“Quatrain” — [linked drabbles]

[aadler]

Quatrain
Copyright June 2006

Setting: Buffy, Seasons 1, 6, and 7
Spoilers: “Prophecy Girl” (I), “Bargaining” (II), “Villains” (III), and “Chosen” (IV)
Requirements: Buffy. Resurrection.

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I — 1997
Her chest aches, lungs heaving to expel foreign breath. She had been fated to die, and accepted her fate. Now life surges through her again, her body snatching greedily for what it had so unwillingly relinquished.

In years to come, she will thwart other prophecies, bulldozing fate from her path by sheer indomitable force of will. This one, however, is not her doing; it was another’s hands that pulled her back from the shadow.

She looks past the man who saved her life, her smile leaping to the creature who would have let it end.

Brain damage. Has to be.

II — 2001
Hell shrieks all around her: engines’ thunder, hammering thuds of combat, eyes aching from scattered fires. Escape from her casket bloodied her hands, the nails torn from clawing through the earth above. Even now, her dress drips occasional soft clods in torturous counterpoint to her heart’s awful lurching.

Movement is horror, slick wet layers sliding over one another. Breath is a foul liquid rasp; slime coats her throat, nostrils.

Her bludgeoned mind is incapable of thought, only suffering. Below that dumb awareness of pain, however, is a core of passion, wordless but molten-pure:

Whoever did this to me, dies.

III — 2002
The pain is good, life slashing its way up from darkness. This had been nothing like the swift, clean plunge into Heaven, equally unlike death beneath the Master’s fangs. He had wrenched life away, dynamic, forceful; this time, bullet-torn, she had felt herself draining into nothing.

She is whole, renewed, but in her savior can be seen only more darkness. Clothing, hair, eyes, all black.

And the soul within —?

Death is undeterred, will have its due. In her friend’s fathomless eyes, she sees bleak promise of whose life will be taken in forfeit … and whose hand must render payment.

IV — 2003
X-rays don’t lie.

Slayer healing can’t fix mortal wounds.

Can’t. Really.

So when the bus passengers (including her) finally get emergency medical treatment, the X-rays have to be explained away.

Severed abdominal aortas don’t self-repair. They’re nonsurvivable without a skilled trauma team already onsite. Fighting with such a wound, leaping tall buildings, even staying conscious until the nearest ER … stark impossibility. Except she did.

She’s not immortal; remembering golden realms lost, doesn’t want to be. Someday she’ll die and not come back.

She came back this time, though.

And, when it mattered most, she did it on her own.


– end –
 

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And there you are. Don’t hesitate to offer commentary.

Comments

[agilebrit.livejournal.com]

Wow. Those are awesome! They each can stand alone, but they make a powerful whole. Very nicely done. Have a dancing penguin.

[texanfan.livejournal.com]

Nice life snatched from death theme. Being the Xander fan I am I particularly liked the last line of your first one. :)

Throughout, I get a small sense of something Spike told her, about being a little in love with death. Possibly Chosen cured her of that as it lifted some of the weight of the world from her shoulders. Instead of Xander and/or Willow ripping her back from the edge she just wanted to live badly enough.

[red-satin-doll.livejournal.com]

The connections here are terrific - I LOVE that final line so much - and it's interesting that you include her temporary death in Villains.

The second to last line of the first second sort of serves as foreshadowing for S2 and Becoming, or am I crazy?


I've always read (as a newbie to the fandom) that she "died twice", but I thought "didn't she flatline in S6? Doesn't that count?" So I'm thrilled to see I'm not the only one who thinks so.

[aadler]

The second to last line of the first section sort of serves as foreshadowing for S2 and “Becoming”, or am I crazy?

That was actually my personal issues coming to the fore. Of course, Buffy was 16 at the time, and it’s no surprise that a teenage girl would prefer the cool hunky brooding (forbidden) older guy to the goofy steadfast semi-ordinary guy her own age … but I got really tired of seeing Xander overlooked, downplayed, and underestimated. Sometimes my frustration crept out.

… “didn’t she flatline in S6? Doesn’t that count?”

I chose to count it, but I was always aware that the flatline might have been the result of quickly-becoming-dark Willow’s entrance into the operating room. (Lights flickering, remember?) Whatever the canon facts, it worked for the story, so that’s the way I went.