The Sidestep Chronicles
Third Chronicle
Katharyn Rosser
Okay, we’re back!
I made a couple of attempts to write a Third Chronicle for Sidestep over the years since the second one finished. Each of them failed because, really, I didn’t have a story worthy of what went before.
I’m the first to admit that (even though I love it and am very happy with it) Second Chronicle simply wasn’t conceptually on a par with the first. Better written IMHO as I got more experience, but the BIG IDEA wasn’t there. When the early versions of Third Chronicle didn’t have a BIG IDEA behind them either I abandoned them.
But… It’s Willow and Tara. I still love to play with them *COUGH* even though I am writing original fiction now. But I have tremendous difficulty NOT writing them as Sidestep Tara and Willow. I spent a lot of years with these versions of the characters in my head and – to me – they were almost the only version. So yes, there was a big pull to come back to Sidestep.
So, anyway… I wrote this story in a couple of months. It’s the size of a good size novel but not sprawling for a million words. By my own standards it’s actually quite short (LOL) but hopefully long enough to do the story justice. I like to think of it as greater maturity as a writer and being a little less self-indulgent. HA!
And yes. It is complete. It all exists on my laptop from Chapter One through to the end.
Since I completed that first draft I’ve left it on the shelf very deliberately for a few months to gain some perspective on it. Now, when I am redrafting it, I barely remember what I wrote or what is coming up so I get to approach it as ‘an outsider’ and to edit it accordingly. I find that works best for me. So I’ll be redrafting as we go, polishing it to the final version that can be posted. Some things may change a little, it might get a little tighter or I may even add scenes here or there, but there will be no major changes.
I don’t use a beta reader anymore. I’d love to but just don’t have the time for the back and forth of 3 or 4 drafts. So whatever is wrong with it is my fault. Given my (poor) memory it’s perfectly possible I will contradict First or Second Chronicle. Just live with it…
This story pretty much shuts down the Sidestep Chronicles. I can’t see a need for anymore and where I leave the characters won’t have unresolved plot points (which this one is based around). Also… the girls are hardly ‘girls’ anymore. They, like me, are getting on a bit. So Sidestep 4 might end up as ‘Willow and Tara in the retirement home.’ No one wants to read that story unless their adventures were really whacky…
Hope you can enjoy it.
Katharyn
United Kingdom, 2011.
Special Credit: SMGOVAN – Having being (nicely) bugging me about a sequel to Sidestep every time I ended up posting in the (massive) Sidestep thread, a few exchanges actually got me to thinking… (Which is a dangerous thing.) Some of that thinking led me to a moment of revelation (which is very rare) and to this story being largely plotted within a couple of hours. So yeah, you get to have your name shown in the credits right up front. Thanks.
Extra Special Credit: Xita! You know, thanks for this place and all… Guess this means you can’t shut it down for a while longer…
I was going to do what follows in separate posts prior to part 1 but the new approval process probably means I can't post any other parts until that comes through...
Prologue: The telling of what was and what is.
Chronicles one and two of Sidestep run to 242 parts and something around one and a half million words. Which can be found in the Completed Fics archive (A-M). While I’d have loved that everyone could read or remember that, it’s just not going to happen. So in a bid not to limit myself to just the ‘old timers’ here at the Kitten Board I’ve attempted a potted summary of events in all that earlier writing. I would recommend that you read this as it will get confusing otherwise…
In my eyes this isn’t an AU except it’s THE original AU from the canon. This story is entirely set in ‘The Wish’ universe. Buffy never came to Sunnydale in what would’ve been season one. That meant that the Master rose unopposed and Willow and Xander were vamped. That, if you like, is canon from ‘The Wish’ as is Buffy’s eventual fate when she finally did arrive in Sunnydale.
In the first Chronicle - Due to the Master’s growing power a wave of vampires spread out from Sunnydale. One such group killed Tara's parents and brother. Tara, on her own after that, found she could help people not to suffer the same fate by using magic. She travelled the country helping with the spreading vampire problems until eventually she arrived in Sunnydale ready to take on the Master. By this point she’d already been dreaming of a red-haired woman that she was drawn to…
Her ally – and employer – at the time was the Mayor who had ‘missed’ his ascension due to the Master taking over. Tara always knew he’d wanted to do ‘bad things’ but since he opposed the vampires she hated she accepted that he was a force for good for the people of Sunnydale. At least until the town was freed from the Master.
Then Tara met the vampire Willow, a Willow who looked like the woman she had loved from her dreams but was not actually her. They were fated to be together but not as human and vampire. Fate, being a certainty, gave other interested parties a way to manipulate events to their own advantage around them – one such party being Wolfram and Hart.
Faith (the Slayer) comes to Sunnydale and becomes friends with Tara but only learns about the relationship with the vampire Willow later. When she, Giles and the Council do find out tough decisions are made. After the Master is destroyed, the Council decree that Tara is too close to a demon to be saved. Faith is just about willing to do her duty, if Tara will not repent, but is killed by VampWillow in Tara’s defence. Tara herself, torn in two, is unable to help Faith without killing all that is left of the woman she wants to love.
Ultimately Tara decides she cannot accept the pain the vampire Willow inflicts on people – not just for a shadow of what should be between them - and is forced to kill her. It was never Willow but... it was as close as she had known.
After Willow had been destroyed though Tara finds a way, via Wolfram and Hart, to get the real, human Willow back. In a terrible mental state, bearing all the memories of what the vampire had done as well as the state of limbo she’d been in while it was happening, Willow is in dire need of help. Tara takes the recovering Willow back to the farm she grew up on the two women slowly fall in love – for real - and eventually return to Sunnydale where they make their peace with the Giles’.
In the Second Chronicle - Tara and Willow remain in Sunnydale and they have become its guardians, practicing magic the likes of which the world has not seen for a long time. They are now friends with the Giles family, Rupert, Jenny (Calendar) and their children, including a girl called Faith who has been named after the lost Slayer. The burden of their duty weighs heavily on them though. They’ve both done things they’re not proud of and feel that defending Sunnydale is the least that they can do to make up for them.
They face the machinations of several enemies, Ethan, Darla, Drusilla and the Mayor, while a young, deaf girl – Toni – is caught up in them too. Toni loses her father to the vampires and gets away just in time for Tara and Willow to help her escape. Suspicious of the girls and their magic, Toni is a difficult charge for them, staying with them for some time while social services figure out what to do with the now orphaned girl.
Ultimately the Mayor – in his ascended form – takes charge of the Hellmouth, which was always his intent in becoming a giant snake demon. He sees it as a service that he can provide for the town he helped found, protecting it from what lies beneath it. His change also frees Tara and Willow from their duty to protect the town.
Toni is finally adopted by Rupert and Jenny, though she is by then close to Tara and Willow too. Finally the girls leave Sunnydale to be able to live their lives together.
The epilogue of the Second Chronicle shows us life a few years down the line where Tara had become the vice-principal of a school for children with sensory impairments and Willow has a company making software to support the education of kids at exactly those kinds of schools. Where they’re based then, outside of Boston, has no need of patrolling and Slayers. It’s – almost – normal.
The epilogue closes with a now college-age Faith Giles finding herself a girlfriend, Toni giving birth to her first child – Charlotte - and a rapprochement between the all too similar Jenny and Faith, mother and daughter who’d been fighting with each other for years.
And for a long time that was – as they say – that.
Except now there’s a third Chronicle.
The power of three, of course.
Notes Since it’s a few years since I wrote Sidestep and also because it’s too much to expect any new readers to go away and read First and Second Chronicles, there are a few chapters – especially up the front – that lay out who characters are and what has happened and make it less of a direct continuation of the same story. In other words Third Chronicle is written more like a self-contained novel that anyone can pick up than expecting you to know everything. While that may annoy devotees, I hope it will make for a better all around experience.
Title: The Sidestep Chronicles: Third Chronicle (Part 1 (243)) Author: Katharyn Rosser Feedback: Constructive criticism is always welcome. Flames just demonstrate you have a tiny mind. Spoiler warning: I’m really not going to bother after all this time except to say that this fic will totally spoil my own Sidestep: First Chronicle and Second Chronicle which can be found in the Completed Fics archive (A-M) Distribution: This story was written for Pens. Pens is its home. No archiving off Different Coloured Pens and the Kitten Board please. (This applies to all my stories, fics and particularly to Sidestep Chronicle as a whole.) Summary: A re-introduction to the characters and set up for what is to come… Disclaimer: I don’t own any of the copyrights or anything else associated with BTVS. All rights lie with the production company, writers etc. I am making no money from this series of stories however all original characters and situations remain my property. Rating: The earlier Chronicles of Sidestep were much darker and I slapped a blanket R rating on them for occasional content. This series is lighter in tone caution is only recommended for occasional scenes. However to understand absolutely everything that went before you’d have to have read the first two fully so… Couples: Tara and Willow forever. Rupert and Jenny are also together. Nothing else referred to. Text convention: We’re occasionally dealing with some deaf characters here and that has to be addressed. Speech inside asterisks is spoken in sign language only. Occasionally people responding to signed speech may do so inside speech marks, which indicates that they are also verbalising as well. Occasionally I might make a mistake and get this wrong but when dealing with a character that only signs, take it as read that they’re doing so when they “speak.” Notes: As mentioned above, the early chapters of this story are structured to re-introduce the reader to the characters and establish their lives. I apologise to those who knew First and Second Chronicle well, but this is really for the newbies. I’ve included the overall part number (243 for this one) above just because that is how I have it organised. Also I like big numbers. Thanks to: Everyone who keeps the Kitten going.
Tara and Willow:
“You’re early, baby,” Willow called down the stairs when she heard movement. Only, what? Five o’clock and Tara was home? On a weekday? That was plenty unusual enough to comment on. “I thought you had an after-school?”
Not that she minded Tara being out quite late – at least in one sense. It was good discipline for her. Running a virtual company – with her developers scattered all over the world – was about as tough as running a normal one with offices and buildings. But for her there was one additional challenge; staying focused enough to get everything done in the face of distractions here in the house.
And Tara was the single greatest distraction she’d ever known when she was here. So… from a professional point of view having her woman out of the house at least ten hours a day was just fine for the health of the company – of which she and Tara were the majority stockholders.
“I do,” Tara told her, poking her head around the office door. “I mean I did. I asked Maggie to cover it for me though.”
Willow greeted her with a sympathetic smile. There wasn’t much that would keep Tara out of her after-school classes. She always loved teaching so much, but got to do so little now that she was Principal here at the school. Those after-school sessions were the ones where she reminded herself of the way she’d have liked things to be. “Guess it must’ve been a rough day then?”
“Never stopped,” Tara said, coming up behind her and kissing the back of her neck. “One thing just led to another. I had the trustees in and then there was that fund-raising lunch. I missed you at that, you know. My cutting edge software supplier always goes down well.”
“I know baby – and its sweet of you to acknowledge that I go down well too - but I had a conference call to Germany. What can I say? The Germans like to go home on time.”
Tara straightened up, just looping her arms around her now.
“I told them all about the work you do with us,” Tara said, “but you know I don’t do that very well.”
“You do fine,” Willow promised her, Tara wasn’t half as technophobic as she pretended to be. Even if the kids were racing ahead of them both. “I mean, you’ve heard me give the speech about a million times.”
Her company worked with the school because it was the premier software company supporting deaf, blind and multi-sensory impaired kids. That’d started as a ‘how can I help thing’ when Tara had started working here at the school. But looking at the market, there was a definite niche there and one that she’d now successfully made her own. The most satisfying thing about it – apart from building it up from nothing – was that a handful of former students actually now worked for the company. A few others had done and then moved onto jobs with the bigger players in the industry. They both got a kick out of that.
“I know, but it would’ve been nice to see you before… Billy Duke got a crayon stuck up his nose.”
Willow couldn’t help but laugh. One of the residential kids, she knew most of them quite well as they were often around here after school and at weekends. Billy was about the smallest and bravest little guy that you could imagine. Fearless as anything for all that life had stacked against him in terms of his impairment and family circumstances. “What colour was it?”
“Why does everyone ask me that? In the end it was stuck so far up there I had to take him to the emergency room. First thing they asked was ‘what colour is it’ too?” Tara said.
“So?”
“It was red, okay. It was red. And yes, it looked like he had a nose bleed.”
“You took him then?”
“Clare’s still off,” Tara said and Willow felt rather than saw the shrug while her woman embraced her.
“Comes to something when your school nurse is off sick during an emergency like that. How was Billy?”
“He thought it was great.”
“That boy’s going to grow up to throw himself out of aeroplanes,” Willow said, despite the fact that the military probably wouldn’t take him, on account of the blindness and all.
“Probably. Anyway, I just got back – schools out and I decided that I was entitled to get out of the office before six. So here I am.”
“I have to work,” Willow said.
“Oh.”
“Yeah, nose to the grindstone. Putting in the hours. Pushing on through and generally being the responsible adult that you didn’t fall in love with,” Willow teased.
“Hmm, so if I started to do this… you’d have to tell me to stop?” Tara’s fingers started to work their magic on the back of her neck, almost literally since any touch was charged and when they worked into something so fundamental as tension… Gods above it was good. Maybe, maybe there was some woman in Turkey who could do more for her in a massage, but massage was the least of it with Tara.
“I really might have to,” Willow managed, suppressing a groan.
“Shame.”
The fingers left her alone and Willow spun her chair around, going too far and having to bring herself back around again – ruining the effect. “Tara, don’t you come in here all frisky and leave me hanging. That’s just not appropriate behaviour.”
Tara was smiling, a sight she never got tired of. It kept her from starting to feel old. No matter how the numbers of years started to mount, she still felt young. Though the kids that they had coming through the school – and for many of them through this house – were starting to make her feel… more mature. God, she was employing some of them and they’d been with her a few years already – after going to college.
“Not sure I’m frisky. Not exactly,” Tara told her, running a finger up the stems of the flowers on the shelf across the room that had started to dry out and die on them. They’d been a gift and neither of them saw any reason not to preserve them as long as possible.
At Tara’s touch the colours started to return. The leaves filled out, turned green and were shapely rather than crinkled.
“Just how long do you think you can keep that going?” There was a prickle of magic in the air. Their own brand of it, one that no one else had ever really matched, not so far as they knew anyway.
“We kept our wedding blooms going for a couple of years,” Tara replied.
True. But this had just been a birthday gift, a delivery from Toni. Hardly super-special, but they’d been pretty and now they were again. All it took was a touch, a directed thought. A wish…
“And just what did you have in mind for this evening that brought you home to me?” Since they lived on the school grounds it was actually very easy for Tara to head back to the office, if she wanted to. Which plainly she didn’t.
“I want to cook you dinner.”
“Kitchen’s that way,” Willow pointed out and turned back to her desk, grinning and wondering what that dismissal would earn her.
With the faint prickle of magic in the air, Tara’s coming back across the room towards her was a little like someone walking through thick fog, it swirled and reformed ahead of her. Especially when it was someone so magically attuned as Tara was.
“Minx,” Tara said, her hands returning to her shoulders.
Willow enjoyed the renewed massage for maybe a minute but found that the tips of Tara’s fingers were dipping lower and lower, inside her shirt and… hmm, that too huh? “Something you like down there?” she asked as Tara briefly cupped her breasts.
“I seem to remember there might be, yeah.”
“Must be tough, for an old girl like you to remember something you haven’t laid hands on in oh… couple of days?” They’d shared that bath and hands hadn’t been the only things that had been laid.
Tara laughed softly. “Remember the days when we couldn’t keep our hands off each other?”
“Yeah, last Sunday was a looong time ago.”
“You’ve not done so badly since then,” Tara reminded her.
“Its always,” Willow said.
“And forever.”
--------------
Holland
“Mister Manners, would you care to move to the nineteenth hole?”
“You’re a good boy, Eric,” Holland replied. “But I think we’ll stay here a while longer. See this out.” He wasn’t quite ready to head inside.
Eric was Wolfram and Hart, of course he was. They’d hardly let him roam free without some sort of supervision. And these days he did need the help.
As retirements went this was about the most pleasant he’d actually heard of. So he couldn’t play golf any more, he did get an obscene amount of pleasure from watching it. And with this boy’s help, he never had to miss a swing. Something Eric didn’t seem to mind.
“Up the fairway, Sir?”
“Absolutely.”
With Eric’s hand lowering onto his shoulder, they shifted, moving from the tee at the 18th hole, up the fairway and a little into the rough near where the ball had landed. Wheelchair and all. The trick to not throwing up was just to take a breath in the instant before you left, otherwise the stench would get you, sure as anything.
Brimstone would do that to you.
“Well done again,” he said.
“Thank you, Sir.”
“Not exactly what you expected when you signed on to Wolfram and Hart, I bet? Looking after an old man? Helping him around the golf course?”
“I’ve had worse jobs, Sir.”
“Hmm,” Holland reflected. “So have I.”
“Besides, Sir, I know that it must be important. The firm doesn’t waste its resources.”
“That is very true. But still…”
“I do what I’m asked to do, Mister Manners. I do it without complaint and to the best of my ability. If you want to feel guilty about that somehow then you’re welcome to do so, but I take pride in my work.”
“That’s an excellent attitude. Excellent. Reminds me of one of my protégés. Back before you were born.”
“I doubt that, Sir.”
“Ah, yes. I keep forgetting, you’re older than you look. No, look. You see, that grip is all wrong. All wrong.” He pointed at the error the golfer they’d been watching was making, but knew that Eric wasn’t particularly interested. Though the demon could hold conversations on any number of subjects, golf just wasn’t one of them. But he put up with it anyway.
In truth his retirement wouldn’t have been filled with so much admiration for the game of golf if it hadn’t been for driving his firm-assigned assistants to distraction. Though, to peel back another layer of the truth he’d driven the others away in part to get hold of Eric - a rather useful assistant who could move him in the blink of an eye from any place he’d been before to another. At every shift though, for a split second, they moved via one of the hell dimensions and if the boy let him go there…
He wouldn’t.
Send Eric for a walk around the course prior to teeing off and he could unerringly find the best spots to view the action – and shots from them. Heck, the boy could actually take him from where the shot was played to where it was going to land before it hit the ground, at least so long as it didn’t go too wild.
The next time that Eric reached for his shoulder though, he put his hand over the seemingly younger mans. “No.”
“Ah. I’ll wait over here, Sir.” Eric recognised what this was.
Holland’s attention was focused internally. To the presence – not just a voice or an image but a very real presence – that entered him at that moment.
“Yes?”
He waited while the presence unfolded, sensation upon sensation unleashed into his brain. Knowledge. Opinion. Questions.
“An opportunity has presented itself,” he agreed. It was easier to verbalise – especially out here while there was no one around.
A further stream of presence. Agreement. More questions. Seeking of clarity.
“I agree; it’s time for her reward.”
Question.
“No, I’ll see it’s entered in her ledger.
Regret. Parting. Good wishes.
“Balance and harmony to you too.”
Eric seemed to know when it was time for him to approach. “Business, Sir?”
“Yes, we’ll be putting you to rather better use in the next little while, I fancy. Home, Eric.”
“Yes, Sir.”
--------------
Toni
The party would go on long into the night, she was sure. It was Friday and she’d already specified that none of her staff were to be found in the office tomorrow. Both security and the Shalk demons that guarded the offices had copies of those instructions and she trusted that she wasn’t going to get a call to say someone had taken themselves in anyway. ‘I just wanted to finish off…’ wasn’t going to cut it.
Maybe she couldn’t stop them working from other locations, nor actually did she have any intention of doing so, but she’d decided that she wanted them to cut loose. They deserved it and she’d learned through experience that they wouldn’t do that – any more than she would have – unless they were very firmly told that they couldn’t do anything else.
The party would go on without her though. She’d left them in the function room of one of last real pubs in Manhattan. Bosses were supposed to start a party off and then bow out at an appropriate moment so that the staff could bitch about her too.
A full one percent of her bonus was behind the bar too. It didn’t sound like much but it was enough to get every one of them blasted on whatever they chose to drink, pay for damages and leave some change along with a hefty tip. And there would be damages. When lawyers cut loose, there were always damages.
Toni walked into her apartment, having drunk enough to be unsteady on her feet and slipped her shoes off as soon as she walked through the door. Why she still did it to herself, she had no idea. Heels. God’s penalty for female lawyers who got to be the best at what they did.
And what she did was broker deals. She made things happen. She played every card that there was to play and in the right order. That was what she did at work and she was very good at it.
Of course the apartment was empty.
It hadn’t always been. Once it had been a place of fun, children and a husband to come back to. Someone to tell her she’d done good. For those who could hear, it’d been a place that had been filled with laughter and giggling.
Happy sounds.
Just because it had always been silent to her didn’t mean that she couldn’t tell the difference now. Toni had been born deaf and never missed what she couldn’t imagine. It wasn’t even a consideration in why her life was the way it was. Didn’t mean that she wasn’t often reluctant to come home, but couldn’t stay away either in case… in case the ache went away.
The first room through the door – and this always tortured her – was her child’s bedroom. She kept the door closed, ever since that night she’d walked into the apartment, looked through that door and just fallen down on the bed amongst the stuffed animals and cried herself to sleep. Next morning she’d woken up a wrinkled mess and dragged herself to work at an unheard of nine a.m.
There were pictures in the hallway too. She didn’t dare take them down. Pictures of her baby, Charlotte. Pictures of her husband. The two and three of them. She couldn’t take them down, despite the fact that walking through them was like braving a tunnel of slaps in the face. But what if they came back? What if she took them down and they came back? What would they say then? They could come back… It was why she stayed here, even though it made her ache, so they’d know where to find her.
The kitchen was a safe place, devoid of too many reminders, and Mal’s absence had forced her to get better at fending for herself. Even making a decent meal when she was home early enough to bother. Mostly she stayed at the office with a healthy take-out though.
It was there in the kitchen that she took off her jacket, dumped her bag and made sure that the pad was left to charge and synch with the apartment systems. All her media, messages, bills and anything else that came up would be there waiting for her in the morning. Right now, she was taking her own advice. She was clocking off. She figured she deserved at least that much.
There was one picture in here though, Mal had hung it for her when they first moved in. Why here? At the time it’d just seemed like a good fit. A picture of her Dad.
He was long dead, of course. Long enough that it didn’t ache the way that the others did. But her last memory of him had been as a corpse that had been reanimated after the moment of death. A monstrous version of what was already monster. Of course that had to be her last memory of him, out at the Sunnydale Hellmouth. The place that had changed her entire life.
For better and for worse.
She couldn’t pretend that some good things hadn’t come out of Sunnydale. Tara and Willow who’d saved her life just after Dad had… passed. The Giles’ who’d taken care of her, given her a new family when they adopted her. Given her brothers and sisters that even after just a few years in their home before leaving for college she’d come to treasure. She’d been at just the right age to appreciate siblings who’d been much younger than her. She still enjoyed being their big sister as well as Tara and Willow’s younger one.
Sunnydale was also where Mal, her husband, had come from.
And she’d found success since then. An athletics scholarship. Running at the Olympics, her medal was buried somewhere in a drawer and rarely saw the light of day. Giving birth. Her career… All big successes. They’d all come from Sunnydale.
But so much lost too.
Because losing her Dad still counted for so much. She was still trying to put it right. Somehow. Why else, after spending her late teens with Tara, Willow and a Watcher would she contemplate working for the very law firm that had caused so much trouble in their lives?
Possibly because it was the only way.
Working as hard as she had… it had cost her almost everything that counted outside of the office. Relations with all of her surrogate parental figures had been strained since they found out and at best no one talked about it. That was when she made it to see them at all. At first it had been about being busy. Then, later, the judgement… Oh, the kids still loved her – and she them – but the adults? They tried hard not to let it show, but they were unsure about her now. Even after the accident… things had been difficult.
About the only person who was still actively in her life was Faith, one of the Giles’ natural born children. Her little sister. Not that Faith was above telling her exactly what she thought of ‘messing around with the forces of evil represented by Wolfram and Hart.’ But at least she was open and honest about it. At least it wasn’t just ignored or glossed over when it was about all she had left in her life there days. And Faith had long since left home, she could visit under her own steam, often just turning up and dragging her out of the office if she had to.
After all, the office and home were about the only places she could be found.
The question she’d been asking herself so much recently was what success was worth without anyone to share it with. Someone else who could appreciate it?
But she didn’t blame them for staying away, this was a self-inflicted wound.
Sitting here, prodding at the food she’d already prodded to stir-fry, left a lot of time to think about these things. She was – by everyone else’s standards – part of a problem that they’d all tried to put behind them.
Naturally Rupert was retired now, both as a librarian and a Watcher (though not as an Englishman abroad.) Her adopted brothers and sisters were off in school, college or the early stages of careers that had nothing to do with ‘evil.’ Faith had actually made a point of checking a number of potential employers weren’t amongst her clients.
Nice.
And the others? Tara was running a school, Willow a software company. They were doing good things with their lives. They all were – but they’d put the Hellmouth behind them. They’d fought so hard to put it behind them without abandoning the people who lived there – or the world because mouth of Hell wasn’t a localised phenomenon when it went wrong – to more danger.
She, on the other hand, was the one being paid a lot of money to keep things like a Hellmouth cooking. Just a few months ago she’d been asked to facilitate an apocalypse. Only a small one, but still. It hadn’t come off in the end, something to do with a lack of credit but she’d been quite willing to do it.
It was her job to do that, sometimes at least.
Willing… but not happy. It wouldn’t have been the first time either. What choice did she have though? What was she supposed to do? Give up on everything she’d been fighting for? Make all the sacrifices worthless by tossing away the end result?
She’d lost Charlie. Mal. All of them. And if she’d lost them then she had to follow through and make sure it was for something.
The price had already been paid.
Such a high price. Only a couple of other people in the world knew how high it had been.
There was a knock at the door. That hardly ever happened. Neighbours didn’t talk to each other here and even the doorman called up from the desk if they had a package or guest. So it was obviously a visitor who could bypass the doorman. One with courtesy enough to knock rather than just make their way inside.
Toni didn’t bother sprucing herself up. She was off the clock, she’d closed a big deal and been to the party. They’d have to take her as they found her. She dropped the fork she’d been prodding the food around with and walked barefoot out to the door.
“Ah, Toni. Nice to see you again.”
*And you, Mister Manners.*
**************************
_________________ ------------------------- If I wanted a little pussy, I've got my own to play with.
Chance in *Chance* -------------------------
Last edited by Katharyn on Mon Nov 07, 2011 4:26 am, edited 39 times in total.
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