river_meimei | (no subject)

(no subject)

This city's never fully dark. There's no star-spangled black in this sky, not even the close second-best that a clear atmosphere sometimes arches overhead; here the light pollution is ubiquitous, and the sky's a hazy humid grey under sulfurous street-lamps.

But it's night. Night, and growing later.

When there's nowhere else to go, you keep

(flying)

running. One step behind, one step ahead.

River's looking for something. A key, a rose, a door.

But here, in the city that (as they proudly say) never sleeps, it's anyone's guess what she might find. And what she won't.

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Low, "Are you?"

It doesn't sound, somehow, quite like a polite inquiry into her health; the blonde may be standing down, but River hasn't yet, and what's in her eyes is a killer's cold scrutiny.

It's possible she recognizes that.

A pause, and she bends slowly (not taking her eyes off River's) and sets her crossbow down on the pavement.

"I'm Brianna," she says, straightening, her hands held up open and empty.

Silence.

And then, "Okay."

One breath, another, and then the killing edge eases back very slightly, and River's fingers loosen fractionally on the crossbow quarrel. Her wariness, though, doesn't lessen in the least.

Brianna doesn't move.

"Are you all right?" she repeats. "I saw them heading this way and thought maybe you could use a hand dealing with them."

"You follow."

"Trace the trail."

She looks a little ... startled. Taken aback.

"Yeah," she says carefully. "It's part of what I do."

"And the rest?"

River's tone makes it as much statement as question, but the syntax is probably clear.

Brianna lowers her voice. "Look, we're still in a pretty bad part of town. You want to maybe continue this conversation somewhere safer?"

River's head tilts slowly.

"Not worried," she says softly, and distantly.

Her eyes are fixed on something just beyond Brianna; the focus shifts now, just slightly, so that her gaze holds the other woman's instead.

"Bring her in. Tea and dumplings for the little lost doll. Lock out the world and say it's for her good. We'll teach you how to think."

-- and at that Brianna looks downright alarmed. And suspicious.

"Who's been trying to do that?"

"Isn't what you think."

River's voice is obscurely gentle; she's smiling again, small and sweet and savage.

"What have they been telling you?"

Brianna's dealt a few times with the zhirelin who've been coopted by the Council. The self-styled Slayers. Fanatics, to a woman.

This one, though, this one ...

"You are."

The thought's clear in Brianna's eyes, even to one who only sees the surface: something here is not right. Something here is very not right.

"You're not making any sense," she says, and it's a little sharp, but mostly uneasy.

River is silent for the space of a few slow breaths, watching the other woman.

Her eye contact lingers too long, unwavering; it may be disconcerting.

Softly, unblinking: "Why are you here?"

There's a weight to the words. As though the answer will decide a great deal, or as if the question has more layers than the immediately apparent.

Brianna watches her carefully for several seconds.

"I know what you are," she says finally. "What we both are. Women like us. That's why I was watching for you. Vampires are drawn to zhirelin, nobody knows why."

"No."

River's voice is very soft. Her smile is back, and again it has that incongruous, lethal sweetness.

"Not like you."

One step forward. Another. The crossbow's bolt rests easily in her hand: not dangling, not gripped. Just held with a thoughtless, natural ease, as if it were no kind of weapon at all.

(As if she hadn't just yanked it from one vampire's corpse-dust to kill another.)

Very deliberately: "I shoot with my mind."

"I kill. With my heart."

Her head tilts fractionally. Gently, implacably: "Where is your heart, Slayer?"

Spike never could resist a good entrance line.

"Little to the left," he says, appearing in the mouth of the alley himself. There's a stake hanging slack and casual between the fingers of his left hand, like a pool cue. He needs the right to hold the cigarette.

"Good to see you again, pet," he says, speaking right past the other, to the Dru-girl. Meaning, alive.

Oh, it's you, says the brief flicker of River's expression, with a noticeable lack of enthusiasm.

Without especial rancor either, though, and her eyes don't budge from Brianna's face.

And if anything else was needed to convince her -- the other zhirel's use of the word Slayer, and the appearance of one of their vampires --

"You're with the Council."

She backs away a step, crouching in a swift motion to pick up the crossbow, setting her back to the alley wall where she can see both of them.

"Why does everyone keep bloody saying that?"

Honestly, you rip your heart out and lay it at the feet of one Slayer, and people just assume you're a lapdog for her employer-of-record ever after. Not like he'd ever been on the Wolfram & Hart payroll either. Or the Order of Aureliwhatchamacallit. He's not much of a joiner.

Spike drops his cigarette and crushes it out with his boot, even though there was one more drag in it, easy. That brasses him off too. But he's in a mood to crush something, and the soul doesn't fancy the throats of little blonde girls these days, even ones with their heads up their tight little arses.

"I'm not with anyone." Except Angel, maybe, on a good day, and that's no one's bleeding business.

Overlapping him, with the same distant calm as before: "I'm not with anyone."

Spike gets a quick, startled flick of a glance, before her eyes cut sharply back to Brianna.

River's a small girl, slim and short. But she stands straight, and right now there's an aura around her of something almost regal: an aura not just of confidence, but of something like authority.

"Not his. Not yours."

"I stand for the White. Rose and Beam and Tower. Khef and ka, watch and warrant."

With a soft certainty that's half a challenge: "I know who I am."

"Lovely. Mind sharing with the rest of us?"

The back of Spike's head, the bit that's spent entirely too much time round Giles and Wesley and Andrew, is automatically noting the nonsense words -- Keff, Cah? -- in case they turn out to be the kind that have three foot tusks and agendas of their own. The White Rose sounds vaguely familiar, like something out of a Yeats poem. Or else even hamburger joints are hiring Slayers nowadays.

Spike shivers, almost imperceptibly, at the mention of a tower. Last time he met one of those, he wasn't fast enough.

Brianna's staring at her, as though trying to get through to her by sheer intensity of gaze.

"You don't have to believe what they've told you," she says, low and fierce. "You don't have to let them control you."

"I mind."

And then, to Brianna, matching her fierce anger with an eerie unruffled calm, she says, "That's the point."

And suddenly she's smiling, almost laughing silently -- as if it's a joke, as if any minute now Brianna might catch onto the punchline. "What I said."

The laughter's gone. "I shoot. With my mind."

"And they do not own me."