Broken by Criss Moody

Date: August 26^th, 2001
Disclaimer: If I look like Joss, I've got bigger problems than I thought. Don’t own them, don't sue.
Summary: Four broken interludes from four characters' lives. Buffy, Lindsey, Faith, Angel.
Rating: R
Feedback: Yes, please.
Notes: Inspired by Rage Against the Machine's "Born of a Broken Man."
Thanks: To Donna for betaing and "jesus. gods. yes." and "perf."
Improv: come, sun, hip, strike

Escape [Buffy]

(("Buffy, you have to get up! Buffy, please! Buffy!"))

This is not how it’s supposed to go. She knows that much. Not a lot to go on in terms of landmarks, but beggars can’t be choosers. Buffy screams. Buffy laughs. And they all fall down, one by one. All gone, like toy soldiers burnt up in a war not their own, ashes left to fly away on the wind and cover her pale, small body with the grimy gray of consequence. When she looks down at her hands, lacerated from the weapons and scraping of flesh against stone, she sees the blood dying the lines pink, criss-crossing brilliant red plump of her palm.

Buffy thought some day she'd get why so many people she loves, leave. They're not hers to keep, and no one ever told her why people weren't belongings. If you let something go, it'll come back to you and that means it loves you or is that all mixed up and wrong and a big fat lie? She wishes someone would tell her the flat out truth without wrapping it up in a fluffy coating and shoving it down her throat before she understands.

There are people down the street who ask her every day if she lives alone. Such a pretty girl, no boyfriend, how strange. Do you like being alone? She's the one with cold sheets to roll into every night, silent apartment driving her back outside, to kill something. She still follows that golden rule. Kill. You are chosen, so thou shalt destroy the demons.

(("Can you hear me? Buffy!"))

No, she's not ready yet. She's still losing.

Doesn't matter how much Buffy loses, though, she still has a job to do. A path to follow. So, some times she wanders off the path. Finds herself smiling. Watching half of Say Anything until she turns to tell Xander "don't be a boy, Xander. Be a man." Then, she has to turn off the TV or she'll howl and break it with her fists, like the first time it happened. She's learned not to listen to certain radio stations. She went through four radios trying to listen to contemporary or oldie stations. They'd play Cibo Matto or Cream and Eric Clapton's voice would die off slowly into the early morning as the radio struck the kitchen wall, shattering into bits of plastic and metal.

((In the end, you're all you've got. That's the point.))

If there's a point to this, Buffy wishes someone would just scream it in her face, loud and clear and in large neon letters because if there isn't a higher purpose for her life, it just hurts too much to keep going. Left foot, right foot, march on into the dawn, and don't forget to bring your bag of tricks with you. Wooden stake, she remembers what to do with that, but when her fingers stumble against a small bit of silver at the bottom of a bag she forgot she had, hot tears wash her vision and she runs. Lets the vampire take its victim as long as she never reaches back into that bag. Almost throws it into the street, has a crazy moment of wondering what would happen if she did. Hey, it brought a vampire back from hell once, why couldn't it bring back others she loves? Huh? Why?

((There are moments that make you, that determine who you are, who you will be.))

If it had all happened quickly, it would have been easier. But marbles clicked down one by one, ringing against their metal chute as they tumbled into the basket. Bringing the proper elements together, aligning the fates, or something like that. Buffy didn't listen. Not really. One second she was worrying about her mom's headaches, and the next she had living energy for a sister and her friends were dying around her.

It sucked.

It wasn't fair. Nobody cared that it wasn't fair, but Buffy felt compelled to repeat it. Silently, whispering, yelling it in the shower. None of this was fair and someone had to pay for it.

She had a nasty suspicion it was her. Her fault, her turn to flay herself with guilt. She'd done it before, but this time felt. Different. Like if she'd just blink hard enough, slap her face hard enough, the walls would buckle and snap and she'd be back home. Waking up to Willow and Xander and Giles and Dawn, hell, even Spike, crowded around her. Buffy, are you ok? Buffy, let's get you to a medical type guy who's not a evil hell god, 'kay? Oh, thank the lord, Buffy. Oh god, Buffy. Damn, you're not dead, uh, I mean, good, this is good.

Even when those thoughts plagued her every living second, she squashed them. Her world might have spun way off it's axis, but some things she still knew for sure.

She was the Slayer.

She loved the darkness in her lovers.

Her friends were good.

Her friends were dead.

She was alone.

((A clean, bright room. She is young and her future is still unknown.

Soon, she will have a baby sister.

A pretty red-headed girl is here and Buffy thinks she might know her.

Yes, this is Willow.

Buffy wants the pretty girl to go away.

She wants to stay here.

Where it's safe.))

Awake [Lindsey]

2 am at a Flying J truck stop. Lindsey thinks he might be in Wyoming, but the landscape doesn’t make sense to him under the horrible black night of the west. Blankets of clouds he can’t see covering the stars, making the rolling hills dead black beyond the burning light of the lonely truck stop. Towns are further apart out here, and Lindsey’s once more gotten used to seeing four vehicles to his one at any given time of the day or night. He likes feeling alone, limitless space to press out into, scream into when the thoughts and dreams crowding his brain spill out into waking hours.

He’s sleeping less and driving more, ever since he decided to turn off of the road to Oklahoma. Considered for a brief moment that perhaps he should return to the beginning and try to understand. But that urge swamped under an overwhelming need to go up.

Up until he came to the end of the world and it told him. Why? How? Didn’t know that, but Lindsey felt sure that going back to the beginning would be pathetic. A futile attempt to regain youth, times before he knew how far he would go for what he wanted. And he always wanted a lot. Fucking and drinking and driving so fast down dirt roads his daddy's old truck just flew. Gunning to a hundred and letting it go, listening to the engine sing as the mass of metal bumped and ground up and down. He thought he could get anywhere in that old truck, and he was almost right. He drove out under the cover of dark, chilly summer night air, and in just a few hours he'd been halfway across Texas.

Never go back, so the great writers say, and Lindsey paid a lot of attention to 'great' in college. Knew he'd have to pull himself up by those damn bootstraps to succeed, so he pulled. And kept pulling until almost by magic one day, he had a girlfriend and a college degree and a law school sniffing at his heels. All one huge snowball in it's infancy and now that Lindsey's laying in the cold icy aftermath, he thinks it's pretty fucking funny.

He wanted out of that endless stupid cycle of poverty so badly that he ended up the puppet monkey of a huge law firm. The huge, evil law firm that gave him the very nice looking, but goddamn evil, evil hand. Evil hand makes him do crazy things like stay up all night watching the moon, stretched out in the bed of his pick up truck. And wink at cowboys in bars to watch them fluster and try to make running look like walking.

Really, it's the hand’s fault.

Lindsey’s not fond of blaming things on someone else, or something else. It’s the one thing he always hated about working at Wolfram and Hart. Time and again, he pinned a crime on a person not even remotely connected to it. So, buddy, you worked once for the big nasty corporation poisoning people’s drinking water for the last 10 years because they used the wrong kind of chemical treatment? Guess what? It’s your fault. Don’t ask why, just fall like a good little domino. Your kids will get expensive college educations, the wife will be taken care of for the rest of her life, and you'll die painfully in jail at the hands of some guy named Len who A) doesn't like the way you look and B) is on the payroll at Wolfram and Hart. Neat. Simple.

Lindsey limps as he comes into the truck stop. Gift shop/convenience store dark and lonely, a bored waitress sits on a tall stool behind the cash register outside the dining room. Without a look up, she speaks.

"Grab a seat. Be right with ya."

He shakes out the twitch in his legs, heads for a far booth, away from both the small cluster off truckers near the waitress and the warm, bright kitchen. Doesn't want conversation or questions about where he's been. Where he's headed. That's the one thing he still hates about this culture. Westerners leave well enough alone, but once you get them curious, step back or be trampled. It's all 'honey' this and 'darling' that and before you know it you've got a place to stay any time you want it in half the county. Or an angry father after you with the family Winchester.

Loves the coolness of the dark brown upholstery. No one's sat in this booth for long enough to remove all trace of human warmth. Just perfect for a man who's lost his own.

"What'll you have?" Waitress drops a menu in front of Lindsey. The woman, probably no more than nineteen, briefly looks up and offers a smile once she sees that Lindsey not too hard to look at. He doesn't bother to acknowledge it or the menu.

"Coffee and some half and half, please. And one of those cinnamon rolls." Lindsey saw them on the way in. Big enough to fill a dinner plate, covered in what looked like a quart of drippy white icing.

"Be right back with the coffee." As she leaves, he finally cocks his head up to watch the swish of her skirt from the gentle movement of her hips. Little things to be missed by skipping out on life. The way a woman smelled coming out of the shower, fresh and ripe with possibility. Silky satin underthings covering just enough to make taking them off fun. And feeling the similarity of a male body pressed up against his own. Promising the tight punishing fuck that would send Lindsey out of his mind. Into a world without lawyers or vampires or anything stranger than a toothbrush out of place.

The coffee and roll come. Lindsey methodically tears the paper foil tops off the tiny packets of cream, watches the heavy whiteness slide into the murky black liquid. Remembers drinking the packets straight as a teen, the roll of the thick cream down his tongue. He relaxes into his booth, lets his feet rest on the seat across the table.

No demons here. Not even a slightly scary vampire. He wonders why the supernatural rarely come out here. Not because there's no hellmouth. If the beasties only proliferated around "centers of mystical energy," then L.A. wouldn’t have nearly such an exciting night life. Lindsey has his theories. Plain sight, vampires couldn't kill without consequences here. Too many people notice and they go up like a Molotov cocktail.

And there's just too much awake, empty space. Makes people, dead or undead, nervous to be surrounded by so much indistinct consciousness. As if some*thing* is out there watching your every move. Judging.

Let it.

Lindsey's sure of only two things. He is ready for judging.

And he is painfully and for the first time in too long, awake.

Pray [Faith]

She knows how to pray now. Bend down, press hardmuscle belly against cold steel bunk. Lean your head into the space before you, and be silent. Words matter less than the intent. Faith finally understands that. She can’t act without thinking about that now. If she wants to be understood, to be loved, to be appreciated, she must act properly. In accordance with the law. Lots of rules and lots of people to enforce them and Faith feels the raw desire to be okay. To be loved. So she behaves.

She prays for everything she never had, doesn't have, and will never have. For Buffy and Angel and a dream called being the Chosen One.

It’s late at night when she forgets and falls into an old habit. Silently mocking the girls in the next cell, her lips sounding out the words

//ave maria

gratia plena//

But she can’t get past gratia plena, and the conviction that those words are the worst of all possible words. Full of grace and full of someone else’s hopes and fears and needs. Always dutied out to what an other wants of you. Full to the agony point of bursting into shards of flesh and bone, cutting the world apart with her pain. Their pain. It's become all the same in Faith's mind. Flashdance trip of shaded pain, colors of the rainbow in spectrum formation.

Some moments, it's easier to collapse into what she knows so well.

Liquid rush of ecstasy pain radiates up Faith's arm as the fist hits. Connects. Feels the pressure thud all the way into her chest and the little bitch she just hit opens eyes up wide. Gasps. Yeah. Must fucking hurt a lot, and that girl doesn't know why. It hurts that much. But see, little girl, I'm a big bad Slayer, and I'm down and restrained and kept in by steel bars and men in blue, but I'm still bigger. Tougher. And better than you.

Or not. 'Cause too many times it's just the quiet in her cell, and stupid fucking unwanted tears soaking the crappy thin cotton of her pillow. It's lonely here, and there's nothing to hit that really deserves hitting, except bitches like Lola, who thought that being butch and in for life was enough to get a leg over on Faith. Uhuh, no. Nobody gets a leg over on Faith.

Usually.

She lets herself lay there at night, arms rigid at her sides, breathing lightly. Waiting for something. Callused hands creeping over her shoulders. Low, hoarse voices. And Faith wonders if this is her path. If she'll find mystical freaking redemption in greasy hair and smelly thighs. Restrains the gut voice telling her to scratch, claw, break and rend her way free of the warm press of arms and lips. Maybe this is how she can finally beat B. She can let herself be the path for someone else, a way to feel something in this dead zone. A way to finally be the one who wins.

This is her sacrifice.

Methodical, thought-numbing movement of hands on ceramic. Warm, plentiful suds cascading down the shiny white plates. Utter, homogenous color, blinds Faith totally to the other colors around her. She gets lost in watching the tiny white bubbles spread and break on her tanned skin. Yesterday, she let her hands float up, letting the scrub brush and dish clatter into the huge metal sink. She had the overwhelming need to do something else with her hands. These slim confections of skin, tendon, bone and muscle weren't meant to wash dishes. Or scrub floors.

There was something else.

But try as she did, Faith's head couldn't quite get to the place where she knew who she was. That was okay. False gods and golden calves and Faith wanted none of that, putting something false before something important and real. Even in her self-chosen prison, she remembers. B. The way her hair fell down, golden and false. Covering all her sins and washing away the darkness inside. Faith never had that advantage. She didn't want to be needed. She didn't need to feel. Not again. Vague memories of spice and sandalwood. Rising pale breast and how good they looked framed by leather. She thinks to herself that they were the same, and when she looks in the mirror, sometimes her hair is blonde.

She avoids the mirrors now. After smashing one with her fists, glassy and gray shards embedded in her hands, and a few weeks in solitary, she knows enough not to look. Her name is Faith, her hair is dark, her eyes are dark, and she works in the kitchens in the State of California penal system.

Bile surges in her stomach when she thinks about who she owes all of this to. Her mirror image wanted her gone. A fucking vampire wanted to save her. Savior of the damned and desperate. His hands, the pallor striking against the shadowed Plexiglas, reach out to her, once, twice a month. For awhile he disappeared, and she clung to the hope that he'd never come back. She hates to know he cared. That a magically animated piece of dead meat has…feelings for her? Affection? Duty sounds better, and doesn't make Faith's gut roll.

Tiny seeds of gratitude litter the tide of revulsion in her soul. He's dead. Underneath a convenient soul and pretty guilt, he's a demon. And more than one Slayer has let him live. More than one Slayer has let him help her. God, it's so fucking wrong.

He 'saved' Faith but he couldn't save Buffy.

Faith prays for the ability to breathe without choking on her past. To wake up without B's name on her lips. Or just for mac&cheese on the menu for lunch. If it would do any good, she'd pray to God until her voice fled and her tongue fell from her mouth. The decay of memories surrounds her and there have been moments where she can't tell yesterday from today. Whether the pretty girl laying smashed up on the ground is a blonde or a brunette.

So she prays.

//dominus tecum….

ora pro nobis//

Empty [Angel]

Perpetual mothbeat, litany of crimes and horrors he committed once upon a time, so long ago that he can’t really believe HE did anything more than fall in with bad company. Flutter, flutter, the fleshbags don’t let him forget. Oh no, not that. Angel, you’re going to pay. Forever and a day, and beyond eternity. Shanshu is a nice idea, but so’s true love, and you know how that worked out, don’t you?

He’d like to say that he’s over it. He’d like to say he’s better and he does, frequently, just frequently enough that disbelieving eyes flicker over him. Funny, Angel, you don’t look ‘over it’. Angel thinks he looks half-dead and he almost says as much, but doesn’t want anyone to think he’s trying to be funny. Because nothing’s funny these days.

((It's Buffy.))

As if he cares. As if they matter to him, their impermanent lives making mock of his immortality. So many times, they’ve made Angel believe that he’s something wrong, something unholy. Wrong on levels he could never explain to a creature with a heartbeat. At his core, Angel knows that he is something more. Greater. Supremacy of the hybrid, better, stronger, and I’ll live as long as I avoid Slayers and lawyers.

That should be easy now that they’ve all gone away and left him. But memories are nasty things he’ll never be rid of. Lollipop kisses, bubblegum and sex wrapped up in super strength. Angel can’t deny that he remembers days when his most pressing concern was finding the kind of gum Buffy liked. To make her grin and blush and say thank you when they met to patrol. Thinks about the rosy blush that spread over her shoulders and the way his eyes would trace the now bright pink lines of her shoulders in the tank top. Raised bone pressing against flesh, a pink almost red, like blood in water. Angel would lick his lips and ask Buffy how school had been that day. Think habit and ritual, not of scraping her chest open to suckle on her heart’s blood. She’d be so sweet, but that Angel, the crazy in love and stupid Angel, wrapped that thought up in silence and tucked it away. Under Sires and Childer and dead families.

Wherever the little Slayer was, she was alive. Her death would have roared in Angel’s veins as her blood mourned the source's loss. He takes comfort, vicious, in the knowledge that she’s not at peace. If she were at peace, nothing would mean anything. She’s not innocent. A tiny micron of Angel’s soul wants to mourn the vanished belief in Buffy’s innocence, grieve for the crumbling pedestal he’d put her on. But he can’t because on the bottom line he believes that she’s better off fallible. Nobody’s dream anything, and she can exist separate of what Angel saw her as, needed her to be, and created her as in his mind. Really, it’s better for her.

Ignores the soul's baby cry, weak and pitiful, that some dreams should stay. Inviolate. Pure. But Angel fucked his dream and made it real and now it's gone. Exhausted the meat it had to feed upon - memories always read to yawn open and swallow them whole - and faded. Dusty, forgotten now, the few physical reminders of what she meant to him. A book of poetry. A picture of an impossibly young girl. Dried daises, brown and faded around the white round edges. The leftovers of a relationship.

Angel lets the memories fall way. Lets the book stay on the shelf, flower and picture tucked inside.

//your eyes reflect the sunset and the dawn…your kisses are a drug, your mouth the urn dispensing fear to heroes, fervor to boys//

Not the best things for him to read, but Baudelaire reminded him of days past. The so-called better days when he had wrapped his demon in twenty layers of denial and pursued the oblivion one pair of pale pink lips promised. Twinning to the cracked mirror memories of dancing in the ballrooms of French nobility, tricking gullible young poets into letting him touch them. Whisper the deadliest of nothings in their ears and send them off dizzy with blood loss and lust into the night. A lark. And as it turns out, a lark which has haunted him for this eternity. His bewitching daughter took the young Baudelaire to her breast and fed him the far away words tumbling out of her mind like rotting lemons. Sour and ripe with promise.

//your eyes, your smile, your feet open for me the gate Of an infinity I love and have never known.//

Forever once shaped a glorious and incandescent promise. The urge to go, see, and do amongst the lands on this earth faded and burned into a man-bound demon. A lesson for the masses. Never let your dick lead your mind. Or permit bottled blondes to mean more than a good fuck. Or even a bad fuck, as long as they stay down in the realms of the forgotten.

Now, he's got a new life, a new purpose, a new reason to let mortals and their problems toddle him into a mind-scraping insanity. Pretend that he cares about shoes, and teen centers, and new translations of the Books of Jhanbik. These people who surround him with their concern and lives live for the pretense of the civilized vampire. Restrained by a soul and grief.

Caught in the trap of broken mortal dreams, he is empty. More truly dead than ever before.

And he is glad of it.

the end.