My Evil Fanfic ..."Miss Edith's Revenge"

[shadowkat]

I've never really done this before. Written fanfiction solo. Would love feedback. It's a Work in Progress and my first solo attempt at writing fanfic on anything, so be kind. The only other time I've tried to write fanfic was as part of a collaboration.

So far I have a prologue and two chapters. It's about seven pages in length. I'm working on Chapters 3 and 4. The fanfic sort of sticks with canon, more or less.

I call it Miss Edith's Revenge or My evil fanfic.

Warning: graphic violence and character deaths ensue. No ships. No sex. Takes place after Season 7 BTVS. Some vague spoilers to Damage 5.11 ATS. No spoilers after 5.11 so far.



Prologue: Ashes, Ashes…we all fall down.

Florence, Italy

The prey she’d been stalking, walked, talked, danced languidly below, whirling, thinking it was alone in this, its special place, where it came to escape, while she waited spider-like on her haunches, watching from a distance. Always from a distance, careful to pick a moment, must be careful…patient, Miss Edith, we must be patient, shhh, like its-bitsy spider creeping silently on its web.

She and Miss Edith used to watch spiders, the black and brown crawly things which kitty chased, while they sipped tea and ate cake. Spiders ugly things with tiny fangs sitting in pretty crosshatched webs waiting as she waited now…to strike. To engorge on blood. Bloody ambrosia, he called it, but that was before, before he began to taste like ashes, on her tongue, on her lips, ashes..ashes, we all fall down, down, down...She flew down. The prey alone now, in a corner, no figures guarding it. Alone. All Alone. Always Alone …they were, they, her sisters, she and Miss Edith, and all the others. But connected to, like the stars were, and the flowers rooted in the dirt, their roots connecting and chocking each other, hungry, always hungry. High slender neck exposed above the collar, hair tied back, in pretty bun like Miss Edith used to tie hers. Miss Edith guided her in her black lace cape to the prey, bright shiny red nails, chipped now, needed a re-painting, digging into the pretty thing’s tanned shoulders, pulling it to her, teeth extending into the neck like a spider. We’re spiders now, Miss Edith, all fangy, she thought with a throaty chuckle. Blood acrid, metallic, yet smooth like the bitter chocolate she drank as a child coated with spice. But richer than that, thicker, deeper, like cognac – her father’s cognac that he didn’t like her to touch. The forbidden drink, poured nightly into her father’s flask, hidden from view. Miss Edith would snatch it and they’d sip from it passing the small flat metal bottle between them in Mummy’s garden. The flask has a metallic taste to it, too, rusty, like a copper shilling if you let it rest upon your tongue. Mustn’t take too much, Miss Edith, must leave breath in the thing, we need it, part of our us now, connected, part of our plan. The plan, she knew, would eventually lead to her own end, she’d foreseen it just as she’d foreseen all the ashes, but not yet, not until she got what she wanted. Not until they united all the sisters in darkness, all sleeping below the earth like the flowers, little bulbs of night blooming jasmine and deadly nightshade.

Cursed Daddy, he should have taken care of it long ago when he wasn’t cursed. They’d still be a family then. The three of them, dancing in a whirl, much rush, much crunch, and lovely poetry, like before when Grandmother left. Like Miss Edith, Grandmother was, wheat colored hair, naughty smile. Hair tied high. Liked the smell of jasmine did Grandmother. But he didn’t like Grandmother much. Her pretty one. Hoity-toity Grandmother was, with her gowns and her face paints, ordering them about. Then Grandmother tasted like dust only to be reborn as daughter, then dust again. She tilted her head listening. No one was coming. They were alone. Cursed one’s fault. No, shook her head, looking down at the prey, its eyes hazy now, but not gone, still here, not dead. Wiped her lips with her sleeve, delicately, like Miss Edith taught her. Took a nail, opened a vein along her white creamy breast, don’t cry Miss Edith, doesn’t hurt. Didn’t really hurt, much, Miss Edith told her, after Daddy leaped on Miss Edith, snapping her neck, not even bothering to drink. Wicked Daddy. She took the doll though, the one with the brown hair Miss Edith used to braid, the doll Miss Edith escaped into when Daddy snipped off her life like snipping off a candle flame. Took it and kept it close. Daddy didn’t seem to mind. As long as she was good and let Daddy do what Daddy wanted she could have Miss Edith. Daddy even let her take William. Pretty William. Blond like Miss Edith. Eyes as blue as Miss Edith’s. Soft smile, her Willy. Will, Willy, Willy-boy Spike. She held the pretty one’s mouth to her bloody breast, the blood flowing like wine. So thirsty it was, sucking, sucking, oooh…it made her sway. Oh, yes, the pretty thing sucked at her as William did, starved it was for Mother’s milk. Red and rich and tasting like cognac, forbidden. Drink, little one. Tomorrow you will be strong again and we’ll go a hunting, you, and me, and Miss Edith makes three. Turn them we will. Make them our sisters, tied to us, not her, strong, powerful like us. Connected. Not alone any more, poor things. Not many. Just enough to distract the nasty things, make them scurry, pick off their family one by one by one just as Daddy picked off ours, just as she picked off our new family – we’ll pick off hers, give Miss Edith a playmate, yes we will, then make us a new Daddy, a better Daddy than the cursed one. Then, when time is right, take the slayer, the one who broke pretty William, and make it taste like ashes.

“No more blood little one, must rest now,” she murmured lifting the new child. No longer a thing any more, now it had their blood coursing through it, now it was connected to them. She carried it over her shoulder and lept up to the rafters and out, out the window to the star lit night sky and the lovely grape vines beyond, damp moist earth to plant her new seedling and watch it grow.





Chapter 1 : The Eyes of Xander Harris

Africa

He felt woozy and numb. Licking his lips he tasted blood, acrid and crusted over. His glass eye was gone, the one they had specially made for him in Morocco, some shaman connection of Will’s. Supposed to have mystical qualities, grant him the ability of second-sight or some such garbage. Right, not doing much good now was it? Except for whom or whatever decided to gouge it out of his socket. Will…Willow miles away in Patagonia on some retreat, even if she’d been home, she wouldn’t be much good. Oh they’d stayed in contact over the past few months, but it was becoming less and less frequent. And, he admitted, after two months cooped in a house with twenty slayers, plus the days in the school bus and hospital rooms, he’d been vehemently in favor of a little distance. No, correction, a lot of distance such as an ocean…an ocean between himself and anything that reminded him of those last few days of Sunnydale, of those who had been lost, of those who remained, most of all of she who shall not be named. He and she who shall not be named, he thought…remembering the silent pact he and the Buffster had made standing alone in an hospital corridor, a few miles outside Sunnydale, waiting to hear on the survivors, each painfully and silently aware of the ones who had not survived. Buff made it clear that they probably needed a little time and space from each other. That their resources would be better spent if they weren’t constantly in each other’s company. Odd, the symbolism of that last parting of the ways in the corridors of Sunnydale High. If he’d known that they’d literally be forking off onto different paths, he might have said something more meaningful at the time. Oh, who was he kidding? He’d thought they were all going to die, no way on earth Buff’s plan could have worked, they’d all thought that…no one, no one could have foreseen the lightshow…or Captain Peroxide’s ultimate part in it.

He coughed, attempting to clear his dry throat, which ached, feeling like sandpaper, rusty sandpaper with a faint metallic taste. He could feel the air uncomfortably pressing against the bared eye socket. His arms were sore, as if someone had bent them behind his back. Not broken, yet looking down at his right sleeve with his one good eye, he noticed it was stained and stiff with blood. He lifted his hand to the side of his neck and felt the gouges in his neck. Vampires. Great. That’s just great. All these years killing the things, and he gets nabbed by a garden variety vampire. Damn Ironic, that. So much for the superhero act. But why didn’t it just kill him?

He tried to move forward, but something hard snapped him back and the slight movement caused the oddest swinging motion. He looked down and realized that his feet were hanging in mid-air, at least five to six feet off the ground. Leaning back he felt the hard poke of metal. He reached behind with his right hand and touched the rim of what felt like a meat hook. Oh that’s original, he thought, instead of just killing me they bring me home and hang me up to dry in a meat closet. He almost gagged at the thought. Remind me, not to eat meat after this. So going vegetarian after this.

Shouldn’t be too hard to get off of a meat hook, except for the numbness and the inability to move his left arm or legs. He sighed, glancing around, which wasn’t easy to do with only one good eye. Yep, some sort of meat locker, cool but not too cold, with all sorts of dried meat hanging on hooks around him. Nothing human that he could see, which was of the good. He glanced up. The roof was dark and high-ceilinged like most of the buildings in this region of France. No hint of sunlight or any other light source emanating from it. What little light there was, came from below him, in the form of all sorts of candles. He could hear humming below him, which meant someone was down there; he wasn’t alone.

He closed his eye for a moment concentrating on placing the sound. Not far away, but also oddly familiar and not a good familiar. Actually it sent a chill up his spine, conjuring memories of things he’d forgotten, Cordy and him locked in Buffy’s crowded basement fending off monsters. They’d spent a lot of time locked in basements and closets Junior year. Good times, better even with the distance, faded old photographs he enjoyed flipping through in his head, before he’d met Anya, before life got complicated and gray, before everything got so confused. It sounded like an old English ditty, similar to something Giles or…oh god, no, not…His eye flashed open glancing with a sense of rising anxiety in the direction of the sound.

The humming came closer and with it a face, a beautiful face, white as porceline, etched with soft blue veins under the surface. She wore red with a long black lace shawl coat, her hair dark as the night sky and her eyes even darker, yet mesmerizing, he looked away, afraid of what he’d see in them. The song she was humming escaped him, but the way she tilted her head and studied him reminded him oddly of a bird contemplating a shiny bauble or treat. For a moment, he envied Anya, who had not seen death coming, he’d always wondered if that would be the better way to go. Now, now looking it straight in the face, he was certain it was. What had flashed through Anya’s brain in those final moments? He wondered. Because the only thing flashing through his…was Anya and the bleak thought that he wasn’t going to get out of this one. No Buffy to swoop in and save his sorry hide. Death had finally come for him and there was absolutely nothing he could do to stop her.

She said very little that he understood, but than he’d never understood anything Drusilla said. She was crazy. A total nut-job. He used to tease Captain Peroxide about it all the time. Her words childlike gibberish as she caressed his face with her razor sharp nails and smiling, gestured to the person he had not noticed, due to the fact they’d snuck up on his blind side, feet silent beneath Dru’s humming. “Miss Edith…” Dru said in her sing-song English accent, “Miss Edith wants a bite, don’t you Miss Edith…poor little sister is sooo hungry…”, as she turned, gesturing to the one she now called Miss Edith. Talking to herself again, he thought, struggling to get free of the hook to find a way, any way to escape. “Naughty, naughty, doggie. Must stay still.” Dru swung back and slapped him, hard, nearly snapping his head back with the force of it. “Come Miss Edith, show the naughty dog, your toy.” He gasped, eyes widening with horror as the vampire Dru called Miss Edith, stepped forward, his mystical glass eye held firmly in her hand, which she tossed in front of it like a toy.

“Hello, Xan…” Dawn Summers said, playing with his glass eye while her face shifted to one he’d only seen in nightmares. His mind raced over the events of the last few days, no there hadn’t been any messages from Buffy, just something about Dawn being off at a summer camp, incommunicado, while Buffy was busy in Rome.

“Oops, almost lost it. Don’t worry Xan, I’ll keep it safe. Mustn’t lose such a pretty marble.” Tossing the eye to Dru, Dawn smiled at him, except it wasn’t Dawn, anymore, he thought. And for a split second he was reminded of Jesse. Jesse’s face before the stake went in and he turned to ash. He watched as Dawn tilted her head to the side, glanced at Dru, and still smiling, gently reached up to his face, caressing his cheek. “Time to say goodbye, Xander.” Then she dug her fingers into his eye socket and plucked out his remaining eye. The last thing Xander Harris heard was Dru humming. It reminded him of the old nursery rhyme, London Bridges falling down. Though the exact words escaped him.





Chapter 2: Sisters in Arms

London, England

When Dana was very young, her mother sang her folk songs. Songs like Oh Susannah, Golden Ribbons, or her favorite, Oh My Darling Clementine. They seemed odd to her now. Those memories mixed in with so many of the others, the ones of Nikki and Xiang Lee, to just name two. She knew they were memories now, not real people, just memories of things that had happened long ago. But since she had no memories of the intervening years, those felt more real somehow. The compulsion to seek and destroy more real than anything else the man who kept polishing and re-polishing his spectacles until they sparkled said. Another man. Another person, who she sensed if he had the power, would hurt her. Can’t hurt me any more, she thought, although his needles told another story. Like Walter…or was it Spike, no, no, Walter, she was sure of that now, Walter liked the needles which were not much different from fangs when you thought about it, draining you of your strength and strength flowed in blood, didn’t it. The guy with the funny accent, an accent so like the vampire she’d tortured, hummed when he stuck the needle into her arm, hummed some old English Folk song, which once again reminded her of her mother. Her father’s favorite had been Clementine. Clementine. Clemency. Forgiveness. Words that had no meaning to her, no translation. She did not understand these words. She tried to work her tongue around them when they were said. Forgive. Forget. What if all she had of herself, her identity was in the memories? Cognitive thought was also a new concept – she thought more in pictures, images that flashed through her mind, sometimes faded by the drugs. Always drugs. Today it was blue to make her weak. To keep her subdued so she didn’t hurt anyone. But what about the people constantly hurting her? And always needles. She hated needles. Needles scared her…they reminded her of him.

Oh My Darling, Oh My Darling, Oh My Darling Clementine. Lost and gone forever…

The words floated into her hazy consciousness. Dreaming again. Always dreaming. She looked up into the brownish black eyes, they reminded her oddly of her own, but darker, deeper, she felt herself drowning in them. Look in me, said the voice. The eyes were above a slender aristocratic nose and high cheekbones, pale like the china of her mother’s old dolls. Fragile. Look in me. See what you want to see. The voice chanted sing-sing into her brain, threading itself with her dreams, searching. And suddenly the face shifted and became that of her mother. Fifteen or was it twenty years before. Before the bad man, the hollow man came to them and took her family away from her. Took her innocence.Took her soul. No, the English man told her she still had that. But she wasn’t sure she wanted it. Or for that matter even believed in it. Souls? What were souls? According to the English gent the soul distinguished the monsters from humans. Humans had souls. Monsters didn’t. Slayers killed monsters. But where did that leave the bad man? He was human, he had a soul. The English gent took off his glasses and polished them again not answering. Lost and Gone Forever My Darling Clementine….Do you want it? Her mother was asking her suddenly. Would you like to go to sleep then wake up even more powerful than before, so powerful no one can hold you back? Dana nodded.

Being weak, she hated being weak. If being a monster meant no longer being weak, no longer having people poke needles in her arms as if she were nothing more than a pin-cushion she was all for it. Lost and Gone Forever….oh my darling Clementine. She felt the vampire’s fangs in her neck, but they didn’t hurt not like the needles did. She felt sleepy and an odd lifting sensation, then something like a tear happening inside, harsh and painful, as if something were ripping her in two and one part remained while the other left…empty, no pain really, just an overwhelming sense of being empty. Next came the acrid metallic smell of blood. The taste of it on her lips. Thick syrupy flooding her throat with a tangy bitter taste like molasses, no whiskey, the drink she’d tried in that warehouse basement, what she once smelled on the bad man’s breath. It flooded her and with it memories, different memories from the one’s inside her head, but memories all the same. Darker. Almost as if the world had tilted and she was suddenly in the monsters’ heads seeing through their eyes. Be with me, said the voice, one with me. And she was gone…into the black abyss.

TBC.



Any feedback would be great. Never really done this before, so a little nervous about it, hence the reason I'm only posting it to livejournal.
Thanks.

Comments

[poisonapple73.livejournal.com]

This is great. I love how disorienting the Dana and Dru chapters are, juxtaposed with the clarity of Xander's thoughts, even when he's terrified. I hope you'll continue writing this.

Thanks...

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

I'll probably keep posting sections even if no one but you reads them, since the exercise is helping stir my creative juices.

Sort of stuck on Chapter 3 and 4 at the moment - they are huge turning point chapters and deal with Buffy and Giles and Dawn and Drusilla. It's a dark fic though - the villains are more or less the protagonists in it at the moment. I'm trying something really different from most of the fanfic I've read.

Poisonapple won't be the only one!

[ann1962]

I will. I quite enjoyed it. (Except I was cooking ground beef while reading when I got to the gouging.) I put down the spoon and went and sat down.

I liked the contrast between locations. Zander, heart of the series and in the heart of the cradle of humanity; Dru in Florence the place of the enlightenment in the middle ages, and Dana in the control center (so to speak) of the British Empire. Heart, mind and hand. Very cool.

I also liked the contrast between the physically damaged Zander (weary but psychologically sound) and the psychologically damaged Dru and Dana (but physically sound). Zander reflected (hence an opposite image) and sandwiched by Dru and Dana.

All tied together by Miss Edith. And hopefully the title is a spoiler. The doll fights back.

Waiting with baited breath.

Re: Poisonapple won't be the only one!

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the feedback!

As for the locations...that was just serendipitous via Joss Whedon. The way they wrote the SG's movements in Damage 5.11 and Shells 5.16 just fell perfectly into my story. So I can stay inside cannon and still do my own thing.

Yep, when I described Xander's fate to my friend cjl, he winced. But it works for the story.

The title is well meant to be more metaphorical than literal actually - it explains how Dru sees things and why her doll is so important to her.

[(Anonymous)]

Oooh, very good. The idea of Dru coming after the Scoobies is very appealing and when Buffy finds out about Dawn there will be literal hell to pay. I especially liked the idea of the trio going off in different directions in "Chosen" being echoed by their current locations, I hadn't thought of that before. What will Giles do with Dana, what in fact can anyone do with Dana that hasn't been done to her already. More please.

[ponygirl2000.livejournal.com]

I thought you captured Dru's voice particularly well, and that doesn't seem to be an easy thing to do even for ME writers! My one very small quibble is that I felt that the use of nicknames was occurring a bit too closely together - "Buff" appearing a couple times in the same paragraph for example - just an unimportant style thing really.

I'm looking forward to seeing more. Poor Xander! Eek.