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cherryThere is one small problem with a few of the fic-requests: I haven't seen 'Chosen' yet. I see Buffy when my aunt tapes it for me and sends it on out, but I'm beginning to be terribly afraid she missed it. So I'm afriad post-Chosen fic might be a bit of a problem for me to write. If anyone wants to make adjustments or new requests, that's fine. If there's anyone who just wants to make a new one, that's also good.
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elvenjen4
The yip of dogs carries over the steady cadence of drums and wooden flutes, the laugh of women and the pattering of children’s feet. Everywhere there are people - black skin and white smiles, woven baskets balanced atop dark curls, brightly coloured fabrics.
The scent of spices rides on the hot summer wind as he lets the flap of the tent settle heavily into place. They will not cover the smell for long, as the body starts to decompose in the South African heat. No one has eyes for him in the bustle, no one has eyes for him because he is different -- they know ruthless men too well, and there is something dangerous in his eyes and the faint shadow of a gun beneath his crisp white shirt.
Brightly painted canopies cast an oasis of shade over each stall. People crowd around baskets of fruit and bread, vegetables and flowers. He melds in easily with the crowd, though he does not have to: there are none here who will remember him if questioned.
A collision, and he has his hand on his gun before he’s even registered the motion. “Sorry,” a woman says, and he manages to stop himself before he draws the weapon. She kneels, dark hair covering her face as she dusts off orange and yellow fruits and stacks them back into her basket. He crouches beside her, careful to keep the ground from brushing his clothes. “I was thinking about something else,” she continues as he hands her an orange, and looks up at him with black eyes.
White cotton shirt, pale skin, brown hair. He shoots to his feet. His hand is on his gun where she can’t see it, but her smile doesn’t fade. She looks out of place in white -- she wears it rarely. She continues to chat inanely, making no move for a weapon or to cover her exposed neck. Instead, she offers him her hand, and when he takes it uses him to haul herself to her feet, wicker basket balanced on on one hip.
She doesn’t let go of his hand when she is standing. It is not a hold, a trap, but merely not removing her long fingers from his. She frowns at him, confusion in her eyes. Her eyes are doe-eyes now. Soft and black, and just helpless enough to bring out the predator in him.
“Do I know you?” she asks, making a map of his face. Her hair is tied loosely back, escaped tendrils sticking to her skin in the desert heat. She is not carrying a weapon. “Did you go to school with me in Mozambique? Did you ever live along the Ivory Coast?”
“No,” he replies shortly. He has lived on the Ivory Coast, but he knows she has not.
“Oh. Well, where in these parts do you live? Work?”
His one hand, the one that she is not holding, has never left his gun. “Business brings me here. Business calls me to leave summarily.”
“Oh.” There is disappointment in those prey eyes. She has never had prey eyes. She has always been the hunter, and he does not think that she could that thoroughly change them of her own accord.
“I would like to think that had we met you would not so soon forget.”
She sighs, and releases his hand. “I guess you just remind me of someone I used to know.”
“Believe me when I say, madam, you truly have never known me.”
***
Irina’s office. Warm and dark, but the air still flows. He knows he left the suffocation of the desert heat behind in South Africa, but there is still a brand of it on his hand and wrist, where fingers grasped his.
Across the desk, black eyes regard him.
“The target was neutralized,” he tells any space in the room except for the midnight eyes. “I have it from good sources that due to the nature of Mr. Kindrad’s death, his former supporters will provide us no more resistance.”
“Good,” Irina says from a chair that she should disappear into but doesn’t.
He rises and turns to go when her voice stops him as surely as a shot. “Mr. Sark,” she says, and he does not turn.
“Yes?”
“Is there anything else you wish to report?”
“Your pardon?” His eyes are firmly fixed on the rug by the door.
“Were there any anomalies? Any -- deviations I should know of?”
Face turned to the door but still neutral, he shakes his head. “There were not.”
Body perfectly still, he waits.
A small explosion rockets the room and he does not move. It is only when it comes again that he realizes it to be a slow, measured clapping. He turns impassively to see Irina leaning back in her chair. “Job well done, Mr. Sark,” she says, and there is something in her eyes that could almost be pride.
Almost.
He inclines his head and turns to leave when her voice stops him again. This time it forces him back around and catches his eyes on hers.
“Make no mistake though, Sark. If you tell a single soul of my daughter’s whereabouts or condition, you will live only long enough to regret the consequences.”
“I would expect no less. You would kill me yourself?”
“Yes.”
His smile is tight and dry. “You do me honour.”
Black eyes that are so much like her daughter’s and so different. They are somehow brighter than the dark, and their brilliance makes him uneasy. “One thing you let yourself forget, Sark. Dead men have no use for honour.”
And, for_nepthys_
(I know I said I was going to try the C/L, but this kind of ate a hole in my mind. How exactly would Bobby react to the whole Emma/Scott thing?)
His steps are heavy and loud. Back and forth, back and forth. There was a time she would have snapped at him to sit down, but she just examines her thigh-high boots (hooker boots if he ever saw them) with eyes he cannot read. She has a broken nail which she looks at disinterestedly, and the only reason her clothes are not torn is that there is not enough of them to do any damage to.
There is a single drop of blood at the corner of her absently curled lips, and it is with anger that he realizes that he still wants to lean in and wipe the single red spot off. Return her to her pristine white, because against the colour she is paler than alabaster perfection. She is something that haunts hallowed ground in the night.
“What the hell was that?” he finally snaps, because he can’t take it any longer. He used to be able to read *something* in her eyes, he remembers.
“On my part? Mostly kick boxing.” She finishes her inspection of her boots and raises her eyes to him. “On Jean’s, mostly -- well, I’m not really sure *what* she was doing, but it didn’t seems to serve her particularly well, now did it?”
“Emma!”
She slides off her bed and over to her mirror. Wipes away the blood. It stands out brightly against her white gloves. “Now, Bobby, I know you know what that was. You’ve trained in most of those same techniques.”
“And you know what I meant.”
“If there was anything you didn’t recognize, it’s because you chose to disappear for a year.” She brushes her hair. She doesn’t wince, though Bobby knows Jean got a good yank in.
“Scott. You’re really --”
“Yes.”
“Scott-fucking-Summers.”
She flips the mass of hair over her other shoulder and brushes that side. “Can’t pull the wool over your eyes, now can I?”
“Why?” he spits.
Her face in the mirror is blank, and she seems to regard it without surprise. “Because I can,” she says finally, thoughtfully.
Bobby fights the impulse to drive a fist through something. There’s no real reason Scott’s face should be at the top of the list, but it’s right there. He’s punched enough walls to know who inevitably looses, so he settles for swearing forcefully. Emma ties her hair neatly back.
He sits down on the foot of her bed, rests is weight back on his elbows and watches her. There is none of the hyperawareness that he is on her *bed* that there has always been before. “Because you can,” he repeats. “You’re fucking Scott Summers because you can.”
She attaches diamond earrings to her lobes. It’s a good thing she wasn’t wearing them before, he thinks, because they might not be there any longer. “Yes,” is all she says. She seems paler than they are, somehow.
“You seduced him because you could.”
“Now, Bobby, what makes you think I was doing the seducing?”
“Personal experience,” he says pointedly. It is at this time that one year ago she would have laughed, and he finds the silence in that space chilling.
“Maybe I did, but he was willing,” is all she says.
“And you don’t feel anything?” Bobby asks. The silence is as hollow as the space where her laugh is missing. He thinks he’s missed a lot while he was gone.
“Whatever,” he says.
She turns to look at them, and he realizes why he is no longer able to read her eyes. There is nothing in them. Absolutely nothing.
“You won. You seduced him or he let you, but you won. Why piss off Jean until she jumped on you? Why whisper those little dirty secrets into her mind until she lost it?”
Emma unwinds her hair and starts to brush it again. She has eyes only for the mirror. “Why not?” she asks.
“Because you’d all ready won.”
“Are you jealous, Bobby?”
He suddenly becomes aware again that he is almost sprawled across her bed, so he draws himself up straight. “You probably know the answer to that better than I do. You’re probably deeper in my head right now than I am, so why don’t you tell me?”
She turns, hair shadowing half her face, and smiles an empty smile. “You’d take me right now, if I’d let you. Up against the wall, so you could prove to something to someone. You want to sit across the supper table from him and know that you had me screaming.”
He swallows dryly. “You never told me why.”
She does laugh at this, a sound not unlike glass breaking. “Why? Because I can.”
“You’d won. You’d beaten her. Now she’s coming out on top.”
Emma laughs again, the sound skittering along every nerve in his body, and Bobby feels himself shiver.
“You really don’t get it, do you?” she asks. All he can do is shake his head. “I only win if she hurts me. If she lands a blow that I can feel.”
“What do you --”
“I only win if she hurts me. Don’t you get it, Bobby? She can’t hurt me. I don’t feel anything.” She shakes her head, and laughs again with her empty eyes. “I don’t even think I can hurt myself. Not any more. You think I've won?”
Hollow silence as he tries to think of something to say. Sitting with his hands on his knees on the foot of Emma Frost’s bed, and the hush says more than he ever could.
She laughs, and it cuts. "I lose, Bobby. I always lose."
I did warn that the quality of these might be spotty, right?
For
elvenjen4The yip of dogs carries over the steady cadence of drums and wooden flutes, the laugh of women and the pattering of children’s feet. Everywhere there are people - black skin and white smiles, woven baskets balanced atop dark curls, brightly coloured fabrics.
The scent of spices rides on the hot summer wind as he lets the flap of the tent settle heavily into place. They will not cover the smell for long, as the body starts to decompose in the South African heat. No one has eyes for him in the bustle, no one has eyes for him because he is different -- they know ruthless men too well, and there is something dangerous in his eyes and the faint shadow of a gun beneath his crisp white shirt.
Brightly painted canopies cast an oasis of shade over each stall. People crowd around baskets of fruit and bread, vegetables and flowers. He melds in easily with the crowd, though he does not have to: there are none here who will remember him if questioned.
A collision, and he has his hand on his gun before he’s even registered the motion. “Sorry,” a woman says, and he manages to stop himself before he draws the weapon. She kneels, dark hair covering her face as she dusts off orange and yellow fruits and stacks them back into her basket. He crouches beside her, careful to keep the ground from brushing his clothes. “I was thinking about something else,” she continues as he hands her an orange, and looks up at him with black eyes.
White cotton shirt, pale skin, brown hair. He shoots to his feet. His hand is on his gun where she can’t see it, but her smile doesn’t fade. She looks out of place in white -- she wears it rarely. She continues to chat inanely, making no move for a weapon or to cover her exposed neck. Instead, she offers him her hand, and when he takes it uses him to haul herself to her feet, wicker basket balanced on on one hip.
She doesn’t let go of his hand when she is standing. It is not a hold, a trap, but merely not removing her long fingers from his. She frowns at him, confusion in her eyes. Her eyes are doe-eyes now. Soft and black, and just helpless enough to bring out the predator in him.
“Do I know you?” she asks, making a map of his face. Her hair is tied loosely back, escaped tendrils sticking to her skin in the desert heat. She is not carrying a weapon. “Did you go to school with me in Mozambique? Did you ever live along the Ivory Coast?”
“No,” he replies shortly. He has lived on the Ivory Coast, but he knows she has not.
“Oh. Well, where in these parts do you live? Work?”
His one hand, the one that she is not holding, has never left his gun. “Business brings me here. Business calls me to leave summarily.”
“Oh.” There is disappointment in those prey eyes. She has never had prey eyes. She has always been the hunter, and he does not think that she could that thoroughly change them of her own accord.
“I would like to think that had we met you would not so soon forget.”
She sighs, and releases his hand. “I guess you just remind me of someone I used to know.”
“Believe me when I say, madam, you truly have never known me.”
***
Irina’s office. Warm and dark, but the air still flows. He knows he left the suffocation of the desert heat behind in South Africa, but there is still a brand of it on his hand and wrist, where fingers grasped his.
Across the desk, black eyes regard him.
“The target was neutralized,” he tells any space in the room except for the midnight eyes. “I have it from good sources that due to the nature of Mr. Kindrad’s death, his former supporters will provide us no more resistance.”
“Good,” Irina says from a chair that she should disappear into but doesn’t.
He rises and turns to go when her voice stops him as surely as a shot. “Mr. Sark,” she says, and he does not turn.
“Yes?”
“Is there anything else you wish to report?”
“Your pardon?” His eyes are firmly fixed on the rug by the door.
“Were there any anomalies? Any -- deviations I should know of?”
Face turned to the door but still neutral, he shakes his head. “There were not.”
Body perfectly still, he waits.
A small explosion rockets the room and he does not move. It is only when it comes again that he realizes it to be a slow, measured clapping. He turns impassively to see Irina leaning back in her chair. “Job well done, Mr. Sark,” she says, and there is something in her eyes that could almost be pride.
Almost.
He inclines his head and turns to leave when her voice stops him again. This time it forces him back around and catches his eyes on hers.
“Make no mistake though, Sark. If you tell a single soul of my daughter’s whereabouts or condition, you will live only long enough to regret the consequences.”
“I would expect no less. You would kill me yourself?”
“Yes.”
His smile is tight and dry. “You do me honour.”
Black eyes that are so much like her daughter’s and so different. They are somehow brighter than the dark, and their brilliance makes him uneasy. “One thing you let yourself forget, Sark. Dead men have no use for honour.”
And, for
_nepthys_(I know I said I was going to try the C/L, but this kind of ate a hole in my mind. How exactly would Bobby react to the whole Emma/Scott thing?)
His steps are heavy and loud. Back and forth, back and forth. There was a time she would have snapped at him to sit down, but she just examines her thigh-high boots (hooker boots if he ever saw them) with eyes he cannot read. She has a broken nail which she looks at disinterestedly, and the only reason her clothes are not torn is that there is not enough of them to do any damage to.
There is a single drop of blood at the corner of her absently curled lips, and it is with anger that he realizes that he still wants to lean in and wipe the single red spot off. Return her to her pristine white, because against the colour she is paler than alabaster perfection. She is something that haunts hallowed ground in the night.
“What the hell was that?” he finally snaps, because he can’t take it any longer. He used to be able to read *something* in her eyes, he remembers.
“On my part? Mostly kick boxing.” She finishes her inspection of her boots and raises her eyes to him. “On Jean’s, mostly -- well, I’m not really sure *what* she was doing, but it didn’t seems to serve her particularly well, now did it?”
“Emma!”
She slides off her bed and over to her mirror. Wipes away the blood. It stands out brightly against her white gloves. “Now, Bobby, I know you know what that was. You’ve trained in most of those same techniques.”
“And you know what I meant.”
“If there was anything you didn’t recognize, it’s because you chose to disappear for a year.” She brushes her hair. She doesn’t wince, though Bobby knows Jean got a good yank in.
“Scott. You’re really --”
“Yes.”
“Scott-fucking-Summers.”
She flips the mass of hair over her other shoulder and brushes that side. “Can’t pull the wool over your eyes, now can I?”
“Why?” he spits.
Her face in the mirror is blank, and she seems to regard it without surprise. “Because I can,” she says finally, thoughtfully.
Bobby fights the impulse to drive a fist through something. There’s no real reason Scott’s face should be at the top of the list, but it’s right there. He’s punched enough walls to know who inevitably looses, so he settles for swearing forcefully. Emma ties her hair neatly back.
He sits down on the foot of her bed, rests is weight back on his elbows and watches her. There is none of the hyperawareness that he is on her *bed* that there has always been before. “Because you can,” he repeats. “You’re fucking Scott Summers because you can.”
She attaches diamond earrings to her lobes. It’s a good thing she wasn’t wearing them before, he thinks, because they might not be there any longer. “Yes,” is all she says. She seems paler than they are, somehow.
“You seduced him because you could.”
“Now, Bobby, what makes you think I was doing the seducing?”
“Personal experience,” he says pointedly. It is at this time that one year ago she would have laughed, and he finds the silence in that space chilling.
“Maybe I did, but he was willing,” is all she says.
“And you don’t feel anything?” Bobby asks. The silence is as hollow as the space where her laugh is missing. He thinks he’s missed a lot while he was gone.
“Whatever,” he says.
She turns to look at them, and he realizes why he is no longer able to read her eyes. There is nothing in them. Absolutely nothing.
“You won. You seduced him or he let you, but you won. Why piss off Jean until she jumped on you? Why whisper those little dirty secrets into her mind until she lost it?”
Emma unwinds her hair and starts to brush it again. She has eyes only for the mirror. “Why not?” she asks.
“Because you’d all ready won.”
“Are you jealous, Bobby?”
He suddenly becomes aware again that he is almost sprawled across her bed, so he draws himself up straight. “You probably know the answer to that better than I do. You’re probably deeper in my head right now than I am, so why don’t you tell me?”
She turns, hair shadowing half her face, and smiles an empty smile. “You’d take me right now, if I’d let you. Up against the wall, so you could prove to something to someone. You want to sit across the supper table from him and know that you had me screaming.”
He swallows dryly. “You never told me why.”
She does laugh at this, a sound not unlike glass breaking. “Why? Because I can.”
“You’d won. You’d beaten her. Now she’s coming out on top.”
Emma laughs again, the sound skittering along every nerve in his body, and Bobby feels himself shiver.
“You really don’t get it, do you?” she asks. All he can do is shake his head. “I only win if she hurts me. If she lands a blow that I can feel.”
“What do you --”
“I only win if she hurts me. Don’t you get it, Bobby? She can’t hurt me. I don’t feel anything.” She shakes her head, and laughs again with her empty eyes. “I don’t even think I can hurt myself. Not any more. You think I've won?”
Hollow silence as he tries to think of something to say. Sitting with his hands on his knees on the foot of Emma Frost’s bed, and the hush says more than he ever could.
She laughs, and it cuts. "I lose, Bobby. I always lose."
I did warn that the quality of these might be spotty, right?
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2003-06-01 09:04 pm (UTC)::cheers:: Yay!! Sarky-pooh!! Very well written, hon! It's always the eyes....mmmm..
This is even better when I realize the woman was white and not African LOL. I SO had a feeling it was Syd! But I didn't reread at that moment. (Baseball distracts me.) I love it even more now! :-D You realize that this begs for a sequel, right? It's asking for it. He neeeeeeds to see her again.
(no subject)
Date: 2003-06-03 09:37 pm (UTC)Tell you what. I'll write more if you write my grad present.
Mwhahah!
(no subject)
Date: 2003-06-02 04:55 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2003-06-03 09:59 pm (UTC)It's possible that I may eventually post this -- I haven't posted X-fic since the new year. Is that all right with you?
(no subject)
Date: 2003-06-04 07:00 am (UTC)Belatedly...
Date: 2003-07-14 01:09 am (UTC)It's been somewhat edited and titled 'Spent Casings.'
Just thought I'd let you know, in case you happened to be interested.