TITLE: Little Deaths: Family and Incest In the Jossverse
AUTHOR: Kita
RATING: NC-17
PAIRING: Angel/Connor, Dawn/Buffybot, Drusilla/Darla with Angel(us), McClay family (Tara) with Willow
AUTHOR NOTES: Written in response to the "responsible fiction" debate. No such animal.

i. Son: Mistletoe and Other Parasites

He’s already kissed this boy.

(like a chalice or the relic of some bleeding saint. Like a holy mystery, he’s pressed  closed lips to a rain soaked forehead, to tiny curled fingers as he counted them one by one, to the soft, baby powdered scent of untouched feet)

But not like this.

Connor presses Angel’s back to the wall.

Long fingers on Angel’s chest, sharp knee between Angel’s thighs, Connor’s attempts at seduction are clumsy, drunk. Young. His smile is pink and crooked; he’s pleased at his own daring, his own strength.

This Connor doesn’t know (anything) he shouldn’t tilt his head back, shouldn’t stare up at Angel with eyes the color of his baby blanket (soft as his skin was soft, puffy white clouds and tiny hand-stitched booties). Doesn’t know he shouldn’t bare his neck.

Angel wraps a hand around his wrist (baby bird bones, lighter than water. Everyone Angel has ever loved could fit in the palm of one of his hands; in the end, he could protect none of them). He holds Connor inches away.

Connor blinks as he cocks his head, and makes a tiny noise of frustration in the back of his throat.

(he needs to sleep in his crib, Cordelia would say, every night. But Connor whimpered when he wasn’t in Angel’s bed, lost kitten sounds that Angel could feel in his own chest. So Angel had to pick him up, cradle him close, hold him tight enough to keep him safe)

When Angel finally lets go, Connor collides against him.

(tumbling out of a tornado, there had been no way in and no way out, but Connor found a way back; once Angel lets go they always come back)

He is shoving at Angel’s shoulders, teething at Angel’s neck. Willful and unyielding, (screaming in the morning, demanding to be fed, to be held, to be loved) the same urgent beat to his heart Angel once heard inside Darla’s womb.

And Angel made that heart, these hands, this mouth- scraping across Angel’s cheek, pressing wet open lips against his own.

Connor tastes like rum punch and candy canes (his blood tasted like the wine Angelus used to steal from church altars, like the hymns sang by girls dressed all in white, right before he tore out their throats). Angel wants to follow the path of all that blood, and with reverent hands and sharp, sharp kisses learn if it still tastes the same.

He lets Connor cover him instead. Lets him tear at Angel’s buttons and zippers, shove Angel to the floor, wrap arms and legs around him. Lets him kiss and cling and dance in Angel’s lap, sleepy-eyed and hard.

Then Connor’s hand between Angel’s thighs. The room spins.

(there’s a carousel in a park north of Santa Barbara, Angel was going to take Connor there for his first birthday

he should be three years old now, sitting in Angel’s lap for his bed time story, turning the pages with crayon stained hands

how did he learn to crawl in Quor’toth?)

He sprawls out in front of Angel with a sure, adolescent grace. Wraps his smile around Angel’s cock (heart shaped boxes, sticky red lollipop kisses) and sucks. Angel moans.

Connor’s laugh is untroubled, blameless, it’s party favors and miracles, it is what Angel bought. The indulgence he would trade anything for (and he already has).

Angel reaches out, brushes the baby fine hair out of Connor’s eyes. Watches the curve of pouty lips and the slow blink of girl long lashes, watches a bubble gum colored tongue wrap around his balls.

(what would Connor’s father say?)

He comes with the taste of Connor’s laugh in his own throat, comes back to Connor’s face, flushed and hopeful, wiping at his mouth with the back of one hand. He crawls into Angel’s lap, tugs Angel’s clenched fingers over to the fly of his jeans.

Angel listens as the zipper creeps down.

And he cradles Connor’s head in the crook of his arm, presses him tight against his chest, rocking him slowly, to the rhythm of shaky breath and lullabies. Connor’s dick leaps in Angel’s fist.

He’s already killed this boy.

---

ii. Daughter: Children of Men


At night the house is blurry, filled with shadows of haunts and never-weres, memories masquerading as ghosts. When Dawn closes her eyes against the dark, all she sees are portals; giant sucking mouths pulsing with dragon’s tongues and electric teeth, trying to swallow her whole.

(In Los Angeles, Dawn and Buffy shared the smallest bedroom, because their father needed the big one for his home office. Their walls were yellow as daylight. Buffy’s constant, even snoring from the bunk above made Dawn feel safe from the monsters she hadn’t believed in yet. Then their father stopped using the home office. Then their father stopped coming home. They moved to Sunnydale, where they each got their own room. Buffy locked her door at night.)

Dawn’s dreams are twisted sharp and shining; spiraling metal towers and daggers that smile like fangs. They rip off her velvet dress, leave her naked while they slice her open. In the time it takes for her to die, whole universes are born. She dreams of falling through them. Of slipping between serrated pieces of time like an unwanted secret. Her bare skin is torn apart on the cracks, her insides spill out. When she wakes, her face is wet with tears, her thighs with blood.

(Dawn had been flirting with a boy when Buffy came to the high school that day. She’d made a stupid joke about body parts, and the boy had grinned at her and it felt like victory. Like she was on the cusp of  being the special one, for once, instead of Buffy. Now she wonders if she’d been thinking about how big his hands were, about what it would feel like to french kiss him, at the same moment her mother was dying. She hopes her mother doesn’t know.)

It’s the bot who finds her, crying alone in bed.

“Dawnie! Are you okay?” She’s wearing Buffy’s favorite sushi pajamas, and her hair is sticking up in the back. She doesn’t look like a thing at all.

(But she smells only like clean laundry, and she doesn’t need to sleep or eat or pee, and yesterday, Dawn walked into the kitchen and found Willow holding just a head in her lap, tinkering with the wires inside, while the body lay silent and still on the living room couch. The bot always looks happy. Dawn thinks Buffy looked happiest when she died.)

The bot sits down beside her on the daisy-covered blankets. “What is it? What’s wrong?” 

(Dawn wants to tell her. Wants to say: everything is wrong, especially me. Everyone who was made to love me is gone, and  maybe now that I’m useless, I’ll just disappear. Or maybe it won’t matter anyway, because I woke up with my period, and maybe this time that will end the world.)

This close, the bot’s eyes are very green. Dawn tries to imagine what they could be made of.

“Am I real?” she asks instead, touching the bot’s eyelids with her fingertips. “Do you think I’m real?”

“Oh, Dawnie,” the bot says, blinking, little lines like bird wings around her pink mouth. “You’re as real as I am.”

The bot is still frowning when she wipes at the tears on Dawn’s cheeks.

(Because the bot was made for love and comfort, she is hardware encased inside soft, soft skin. And Dawn has never had a prince.)

“I steal things,” Dawn says, right before she kisses the bot’s open lips.

This time when Dawn falls, there are strong arms to catch her. They wrap around her waist, fierce enough to shove the air from her lungs. The bot’s tongue tastes of chemicals and cherries, her teeth are tiny and precise. She makes a noise that could be breath.

The jolt in Dawn’s belly feels like being stabbed, like the sky tearing, like being re-defined. The bot lays her down against the sheets, drops kisses soft as cotton candy on Dawn’s forehead, her cheeks, her neck. She smiles while Dawn clings to her shoulders, wriggles closer, spills moans and secrets

(when I was seven, I started reading your diary, and when I was ten I was so mad you’d started ignoring me that I threw your favorite sweater in the dumpster, and when I was thirteen, I killed you. I’m sorry, please forgive me, I’m sorry.)

“You’re so silly, Dawnie,” Buffy tells her. She’s brushing the hair off Dawn’s forehead, and she is still smiling.

“I’m right here.”  And she presses her palm between Dawn’s thighs, where Summer’s blood runs and runs.

--

iii. Mother: The Happiness of Fish


Darla shall wear red.

Drusilla has chosen carefully. Red is the color of hearts (beating or still) of blood (innocent or fallen) of weak handprints round her own wrist (don’t do this, I don’t want this, please don’t).

But Daddy never listened to bad little girls, when they cried no.

(You don’t really mean that, he would say, braided riding crop dangling idly from his hand, bits of flesh dangling from its wicked teeth, I can smell your cunt, princess,  and it’s so wet for Daddy. Then he would press Drusilla face down onto mounds of white linens while Grandmother watched, her smile cool and distant as the moon.)

This is symmetry, you see, and Drusilla has always been fond of circles.

She washes Darla’s feet, she buffs her fingernails so they shine like carving knives. Cradles Darla’s head in her naked lap, and combs her tangled hair so it shines the same, one hundred swift strokes with an old silver brush.

(Grandmother used to spank her with a brush like this one. She left marks on Drusilla’s bottom that prickled for days afterward, cactus thorns nestled deep inside Dru’s most secret places. They were red as wine stains, and they made her drip honey and dew, made her dance as she tried to sit at the supper table, made Grandmother and Daddy laugh.)

Darla’s skin is soft, cold, like dead kittens or fur hats in the St. Petersburg winter. Snow on virgin ground, before naughty children come to dirty it with their merriment and mistakes.

Drusilla will be the first to leave her mark.

She presses fanged kisses on the whitest flesh: the crease of both elbows, the fold behind Darla’s knees, the curve of her open thighs. She runs spread fingers through the baby bird’s nest of Darla’s cunt, tugs on brambles without any blackberries.

Darla won’t bleed from here anymore, same as Drusilla who now must make children with her teeth. This sweet, empty space is good only for slipping things inside, tongues and fingers and pitiless cocks. She covers it with a cream that smells of cherries, covers the rising stink of decay between Darla’s legs, uncovers the pink, plump skin beneath it all with a straight razor. Darla always had been better at lying very still.

(Drusilla would squirm under Daddy’s hands, until the sharp edge of blade would catch on all her delicate parts, making her scream. Then Darla would need to hold Dru in her lap, because Daddy would not stop until he was quite finished. He rubbed himself hard against her where she bled, cooing to her all the while, what an immaculate baby girl he had made.)

Darla’s limbs are stiff, heavy, and Drusilla must bend and rearrange them to dress her, as if she were a dolly.

The blue eyed barrister had offered to (watch) help. He belongs to Daddy, that one; Drusilla could see it on him, burned leaves and crabgrass, crisp, futile anger. Angel had already engraved his intention on the mangled stump of one wrist, but the boy was a creation left too long unfinished. Daddy had not loved him enough to kill him, and so Drusilla sent him away.

Then she had Daddy to herself for a while. Tied powerless with barbed wire and silks, his body a basketful of candy apple bruises (not really Daddy at all). He scarcely even resembled her Daddy anymore, and Drusilla thought this imposter should bleed pink or yellow; shabby, impertinent colors that know nothing of love. But Angel’s blood ran red and dark over the filthy bed, staining Darla’s cheeks as she lay beside them, eyes open in vacant circles, watching, always watching.

This Daddy had secret places, between his legs and the curve of his bottom, places which took easily to fingers with long nails and cocks made of wood and shiny rubber. They broke apart like strawberries and bled their juice as well as Drusilla ever had. He came over and over, arching his back like a horse, shuddering her name through the disgrace of tears and memory.

When night fell and Darla began to rot, Drusilla smoothed the sweaty hair off Angel’s forehead. She pressed a kiss there, on the untouched map of shining skin. Left her lipstick in the shape of a small, red heart, a single footprint so he may find his way home again.

Darla is dressed, now, and Drusilla crosses her frozen arms over the swell of breasts, tugs the hem of her red skirt down over her knees. She buries her daughter to her neckline, in the same solidly packed dirt which births flowers and fruit trees. She slips her tongue between blue lips and suckles on the stillness there.

And she touches herself while she waits, humming all the lullabies that she can remember; babies tumbling from treetops, songs of love and murder, circles of family repeated in the spring time air.

--

iv. Father: Survivor Guilt


When Willow kills the doe, she expects more to happen

(for the sky to rain, her heart to tremble. For G-d to speak down at her, disapproving and disappointed, in her father’s voice).

The blood on her hands is sticky and wet, she wipes it on the inside hem of her dress. Then she slips the vial into her pocket, and buries the deer’s heart deep in warm earth.

The entire Vino De Madre ritual takes less than fifteen minutes. The woods stay still and silent as church.

She buys herself a frozen yogurt on the way back home.


The doors in Tara’s house have no locks; she is very young when she learns the language of secrets.

Spells taste like Christmas mints when she holds them on her tongue, shine like moonstone on her breath when she speaks them aloud.

(crystals and sage, buried in an old cloth sack beneath the hearth. These are for us, Tara, just for us, her mother says. You mustn’t ever tell anybody else, they’ll want to punish you. Tara promises. Her mother smiles, and presses a kiss to Tara’s forehead. The trunk sitting above their sacred space is filled with her father’s guns)

Silence tastes like blood.

(heavy lidded stares and whispers buried under the sound of the television blaring from the other room. No need to shut your door, a father’s allowed to look, he says. You be good and quiet, and I won’t need to punish you. Her father wears a heavy leather belt. It sounds like the flick of a lighter when he slides it through his pants loops. It leaves bruises though layers of clothes)

Tara’s mother is dying. It’s slow, painful. Her father says she’s been dying since the day Tara was born (like you sucked the soul right out of her) but she doesn’t believe that’s quite true.

It’s just she can’t always remember clearly; all these moments of her childhood recall like blurred, underdeveloped pictures, taken with an unsteady and inexperienced hand. If she stares too long at the sky, even the stars disappear.

(But if she looks off to one side, sometimes she can see them all, stuttering against the cold glow of the moon.)

It is August, when everything grows hot and high, and Tara wakes to find little buds on her chest, points pink as tea roses poking through her nightgown. She puts on an extra undershirt, beneath her Sunday blouse. The cotton is tight and it makes her sweat, makes her skin itch in places she shouldn’t touch, places she didn’t used to have

(look at where her hand is, Donny said once, a long time ago, grinning at their father. Tara was laying on the couch watching tv, with her palm against her own thigh. She blushed, and tucked her hand behind her back. She was nine.)

That summer, Tara takes several beatings for wriggling in her seat at church. She starts to wear long, loose dresses. She starts to sleep on her stomach.

Tara’s mother starts coming home later and later from her waitressing job. She is always tired now, pale and thin. All their magic lessons center on potions, a pinch of this powder to ease pain, a pinch of that one to help bring on sleep. She sleeps a lot.

That summer, Tara’s father comes in to her bedroom for the first time.

A man has needs, he says, and Tara hears the snick of leather.

(from the dim light in the hallway, she can see the mounted deer head on the front room wall. She stares at it, and it stares back, useless. Dead. Its mouth is a thin, black line, and there is no spell for this)

That is all he says to her.

Clawing at his cheeks with uneven nails doesn’t merit a flinch. He pins her arms over her head with one hand, and bleeds a bit on her pink pillowcase, his face pressed into the hollow of her shoulder. The whole thing takes fifteen minutes. The stubble from his beard leaves a mark on her skin, like a sunburn, itchy and raw.

The next morning her father puts a single band-aid across his own cheek. It covers the marks she’d left on his skin, as if she hadn’t really been there at all.

It rains for three days.

Tara leaves in the middle of night, in the middle of winter, one week after they put her mother into the ground. She is thirteen. All she has is a bag of stones and herbs, and two thousand dollars in small bills, stuffed inside an old mason jar. Her mother’s last secret, dug up in silence, from under the floor boards.

It is years before Tara understands what that money cost. By then, she is in a place where it never rains, with a girl who she trusts never to keep secrets.


When Willow first visits Tara’s grave, summer is over. She closes her eyes against the silence and the sunshine, runs her fingers over the delicate carvings in smooth, cool granite, the outline of a family name.

(Tara’s father hung up the phone when they called to tell him his daughter was dead. Giles bought the coffin. Willow wasn’t at the funeral.)

And Willow wishes now that she could remember the Kaddish (may His name be blessed and exalted above all others) but it has been too long, the words will not come. All she can do is pull the rocks from her pocket, place a handful of them on top of Tara’s headstone, and pray that she is buried deep.


-Fin

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