Buffy Summers (slayer_comma_b) wrote in wariscoming, @ 2013-06-07 00:31:00 |
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Entry tags: | buffy summers |
WHO: Buffy Summers, Open if anyone wants, or narrative.
WHAT: Music and vampires.
WHERE: An alley.
WHEN: Late at night.
There was a club, it reminded Buffy of the Bronze. Mostly a young crowd, and young bands too, glad to get the gig. Buffy liked to go there late, when the crowd had thinned out and the bands started playing their less pop-like stuff. There was one band that played there...when they played, she sat right in front of the stage and listened.
The guys in the band thought she was way into them, band groupie or something. The lead singer had tried to chat her up but she'd blown him off. She was just there for the music. Definitely no time for guys who were full of themselves. But the music: it was loud, it was obnoxious, it was a violent assault in musical form, it was pure defiance made audible...and somehow, it was beautiful. And she couldn't figure that out, and she couldn't get enough of it.
* * *
She caught a vampire. Not during patrol, when she was supposed to. After patrol, in the alley outside the club, with a cute but totally full of himself guy watching every move with his jaw hanging open. "If I were you, I'd just forget you ever saw anything," she told him tiredly, but she couldn't get rid of him till the drummer came out and pried him away.
That left her with a vampire on the ground and the tang of violence in her mouth. She'd taken a punch to the jaw and bit the inside of her cheek. She didn't like the taste of blood.
Once upon a time, she'd killed vampires. Stake to the heart, easy as breathing, and then they were dust and she moved on to the next one. These vampires, though, they could turn back into humans, living and breathing humans, so it was a capture not kill operation.
Buffy got out the restraints she'd been provided and trussed up the vampire -- a woman, about the age Buffy's mom had been when she died.
She'd dusted so many vampires. Not a thought. They were already dead.
Dead seemed to have a lot of exceptions.
She ought to be grateful that she could save this vampire. This woman who'd been turned into a vampire. She ought to be grateful that things were different here. But it was actually hard for her to put her stake away. She blamed killer reflexes.
* * *
"Are you okay?" the drummer asked. She hadn't noticed that he'd come back. She was getting careless, that could kill her someday, but she didn't seem to care at the moment.
"No," she said flatly, grateful to have someone she could give the stark truth. "But thanks for asking."
"Is there anything I can do?"
She'd already been turning away. She'd expected the truth to drive him away.
"Shouldn't you be freaking out?"
"I'm the one who doesn't freak out," he said. "I guess you are too. So is there anything?"
"Play me a song?"
He nodded. "We can do that. Well, maybe not Grant, but the rest of us."
* * *
And that's how Buffy ended up standing in the alley with the backstage door open to listen to the last song of the night, with a middle-aged vampire bound and gagged at her feet, squirming to life part way through and trying to yell over the music.
It was still good music, but it had lost some of its fascination. Buffy'd figured out its secret: for all the loud imitations of violence, the music followed the rules, and it always ended when it should, falling away into silence.
And when the music ended, the cries of the vampire at her feet continued.