#wanton cage aux folles

[cosmictuesdays]

A Need-To-Know Basis

(Thanks to @ifeveristoday and @yoursummerfrost for helping me put this together.)

I was thinking about how in my kidfic, Spike and Buffy aren’t ever telling Joe a lot of details about their lives before he came along, like his mother dying twice. And that got me thinking.

How many people - for a given value of "people" - on God's green earth - discounting those off it - actually knew Buffy died in "The Gift"?

- Buffy herself - Spike - Dawn - Willow - Xander - Giles - Tara - dead as of the last scene in "Not Fade Away", and not a vampire-style dead, either; really and fully dead - Anya - also dead - Angel - Cordelia - dead - Wesley - dead - Gunn - Lorne - Fred - dead enough to just say dead - Glory's minions

We can presume Faith knew, either through Slayer dreams or someone having the good grace to tell her. We can also presume that Glory's minions are themselves dead, ideally with Spike hunting them down and killing them over the summer after season 5 as a suitably violent form of grief and mourning - and if there's fic of this, please let me know because I'd love to read it. But to the best of my knowledge, there's no lines of dialogue to cite or moments that point to textual on-screen evidence.

And that's it. Not a whole lot of people. Enough to keep it on a need-to-know basis, with the likely outcome being that it's decided nobody needs to know.

It's something which could be found out, whether consulting people not from God's green earth, oracles, other Slayers currently active as of "Chosen" that might find out through shared Slayer dreams, asking the living people on the list some very persuasive questions - and in the end, as of "Not Fade Away", it's still a short list.

Similarly, there's not a whole lot of people who ever knew Dawn was the Key:

- Dawn - Buffy - Joyce - dead - Giles - Willow - Xander - Tara - dead again - Anya - still dead - Spike - The Monks of the Order of Dagon - dead - Ben - dead - Glory - dead - Glory's minions, which are still presumed dead

Again, it's enough people to fit around a dinner table.

How many people are completely aware of what Spike did to earn his soul?

- Spike - The Lurking Cave Lurker Demon What Lurks In The Cave, or Lurky for short*

A lot of people know Spike has a soul, and a few of them are aware of the general circumstances, but nobody's yet told anyone anything about the details of what happened in that cave.

*It's been hypothesized Lurky's name is Lloyd, based on D'Hoffryn's dialogue: "The flaying of Warren Meers? Oh, truly inspired. That was water cooler vengeance. Lloyd has a sketch of it on his wall." To which I say: I don't buy it. Lurky isn't a Vengeance Demon of D'Hoffryn's stripe. He seems to be pretty secure to stay lurking in his cave and doesn't seem the type for water cooler conversation, however literal or metaphoric that water cooler might be.

Who knows for certain Spike assaulted Buffy in the bathroom?

- Buffy, who was there - Spike, who did it - Xander, who found Buffy and put the pieces together - Dawn, because Xander told her

Spike alluded to the vague concept of what he did to Clem without mentioning any specifics. Willow seemed to have some idea, but quickly moved onto other tasks at hand and let the subject drop. There's nothing to say she couldn't be told later, and it's possible someone decided to fill Giles in on it. But as far as I can remember, we have nothing that we can use to definitively argue that anyone besides those four know.

It's honestly pretty fascinating to think about the limited information characters have to work with, and what they’re all walking around with inside of their heads.

#wanton cage aux folles #buffy the vampire slayer #btvs

[cosmictuesdays]

So many different places to call home.

I've threatened, and since had requested, that I write up my notes and thoughts on how I'd redo Angel the Series season 5. I already largely outlined them in an email a while back, which simplifies the process considerably. That, and borrowing the good ideas Ginger sent back in her response to that email, I figure tonight might as well be the night for it. I wouldn't redo all five seasons of the show, because I'd rather not rewrite the whole thing from scratch. I'd rather focus on theoretical alterations of certain parts of season 5 for greater narrative coherence. While this does keep some of Whedon's ass-butt decisions, I've been in enough fandoms for enough time to learn how to focus my energy. All right, that's not entirely true. In this version that lives in my head, there'd be a few lines, and possibly a couple of scenes, about Fred moving into Cordelia's apartment in season 4. Then: Spike comes out of the amulet whole, intact, and corporeal at the end of episode 1. Because they didn't do anything worthwhile with it, getting rid of the concept of a vampire ghost smooths things out considerably. Spike spends a good chunk of episode 2 rallying on about making a grand romantic entrance back into Buffy's life, but then something happens, the sort of thing which compels him to be a white hat that has nothing to do with Buffy and all of the work he has to do to grow into his soul, and he realizes that he's got more to do that has nothing to do with her. The final scene of the episode has him showing up in Angel's office: "You're still here," Angel says. "Today, anyway," Spike replies.

"Destiny" is moved to the third episode of the season, where W&H try to pit the two known heroic souled vampires against each other in a bid to simplify possible destines and prophecies. It doesn't work. Spike growing into his soul - the soul he earned, not the soul he was cursed with - would make for a solid ongoing plot thread through the season, in conversation with, and contrast and counterbalance to, Angel's own journey.

The fourth episode has Xander come to collect Spike at the behest of Buffy, all remaining Slayers and Watchers, and the Scooby Gang, which covers the full cold open. Buffy sent Xander specifically because she knows they can't tempt him with anything. Additionally, framing Xander through the eyes of AtS would show what surviving growing up on the Hellmouth and several years of constant apocalypses would do to an ordinary person, which would honestly be pretty fun to see. Lilah Morgan: "Mr. Harris -" Xander: "No, no, please, Mr. Harris was my father." [Lilah smiles. Xander smiles back, sharply.] "You can call me 'sir.'" [Lilah stops smiling.] Because after the Hellmouth, the ordinary human evil of W&H is small potatoes to Xander. He'd comment that as evil as they are, they want the world to stick around to be evil in, and that's almost relaxing to have to deal with. "You guys, seriously, small potatoes, you don't even want to end the world! It's nice, really. Nobody wanting to eat the sun, nobody wanting to make literal Hell out here, just keep on being evil. I can respect that. I don't support it and would rather see all of you give this up and go join a commune up in Petaluma, but I can respect it." I assume the rest of episode 4 is either filler, as was the case with the Mexican wrestler episode, or it's where we get the werewolf girlfriend. "Damage" is next - the one with Dana, the mentally ill Slayer. Spike's sent to Los Angeles to collect her, along with Andrew and a few other Slayers, and gets his hands cut off for his troubles. They're reattached, and the next episode has him stationed at W&H by Buffy to openly spy on the place. Angel is fine with this. "It means she still cares." "That you're head honcho of Evil Inc." "Yeah, but if she didn't care, she wouldn't send you to spy on me." "I'm spying on W&H." "She still cares." "No she doesn't." And so on and so forth, etc cetera, ad infinitum, ad nauseam. Because the two of them are best when the show remembers they're family. Spike doesn't have the weird sub-plot with the Doyle faker, though Lindsay still tries to play the part. It doesn't work, and he's caught almost immediately, which shifts the power dynamics around enough to give Spike a good amount of stuff to do. Spike's also given freedom to go wherever he wants, and hang out all over the place, and Angel sometimes helps him edit his weekly reports to Buffy in case he missed anything. Everyone knows why Spike is there. This is played for both comedy and drama, because he and Angel grow closer as they keep talking to each other over the course of the season. So we still get moments like "wee little puppet man" and Spike freeing Angel from the parasite that trapped him in those hallucinations because he doesn't care about Angel's privacy. Those kinds of delicious relationship moment which show them as being genuinely close in a way that can't easily be translated to human terms, but the viewing audience easily understands. Out of everyone in the world, they're the ones best qualified to call each other out on their bullshit and when they're indulging their inner blowhard. (Spike leans towards the bullshit, Angel towards being a blowhard. "I know for a fact you spent that decade moping in disco halls." "It was only thirty minutes, and there was just the one werewolf.") "Hell Bound" - the only Angel episode aired with a warning for graphic violence - still happens. It's because of Fred. At some point, someone - possibly Xander, when he collects Spike, or possibly Andrew, when he drops by - comments how few ghosts there are around W&H. How little spirit energy. Magic energy, yes, but the spirits are weak, and few and far between. Unrelated to that, Fred invents some sort of machine to help Phantom Dennis manifest, because they've become friends since she moved into the apartment. It's one of those "gone horribly right" situations, because instead of Spike fighting Pavayne, it's Dennis. He makes Pavayne corporeal at the sacrifice of being able to return to life. He does get a moment of Fred seeing his face, and them being able to smile at each other, before he's whisked off back to the apartment - if he doesn't finally move on from being a ghost and goes into the rest of the afterlife. The back end of the season plays out much as it already did. There'd be a few more lines, here and there, giving reasons and justifications and explanations for why Buffy isn't contacted for whatever reason, and why they're not asking the Slayers for help for one disaster or another. Maybe "they won't get here in time," maybe "they have their own apocalypse," maybe "I have to do this alone and if I come out of it, I'll go see her because I'm Angel and that's what I do." "The Girl in Question" has its plots swapped, so more time is spent on Fred/Illyria and Wesley, and less on Spike and Angel in madcap hijinks in Italy. Also, no Immortal, no casual racism, no Andrew with a bunch of women, no Buffy decoy/fakeout, no explosion destroying Spike's coat. Because this is how I'd do it, and I don't much like any of that. I've read reports Whedon wanted season 6 to be a sort of Mad Max post-apocalyptic scenario, with car chases and big action sequences. I have no plans for season 6, not even theoretical ones. Mostly, I'm fine with Angel being asked how they survived the final battle, and Spike answering, "Heroically!" or "We almost didn't" and not elaborating past that. Because the audience can fill in that part themselves.

#wanton cage aux folles

[cosmictuesdays]

Too many are the best intentions.

There's a trend in Buffy fandom - at least, in the segment of the fandom that writes fic and posts it to the Archive of Our Own - to do large-scale full-series rewrites, primarily fix-its and canon divergences. The majority of these involve someone going back in time and living through a good deal of their past with the foreknowledge to avoid mistakes. It's a trope that's unintentionally picked up a good deal of resonance in the wake of Avengers: Endgame, and it's a trope that's reliably done the same way in a lot of stories. I understand the impulse and impetus behind the base idea, and I like the "Dear Whedon, Fuck You, Strong Letter To Follow" approach the fandom is taking, and it's mostly the surface details of the mechanics that change. It's a fairly reliable idea. As doing something fairly reliably isn't my jam, I wondered how I'd do a "relive one's life with timey wimey shenanigans" fic. Then I thought how nearly all of the fics I've seen involve someone going back to the past and coming back to the present one day at a time. I haven't seen anything involving someone going to the future and then coming back to the present. Especially not with someone living their life day by day without the preparation of having gone through it at least once already, but instead with knowledge of what's to come. Not so much "Buffy is shot from 1997 to 2005." More "Buffy is shot from 1997 to 2005 and gets sent back to 1997." Or whatever date range you like. Could be 1998 to 2368 and back. Could be 1997 to 2001 and back. The important part is Buffy gets sent someplace later in the timeline and then gets shot back with knowledge of what's going to happen. It wouldn't be a "go back and fix it" situation because she doesn't know what, if anything, needs fixing, much less how to go about fixing it. She's working from incomplete information and a biased point of view, so there's no "kill Ben/ally with this person sooner/stay home that one night" checklist. Additionally, a lot of the fics have someone move through time willingly in order to make things better. Having someone moved against their will presents a new facet that I'd like to see explored. Maybe someone said, "We need a Slayer here, now, in The Future. Grab her from that portal, and - oh, crap, we can't keep her here, send her back as soon as we figure out how to PUT her back." (Buffy: What the fuck.) Maybe someone did want to send a warning to the past, and their method of grabbing Buffy from her present and putting her back didn't work out the way they thought it would, because these things need specifics they didn't think to provide. (Buffy: What the fuck.) Maybe someone thought that bringing Buffy forward would solve their problems, possibly by grabbing her from a specific point in the past and circumventing the time in between, and things don't work out as planned, so she has to be put back as best they could. (Buffy: What the fuck, people.) Maybe Buffy herself thought going to the future would give her a solid idea of what not to do next, but it just made things even more difficult. (Buffy: Oh, fuck me.) Mostly, I'd like to see something meditating on and wrestling with Buffy's conflicting drives to both accept the destiny placed on her shoulders, as she did in the end of "Prophecy Girl," and to break the chains fate forged for her and be the one to say "I flunked the written." For Buffy to want to change things which haven't happened yet without knowing where she isn't supposed to end up would change her considerably. Season 7 Buffy saying "The mission is what matters" has supporting context. Season 2 Buffy saying that would be chilling. This isn't a story or narrative so much as an idea, and I don't know what else to hang it with, so I can't say what I'd do with it. Other than share it in the hope that getting it out might rattle a few other pieces into place, or at least that someone else on the internet might like the concept, too. (Convincing people about what she now knows would be a hard sell. If she even wants them on her side for all this. "Telling them's going to change what I saw. Screw it, I'm telling them.") ("I've got a little sister coming, and -" Giles blanches, thinking that he didn't remember condoms on the police car. "Not you, you lusty stevedore" she tells him with a smile.)

#wanton cage aux folles

[cosmictuesdays]

Spinning through the town.

If filming schedules had allowed Brad Kane to return to Buffy as Tucker Wells for season 6, his presence would've gone beyond making a few parts of season 6 make a little more sense. We'd also have gotten Jonathan as part of the Scooby Gang in season 7. Tucker was supposed to be the leader of the nerd trio, which offers better reasoning for why they went after Buffy as their official nemesis. Given that neither Jonathan or Warren have any real grudge against her - Jonathan's a small, weak coward who wants the easy way out as we saw in "Superstar" but still liked her and her friends, and Warren's a creepy misogynistic asshole but didn't hold anything against her after season 5 - having that extra motivating factor beyond James Bond/Venture Brothers-type genre conventions. To imagine Jonathan going along with it because he wants to be accepted by other men is already part of the show. To imagine Warren going along with it and eclipsing Tucker in terms of mundane human evil would've made for a strong plot thread running through the season. To imagine Tucker and Jonathan in the school basement in "Conversations With Dead People," for Tucker the one to deliver the "I still care about them" speech and Jonathan the one to kill his friend to open the seal, is in keeping for both characters. Tucker tried to murder his classmates because a girl turned him down: for him to talk about time going by and everything dropping away would show his capacity for change and growth. And it'd be just at the end of his life, in the classic Whedon mode. Jonathan stabbing his friend in the gut because his other friend told him to would show that he's still a small, weak coward who hasn't changed much. He's forgiven a lot because of Danny Strong's performance and the Class Protector award scene. Much of what he does later in the series breaks the goodwill granted to him. From everything we saw of him up until then, he totally would've stabbed a friend in the guts for an empty shell of a promise. I love what Andrew brought to season seven, and his turn in "Storyteller" is simultaneously a great metatextual and narrative episode. I'm glad we got what we did of him, and what Tom Lenk brought to the performance. Even so, putting Jonathan in Andrew's place would mean more than just another good character added to the cast list. It would've been the culmination of seven seasons of a slow-burning character who wasn't even named for his first few appearances - up until "Go Fish," Strong was just listed as "Student" in the credits. Imagining Jonathan begging Buffy for mercy as she holds him over the seal and seeing him finally become strong enough to be accepted by a group he holds in such esteem, becoming the person he always wanted to be at the end of the world, is very much the kind of narrative the show would've taken joy in telling. But shooting schedules didn't allow. So we got Andrew being the most delightful guestage ever to appear on TV, up to and including Theon Greyjoy, and Strong giving the "I still care about them" speech to break our hearts and then going off to win Oscars and Emmys and punch Roger Sterling in the crotch. So it pretty much works out.

#buffy the vampire slayer #btvs #wanton cage aux folles

[cosmictuesdays]

Big Bad Benevolent Boss.

One of the Buffy podcasts I follow, Buffering the Vampire Slayer, just started covering season four. And it's really making me think: Sunnydale only really started going off the rails after season three. Not the show itself - it did as well as it could with what it had, a piece of ongoing serialized media balancing being a piece of art and a marketable commodity that almost never knew if it'd be renewed for another year or not. I mean Sunnydale as a town. As a fictional location that served as the setting for the narrative. Within that narrative, its stability began cracking after the death of the Mayor. Because that guy was a great and wonderful villain who had the strengths of unfettered ambition and personnel management. He knew what happened in his town, and I'm not saying it was a good place to live by any means. I'm saying he knew how to run the place to make sure it stayed around. Stability. Organization. Management. I cite the Initiative as proof of this. Canon-wielding it onto the existing world isn't hard: recruiting Marcy from "Out of Mind, Out of Sight" into the shady government organization, the army base where they stole the rocket launcher, and the fact that no one as civic-minded as the Mayor would've let a giant underground base get built in his town without him knowing about it. Before Maggie Walsh set up shop, it didn't seem to have much focus on capturing, killing, and experimentation. Just on existing as a military force that knew demons existed and how to fight them. After the Mayor's death, the Initiative probably looked at the power vacuum above them and began working on the stuff they'd always wanted to pursue but never got approval for. Hence the capturing and experimenting, and the whole Adam plotline. Nobody was saying "no" to the crazy ideas anymore. (Momentary digression: please imagine the Mayor touring the Initiative facilities and clapping with glee over the idea of putting giant murals of monumental American public works projects on every wall. Hoover Dam over here, part of the Interstate Highway System over there, the greatest hits of the National Park Service all along this one corridor...) The Trio from season six would've been recruited within minutes of breaking out onto the scene. Glory, exiled Hellgod, versus Pure Giant Snake Demon would've been a battle for the comic book pages because early 2000s CGI would've just been sad - and it would've happened because he'd have known she was around and he wouldn't want his town sucked into the nothingness between worlds. Like I said, Buffy was a piece of ongoing serialized media that was making itself up as it went along, and did a pretty good job of it. Some of the stuff it did was planned out years in advance, and sometimes it scrambled to keep going on a week-to-week basis. And every so often, things lined up in such a way as to make it appear like that was the idea all along. Which itself is something that you can only get in this sort of work, and that's to be celebrated.

#btvs #buffy the vampire slayer #wanton cage aux folles

[cosmictuesdays]

Chapters: 27/27 Fandom: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV) Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Drusilla/Spike Characters: Spike (BtVS), Drusilla (BtVS), Buffy Summers, Dawn Summers, Joyce Summers Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Human, Friendship, Disability, Mental Illness Summary:

There's still a Sunnydale. There's still a Buffy Summers living on Revello Drive. There's still strange people with business of their own coming to town. Except this time around, Spike and Drusilla didn't come for the Hellmouth or the Slayer. They weren’t looking for power or fame or glory, and they weren't staying so they could end the world. This time around, it was just as good a place as any other to stop for a while until they were ready to move on again. They weren't expecting anything more.

This time around, they stayed because they found out it was a place they might have a chance at a future.

#buffy the vampire slayer #btvs fic #btvs #wanton cage aux folles

[cosmictuesdays]

Chapters: 1/27 Fandom: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV) Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Drusilla/Spike Characters: Spike (BtVS), Drusilla (BtVS), Buffy Summers, Dawn Summers, Joyce Summers Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Human, Friendship, Disability, Mental Illness Summary:

There's still a Sunnydale. There's still a Buffy Summers living on Revello Drive. There's still strange people with business of their own coming to town. Except this time around, Spike and Drusilla didn't come for the Hellmouth or the Slayer. They weren’t thinking of finding power or fame or glory, and they weren't staying so they could end the world. This time around, it was just as good a place as any other to stop for a while until they were ready to move on again. They weren't expecting anything more.

This time around, they stayed because they found out it was a place they might have a chance at a future.

-

And we’re off!

#buffy the vampire slayer #btvs #btvs fanfiction #btvs fic #wanton cage aux folles

[cosmictuesdays]

Hypothesis

Vampires in the Buffyverse don’t need to eat anything besides blood to survive - if they do, it’s only for the fun of it. Sometimes there are side-effects, like getting drunk off enough alcohol, which raises further questions about their physiology but it’s not something they need to drink. They drink because they want to.

It’s pretty clear some foods are more fun than others. I’ve seen it posited that vampires would prefer hot chocolate to solid chocolate because, what with vampires’ bodies being room-temperature, they’d be able to better enjoy the flavors when they’re served warm.

It’s established Spike likes salty, spicy, fatty, snacky foods, like hot wings and fried onions, or anything with a strong texture, like Weetabix in blood. It’s also shown Spike’s a weird vampire for enjoying eating. We see other vampires drink, but not eat. So Spike’s eating foods that he finds fun, for both texture and taste reasons.

He’s also established as a dedicated smoker.

My hypothesis isn’t that vampires have a bad sense of taste, so they gravitate towards foods with strong and simple flavors. My hypothesis is that Spike likes eating for the physical sensations thereof and he tends to gravitate towards foods he can taste through all the accumulated tar.

#buffy the vampire slayer #spike #wanton cage aux folles

[cosmictuesdays]

Chat silliness.

CosmicTuesdays: Aww, Connor. Turning into Pete Campbell was an improvement on your life. Though I keep expecting him to shout "NOT GREAT, BOB" at someone. Petra: Yeah, there's a certain amount of "Even Pete Campbell is better than this." CosmicTuesdays: It'd be hilarious to see Pete start punching things with demon strength. Petra: Yes. CosmicTuesdays: Don: Yes, yes, Pete go punchy now, we get it. Petra: He'd be SO unimpressed. CosmicTuesdays: Roger: Good God, man! We're on the 37th floor! Don't throw him at the window, throw him at the elevator! Until, eventually, Roger goes, "...you know what? Pete, throw him out the window."

#wanton cage aux folles

[cosmictuesdays]

The stronger the wind is, the stronger the tree.

The vampires on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel don't have a culture. They've got traditions and customs, like not going out on Halloween, transmitted information and oral histories, like the Whirlwind's notoriety and the near-mythic Slayer, and the occasional prophecy or cult of personality, but no culture. No society as such. It reminds me a bit of childlore and other parts of children's culture, where it's only tangentially connected to the surrounding civilization. They're so bereft of anything - any connections whatsoever - that the moment someone says "I'm going this way" they've got people following them. Usually vampire society is shown as something that's existed for thousands of years with all sorts of small details, elaborate hierarchies and aristocracies, and established protocols and rituals, like what to do if you make a new vampire. Sometimes it's completely absent and vampires are non- social solitary predators. Every so often, it's shown as something in flux and ongoing development, but I've never seen anything with vampires creating a society of their own. It'd take an immense shift in the entire dimensional paradigm to get vampires to talk to each other long enough and consistently enough to make something which could be accurately called a culture. And it was when I was discussing the parallels between Spike and Konstantin Bothari - two monstrous people that devote themselves to becoming heroes and take meaning in their lives from being a beloved woman's dog - that I realized the Vorkosigan Saga had the ideal framework I could hang these thoughts on. As ever, would that I had world enough and time; instead, at a friend's request, a write-up it is. With about 6,000 words under the cut in three parts - the cultural framework and general backstory, the crossover narrative itself, and a crossover pairing of happy monsters - to avoid breaking anyone’s screens.

Vampires are monotheists. They refer to their god in euphemism, by her title, because her current name isn't known and her old names aren't to be spoken aloud. They call her Slayer, as she was in life. In all of her lives. Her face is never shown in the same way her names aren't used, especially when there's no knowing what her next face might look like. She's not here, but it's understood she may yet return, if needed. So vampires work to make sure she's no longer needed. They swear on her bones, her eyes, her hands, her mercy, her grace. Her name, all the ones she's had and all that may yet come.Vampires work to be good, to let her know that she's not needed. To make sure they never see the face she may yet have. Once a year, on the day the last known Slayer died, they gather and pray that they live to see another year without her. They pray she doesn't return. All that they do, they do for her, to please her. To make her proud, make her happy. To see that she stays kind, to see to it that they never see her again. To make sure she's not needed, and they do her work for her. By her grace, they live. By her mercy. Vampires don't make new vampires on a whim anymore, not for the fun of it, and they certainly don't abandon the newly-made vampire as soon as the deed's done. Depending on where the vampire's made, there are different customs on how it's done - if there's dirt, then there's laying together in it while the transformation takes place - but it's always done at the human's request. It's not offered, as such, and the human has to be turned away, to have the chance to step away if this isn't exactly what they want. Usually it isn't. Sometimes it is. If you're trading one life-ending condition for another, details like breathing don't always matter so much. Vampires throughout the Nexus, including Barrayar, are seen as lower-class, working-class, hard labor class - if a job would be dangerous for a human, try sending a vampire - and while a few of them do rise in society's eyes, most of them stay far down. But that sort of human-style stratification doesn't exist for vampires, not in the same way and not even close. Depending on where the vampire's from, where they were made, lineage can be an incredibly important factor - who made them, who they might make, the unbroken chain up and down the centuries. Or it might not be, if more emphasis is given to the group at large once you become a part of it, one small piece of the network, the net that catches them. In either situation, there's no governing authority determining what's correct or improper. Wherever you find vampires, it's consistent that while there's varying social standings and persons of given amounts of power within the group and over the ones right around them, there's no magistrates, no mayors, no kings. It's all very social, self-governing from within. Not necessarily by committee, but more by non-voting consensus. Some places put more focus on deferring to the ones above them in their lineage, and in other areas, that's much less important and not given nearly the same amount of emphasis. There are rules and customs governing how to eat, where to eat, when to eat. It's always blood, and it's meant to be shared. You eat at a table, sitting with people, holding your bowl in both hands. It'd be rude to do otherwise, especially because it's important to know where everyone's hands are. Blood is bought, and shared, and sometimes it's synthetic human and sometimes it's vat-grown animal and sometimes it came right out of a living thing, but if you're living together, it's strange to eat all by yourself. If you're living alone, all bets are off. But in a shared home, it's expected to be done as a group. Blood can be shared outside the home, in what's usually called a Liquitería or Sangrería or sometimes Hemeteria - ranging in decor from the utmost ethos of a dive bar to a shiny upscale coffee place. But they don't serve their blood "to go." Whatever's ordered, whether it's horse or bear or human, has to be consumed on the premises. Sometimes because of local laws and regulations, other times to prevent controversy from arising. Vampires have gotten pretty good about avoiding human-based conflicts, and at taking care of things among themselves. It's the group that determines and delivers punishments, if necessary. One of the more well-known ones, because of its visibility, is the return of keelhauling. A vampire is stripped naked, save for a chain on their ankle, and thrown into the hard vacuum of space. It's the ultimate in solitary confinement, in its own way. They're left out there for days, sometimes weeks, depending on what they did and how much time they need to give to earn their forgiveness. Vampire houses, when they're built with them in mind and not converted from human usage, have subterranean sleeping areas and don't bother putting in windows except on the highest floor. There's usually sleeping pits, like those old sunken conversation pits from the 1970s, that even come with covers that slide closed, to provide maximum security against any possible sunlight. And because emphasizing communal living in as many ways as they can is nothing but sensible. If you want privacy you can go into a little workroom, and if you want to sleep alone all you need to do is ask. There's a toilet off in the back somewhere in case a human visits, and plenty of soaking tubs to get some warmth into the body before going out and pretending to be harmless for a while. They don't quite do marriage as humans think of the arrangement, but there are ceremonies where a pair of vampires will declare their mutual loyalty to one another in the eyes of their community and before the Slayer, may she ever be merciful. These happen with the community encircling the vampires - a ring around the couple - and also includes both members of the couple each placing a flower crown on the other, if resources permit. If they do, night-blooming jasmine is what's traditional. Daysuits look like a cross between Scorpius' coolant suit, Crichton's vacuum suit, and Aeryn's pilot uniform: sleek, black, intimidating, shouting hi there! I'm a vampire! The open faceplates are highly reflective, both to keep sunlight down and for privacy. Because humans won't see who's inside, just their own faces reflected back. But if two vampires see each other, then they're fine, because there aren't any reflections getting in the way. Vampire culture is precipitated on two things: forcing vampires to get into a position where they have conversations on a regular basis, and supplementary technologies providing assistance and helping humans see them as a different sort of person that shouldn't automatically be killed on sight. Vampires still look at humans and have the instinctive, primary thought, "food." When the situation is such that there's cooperation and mutual benefit, it's easier to push those instincts aside and think "person." But it takes a lot of work for the vampires, more than for the humans. Before vat-grown blood and other such technological developments and the basic idea of culture came along, there were a series of experiments done to figure out how to keep vampires from eating humans. One of them was a mass ensoulling project - cursing a control group with souls to see if that would do it. It didn't, and breaking the mass curse ended up being even more harmful than just killing them would have been, and it ended up as one of the factors involved in the decision to seal off the dimension from everywhere else. It's not that magic vanished and it's not that it faded away and it's not that it was destroyed; it's still here, it's still available with the right tools and the proper knack. It's that this specific dimension got cut off from the rest of them. No more quick trips to Pylea, no more summoning things from the depths and the farthest realms. All that you've got to work with is just what's already here. Throwing up the walls was the best, most effective way to keep the place safe and stop things from getting worse. There was a lot of damage done before the walls went up, and they're not coming down anytime soon. There's two ways in and out: you can blast your way through with the magical equivalent of a tactical nuke, like for Quor'toth, or you can slither your way through the tiniest cracks and holes that will never be completely sealed over. Which is why there's still new vampires coming along, though not nearly as many, or as frequently. - It took throwing up the walls to bring every slithering and creeping thing out of the shadows and into the open for everyone to learn about them. Something suitably terrific and terrifying to push the magic and the dark creatures out into the world's eye forever. Something to get vampires to speak to each other. The realization that where you once had a huge, lush forest, you've got a botanical garden. Beautiful, but not wild. Never wild again. And about 200 years after that, humans start colonizing the galaxy. Just because you can't drive to Pylea doesn't mean you can't ride a rocket ship to outer space. Full-on demons are more or less yellow-billed magpies. They're not endangered, but there's only one place they live, and they can't be found anywhere else no matter how hard you look or how much you want to see them. They just don't live anywhere else but Earth. No matter how far out humans go, demons are staying on that one planet. But vampires can leave, and a lot of them do. Synthetic blood was intended for human use in surgeries and emergency situations, and it's still widely used in those applications. But vampires eat it, and knowing they're eating something that never came from a person helps humans feel a little more at ease around them. Never entirely so, but enough. The best that can be said of it is that it stops vampires from being hungry. It's nutritionally complete and tastes of real blood the way energy bars taste of chocolate, which is just enough to get you to remember the actual flavor and realize the vast gulf between that and what you're eating. But at least you're not hungry anymore. Until the technology comes along to synthesize specific blood types and different animal species, Spike eats his with Sriracha. And sometimes Weetabix, if he's got any. Usually at the same time. He'd been doing Outside, deep-space work - construction and repairs and long- haul spaceflights - for some decades. Angel's still on Earth, and he doesn't leave until there's a terraforming project that opens up. He'd been drifting around at short-term positions - twenty years here, forty there - and wanted something in a long-term scale he could really devote himself to. A couple hundred years at the very least. And terraforming seemed the best fit. Wormhole jumps are bad on vampires - they're the leftover spaces from where the present dimension slips and touches the next one over, a little pocket of in-between that you can slide through if you manage to maneuver your way through that fifth dimension. The works of Winnifed Burkle were some of the founding texts of wormhole theory, and most people have it on good authority that for a vampire, riding through one feels like having your soul ripped out. So to get through them, vampires have to fast for at least a day beforehand, take a heavy dose of the good drugs two hours before, and hide in their cabin in the fetal position because that's how they're staying for at least another eight hours after they get out the other side. Angel wanted to take as few wormhole jumps as he possibly could, so a direct flight to his new jobsite seemed like a good idea. He and Spike parted on good terms, joking over different work positions and what to do when they see each other next. It was 50,000 human colonists to Barrayar, and 1,250 vampires. Then the wormhole closed. Almost immediately after that, the vampires collectively explain that if anything happens to them, the humans are going to be fine, but if anything happens to the humans, the vampires are screwed. So they're pitching in everything behind the humans, and they're there to help any way they can. ("Can I get you something? Soup? Another blanket?" "IT'S JUST THE SNIFFLES." "I'll get you some tea.") It's Barrayar where vampires are integrated into human society, much better than in the Nexus. Even on Earth. They always stand apart, with their own traditions, customs, and belief systems; it's that on Barrayar, there's a level of mutual support and understanding between humans and vampires that isn't seen elsewhere. Usually, vampires are a mix of predator and parasite. It's rare and almost unprecedented for them to be symbiotic. It took Spike a little getting used to, when he arrived. Most people would think it'd be Beta Colony, given its subterranean cities and extensive vat-grown blood options. But it's not exactly friendly towards them - tolerant, to a point, and indulgent, in its own way. Betans think of themselves as providing services and assistive technologies that free vampires from their previously chaotic ways and what they'd call "specialized needs." Vampires wish Betans understood it comes from their social structures. Even when a given vampire predates the technology that allowed their planet to be colonized to begin with - well, Betans can condescend to anyone. It's really part of their charm. Cordelia Vorkosigan couldn't quite understand the level of Barrayaran integration for her first few years living on the planet, how fundamental they are to her new home's culture, and her realization that they're satisfied with how they are. How the way they're living is very much what they want. (To a lot of vampires, post-Time of Isolation Barrayar looks right in a way that only works for beings who think and live in the very long term: big honkin' castles right next to flying cars.) (Beta Colony has the second-biggest population of magical practitioners in the Nexus, right behind Earth. Magicians and witches and wizards skilled enough to slice the electrons off an atom! ...who do a lot of work in research labs where they can pull together a cubic foot of helium for particle accelerators without any fuss.) The six hundred years apart passed one day at a time. There wasn't always much to distinguish one from another, and Spike continued on through them, knowing either faster-than-light technology would come along as promised - they've got spaceships and flying cars and fake gravity and people grown in jars, FTL should be arriving any day now - or there's going to be a new route uncovered at some point. There was one time he miscalculated the dose and timing of the wormhole jump drugs, and wandered out of his cabin in a weird daze - "Are we on a planet?" "...no." "Right. Fake gravity. Forgot we had that now." "Yeah." "Should I get dressed?" "Yes." - and no matter what people say to him, whether or not he knows the precise model and year of a given ship, his vocabulary is always at least twenty years behind. It's fake gravity. It's a spaceship. It's a ship in space. A spaceship! Give him some credit: when he was human, cars hadn't even been invented yet. There was one time he was working Outside in a group, and there was a small accident, an explosion, and his comm suddenly cut off. His crewmates worried until they saw him again, and he seemed to be doing fine, but once they were in the airlock they saw it wasn't a failure of the comms: there was a cut in his suit and all the air had gone out of it. So he couldn't tell them what had happened, or even that he was okay. It nearly made one of his crewmates throw up, because they'd seen people die from exactly that sort of rip, and here Spike is, talking cheerfully and saying he'll fix it with duct tape. Because humans don't survive those things. (Reclamation crews call vampires "twitchers." Because calling them anything more detailed, like "people who are starving and will try to eat you," is exactly the kind of press vampires hate. They're why modern defrosting protocol always involves a heavily armored chamber and readily available bags of blood. Because everyone, especially vampires, understand the necessity of being careful about these things.) There was one time Spike was doing some fine repair work, and by accident and bad luck, got a jolt. Not a big jolt, just a little electric kiss that anyone could shrug off, no damage done - except he still hates electricity, can't stand it, has such issues with the shocks, the one thing that makes him lose it, dropping his fangs and screaming and swearing by the Slayer's blasted blessed cunt and locks himself in his cabin for the rest of the day, and some of the next. He apologizes as best he can, as much as he can, for the rudeness of dropping his fangs in front of humans. But not for how he acted, because he knows he shouldn't have to. Not for that. But there was one day he'll always remember. That's the day one of his crewmates came out to see him standing on the hull, job long since over, staring out into the stars. They want to know if he's okay, if there's anything wrong. No, nothing's wrong, not at all: "That's my sun," he says. "There. That one," he points to a tiny dot, no different from all the rest. But vampires know their sun. "I haven't seen it in..." Because far enough away, every sun becomes a star. It's got nothing to do with wavelengths or radiation. It's got everything to do with light, and magic. There's no practical biology involved with demon-possessed corpses. Vampires can happily soak in starlight and moonlight, but they can't walk in the sun. No matter where they are in the universe. On Barrayar, years came and went. Society rebuilt itself almost from scratch. In the beginning, some humans said that because vampires were alive when Earth was at similar technology levels, they should be able to help out with more practical work, with vampires pointing out humans rode spaceships here so by that same logic they should know how to build those. Among the developments in the rebuilding process was formalizing something that had been casual circumstance until then, done in a specifically Barrayaran way: vampires aren't allowed to be Vor. If you're Vor and become a vampire, you left that honorific behind, and no vampire can ever earn it. Too much worry about corruption and immortal dynasties. It goes beyond tradition into written law. Keeping the Slayer away is an active process, and threats humans make to each other - I'll get a vampire to eat you! You have a mutie baby, you just leave it out for the vamps - don't help matters. Angel only turned two vampires, both in the last hundred-fifty years or so before the Time of Isolation ended. Both of them asked for it to happen, were turned away three times and still came back. He lay with them in the ground until they dug themselves up, and it seems better, now, for someone to be with you when it happens. Kinder, to know you're not going to be tossed aside and abandoned. That it's a process, a commitment to the new person you've brought up from the ground. What he had with Darla and Drusilla and Spike was for the most part stable, and he knows that helped keep the four of them as functional as they were. With so few vampires turned on impulse, the average age for turning went up by a couple of decades. Because there aren't many resources for both humans and vampires to share, not many are made on Barrayar at all. One of the first things to go was vat-grown blood, the support needed to keep that going winding down fast, so with vampires relying on butchers, on consensual feedings, and the occasional horse with a broken leg, they've gotten used to being a little hungry all the time. It's accepted as a normal part of being a vampire. (During the Cetagandan invasion, young vampires looked to Angel for guidance, for advice, for permission - "Can we eat them?" "With the Slayer's blessing, you can eat them." Because she was a warrior, a defender, and would have understood. And many of those young vampires learned, for the first time, what it felt like to eat their fill and finally be sated.) ("What do you mean, he threw the horse at you?" The rider had been a vampire, wrapped up safe from sunlight, out during the day, and the scouts had shot the horse. "You mean he threw the -" "No, we mean he PICKED UP THE HORSE and he THREW IT AT US." When Angel relates this story to Spike, he can't stop giggling over Angel's banked and simmering anger. It's been a long time, and he's still mad - "They shot my horse!" He'd kept horses for centuries, one at a time, as food and companionship, and that one was one of his favorites. Then the Cetagandans shot it. He knows a few landscapers who hate them for similar reasons: two hundred years they spent on that one lawn, and now the whole thing's radioactive!) Angel lives alone, and always has. Some vampires live in small communities, little neighborhoods, and of those, some stay with the ones they've made or the ones that made them. He doesn't - he's the oldest vampire on the planet, third-oldest in the Nexus, and it's hard to find someone to really speak to who's able to understand because they've also been there. He hasn't even bothered to remove the mirrors from his bathroom. Then another wormhole opens, and spaceships come roaring through the atmosphere for the first time in centuries. And not long after that, coming every day and waiting where spaceships touch down and open up for visitors, he sees someone in a daysuit walk out with the other humans that can turn their faces right to the sun. He's there in the finest wrappings and rags and his best goggles, and there's no way to be sure - except that he knows. They walk right up to one another and from the outside, it's a strange scene: goggles looking down into a faceplate, a faceplate looking up at goggles. With no reflections to get in the way. And they hug. They stand there for a long time, not paying any attention to the people daring glances or openly staring, and then silently go off to Angel's basement apartment, turning away from each other just long enough to get undressed, removing the helmet and unwrapping the rags, both of them boggling at the other - Spike's let his hair grow out, brown and corkscrew curls, and Angel managed to find something to get his hair to lie flat in a perfectly regimented military cut. But that's nothing to their accents, with Angel rolling his R's like a native Russian speaker, and Spike's flat Californian accent a tribute to his long-lost friends. ("Cavemen," Spike grins. "Astronauts," Angel insists.) There's a lot of time spent comparing notes, a lot of requests to pronounce given words, some bonding over both of them having settled into four-digit ages ("Do you remember when five hundred years was old?"), and some deep amusement when Spike meets the two vampires Angel raised. He's comfortably over a thousand at this point, Angel closer to twelve hundred, and even taken together the two vamps aren't even half as old as Spike is. But by Barrayaran vampire custom, they'd be seen as being above him - they were made by Angel while Spike was made by someone Angel made, so they should rightly be above him. Or so they thought, until he throughly trounced them both. Angel sat back and laughed his ass off; they needed to be taken down a peg or two. The Barrayaran insistence on direct linage above and below is hard for Spike to fit into: the one who made him is gone and there's no one he's raised who remains. He won't talk about them, and the Barrayaran vamps respect his desire for privacy, but still - no one? No one at all? So he's isolated and alone like that? How can a vampire live all alone like that, nobody directly connected to you? It must be so lonely. The Nexus insentience on the group and collective life is hard for Angel to fit into: he doesn't know how to fit into a group where there's nobody in charge, no clear chains of command, and he really doesn't know how to sleep in a shared space. He requests, and gets, a sleeping-pit all to himself even though it's understood as something of an odd request - even if nobody's in charge you tend to defer to the oldest ones in the room, the ones closest to or from the time of the Slayer. And as he's trying to fall asleep, Spike slides the cover open, "Shove over." Neither of them comment on it, but it's easier for Angel to fall asleep with Spike there. At Spike's insistence, they take a couple of wormhole jumps. He wants to show him their sun, and they both want to see Earth again for the first time in centuries. And he gives Angel his two-part human name of Liam Summers when he needed forms to travel through the Nexus - they both knew the gesture for what it was, and don't speak about it, not needing to. Angel says nothing about Spike taking Drusilla's human surname, William Keeble,for the same reasons. When they get to Earth, they go to the same places most vampires come to see, the places important to their religion: the Hellmouth that Spike closed, the Los Angeles that Angel helped sink, battle scars and birth sites and places that used to take you someplace very different but now only leave you wondering what might still be on the other side. While they're on planet, they attend a wedding out in the California mountains. They were only told about it a few hours beforehand, because you're supposed to invite all the vampires around, and when they say who they are, all the jaws drop. It's an amazing honor for all those present to have them there, and they're asked to give a few words, which they both do. They speak about how the Slayer would approve of what they're doing, how she would be happy. A while after the Cetagandan invasion, long for humans but not so much for vampires, there's a small gallery show in Vorbarr Sultana, a collaborative venture with some poems inspiring art and other pieces of art inspiring poems. Words by William Keeble and art by Liam Summers. They've both had centuries to hone their craft and get genuinely good at it, enough to be worth the sharing. Someone asks the two of them, "You've both got souls? How many souled vampires are there?" They think a minute. Spike counts off, "One. Zero. One, two, one. Two. Twenty-seven. Then, one." He smiles big at that. "Now, two. Us. Him and me." "I've had mine longer." "I've never lost mine." (When the curse broke, Angel's soul left him, because it was all the curses breaking. Not so with Spike's - "It's mine," he says. "I earned it. It's not a curse, it belongs to me." And it was Drusilla who helped Spike fight to get Angel's soul back to him, by her own agency, coming to Spike on her own in her last moments of clarity. And it was by her own agency that she died, meeting the sun one morning as it rose after saying good-bye to Spike. And never in a hundred thousand years would he have known any vampire could burn blue like a flame - it must have been the part of her that was never human, that burned so blue and beautiful. Not even ash remained. In a way, he's all that's left of her.) Someone else asks the two of them, "I've seen pictures of old vampires, they get all - grr, argh. How come you both still look human?" They look at each other, shrug. "Soulful living." (And if you thought that maybe, just maybe, because Buffy's magic is strongest when it has a backdoor, that if a small number of specifically impossible things occurred long after the walls are put up, impossible like vampires standing in the light of their sun, then those walls would come falling down...you just might be right.) - Spike met Taura when she was in her early 20s, on shore leave from the Dendarii. She was out with her friends, enjoying the night, and when Spike didn't hesitate at all when he saw her across the room, just came up and started talking. It was the first thing about him that she liked, that he wasn't afraid of her. Granted, he came up to her and started speaking in some sort of gibberish, and when he saw she didn't understand, switched to another, different kind of gibberish. In all fairness to Spike, he'd mistaken her for a demon and wanted to know where she'd come from, if a portal had been opened back up and the walls were coming down and maybe she - wait, you're not that kind of demon? You're not that kind either? He leaned in and took a big sniff, and in a flat, almost Betan accent, immediately apologized for the misunderstanding. She accepted it gladly. And by then, they were happy and willing to keep talking to each other. That said, the sniff was a little strange, and Taura asked Spike very delicately what that was. He just points at the big mirror on the wall. She looks, and then does a double-take, because negative space is hard to notice unless you're looking for emptiness. Then it's her turn to stare and apologize for staring, because she's never met a vampire. So they formally introduce themselves, and shake hands, and very quickly go back to her quarters to make with the sex. Spike really likes that Taura doesn't waste any time. The second thing about Spike that Taura likes is how strong he is. Especially since he doesn't look it at all. He used to be a fairly reasonable height, and then nutrition standards got raised across the board so by modern galactic standards, he's not that big - the top of his head might not even reach her collarbones. But he's the strongest person she's ever met, even stronger than she is. She knew a little bit about vampires, had read about them, but this is her first time so much as talking to one, let alone getting into bed with him - and more to the point, this is the first time she's never had to worry about how fragile her partner is. Much as she loves Miles and Roic and all the men she's had, they're all fragile in ways that she has to be careful about. Not so with Spike. "I don't want to break you, love." "You can try." But what's even better than that, the best part of how strong he is, she realizes not too long after she's invited him into her bed, when he lies on his back, places his feet on her stomach and holds her hands - and lifts her up into the air in a delightfully old-fashioned airplane ride. And Taura cannot stop laughing. They spend the rest of her shore leave exclusively in each other's company. Comparing horrible memories of testing labs - electricity is the worst, by far the absolute worst, they both still have nightmares about it - and amusing themselves over their vastly different dietary needs and metabolisms - "Do you have one? Technically speaking." - and going out and doing all the things Taura's seen and read about and never been able to do before. And now she wants to do it all. Things like that airplane ride. Going out dancing and being dipped by her partner and if the dance is right, being lifted up over her partner's head. Jumping onto his back for an impromptu piggyback ride. Sitting on his shoulders. And simply being picked up and carried. Spike's equally over the moon about this, because he loves making women into princesses and queens. That Taura can do all of those grand romantic gestures to Spike is nothing special. That they can each do that to each other, now that's something different. It's novel for Taura in all the best possible ways. What's also novel for her, though far less fun, is what it's like for them to sleep together. Just the sleeping. Because it's when Spike's asleep that Taura realizes exactly what she's in bed with. It's deeply, viscerally disturbing when Spike's asleep, because of the complete lack of automatic bodily functions. She's handled corpses before, and to think of the man who cheerfully tossed her around and gave her such pleasure as one is genuinely creepy, down in the bottom of her guts and the small parts of her spine. She reaches out and pokes him as gently as she can. His flesh moves, but he doesn't snort in response. Because he's not breathing. She puts her hand on his chest, and there's no movement there. It's the same temperature as the bedsheets. Ambient temperature. She leans down to sniff him carefully, and there's not much there, either. He's a not-corpse, and doesn't have much personally generated scent. He'd been so - not body-warm, but spirit-hot. She sits back and looks at him, really looks at him, someone from the other side of death, and wonders, would it be rude to ask if it hurt? Later during their time together, he tells her about the Slayer, the vampire's god-figure. Not quite myth, not quite truth. Those lovely warriors from long ago, girls and women, beautiful and terrifying, figures of fear and love who always burned up fast. She'd have made a grand one, in the days they were needed. There hasn't been a Slayer in centuries: "We're good, now, us vampires. All of us, we're good. So the Slayer doesn't come for us. If she comes, she comes for us all. So we're good, so she won't come." "But you miss her." "I do. And I hope I never see her again. But meeting you is like meeting her." And Taura knows how high a compliment that is. She doesn't quite grasp how old he is, when she asks him. The number he gives her - that's too much. A hundred years, two hundred, she could understand those. But what he has, that's practically the age of a planet. It's beyond her comprehension, that he's well into his eleventh century and still counting. There's only four vampires around that are older than him, and three of them are on Earth, so almost anywhere he goes, he's the oldest creature around. Once she knows how old he is, she doesn't much care if it's rude anymore, and there are all sorts of things people have asked someone over a thousand years old, and this is a question almost everyone wants to know the answer to. The way she asks it, though, he knows to give her the truth: "It did at first." ("Thank you. For telling me.") She asks him if vampires still eat people. "We don't hunt," he tells her, which isn't saying no. He doesn't ask her - he can't ask her. It'd bring the Slayer, asking her. But if she offers her blood freely, he can accept. It's not until their last night together that she offers him her blood, her own choice, her own decision. He thanks her before he accepts, and when she sees his other face, she thinks not even the greatest sculptors on the Whole could make a face like that. When he's shifted back to his human face, and looks at her with clear blue eyes, and she knows they couldn't carve this one, either. And when he's finished eating she asks what she tastes like. So he tells her: "Like smoke. Like the air before it snows. Like forests, and running." They part on good terms, happy with the time they've spent together. And they do see each other again, once. Several years later. He's still the same, and she's burning up, burning fast. And he still looks at her like she's the same. She thinks to ask, if he could, might he - he says no, cutting her off, no, he'd never. "Thank you," she says, and smiles. "Thank you."

#buffy the vampire slayer #vorkosigan saga #crossover #wanton cage aux folles

[cosmictuesdays]

If fandom's already written this, I'd love to know.

Going through the first season on Buffering the Vampire Slayer is mostly reminding me how much better so many of those early episodes would've been if most of Xander and Willow's plots had been switched. I just listened to the episode on "The Pack" - and come on, hyenas are matriarchal animals to begin with, and Willow could take a moment of serious soul-searching over what she did while possessed. "I've never even eaten a cheeseburger, and now this." Most of the rest of the series, come to think of it. Of course, to really get the most out of that, Xander and Willow would have had to be queer from the start, but I wouldn't complain about watching that version of the show. "Yes, little podunk Sunnydale High has a GSA, just like if you were back in Los Angeles," Xander says to Buffy. "It's me, Willow, and a bag of Funyuns behind the MPR." "So the S in that..." Buffy asks. "I guess now it stands for Slayer," Willow says. Largely I like to imagine Willow and Xander preparing for big dates in formalware and dancing together with no sexual tension whatsoever, and the ways the show would've played out if the emotional 'heart' of the group had been a young gay man. He'd still have been something of a dick to Willow over her dating partners, like Oz ("I'm not experimenting! Why don't you go experiment!"), but it would've felt very different and might even have been easier to live with if it hadn't come from a misapplied 'nice guy' sense of romantic betrayal.

(I talked to @inkandcayenne about this, but I don’t remember if she knew of anything specific.)

Keeping Anya around in the later seasons would take some doing, though they managed some reasonable justifications for Spike, so I'm sure they could've done something. Demonic and black magic consultation, for one - she was there, she met that one personally, things like that. Possibly becoming really good friends with Xander's boyfriend, because vengeance knows no gender or sexuality. "I generally wouldn't do it for scorned men unless it was another man doing the scorning...what? You thought the twentieth century invented these things?"

#wanton cage aux folles

[cosmictuesdays]

Hopefully this isn't a question you get asked too often, but what's the origin of your Buffy tag?

It isn’t a question I get asked much, no! And what a good question to be asked, too. I wanted something that’d make me smile every time I saw it, and in thinking about references and allusions to things from the shows, remembered Spike’s poem in Not Fade Away with “wanton folly” in the title. It made me think “wanton follies” - which sparked the memory of the title La Cage Aux Folles, the original French version of The Birdcage (incidentally, a rare example of the remake being the superior product).

Bring the two of them together, you get wanton cage aux folles: the cage of lustful mad women, the lustful crazy ones, the realm of the mad lovers. The deepest deep cut I’ve yet to make in any of my fandom-focused tags, and as such, one I’m very fond of.

[cosmictuesdays]

Fic Year In Review.

As is the case for the last few times I've done this question set, I only finished and posted one major fic this past year - no drabbles, no ficlets, no chat logs cleaned up and edited to be read as short narrative sketches. Just the one long fic. Buffy the Vampire Slayer Set Off Like Geese, 80855 words. Gen-focused all-human AU. Summary:  There's still a Sunnydale. There's still a Buffy Summers living on Revello Drive. There's still strange people with business of their own coming to town. Except this time around, Spike and Drusilla didn't come for the Hellmouth or the Slayer. They weren’t looking for power or fame or glory, and they weren't staying so they could end the world. This time around, it was just as good a place as any other to stop for a while until they were ready to move on again. They weren't expecting anything more. This time around, they stayed because they found out it was a place they might have a chance at a future. What was my inspiration for this fic? How did it come to me? My usual tactic is to add some metaphor or fantasy to a mundane canon in order to externalize an inner trait and offer a clearer explanation for my given reading of the text or a character. This time around, as I said to petra, "Strip away the metaphoric conditions to show people exactly what it is in the characters that whispered to me." She replied, "The pain shows better without the metaphors." Other things which pushed me to roll up my sleeves: disability representation, the flatness of all-human AUs, and vampires' liminal status. When I got into Buffy in 2016, I began looking around for fic and meta dealing with its depiction of mental illness and disabilities - physical or mental. I didn't find much, and most of what I came across didn't have the depth or detail I was hoping for. I kept searching, and kept coming away dissatisfied at the lack of attention people gave to one of the more nuanced aspects of the canon. I sat down and gave some thought to what I wanted to construct, talked it out with some people, and did what I could with it. Another trend I noticed was for all-human AUs to flatten out the characters and situations. Maybe everyone's a high school student, even Angel and Darla. Maybe they're all so far removed from the canon the story isn't saying much about the canon itself anymore. Nothing much seemed eager to explore the depth and complexity of the relationships that existed even without the fantastical aspects - consider all the pieces both in and outside of fandom written about the strengths of the friendships between the core Scooby gang, and Giles's paternal support for Buffy. It seemed a shame to give that all up. The liminal space vampires are presented with has a way of echoing back to me and my own life, and what I wanted to say about social perception of the disabled. Vampires are beings of great power and danger, and they hold virtually no societal standing. Spike and Drusilla are massively well-educated but have no practical methods to turn their disorganized skill sets into practical labor. They're trusted with the well-being of other people, but they don't even have the civil responsibility of library cards - Dawn checks out their library books on her card, so while they're looking after her, she takes care of them. There was a lot I wanted to say, and I think I managed to say most of it.

What’s my favorite part of the fic? Being able to accurately translate the characters from the fantastic into the mundane and still have them stay themselves. What’s the part of the fic I’m most proud of? The two second-person point of view chapters. What part of the fic was the hardest for me to write? The two second-person point of view chapters. What part of the fic am I still dissatisfied with? The scene of Spike and Dawn on the back porch after she saw him naked communicated the information the story needed, but I never found myself fully satisfied with the rhythm of the moment. The beats, sure, but not the rhythm. Who’s my favorite character in the fic? Dawn. Not Spike or Buffy, though I loved working with them in this context. I loved working with Dawn because of how much information she could take in, and how because she was adjacent to all these strange people but not quite one of them, she was able to express both sympathy and genuine affection. And because she was a child, and operating without decades of collective reinforcement of proper social norms and mores, she could engage with them directly in ways other people around her sometimes struggled to achieve. Even Buffy had trouble with that. Granted, Spike and Dru didn't, but they also didn't carry a significant percentage of the narrative through their eyes, either. Were there any major decisions I made about the fic that could have made it go a whole different direction? No. I had it fairly well planned and outlined before I started, and I knew what I wanted to accomplish in terms of emotional growth and character arcs. Was there anything I only learned about the fic after I had finished it (themes, motifs, symbolism, etc)? Both Spike and Drusilla's major hobbies - ornithology and astronomy - require looking upwards at the sky. Also, that the two of them worked as effective foils for all three Summers women in three distinctive ways, which was something I didn't realize until I was chatting with one of my beta-readers. Did anyone in the fic surprise me by doing anything? Andrew surprised me by showing up. I didn't plan on him making an on-screen appearance, but then I began drafting, and I saw exactly where he needed to go. Joyce's quiet ambivalence with her life and the ordinary dissatisfaction she felt over certain parts of it - most particularly in the Fourth of July scene - also surprised me, because until I started writing her, I never listened to her all that closely. If I had to sum up this fic in a sentence, what would it be? "Learning how to be a monstrous person." If I were to rewrite this fic, what would I change? I'd make sure to give myself another month to slow down and read the draft out loud. Rereading it for this question set, I can see the places - sometimes just three or four words, or a specific noun or verb choice - that could have used another pass to make them really shine. I'd also like to have given a tiny bit more attention to Willow and Xander's families representing the two major Sunnydale economic focuses of the blue-collar cannery and the white-collar university, and how that impacted high school society. By which I mean, maybe another four sentences scattered throughout. Did any thing about this fic’s reception surprise me? That other people wanted to read the story, too. Not just that they liked it, and not even that I broke their hearts and put them back together again: that they'd wanted my words. "This was the story I didn't know I needed until I began to read it" had me stunned for days and still shakes me, in a good way. What were my beta’s major comments about the first draft of this fic? There are a lot of long sentences I needed to make shorter and a lot of clauses I needed to simplify. Everyone is kept in character. This is a heartbreakingly accurate depiction of living with major depression. If I were to write a sequel to this fic, what would it be about? I've discussed this with a few people already: it'd be the obligatory post-season five summer fic, with Dawn running away to Sunnydale to escape her life and be with her friends.

#wanton cage aux folles