taxonomites | 5. [Location: Hyperion] [Voice] A song of world's ending

It's the middle of the night, and Lorne can't sleep.

The shadows have eyes, and they are watching him.

After hours of tossing and turning, he finally gives up and rolls out of bed. Stares at his bedside clock through bleary eyes. It's well past midnight. He slips a bathrobe over his stripey pajamas, puts on a pair of fuzzy pink slippers, and shuffles out to the bar. Turns on the pink lamps, but they only make it worse, since shadows can only exist where there's light. Still, there's no way he's turning them off.

Lorne pours himself a shot of peach schnapps and downs it, reveling in the sweet burn. His eyes are drawn to the empty stage, only to discover that it's not so empty. There's something shifting behind the curtain.

The curtain ripples, and silhouettes pour out to the edges of the stage. One of them steps into the middle, where it's dimly illuminated by the lamps, but not enough to make out anything more than the moldering outline of a corpse.

Then, all at once, the ghosts begin to sing, and Lorne's world falls apart.

Caritas, a pile of colorful rubble in the street. Castle Summers in ruins, its towers torched. Even the Sanctuary is a shambles. The air reeks of smoke, decay, blood, and charred flesh.

But the streets are the worst sight of all, because the people of Taxon are tearing each other apart. Weapons fire at a car zooming through Osten. In the shadow of a wrecked building, two vampires snarl as they wrestle for dominance like wild animals. Everything is chaos. Screams rend the air like knives tearing through cloth. Piles of the dead lie rotting in open graves.

Soon, the entire city will be a grave.

The song ends, and Lorne collapses, trembling, against the bar. He catches one last glimpse of the ghost in the middle of the stage. Its face is strangely familiar. At the sight of it, he leans over a trash can and retches, bringing up black bile.

When his senses return to him at last, Lorne keys up the tablet on his wrist and sets it to voice. He feels so terrible right now he can't let all of Taxon see his face. "I got a musical message from our ghostly friends. Apocalypse. Second verse same as the first." He lets out a shuddering breath. "But I got something new to add. It's not all the hamsters' fault. The people of Taxon?" He stares grimly into the tablet. "We're all fighting each other."

"By the way, team? I'm coming to the Hyperion. I hope you'll all join me. 'Cause all that fighting I saw? Not gonna happen."

He takes off as fast as he can in his fluffy pink slippers toward the tram. No time for a snappy suit. At this time of night, the tram is mercifully empty of Extras. As he gets out of the tram and approaches the Hyperion, he feels a flutter of apprehension about seeing Angel again.

Then sets it aside. All animosities have to go.

Clad in pinstriped pajamas, a purple silk bathrobe, and slippers, he opens the doors to the Hyperion.

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She'd seen it. She'd seen it, but the hamsters were twisting and turning and doing their best to make sure that they couldn't stop it.

It seemed obvious to Drusilla. They'd taken away the Doctor and his Master. The last of the Time Lords. The only people who had stood a chance of stopping the pictures in her head.

(One evening, she might wake up to find that the Angel Beast - or Spike, or the Slayer, or her little brother - had been snatched away. How could they bear it? How could anyone bear it?)

"They're taking all the people," she said, addressing Lorne in a sharp tone. He needed to know. He needed to know and he needed to pass on the message to Angel and the others. "They're taking the people that can save us."

What do you care, Drusilla? You're a big fan of carnage. You liked watching Cordy and everyone else suffer at the hands of that creep. What's it to you if all these people die?

The vampire shook her head. Yes, she enjoyed carnage and bloodshed and pretty messes on pavements slick with scarlet. The joy of it, the thrill of it, the scent of it. It was in her nature. It was one of the strongest things in the world.

But it wasn't the strongest. Her love for her family was stronger. For all her faults, Drusilla adored her family. Her Daddy - or what was left of him, trapped in the Angel Beast - and her little brother and her darling Spike and the Dawn bird and her Slayer.

"I won't be fighting for them," she said, with something close to derision. She'd be fighting for the only people in any world that mattered.

(She'd bristled, just a little, at the word 'creep'. It wasn't the time or the place, but the Master had been a good friend and she missed him terribly.)

Oh, right. You don't care about us plebes. This is about family. All that vampire siring stuff.

Well, you're right. They did take the Doctor away, and he could've been a big help. But what could they do that's so bad that even those of us who don't like a little slaughter with their breakfast start going at each other's throats?

She nodded, giving Lorne - or the tablet and the shadow of Lorne that echoed behind it, at least - a dry look. Fool. Foolish little demon. As if anything else and anyone else mattered.

(Morgana. Dawn. The Slayer. They mattered. She'd fight for them as well. But she didn't like the man that stank of songs that weren't his own and decided not to share that.)

"And the Master." More powerful - more dangerous - than the Doctor would ever be. He wasn't brave enough.

"I don't know," she admitted, "The pixies haven't told me yet."

She couldn't be sure if they would. Sometimes, they liked surprises.

The Master wouldn't have done anything about it. He would have laughed maniacally and congratulated the hamsters for a job well done.

The things that told me what's going on? Weren't pixies. Think ghosts. Not the Casper kind. The creepy rotting corpse kind.

Edited 2010-06-19 01:10 (UTC)

Oh, he really didn't understand the Master, did he? Nobody in the city did. Drusilla could have laughed. He wanted control. He wanted power. He wanted the mastery he rightly deserved. Although his schemes occasionally involved devastation, that wasn't the same thing. He only liked destruction on his terms.

(He was a lot like her that way.)

"They don't speak to me," she said, dismissively. Drusilla didn't want them to speak to her. "I saw the city of ashes in my head."

Well, aren't you a lucky gal.

Yeah, Angel mentioned the whole visions thing you have going on. But it's different from Cordelia's. Somehow I doubt the Powers That Be like what goes on between your ears.

She was a lucky girl, but you couldn't rely on luck alone. It paid to make your own, so that was what Drusilla - with her whispers and her tricks and her carefully guided footsteps - tried to do.

Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn't. It had to work now.

"That doesn't change what I saw," she crooned, preening a little when she heard that the Angel Beast had been telling stories about her. "I'm never wrong. Tell him about the Doctor. Tell him to watch his back."

If they were stealing away champions, Angel was bound to be next on the list. He was all that she had of Angelus.

All right. I'll pass it on. Though I gotta ask - why can't you tell him yourself?

Drusilla was trapped in a cage - smaller than the city, a cage in Wolfram and Hart - and unable to wander off in search of the Angel Beast. Besides, she didn't think the other members of his little family - another family he'd built for himself, though he hadn't used a drop of blood - would be happy to see her.

"You'll see him before I do," she said, with a dismissive shrug. "And he doesn't like machines."

She wasn't particularly fond of science herself. Word of mouth was swifter and smoother and clearer.

5. [Location: Hyperion] [Voice] A song of world's ending

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