missedithalternateroses

"Alternate Roses"

Winner of the Dark Magick Challenges Award

Plum's Pick Award



            Disclaimers : All characters belong to Joss Whedon.

            Author: Miss Edith. Feedback welcomed!

            Rating: PG-13.

            Spoilers: None.

            Summary: Drusilla’s realities facing the one who is responsible for them. Drusilla/Angel, PG-13.

         She had left for another part of the world, boarded in a sumptuous ship that remained in her little seaport. No one knew where she was now. She had found this place all by herself. Lying in white linen sheets, she was counting the stars through portholes. Whispers sang to her that, some night, her ship would fly away. Fly away into the milky way, endless and eternal as she was. But first, she would fall asleep. She wanted it.

         None of her realities pleased her anymore.

         One night after twilight, a muffled knock on the wood woke Drusilla up. Her instantly wide open eyes stared at the entire row of dolls at her feet. Her lonely and disturbed sleep had made some of them fall onto one another. They were throwing weird shadows on the wooden walls of the ship. Maybe the dolls, gently answering to her secret desires, were the ones that had knocked at her door… No. Twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two. All her dolls were here at her feet, at least the ones that hadn’t drowned into the deep sea. So who knocked.

         Drusilla pushed the sheets aside, the long nightgown she was always wearing now whistling around her legs. Her sick hand slightly touched every wall of her narrow cabin, and then closed itself around the horn knob. A blue sparkle briefly lit up into her iris.

        “Who is the naughty one who dares come to me… Who dares wake up the little porcelain girls that wanted to keep their head hollow, hollow, with nobody inside…”

         She opens the door, threatened by headache. The bridge, held by a rope, barely sways under her shy glances. Dust on the moon, and a deserted bridge. The longshoremen she feeds on will come after midnight. Strings are quiet and waves all cold. There is nothing else on the bridge than a stem wrapped into silken paper.

         She takes the delicate present and puts it on her bed saturated with her own smell. Inside the thin silk, a single white rose with thick and milky petals. And a soft chalk has written on a side of the paper: To your humanity.

         Drusilla doesn’t want to touch the flower, surprised and worried, then comes back her counting habit and she plucks the ivory petals off. Her humanity… Who thought of her humanity, lost centuries ago into her torn memory’s limbos… She feeds her dolls with each petal. She doesn’t want to hear about her humanity anymore… The clear and cloudless sky of her youth. When she was eight years old, had long dark braids wrapped around her head, and a marvellous dress with blue squares that she used to spoil when she laid herself down on the garden’s grass. She stayed hours like that, eyes raised toward the sky immensity, and when she stood up, sun spots were dancing before her dazzled retinas. She liked blue sky, and also butterflies and cricket, the cooker’s hot cookies, and the photographs of children made by this curious mathematician they called Lewis Carroll. She was human, and she knew how to appreciate the passing pleasures of life. Everything came and passed, like her sorrows and cherries. Humanity was a blurred rainbow, and it was just her childhood.

         Who thought of her humanity…

         She falls asleep in the middle of scattered petals, for fear of feeling tears rolling cold on her cheeks.

         The following night, the wind is wilder and she wakes up choking. It is only a few minutes later that she remembers her lungs don’t function anymore. She deeply sighs from despair and picks up what remains of the rose on her sheets. She puts the petals into a tobacco pouch. She has drained a captain formerly. And here comes back the knock on her door. Just once, maybe it was the wind…

         But Drusilla doesn’t wait. She lifts her fingers to her lips, then opens the door quickly. The ropes are creaking under the wind, but nobody’s here. She offers her face to the wandering blast, but can’t smell any human being. Not a single drop of blood. Yet, on her doorstep, there is another shaking rose in its delicate paper.

         She takes it into her arms, as she would hold a child to protect him from the cold, brings it into her cabin and slowly unwraps it on her pillow. A pink rose, purple veins running on it, weird and perfumed. On the silky paper, the same person let these words: To your madness.

         Her madness. When the blurred rainbow became so sharp and bright that all her nerves suddenly broke up. Feelings beyond human and inhuman capacities. Yes, too many feelings; too much lucidity. And madness appeared.

         She remembers the first time. After her father and her sisters, she found her mother in a puddle of blood when she woke up that morning. Head into the chimney, and body oddly lying on the crimson tiles of the floor. Instead of screaming and crying, like she did before, she just smiled. Very kindly. Reached for the body, baby step after baby step, dove her fingers into the drying blood and asked: “Did you slip into red jam, mummy?… You need to be more careful, mummy. Don’t stay on the tiles like this, you’re getting cold. Mummy.” And as mummy didn’t move, she kicked her with her feet and ran away. Very far from home, and very far from her mind.

         It was kind of soft. Tiny things were becoming amazingly important, and no twist of fate could ever touch her. The world was a giant merry-go-round. Whirling, whirling, and taking with it the worst and the best.

         The smell of this rose occulted everything else and when Drusilla wanted to sleep with it to soothe her pain, she realized later that its sly thorn had stung her to blood.

         She guessed what rose would be next. Of course, it was a deep red, almost black. Of course, a curious epitaph came with it: To your death.

         Of course, she thought, idly rolling it against her face. After she went mad, she died. Let’s say it was just another reality. Nothing more, since madness came first. The switched off rainbow was replaced by an endless and luxurious night, into which she could move like a cat. Mmh… no conscience anymore. How charming. Intoxicating. Blood suddenly had a deep flavour, attractive and thirst-quenching. Shadows walked faster. Her empty body didn’t suffer anymore. The demon into her didn’t allow any subtlety anymore, and hence tasted her madness with a high delight. Sometimes death seemed so dark that it became an unbearable restraint. No way out, except naught.

         Somebody knew somewhere that she lived and that she died.

         The crimson petals went on the top of the other ones into the full tobacco pouch. Later… Eternity was nothing but delay. Later she will try to understand. For now, she just wants to lie down under the blue crescent of the sea moon. Depths exhale the intersidereal sounds of unknown animals. When she closes her eyes, she can see them under the hull, all those nameless cetaceans far too huge. And she seems nothing in front of their gigantic gnawing mouths.

         The next rose is like the ocean. Mysteriously blue. It is not possible. She smells its dark stem. Like powder. To your dreams, claims the silk around it.

        “My dreams are not for you.” Drusilla pouts and wildly pulls on the elegant blue head. Her dreams are for no one. Her dreams wildly run through her life and her death, streak all her madness. Dreams or visions, whatever. Penetrating each fiber of her body. This is the ultimate reality. Those powerful pictures, full of an atmosphere more suggestive than the one her eyes can see, are the extreme reality. Her brain’s reality. Her private reality. She dreams all night, all day long, sometimes even when she is walking.

         She dreams about her life, her madness, her death. The worlds she creates out of them are all treasures.

         And that’s why, bored, she came into this swaying cabin where there is nothing else to do but sleeping in the wooden-framed bed, in company of dolls.

         This time, she dreams that she is a fairy; swinging with the rolling boat, she sees herself flying to the night globe with a single beat of her wings. But when she reaches the heavenly body, she bares her fangs and bites it. Moon tastes like hot pastry. What it bleeds flows out of her mouth and Drusilla wakes up, fearing of being dirty. She realizes that she is covered all over with white, pink, red and blue petals. And she can feel an intense presence.

         “I came to apologize…”

         She shivers; at last, the voice of the writings on roses. Familiar, and though so strange. The one who is sitting on an oak chair near the tiny desk isn’t the one she once knew. But his iced smell is exactly the same. She turns her head toward him. Opens her lips and barely whispers:

         “My Angel… How did you come to me?”

         Angel smiles and looks around the small cabin lit by a soft moonlight.

        “Very easy, Dru. You just need to follow blood puddles stained with laces and plastic limbs… I had to find you. You’re the toughest step on my way to redemption.”

        “Your redemption, my Angel… Who makes you believe I would give it to you? For four roses… It is not enough.”

         He rises and comes near her in silence. His cold hand glides on her cheek but can’t warm it up. She stares at him, but doesn’t want to get up. She slowly moves her head on the silken pillow of her hair. The friction intoxicates her. He has eyes like total eclipse.

         “You have a soul, Angel… You can’t get rid of it, never… You’re always the same. Me, never.”

         “I know. You’re so multiple that I couldn’t understand you. I regret it. I killed you by pleasure, and never wanted to know your inner richness.”

         “What are you talking about, I’m empty… Like the sky, look, so big and so empty…”

         “The sky is full of stars and planets, and never stops changing colours.”

         Now he knows that she is listening to him carefully. He hid from her several nights because he was afraid of her. So unexpected. She could have killed him. As sharply as Buffy did. And besides, she could have liked it. Because, sometimes, she had to get pleasure.

         Kneeling in front of her, his non-beating heart was at last a bliss.

         “I know you can’t feel love for anybody anymore. My fault. Or maybe not. But though, you must be loved. Desperately. Even if you’re a lost cause.”

         “Oh yes, I must be loved… like autistic children must be loved, hopelessly…”

         She is playing. He understands. He strokes her nightgown and lets a few petals fall gently. What did he do to her. He never loved her. He puts his lips against her ear.

       “Please… Let me give you all the love you deserve…”

         “Again?… You’ve already had me. You never said my name during love. You gave me others’ hearts, never yours.”

         “Angelus fucked you. But Angel would make love to you…”

         “No…”

         Child voice, like from the grave. She can feel his large hand on her small neck. He comes for his redemption, that’s all. So she closes her eyes and doesn’t answer anymore. In the silence full of sea, Angel’s hand is weakening. Shaking. Disappearing. When, much later, the beautiful dead girl opens the eyes again, he is still on his knees, and he is crying.

           She should like it, but no, she regrets it. From ages ago, the memory of a feeling crawls into her throat and makes her whimper. Pity?… Immediately, her fingers are beginning to tremble too. The smell of roses on her skin oddly deafens the disgust she should have of his soul and his request. Maybe she understands him, at last. He once was human, then had a wild death, then a weird softness, she wishes she could see his dreams. Suddenly, she takes his head into her translucent arms and holds him tight. Don’t cry, my Angel. Oh please, don’t cry.

         She is the one who cries now.

         Her tears fall on Angel’s neck, surprised he lifts his head, catches her huge eyes with his wet lashes, and without thinking, without thinking, puts his lips on hers. His face wants hers, her face sticks to his, their faces loose themselves into one another. Something is going to break up inside both of them. Surely the sharp lines between all their realities. They melt into each other.

         Angel keeps her a long while against his naked torso, stroking her flesh and her hair. He will never warm her up, he will never be less cold. But maybe that, when he leaves her, they will both know what they truly are, and will do beautiful dreams.

         He puts a last kiss on her forehead and tastes all the thoughts that come to his mouth.

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