Those of you that know me understand my complete lack of practice in all things linear. I truly wanted to write a serious fic for you. Something that would delve the utter depths of the soul and leave anyone who reads it, a more educated, significantly better human being for doing so. A fic that would challenge social conformity, and bring about world peace….or at least the much undermined marshmallow peeps shaped like Thanksgiving turkeys….
Okay. THIS is soooooo NOT one of those fics.
I’ve come to terms with the knowledge that I am not normal. (gasp) Nope. I will never be the kind of person who can see the envelope sitting there and keep my hands off it. Darn it. I have to nudge the envelope…even push it a little…possibly SHOVE it a couple of times back and forth over the table until it gets really toasty warm under my fingers.
If you are reading this for coherent thought, or even cool, babbling wit… STOP. This fic is not for you. There will be no frank discussions on the meaning of the dormant light bulb over the protagonist’s bed in here. Mindless fun resides beyond this point. Grope if you will….
Feedback is totally welcome. If you like it…or you don’t like it…I’m open to constructive criticism…so long as it’s …you know…constructive… As anything I write, everything means something…or nothing…and sometimes it’s a little of both.
This story begins where many stories do: In the middle. You are going to have to take for granted a few things.
1) This is a completely separate dimension than the current ‘real’ Buffyverse.
2) The characters of Tara Maclay and Willow Rosenberg do not belong to me. They are just here for the ride.
3) Take nothing seriously.
****
A Letter from the Studio Council:
We, The Demons That Be (the true power behind most of our poorly plotted television line-ups and quite possibly EVERY reality show on the market these days) Have found the characters of Willow Rosenberg and Tara Maclay far too High Risk for their current primetime show slot. In order to rectify this, we are proposing that they be reinstated into some other series on another channel …portraying totally straight, and thereby highly acceptable, ‘non-inflammatory’ female lead characters.
We have devised a series of pilot television shows on various channels to test their theory (and oh by the way this merely bolsters our master plan of keeping Willow and Tara apart… I mean we ARE demons after all) of a more socially acceptable plotline for OUR girls. We think that at least one of these pilots will be a rousing success.
***But as the viewers at home know…nothing…and mean NOTHING keeps our two favourite heroines apart. Even in the vast abyss of abhorrent television drivel…they seem to find each other.***
And with that…we invite you into our late night viewing room:
The Cataclysm Café []
Blind lottery luck finds us tuning into:
Channel “ The Living Woman Network”
Story Pitch: “A small-town doctor gets a life lesson from the mysterious stranger who has been admitted to the hospital. It’s Dawson’s Creek meets ER…”
Pilot Episode: “ The Road to Hellsville”
Willa Rothberg swept down the corridor in a flurry of rustling papers and long red hair. Today she looked frazzled. The staff knew the hospital protocol for ‘frazzled’.
See Willa Rothberg….
Step emphatically and polite out of the way…
Make no eye contact if possible…
Slip into the shadows…
And if you are the unlucky bastard caught in a hall where there are no shadows… grab your pager off your belt, and knit your brows (important call coming in face) and run….run like hell…
Willa made a beeline for the front desk where Lois, the Lead Administrative Assistant in the mornings, steeled herself and held her ground as Rothberg bore down on her…red hair bannering behind her like a Viking goddess thundering down from on high.
“ Who paged me?”
No good morning. No how do you do’s… no questions about Lois’s four… or how ever many she had children. There was no time for that. She had a job to do, quite possibly a life to save. Pleasantries were superfluous… and someone…someone had sent her a page.
“ They just brought in a stray. Kind of on the rowdy side. Fought the Medics all the way through here. They had to use restraints.” Lois said, she used the art brevity, which Willa respected, but still…a tiny inkling of her felt that she was offending the shorter woman somehow…But now was not the time.
“ Which curtain?”
“ Three.” Lois said, handing her a chart. Willa flipped through it with mild attention to the details. She had all of several seconds to read about Miss No Name who came in with no ID, no apparent urge to speak, and no insurance.
Willa patted the counter curtly. It was as much as Lois could expect for gratitude. Lois watched her head down the hall. The med students and residents alike appearing to have a sudden rash of urgent pages in her wake.
Willa Rothberg, though striking and lithe, seemed to do nothing but work. If someone were to ask Lois what she thought, which no one probably would, she would have told him or her that Dr. Rothberg was an impeccable doctor. A genius even. But she did not have a happy or personable bone in her body. Something was certainly missing from her. Willa Rothberg seemed to have been expertly fashioned without the capacity to smile…to make easy-going banter, or to have a basic fear of anything…especially not failure.
They were still fighting the blond woman down onto a bed when Willa entered. Though the patient was not much taller than Willa was herself…at least not significantly so… she was giving two male nurses and a muscular young med student a run for their money. She thrashed her entire body from one side to the other, testing the restraints with swift jerking movements, and raised her torso to high for them to get a securing strap around her middle.
The whole scene seemed odd to Willa because the only sound that seemed to be in the room was the snap of the restraint chains, the bark of the bed railing as it precariously kept it’s place, and the grunts and sharp commands of the men trying to restrict her. Not a single sound emitted from her. Her expression was harried, but not frantic. Her smooth, features and honey blond hair seemed more appropriate to a Waterhouse painting than a hospital gurney. Her serene visage warred against her body’s actions. Her motions were insistent and methodical and completely within her control. Willa set the chart aside and nudged into the fray next to a perspiring male nurse. Still staying an arm’s length from the struggling woman.
“ This chick needs something to…like… put her down!” The med student panted, holding onto the woman’s leg.
“Let’s see…Three men are trying to pin you down…you’re confused…possibly injured…and unable to tell anyone how absolutely terrified you are…all the while hearing some jackass in the room suggesting pumping you full of tranquilizers…like you’re on a wildlife preserve… Don’t you think we should try something a little more drastic…” She hoped her sarcasm wasn’t lost on him.
“Like what?” It obviously had been lost on him.
“ Why don’t we all just take a few steps back…stop crowding our ‘guest’ and go from there.” Willa kept her voice low and soothing…it caught the attention of the patient who seemed to hesitate for a fraction of a second in mid arch before continuing to strain against her captors.
The men looked at Willa as though she had grown an extra head.
“ Let her go???” The Med student asked.
“ Letting Go…as in…hands moving…coming off the patient and into respective pockets, or thumbs being re-housed in appropriate locations…” Willa said evenly.
Slowly…like their language translation processors were on some other time cycle, they stopped trying to push the young woman downward.
Even more slowly, like the woman could even possibly break the straps that held her, they withdrew their hands and stepped back. Moving together… like a dial-up Borg Unit…
The effect was immediate.
The woman stopped jerking against the arm restraints… she held them taut. The short chains that connected them to the bed railing quivered like loose guitar strings. She lifted only her head up this time, fixing each of the men with an accusatory glare.
You did this to me. It said.
She scowled at them, tugged at the wrist restraints again, and then craned her neck to inspect them. She seemed confused, as though she felt she should have been able to easily remove herself from her binds, and there they were…still on her wrists… Like the fact that she was still ensnared was unfathomable.
She lifted her gaze to the red-haired doctor. The sensible one who was not all hands, and unchecked aggression.
She was someone who could see reason. Someone who would let her go if she only knew….if she had an inkling of what was coming…
But she couldn’t speak reason. THEY had seen to that.
She was bound.
Not only by the restraints on her wrists, no…the leather and chain straps on any other occasion would have been consequential...laughable even.
No… Something more sinister held her. Something heavier than anything that these people could anchor her with.
They had taken her voice and her free will. Now she was left with nothing more than her fierce dignity…which seemed to be waning even as she felt the fight leave her.
She was tired…she wanted nothing more than to curl up…and pull her knees to her chest…and sleep.
Let them come…she was too tired to fend them off this time.
Let them come…
But she knew it would be worse if they had her. Time was running out. It was only a matter of time before they found her. Her best bet was to keep running…to find someone who could reverse the binding spell…
But to do that, she would need to be free.
Get me out of this. The look said.
Willa startled herself by not going immediately into action. She held off her usual clinical “hands-on” approach. And hung back as the young woman seemed to be pleading for her silently to let her free. There was something…something about her…something familiar….
“ I’m Doctor Rothberg…erm…Willa…” She said lamely.
Damn it…what is wrong with you? She scolded herself.
You’re acting like a fifth grader. Next you’ll be socking her in the arm and pulling her hair…
The blond creased her brow and made an emphatic eye gesture to her wrists.
It’s all right…you can be as lame as you want, Doctor Willa…but kindly undo these ugly bracelets…
If it were anyone other than herself, she would have thought the dove-faced woman had somehow entranced her victim to move forward and begin unbuckling the straps.
Willa Rothberg was not a naïve woman…nor was she stupid.
She was also not easily controlled. And yet despite all of these factors, she moved forward anyway.
“I’m unbuckling your straps. I have to warn you that we’ll have to sedate you if you try anything funny.”
The blond watched her patiently, quirking an eyebrow at her.
Don’t worry…nothing funny…not like I’ll be doing stand-up comedy any time soon…
“ Uh…Doctor Rothberg…do you think that….that’s…like…safe?” The med student inquired…taking a few steps out of harm’s way.
“ I’m going to say this once…” Willa said, working on the right wrist. “ I don’t care if you are from the very heart and soul of California…If you say the word LIKE one more time I’m going to…”
It was brief…the contact.
Merely a finger…a knuckle maybe…grazing the inside of the Jane Doe’s wrist…
It was electric. Knee-buckling even.
Willa’s medical training careened her through a slough of reasons for this occurrence….
Static? The conductive chains?…Metal railing…Anything to deny that there was….
Something.
Something that told her touching the blonde was the most wonderful, natural thing in the world. That everyone should do it…
…Well not everyone…
…Maybe just her….
…Just her and…frequently…yes…just her and a whole lot…
…On the other hand…
Something else told her that touching the blonde was fiercely taboo. That by doing so…she was upending the balance of nature…that it was dangerous…and this was basically because at the moment of the brief contact, the woman’s eyes widened. Her face paled….and she fixed Willa with a look.
It’s you. The look said.
Just before the lights went out in Willa’s world…
Commercial….
(Yes kids…it’s that time again….time to channel surf.. And YOU get to pick the channel…)
Television Guide:
Channel Two: The Living Woman Network
Channel Three: The SO-REAL Network
Channel Four: Must Flee T.V.
Channel Five: Pacific Tides Television
Channel Six: Flashbackland
Channel Seven: Futopia Channel
Channel Eight: Children’s Broadcast Station
Channel Nine: Nine West
Channel Ten and higher: Cable access (You need the silver cable package to view beyond this channel – coming soon…)
Edited by: wiccachica
at: 11/22/02 10:16:34 pm
they're buldging! Chica, I'm off to read this as I KNOW I'm gonna end up laughing my ass off on this one! My gf's gonna have hold on to it til the laughing subsides. And speaking of funny fics, whatever happened to The Late Shift? Will the much needed wackiness continue? Will our heroine find a way back home? If she's still in the discotekka, will she want to? 
OK now chica....These commercials are getting a bit too close together 
)..right now I'm enjoying the awesome wackiness you have to write 