSE WAS A MILLION TIMES MORE ENDEARING AND BELIEVABLE THAN THE CORPSE YOU WILL PLAY IN THE TWILIGHT MOVIES.

JKR created a world that has so much possibility, not to mention deals with themes like responsibility and heroicism, NOT TO MENTION has female characters that aren't ornamental, so in conclusion? Badly written conclusion?

HARRY POTTER>TWILIGHT.

Again, if you're a Twilight fan, probably shouldn't click.

IN OTHER NEWS: MY FLIST IS AWESOME!

rgruch@gmail.com — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 06:17:19 GMT

I think compliments make people feel warm and squishy inside. I like feeling warm and squishy. So? Logical conclusion: PLEASE FEED?

ಌ~~love~~ compliments don't cost a thingಌ