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thenewbuzwuzzAuthor: thenewbuzwuzz
Fandom: BtVS
Rating: T, I guess
Word count: ~5.5 K this chapter, ~10 K total so far
Characters: Buffybot, Harmony
Warnings: Buffybot, Harmony; not particularly Spike-friendly. Chapter warnings: animal death, plant death, POV character died in the past (she’s fine now!), bad houseplant ownership, messing with endangered species, life of crime, cultural appropriation of Fearsome Critters, bizarre side ship.
Working summary: A Spike stan and a Spike hater discuss their Spuffy-related woes while painting each other's nails or doing whatever skirt girls do together; eventually, unicorns.
UPDATE SCHEDULE: when I get around to it, possibly never! Current track record: 5 to 8 months between chapters.
Beta credit: thank you to
thewiggins, kind and invaluable as ever. If this chapter makes sense, that's because Wiggins is so very good at saying huh? Also, thanks to OffYourBird for explaining how big America is, back in the early planning stage of this story.Feedback: always appreciated, including about things that aren't working so well. This has been beta-read once, but I've changed a number of things since then and made some parts even weirder, so I'm curious about how this version works.
Notes: surpriiiiise, there's an update! :D I attempted a couple of scary things this chapter, such as using the POV of an original character. I'm very excited about a bit of mythology I got in. Tweaking the mood was an interesting time as well—the final version of the chapter is quite a bit less macabre and tragic than some of the drafts.
Chapter 1 is here.
Chapter 2 here.
Unicorns Are Totally Real
Chapter 3: Mean Ole Lion
If you're half bright,
you'll detour to the right
from a mean ole lion.
— Charlie Smalls, The Wiz (The Super Soul Musical)
Louise gave them two days, tops. Two days before these blonde airheads lost their way in the desert, with her help, and she had two more victims to add to her tally as their bones bleached in the sun. Well, her two first victims, really. And Louise didn’t know how it would all go with the bone bleaching and stuff. She was new at this disorientation demon gig.
She had died, as many of her kind did, of overwatering.
Back then, she was still busily cursing her murderer for keeping her soil moist for weeks. She wished the stupid human’s legs would rot off, when she noticed she had a mouth, or how else would she be spitting out the taste of the too-strong fertilizer solution? She looked at herself with eyes, which she now had. Her shorter, sharper spines were gone except for a few in her mouth and on the tips of her four new branches… or, her paws, she supposed. Her long, soft spines had turned into fur that covered her body. She didn’t have roots anymore, but she did have a tail and whiskers. Her flowerpot was nowhere to be seen. She had become a monster, a nightmare creature. She had become a cat.
Her new boss had approached Louise then. He was a demon in the form of a dead lamb, with a hole in his chest, a thousand yard stare, and a voice that was soft the way raw meat is soft. He explained that Louise was going to Hell, since her last words and thoughts had been so full of wrath and malice. But they would let her go if she got enough other souls to damn instead. All it took, the demon said, was getting people to die of unnatural causes. The more agitated they were, the better, so they wouldn’t be thinking their most charitable thoughts and wouldn’t have made up with everyone they’d mistreated and so forth. If she led nine people astray like that, she could go.
“I can go… you mean, to Heaven?” Louise had asked.
In Heaven, the sun would be plentiful but not too scorching. She would grow in well-draining soil with good microbes and humic acids, and there would not be a single aphid. She would listen to relaxing instrumental music played by attractive, greenish angels.
Her new boss had laughed. “Did you have somewhere else in mind?”
Louise supposed that was as good an answer as she was going to get, at least for now. It wasn’t like she had a whole lot of other options now that she was dead. This demon seemed to understand something about how things worked, and he needed her. And he wasn’t asking her to do anything really twisted, like knocking down flowerpots and chewing on defenseless plants. It was probably safest to stick with his offer for a while, while she figured stuff out.
Some things took a lot of figuring out. Being kitten-shaped, for one. They said you could choose different shapes once you reached three victims.
Louise wondered if she’d ever get that far. She hadn’t had any luck yet. People always seemed to come to their senses at the most inconvenient moments.
She was bound to get it right any day now.
Today had started badly when that thin rambly guy in the van abducted her. She’d been prepared to make him walk into traffic for that, but it seemed he was protected somehow—her suggestions had no effect on him. Instead of walking into traffic, he drove to the outskirts of LA, parked near an intersection, and spent a lot of time talking on the phone with someone named Warren. But then he let her go, after attaching a small pendant to her collar, and Louise had heard enough of his phone conversations to know she wanted to keep the pendant on. It made her powers stronger. Now she’d be able to confuddle things that didn’t have souls, such as car navigation systems. Louise wasn’t sure what she’d do with this new power, since she could always simply disorient the drivers instead, but she wasn’t going to knock anything that gave her an advantage.
So she felt pretty good about herself as she sat on the safety island in the middle of the highway. She wasn’t strong enough to disorient people much in the time it took cars to go past her, so at first nothing happened. But once someone slowed down to look at her, the rest was a cakewalk.
Louise said, “You don’t know where you’re supposed to be going.” As always, her kitten form translated the words to innocuous purring.
And sure enough, the curious driver put a hand to her forehead and stopped the car on the spot. That made the other cars slow down and stay in Louise’s influence, so next she called out to another driver that he was on the wrong fork of the road—nope! still wrong! wrong again!—so he went back and forth, slowing more cars down. Sooner or later, one of them would crash and die, or maybe adopt the cute kitten so she could lead them somewhere even more fun. There were mountains nearby. Maybe someone could fall and break their flowerpot—their car. She purred, basking in the sun.
And then her killer arrived.
Her killer stopped the car and picked her up. Being held precariously up in the air like that gave Louise the creeps, but she’d tolerate it for revenge purposes. It wasn’t like the girl could kill her again… right? It wouldn’t make sense. She, on the other hand…
She dared to gloat a little as the murderer and her companion let her into the car. She knew they’d only hear purring. People always did.
They took the bait like big, dumb guppies and seriously set out to drive to France.
As they left LA behind, the road wove through mountains. Louise didn’t much care for it. Being on the road. Moving. Going places. She wished she could be back home, sitting on the windowsill for years, lost in her thoughts, left alone in peace! Hopefully she wouldn’t have to endure a lot of travel before she got to Heaven.
She let them pass through the mountains without suggesting anything. It would be hard to make them tumble down the slope next to the road, because it was all the way on the other side of the other lane, with a big old barrier in the middle, and getting people to cross over all of that hadn’t worked earlier when she tried it with others.
In Barstow, she saw the sign and decided to try Death Valley. It had to be easy to work there, right?
She had some luck upon arriving in the valley. She almost made the car go down a cliff, but it wasn’t fast enough and didn’t go all the way over the edge, and then it somehow managed to pull itself back up while the front wheels were spinning mid-air.
“I’m sorry, Buffy,” Louise’s murderer said. “I just felt like that was the way to go.”
“That’s okay, Harmony!” the other girl chirped. “It’s important to listen to your heart.”
“It’s not always good, though,” said Harmony. “Sometimes your heart leads you to wack kinds of places. I mean, look at the whole Spike mess. In my heart, ours was a beautiful love, but really it wasn’t. Not for him. He used me.”
“I loved it when Spike used me,” Buffy said, grinning.
“He… did?”
“Oh, yes.” She nodded, still smiling.
Was this person okay? Why would Louise care if she was okay? The more messed up she was when she died, the better the chance she could take Louise’s place in Hell.
She sounded very messed up, so that was promising. She continued, “I ran all sorts of programs for him to satisfy his needs. And he loved me and took care of me. Until the real Buffy found out, and then he decided he shouldn’t be with me anymore.”
Harmony opened her mouth, shut it, and immediately opened it again. “Oh my god, that sounds so like him. He even made me dress up like Buffy and play these nasty games with a stake and everything! Can you imagine? Sorry, of course you can. Anyway, now I know that I’m a person all on my own. I don’t need him.”
“I do need him,” Buffy said. “But he only likes real girls now, so I have to become real.”
“Well!” Harmony said after a pause. “The important thing is that something inspires you to become your best self.”
They went down to the salt flats. Louise tried to get them stuck in the mud, figuring that too much moist soil had to be bad for anyone. She succeeded with Harmony… sort of. Harmony fell face down and got stuck, but then she just kinda lay there.
It turned out she somehow didn’t need to breathe? How was Louise supposed to know that? And of course, Harmony didn’t have roots that could get damaged.
In the end, Buffy got Harmony out. And then they went and left this promising place with all its Ash Meadows and Funeral Mountains, and still not a single kill on Louise’s record.
She tried to make them stay, but Buffy was very insistent. “France,” she kept saying. “We have to go to France and find Warren so that I can become real.”
Again this obsession with going places.
They stopped at a motel, where Harmony and Buffy spent a boring hour wiping mud off their clothing and stuff. Louise didn’t watch. She ate some of the cat food Harmony had gotten for her, but only because she wasn’t sure what would happen if she didn’t eat anything; it wasn’t like she could photosynthesize in this form.
Then, her collar rang like a phone, three times to allow her to find some privacy, and, “Louise,” her boss said sourly. He pronounced the e, as always. “Well, let’s get straight to your scorecard. How many conversions today?”
Louise hated this part. “None,” she said, “but…”
“Your key performance indicators are the lowest in the team, Louise. Remember our vision: miserable clients every day…?”
“...happy company in the long term,” Louise finished. “I know. I’m working with two new leads.” She let some enthusiasm show in her voice. She was pretty proud of herself, all told.
“Well, finally. Get out there and murder them, then!” The demon laughed genially.
The call disconnected. Her targets were coming out of the bathroom, apparently done with the mud, so there was no time like the present to try again.
Buffy went to bed straight away. That suited Louise’s plans just fine. Whatever was going on with Buffy’s cables and blinking lights, she didn’t want to know.
Harmony started looking for Louise, calling her the silly name she’d decided to use. Louise froze for a second despite her determination, but she knew Harmony had no power over her anymore.
“Let’s go outside,” she suggested, scratching at the door.
“You want to go outside, kitty?” Harmony cooed. “But we got you a sandbox and everything.”
To spare herself long, potentially embarrassing moments of Harmony trying to get her to use the kitty sandbox, Louise doubled down on her effort. “Outside,” she said firmly, knowing that her kitten form would translate this into meowing.
Harmony threw a worried look at her sleeping companion. Louise repeated the request more loudly.
“Okay,” Harmony said. “Maybe we can find you some kitty toys.”
“I’m going to destroy you like a kitty toy,” Louise said. Harmony smiled and opened the door.
Things went well up to a point. Harmony had opened the outside door of the motel four times already, and she certainly seemed confused. But, each time, before Louise could lead her out and find a properly dangerous place for having a tragic accident, Harmony hesitated, shook her head as if to clear it, and turned around.
Louise was about to change tactics—to what, she didn’t know—when a daddy longlegs sauntered across the floor.
Her cat body flooded with excitement, and her paws itched to swipe at the thing.
These demonic urges were unnatural. She wasn't really a cat or even a carnivorous plant. She turned around slowly and walked away.
But she saw motion from the corner of her eye, and she came to her senses a moment later, chewing a dead spider. It tasted good.
Louise spat it out. She was really a cactus, she reminded herself. Cephalocereus senilis to be exact, also known as an Old Man Cactus. She would get out of this mess and go back to growing in some nice soil as she should.
Harmony was talking, she realized. Enticing the kitty to come back to the room. Fine, whatever. She might as well call it a day, recover her dignity after the spider incident, think up some strategies.
Back at the room, she curled up in the sunlight on the windowsill, on the other side of the thick curtains, and she thought.
Her introductory training presentation had said that drowning people in swamps and lakes was a classic. It did have poetic justice going for it, but it hadn’t worked in the salt flats, and, besides, she was pretty sure there wouldn’t be a lot of other opportunities to try it in the southwestern US. The head office in eastern Europe had clearly not considered how their training would work in other climates, or nobody on this side had bothered to adapt it.
Her training hadn’t mentioned traffic accidents, focusing instead on getting people to remote places that were dangerous in and of themselves. Must have been written in the Middle Ages or something. But Louise had had pretty good results messing with traffic so far. If she could get them to drive in the wrong direction or turn their lights off at night… That had a lot of potential.
Leading them so far out into the desert and getting them so lost that they kicked the bucket before they got back was a good option, in theory. It would take a lot of work, but the best part was that, by the time the disorientation broke, they’d be too tired and too far from help to do anything about it. Since Harmony apparently didn’t need to breathe, Louise wasn’t sure how her body worked, but presumably she could starve just like anyone else? Or wait, even better. She remembered Harmony hesitating at the motel door every time, taking one step out but stopping at the edge of the shade of the roof. Usually, the disorientation held until someone was in mortal danger. There had to be something up with sunlight! Or maybe something else that made it dangerous for Harmony to be outside during the day. If Louise could get Harmony stranded far from shelter… that could work very well indeed.
Then she’d figure out something for the other girl, and they would die of unnatural causes, and Louise’s boss would get off her case, and she would be two-thirds of the way towards earning the shapeshifting bonus. And, eventually… Heaven.
Satisfied with her plans, Louise dozed off until she heard Harmony stirring again and attempting to wake her companion. Louise washed herself best as she could and then ventured into the room to demand some cat food.
Buffy woke up about an hour after sunset, and they set out.
As Louise contemplated how best to get her targets caught in a traffic accident, she heard them straight up planning a robbery, so she decided to wait and see. Maybe they’d get themselves killed and damned and Louise wouldn’t have to lift a finger… paw.
The issue was gas, it turned out. Harmony was in favor of marching into a gas station, filling the tank, and killing anyone who tried to stop them from leaving or followed them. Buffy objected to this plan, but not, it seemed, to robbery as such, as long as she didn’t have to do it herself.
So it came to be that Louise sat in the parked car with Buffy and watched Harmony try to wrest open an ATM that she had ripped off the ground and manhandled into the trunk earlier.
Louise purred as her work did itself. A lot of cops were bound to arrive at any moment, right?
“How are you feeling, Coco?” Buffy asked. “You're my pet! I should take care of you. I don't have a program for that, but I could nurse you to health! Are you sick?”
Louise smiled and didn't say anything. Harmony climbed on top of the ATM and jumped up and down.
“You're my pet,” Buffy said. “You are a kitten. You're also a Vadātājs demon!”
Oh fuck. She'd been found out. The broad, friendly smile of the girl suddenly seemed creepy. Figured—of course Harmony would be traveling with another serial killer.
While Louise spent precious seconds considering how to get out of the car, Buffy continued, “But that's okay! You're harmless to me, because of my special Slayer immunity.”
Oh, good. Buffy could go right ahead and keep thinking that.
“So you're like Spike and Harmony!” she concluded, looking proud of her logical reasoning. “I don't have to slay you.”
Harmony gave up on the ATM, and they filled the tank at the next station. Louise tried to delay them long enough to be caught, and the staff did notice them, but from there the situation went nowhere. Harmony’s spooky changed face scared the staff so much that they loudly announced their intention not to call the cops, just to get Harmony to leave and not attack them. Louise sighed. She supposed she couldn’t blame them for freaking out.
She could lead the pair off the highway and deeper into the desert, at least. Maybe she could get them stranded where the morning light would hit Harmony. She suggested they veer more towards the south.
“I'm gonna have to stop soon and eat someone,” Harmony said out of the blue. “Don't worry, I won't take long.”
She was going to what? Louise had known Harmony was evil, of course—she’d heard her talk about adding cactus to her smoothies just for fun—but she’d even eat her own kind?
Buffy jumped in her seat. “No! Killing is bad! Except when I kill vampires, but that's slaying, and that's different.”
“But I’m hungry,” Harmony whined.
“If you eat people,” Buffy said, friendly smile only punctuated by a brief pout, “then I'll have to kill you.”
“I thought we were friends...”
“I'm sorry you're upset, Harmony! You're my friend! Also, if you eat people, I'll have to kill you!”
“Fine!” Harmony threw her arms in the air. “You're just like Cordelia. Except nicer and more understanding, and okay. I guess I can have pig's blood. For you, okay, for our friendship.”
Buffy nodded, beaming. “Spike has pig’s blood all the time! There’s nothing wrong with it!”
“Excuse you? The taste! And the calories.”
But Harmony did spend the next few hours checking every tiny roadside village for all-night butcher shops. They didn’t find any. Weird.
Finally, Buffy suggested that there had to be some pig's blood inside wild pigs, and Harmony went hunting.
There was a scream that broke off. Louise left the parked car and walked slowly towards the sound.
Harmony was sitting on the ground, clutching a fluffy fox whose eyes had rolled back in terror. Harmony held it in a death grip with one arm while petting its fur with the other.
“So soft,” she said. “I knew she would be.” She bent to kiss it on the nose. “She's like a little kitten with a big fluffy tail.”
“Some vampires feed from kittens,” Buffy pointed out.
Oh god, was Buffy goading Harmony into killing Louise? After all that talk about taking care of her?
“Ugh,” said Harmony. “Is it Spike? He would.”
“It’s better than eating people. I don’t have to protect kittens. Except for you, Coco,” Buffy added with a glance at Louise.
Louise absolutely did not let out a breath of relief, because she didn't need this silly human’s protection. Wait, what was that Buffy had said about vampires? Louise supposed a couple of things about Harmony would make a hell of a lot more sense if vampires were real. But since Louise didn’t know anything about how vampires worked, that didn’t tell her much. She’d have to go by observation as before.
“I don’t see why you wouldn't protect kittens,” Harmony said. “They're much cuter and nicer than people.”
“I didn’t ask Warren why. My programming says that kittens aren’t people. Neither are foxes.”
There was a moment of silence as Harmony cradled the fox. “Who’s the cutest little flufftail?” she said, frowning when the fox didn’t respond.
“I think it’s dead, Harmony,” Buffy pointed out.
“But why?! I didn’t do anything! I was holding her real careful, too… until she started kicking.”
“Maybe it was old?” Buffy suggested.
“No. She had many years ahead of her.” Harmony sniffed. “How long do foxes live?”
“I don't know, Harmony. Wait a second. In captivity, kit foxes have been known to live as long as 10 years, but in the wild, they rarely live to 7 years of age. Maybe it had a heart attack. People die of those all the time.”
“Like, she ate too much cholesterol? That’s terrifying. I’ve never seen it happen up close. ...We need to give her a proper burial now.”
Somehow, Buffy convinced Harmony to drain the dead animal first.
So, that was pretty disturbing. But not really more creepy than mouths and stomachs in general. Louise couldn’t wait to go back to having roots.
“She will be part of me forever now,” Harmony sobbed. “I won’t forget you, Emily.”
Maybe letting Harmony live was the bigger revenge, Louise thought, when she did all this shit to herself.
“Who’s Emily?” said Buffy.
“Well, I don’t know her name, but she looks like an Emily, don’t you think?”
“The only other Emilys I know are Emily Brontë and Emily Dickinson.” Buffy tilted her head. “I guess the hair is a similar color.”
They ended up getting an icebox and some pig’s blood in Phoenix. Harmony made faces at it, especially when she discovered she couldn’t sip the frozen blood with a straw and the butcher didn’t have any cocktail umbrellas, but she didn’t complain much. When Buffy brought up hunting again, Harmony said, “Hunting is different with people. I’m supposed to hunt those. Killing fluffy little animals just feels wrong.”
A little bit down the road, Buffy got restless and insisted on getting out of the car and doing a real quick search for vampires or something.
Louise followed. She wasn’t sure whether she’d get credit if Buffy got herself killed seeking out vampires, but it couldn’t hurt to be close by, so she could witness anything bad that happened and claim she had a part in it. She made the suggestion just to be sure. “You should find some vampires,” she said to Buffy, who was already brandishing a sharpened stick and cheerfully exploring the desert between the tall saguaro cacti.
There was a raspy screech, and a creature approached them from the shadows. It was small for a bobcat, or big for a housecat. Louise could tell, because her job training had covered various cat forms in detail. Its fur was white and shaggy, like Louise’s own, but it had sharp bone spurs on its front legs. Its branched, spiky tail twitched slightly as it watched them. A cat monster, like her—but no, it was worse, like a perverse hybrid between a cat and a cactus. The sight made her gut churn.
Buffy said, “Hey, kitty!”
Was she about to pet the monster and get eaten? That would be nice.
“Hey,” the thing said in a gravelly voice that made Louise shiver, like the sound of a flowerpot sliding towards the edge of a windowsill. “Didn’t mean to yell at you like that, it’s just you came out of nowhere and—want some cactus brew? We’re having a party tonight.”
The abomination drank what?!
Buffy seemingly didn’t understand that the cat… cactus... thing had spoken. She reached out to pet it. It allowed this for a minute and then stepped back from Buffy and stretched. Louise noticed, against her will, the fragrant pink and white flowers on the creature’s head. She had never been so close to another cactus’s pollen. A few steps closer, and there would be no need for birds or bees…
But, of course, this was not really another cactus. Obscene was what it was, the unnatural creature walking around like that with his petals waving all over the place.
The cactus cat went around a tall saguaro and cut a spiral slash into it, using the bone spurs on his front legs.
Louise trembled in revulsion. Her cat body was very unhelpfully thrilled with this display of violence.
Sure, she had never cared much for wild cacti, and what happened to the saguaros wasn’t really her problem, but this was still a harsh way to go.
“So how about that party?” the murderous creature said. “This drink’s not ready yet, but we have a fine matured cactus a little ways away.”
He was looking directly at Louise. “In your dreams,” she said. She may be in a cat form temporarily, and, fine, she may be working on a kind of unsavory gig at the moment, but she would never be a monster like this. Or associate with one.
The cactus cat laughed. “Hit me up if you change your mind, kitten,” he said. “Look for the cuts in the saguaros.”
Buffy seemed to remember herself, as if someone had flipped a switch in her head. “I have to go to France! I need to find Warren so I can be with Spike again!”
Louise followed Buffy back to the car. As the growth of saguaros shrank in the rearview mirror, an otherworldly wail rang out over the desert. She didn’t look back.
When her boss called in the early morning, she had to report another night of failure. With Buffy’s newfound determination, the most Louise had been able to do was confuse the girls about where their destination was. Just by themselves, they were already half confused about whether they needed Paris or another place in France. Louise encouraged them to focus on Paris. There was a Paris just over in Texas, and going to that one would keep them on the road, where Louise could suggest changing course once they calmed down a little. But tonight they had found a hotel about an hour on the way towards Paris and spent the day safely.
The next night, Louise napped in the car and only got up briefly to watch Buffy chase something that looked like tiny dinosaurs by the Rio Grande river. Buffy was kind of cute, Louise decided, feeling well-rested and generous. And she gave decent ear scratches. Sometimes, Louise didn’t even feel mad at Harmony anymore. What cause did she have for revenge, if life now wasn’t all bad? As a perfectly watered cactus, she’d never have seen the world.
Louise didn’t have to get them both killed right now. She had plenty of time to cherry-pick the best dangers, when she felt like it. It wasn’t like they were going to break free of her powers anytime soon—not for longer than a moment at a time. And their antics were, what was the word? Entertaining. Louise was warming up to this entertainment thing. Maybe there was something to be said for experiencing more than the sunlight and her own thoughts.
The next time her boss called, Louise realized she hadn’t tried to put her targets in any danger all night long. No matter, she could just bluff through it. It’s not like she’d had any results on the days she had tried.
Her boss had a different idea, though, and gave her a deadline.
Louise hated deadlines. As a plant, she’d never been attacked with the passage of time.
Apparently, today was the last day of the month (whatever a month was), and that meant they’d be looking at her scorecard and making Decisions. Her scorecard was still empty of kills, as she well knew. If she didn’t fix that today, she’d lose her job, and that meant going to the murky depths of Hell.
Sunk in her thoughts, she hardly noticed when they arrived in Paris.
The girls tried hard to be excited, but Louise could see it was forced, especially when they found out all the shops were closed at the fun, early hour of 2 AM.
They went to look at the Eiffel Tower.
“It’s funny I never saw the hat in the pictures,” Harmony said. “You’d think I would have noticed.”
The cowboy hat on top of the tower was bright red and very large. “It’s noticeable,” Buffy said. “I noticed it.”
“Maybe they took it off for the pictures,” Harmony mused.
Okay. Louise had had her fun observing this pair of fools, but she was done with them now. It was time to get them killed and increase her tally.
“Go, quick!” Louise said. “Paris is at the top of the tower!”
They both climbed the tower, the steel beams twanging under their feet.
“Paris is down here, you have to jump!” Louise tried. This bit had never worked. She didn't know how to complete the job. Maybe if she just kept trying...
Sure enough, they both moved as if to jump, but caught themselves. Harmony let go of her handhold a tiny bit, but came to her senses as soon as she started to sway away from the tower. Buffy slipped, but caught hold of a lower beam and then climbed down safely.
“Why did we do that?” Harmony wondered.
“It must be the demon. I mean, Coco. I thought she was safe, but I was wrong.”
“The highway is the place to be and lie down now,” Louise suggested.
Buffy repeated, "She's not safe. We can't follow our hearts right now.” She stared into space for a little bit and then announced, “We should slay the demon. How do you slay a kitten, Harmony?"
“That's nasty,” Harmony said. “Are you sure she's not fine? I mean, I've gotten lost before. Maybe it's not Coco's fault at all.”
“No. I think we’re not really in France. She won’t let us find the way. And I must find the way to Warren, so I can find the way to Spike’s heart.”
“If you say so.”
The girls took an indecisive step towards Louise, and she told them to walk into the scraggly trees. Buffy started walking in a circle instead, but Harmony did walk into a branch face first. It got caught in her hair.
The next bit happened really fast.
Harmony screeched, pulled her hair free from the tree, stared at the strand of hair that was left in her hand, and ran full tilt towards Louise.
“Turn around!” Louise said in a hurry, but Harmony was beyond hearing.
Harmony grabbed at Louise. But Louise had more than just her prickly spines to defend herself now. She could scratch and spit, bite and wriggle and yowl.
Catching her breath after a narrow escape, Louise had to face it: if she hadn’t been able to fool these two, she would never meet her victim quota. This job wasn’t worth the effort. If she was going to Hell anyway, she might as well have some fun first.
Louise clawed off her collar and padded into the night.
Years later, in the quiet of dawn, as the cactus cat's rough tongue groomed her fur, sometimes Louise thought of the two dumbasses she had tried to kill that time.
She wondered if they ever did reach France.
***
End notes
I made a one-sentence retcon in the previous chapter to say Andrew digitized Bristow’s Demon Index for Warren last week.
Copied a sentence from this page about kit foxes when Buffybot looked them up on the ‘net.
Supernatural critters mentioned in this chapter:
Vadātājs - Latvian disorientation demon
Cactus cat
River dinos
This way to Chapter 4
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Date: 2020-04-13 03:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-04-13 05:41 am (UTC)Once I had the cactus cat, I had to have saguaros for biological accuracy. I don't make the rules. :)
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Date: 2020-04-13 06:46 pm (UTC)It's enough to demoralize any killer!
Maybe letting Harmony live was the bigger revenge, Louise thought, when she did all this shit to herself.
Hahaha :D
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Date: 2020-04-13 07:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-04-14 03:15 am (UTC)She continued, “I ran all sorts of programs for him to satisfy his needs. And he loved me and took care of me. Until the real Buffy found out, and then he decided he shouldn’t be with me anymore.”
Harmony opened her mouth, shut it, and immediately opened it again. “Oh my god, that sounds so like him. He even made me dress up like Buffy and play these nasty games with a stake and everything! Can you imagine? Sorry, of course you can. Anyway, now I know that I’m a person all on my own. I don’t need him.”
I love this interchange, hehe.
“She will be part of me forever now,” Harmony sobbed. “I won’t forget you, Emily.”
Maybe letting Harmony live was the bigger revenge, Louise thought, when she did all this shit to herself.
This feels like the summary of all of this. I love your Harmony voice so much; it's just right and sympathetic without losing the ridiculousness we all know and love.
Seriously, the idea of playing her and the Buffybot off each other was inspired, and this story is a delight!
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Date: 2020-04-14 05:04 am (UTC)