Work Text:
The train was late, but she wasn’t expected anyway.
There’s only one available hired hack at the station and the driver is obviously deep in his cups. She lifts her skirts daintily because she is still a lady after all and gives him the address in a curt, no-nonsense tone that sounds to her ears like an echo of her mother, but there’s a pounding in her ears that muffles it (dulls the ache).
She’s never been to London before, her uncle insisting on training her in the privacy of the family estate as near to Scotland as you can get without contracting a sense of entitlement that he claimed rolled off of Scots in waves. A predicament he also felt would occur if one spent too much time in London. Facts of her life that she never saw for anything other than what they were: a poor man bitter with the rest of the world and determined to twist his charge into something as spiteful as he.
Her father had been a hero they said, worked for the Council his whole life, and married the most promising female Watcher in a generation. A company man who toed the line and sacrificed his life with no regard for his infant daughter because it was for the greater good.
(She secretly wishes that it was all a hoax, a figment of her uncle’s fragmented imagination, and that her father was just a grocer and her mother a sweet figure instead of a warrior and she could just wash her hands of the whole affair – walk away from destinies and Slayers and maybe marry a simple man with a simple heart someday. Be like the other girls.)
As the hack swayed back and forth, jostling her over decrepit streets, she fluffs through the file on her lap for the hundredth time since her uncle slapped it on her lap with a train ticket and walked away without another word.
A Slayer in need of a Watcher.
Olive knows that they expect her to fail. Trained in relative obscurity, the only child of legends. They need her fail – it’s what they always wanted of her. Heroes don’t last long, they breed too much hope, encourages free-thinking. The children of heroes are even more dangerous. (Looking through the file on her first charge she has also guessed that they’ve been working to put this Slayer down for a long while, but she keeps evading all their best efforts. A Slayer with the gift of sight. It’s not completely unheard of, but it’s rare enough that it scares them.)
They’ve signed a death sentence on us both.
They are the first words her Slayer says to her when she finally finds the run-down building and convinces the grumpy matron to let her into the rooms where they will be staying.
They are the first words her blood-stained Slayer with long dark hair and dreamy eyes says to her and it’s the first truth she’s heard from anyone she has ever met.
So let’s prove them wrong. Olive squares her shoulders and looks into those nearly-absent eyes, hiding her shiver and fear in a bravado she learned from years of watching a lesser man leer over her. She’s not afraid. She will prove them wrong, she will survive and their memory will be something other than a footnote in the Council’s records.
Later, they will tell each other their life stories. Probably with a glass of port in one hand as they lean into each other at a pub respectable ladies shouldn’t be seen in, pretending to be more drunk than they are because they became a team (of sorts) before their luck runs out (it’s bound to run out) and anyways it’s been a long time since either one of them was respectable anyway. And this is the only way they can discuss the past openly, with an empty bottle between them and a hand on their waist if they start to fall and a grim humor the mayhem of their lives.
Somewhere in the deep recesses of those eyes something sparks and in seconds Olive is pinned up against a wall, her Slayer holding her there with her own body as she peers closely at her, her head quirked to the side strangely like a feral animal.
“You shouldn’t be able to move like that.”
With her lips hovering over her clavicle the Slayer replies, “So there are words in your breath.”
Olive shifts uncomfortably, the hazards of this Slayer ringing in her head:
Claims to have gift of Sight. Reckless. Given to romantic fantasies. Untrustworthy. Manipulative.
Everything about her in the notes Olive had been given were clinical, precise. Her story one of a hundred thousand, a Slayer just like any other Slayer. Just a girl, called at the right moment to her higher purpose. To a cause that didn’t want her but couldn’t seem to find a reason to kill her.
“Mother said God would not forgive me but I have heard the stars whisper and there are no gods with them. They are all below below below like rats eating away at what we saved for Christmas feast,” The Slayer angled her head to the left, still inspecting Olive’s neck as though she expected to find evidence to the contrary there.
Feral, Olive thought as she retained a shudder, adding to the mental list of her Slayer’s attributes.
There seemed to be a gap of information missing, for the girl in her notes went from an innocent about to take her vows, to the creature standing before her.
The Slayer’s eyes snapped into focused and narrowed in on Olive’s, “Have you ever met one?”
Olive tried to swallow, but her throat was dry. “I have read all the first-hand accounts and have been properly trained in all the newest fighting styles. I am more than well prepared for an attack.”
Not from them.
The Slayer clucked her tongue in amusement, “There’s no such thing as ready, dearie.”
And then, much to Olive’s amazement, her Slayer pressed a dry kiss on her lips.
Welcome to Hell.
---
He hit a convent again. Left her with a mess of at least a dozen ravenous nuns out for her blood. She put them down as she always does, no longer pausing over the flying dust to pray for their souls.
She’s pretty sure the time of souls is over. She’s swimming through the muck of the world and there’s nothing divine left for her to save.
(Least of all her fragmented soul.)
Occasionally a Watcher or Council Member will catch up with her and try to stress the importance of her calling.
The Slayer.
A killer made to put an end to vampires and the creatures of darkness.
She only laughs.
They can’t see that she is the darkness. Made from it, she breathes it in and out of her dead lungs every day.
She doesn’t have the heart to tell them the truth that she knows: she is no angel, she is death.
(Sometimes her mind slips and her family still walks around her and she wonders if that is the true world and prays harder for the girl she lost on the edge of her innocence.)
I killed them, she says to a priest. And he is her personal demon and he laughs at her through space and time, forever there and always out of reach.
They all have one face, her monsters. It’s her face. Strong and young and masculine and full of so much amusement. She kills them every night and every night is the same night, a girl in a pool of her own blood and her family gone and she is pieced back together by the darkness.
(In her dreams she died. In the whispers she is dead still.)
They tell her she is a Slayer. They tell her that she healed from her wounds because of a calling. They tell her that she can kill her monsters. They tell her that is her purpose.
They change faces and that’s how she knows time is passing. Some of them tell her harshly (kindly) that she is a miracle, that she is living far longer than they anticipated.
(She whispers to the stars and they tell her this is true. The stars always tell the truth. They tell her that everyone wants her dead. They tell her no one understands how she is still alive. They tell her to rest and she laughs at them.)
(She laughs at all of them.)
She is covered in blood and feels as though that is apt. It glistens in her moonlight and she wonders if she can construct a new soul from the spilled blood of her lost innocents.
(Wasn’t she one once?)
She is covered in blood and a girl walks into her room with dark eyes and wild hair and she can hear the stars whispering to her. She is full of so much hope and pride there is nearly a smell in the air.
It almost makes her sad.
They’ve signed a death sentence on us both, she thinks and the girl hears.
---
My Watcher, Drusilla thinks the first time she kisses her. A dry kiss on the lips because her hands are still covered in blood.
---
My Slayer, she will say when she is brave enough. When she too is covered in blood and grime and her hope is just a ragged flag still trying to fly.
---
Mine, they dare the world, wrapped up limb for limb and vein for bleeding vein.
And the stars whisper to them because they are impossible.
Yet still they breathe.