FIC: The Grave Bride (BtVS, Darla/Xin Rong, R)

[carlyinrome]

TITLE: The Grave Bride
RATING: R
FANDOM: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
PAIRING: Darla/Xin Rong
SUMMARY: Peking, China, 1900. A different fate befalls Spike's Chinese Slayer.
AUTHOR’S NOTES: Written for brutti_ma_buoni femslash_minis Round 153.

Xin is fourteen when the man from Peking comes to her village to collect her. Xin’s father joined the Rong ancestors not long after her birth, so for a long time it has just been Xin and her mother and her quiet, moon-faced brother. She was always going to lose her. Xin’s brother will bring their mother another daughter, and Xin will leave with the man from Peking to serve China, and instead of losing her only daughter to in-laws, Xin’s mother will lose her to the grave.

***

Darla comes to China alone. Angelus is worse than dead, and she'd just as soon kill his children than lay eyes on them again. She left them in Italy; who knows if they've even noticed yet. She spent time in the Orient before Angelus, when she was just a fresh thing with a light heart. She doesn't expect to find that girl here, really, but it is that memory that draws her back. The moon festival, fireworks and silks and teahouse terraces with beautiful views. Laughter and blood sweetened with candy and sweet buns, and none of this feeling in her chest that she'd excise with a knife if she could, if it was that sort of ailment--the simpler sort. This is a more complicated thing.

It's the late days of summer when Darla arrives in Peking, and the streets are carpeted with cherry blossom petals. Everywhere smells like perfume. Darla looks out the window of her apartment until the sun threatens to rise, rays like blood spreading up the inky purple of the night sky. She closes the shutters, then, and sits in the dark in her silks, choking on her grief.

***

In Mandarin, Xin means heart. Xin is eleven when her mother cups her face in her hands and looks her in the eye, and says, “I grew you in my belly like the ginseng I've sewn in the garden. When you were inside me, I felt your heart when it began to beat, and it beat in time with mine. Your blood is my blood. Your flesh is my flesh.”

Xin wakes from this memory alone in her room with the night chill in the air. She can smell cooking and cordite from the streets. She is nineteen and her Watcher says she's still growing, but she can eat and eat and she never feels full. There is always an emptiness.

She dresses and heads out into the night. The moon is full and brilliant, fat and yellow in the sky. Xin buys dumplings from a man with a cart and eats them in two bites. There are fireworks whizzing up into the smoke-filled sky, bursting into dazzling waterfalls of brightly colored sparks. It's beautiful, but it clouds her senses, the thunderous noise and the sharp smell of the smoke. She feels at a disadvantage, a hand bound behind her back, and she resents everyone out celebrating. They don't think of her, tucked among the shadows, saving them from the demons hungry for their blood. They don't even know she exists.

Xin sighs. She adjusts the strap of her sword on her shoulder, the scabbard a familiar weight across her back, and walks on.

***

There is some festival going on, which means the streets are full of people and chaos even after dark. Darla walks through the crowd, feeling warm flesh brush against her, hearing the humans’ heartbeats. She hasn't fed in days but she can't feel the hunger. A trio of small children rustle her skirts, running past with sparklers and giggles. She could reach out a hand and sweep one or two of them to her, disappear into the night unnoticed. She sighs. Not much sport in it.

Darla keeps walking. The crowd thins, and soon she finds herself away from the screams and cheers. The fireworks crack overhead, and the air is thick with smoke. Beneath it, she can still smell the cherry blossoms, and something else. Almond soap and snuffed out incense, jasmine tea and steel.

The pulse is strong and steady. Darla stops, listens. Speaks.

“Come out, come out, little bird,” she says in the Chinese dialect she learned many years ago, lead paint on her face, her hair twisted in tortoise shell combs.

There is movement from the shadows. A girl steps into the moonlight, lithe as a willow, long black hair tightly wound in one long braid.

“Where did you learn to speak Chinese?” she asks.

Darla arches an eyebrow. “Why? Is it incorrect?”

“No, but it's… old, I guess. Like what's written in texts from hundreds of years ago.”

“Hmm,” Darla says.

“It's beautiful,” the girl says. “The cadence. Like a song.”

Darla sees the battle between them. The girl has her sword, and her strength, but she's young. Darla is unarmed and unfed, but she's killed Slayers before. She sees her hand crushing the girl's throat, the Slayer’s blade tearing her flesh.

She feels nothing.

“Come, little bird,” she says. “I'll buy you a drink.”

***

They drink rice wine in the back of a dark, empty restaurant. It is sweet and burns down Xin’s throat as she swallows.

“There's a story I heard the last time I was in China,” Darla says, taking a drink and then licking her lips. “A story about ghosts. You have a lot of different ghosts in your country.”

“Are there no ghosts in your country?” Xin asks.

“Not so many kinds. This story is about a hungry ghost.”

Xin knows this story, but she listens.

“The hungry ghost’s stomach is huge, desperate to be filled, but its mouth is so small it cannot eat even the smallest crumb. ” She looks into the image distorted by her empty glass, Xin’s placid, slightly flushed face. Darla runs her tongue over her lips, but finds her mouth dry. “A terrible torture,” she says, “though I can imagine worse.”

Xin fills Darla’s glass with the rest of the wine.

“Drink,” she says.

***

It will be dawn soon. The fireworks are over;the moon is gone. Darla follows Xin through the empty streets, watching her braid sway, her hips. There are cherry blossom petals on the soles of her shoes.

Xin’s room is sparse and clean. The mattress is on the floor. She covers every window and lights the lamps.

“I feel as though right now everything is in balance,” she says. “I feel like I cannot catch my breath.”

She hangs up her sword. Her fingers work through her braid until her long, black hair falls loose around her shoulders. Darla steps forward. She peels Xin’s jacket from her. The skin beneath is brown and smooth. Darla wonders if the girl has ever been touched, and imagines she has not. She runs her nails lightly down Xin’s chest, listens to Xin hiss out a breath. Darla cups the girl's breast in her hand, leans in, kisses her.

They lose their clothes and find the bed. Darla presses Xin down beneath her, winding a hand through Xin’s hair. Darla parts the girl's legs, and she moves like an echo, opening for her, angling up her hips. Darla slips her fingers into Xin’s slick sex. She's so hot, and if it hurts she says nothing; Xin’s body pulls at her, begs for her, takes her in. Darla moves fingers inside her like beckoning, pressing at the clutch of nerves, and Xin arches her back, pushing against her, every inch of her beautiful in the gold lamplight. She is holding her breath. Darla massages her until she lets go, and finally they both exhale.

***

They lay together on the small mattress on the floor, morning outside and the lamps dying within. Everything still smells like cordite and perfume. Xin feels Darla’s icy skin, looks at her so pale in the lamplight. Her body wants sleep. She knows it's foolish, but she closes her eyes. She wonders if Darla was buried, however long ago. Sometimes if an unmarried man dies, his family will pay for a woman's bones to bury beside him, a wife for the afterlife. Xin dreams of herself as a grave bride, stripped to bones and buried beside Darla’s empty coffin. She dreams of her mother's ginseng budding in the garden, her bare feet on the cool earth, rooting her. She knows this balance is precarious, and it may only last a moment. Like her, it is destined to slip away. But for this moment, it is here, and it is precious.

Comments

[sibilant.livejournal.com]

Fabulous! Two lonely, desperate people longing for connection. Fantastic sense of alienation and lovely evocation of a particular place and time that yet feels timeless. Nicely done.

[carlyinrome.livejournal.com]

Thank you so much!

[kita0610.livejournal.com]

Man, you are SO good.

[carlyinrome.livejournal.com]

Praise from Caesar. Thank you, D.

[brutti-ma-buoni.livejournal.com]

I love this. It's really painful, but in a slightly distanced way, which resonates with Xin Rong's thoughts. Such stayed emotion, close to terror in so many ways, but not quite there: “I feel as though right now everything is in balance,” she says. “I feel like I cannot catch my breath.”

[carlyinrome.livejournal.com]

Thank you! It was nice to get a chance to write Xin.

[snogged.livejournal.com]

This was fantastic. :)