taxonomites | [ Voice ]

Entry tags:

[ Voice ]

[She finds the voice option comforting somehow; the anonymity allows her to feel less vulnerable and helpless, given the question she's posing to the people at large]

C-Can anyone recommend a good way to stop nightmares? Or at least...manage them, somehow?

[She knows magical ways to quell the disturbing dreamscapes she's been having of late, but she prefers to try something more natural. For now, at least]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"Hi," Tara smiled softly at her. "Cassie?"

It had to be her, of course, so the question was more rhetorical than anything else. Her arms fell to her side and she walked closer to the young woman.

"You brought a van?"

Cassie glanced back to the van. She really needed to name it...something.

The Revenantmobile? Too Batman.

The Slasher Machine? Too Scooby Doo.

She nodded, before looking back to Tara, "Yeah. It's what Vlad and I rode around in. We had to drive around an RV for a short time, but that got destroyed. Thanks to a buncha fucking wooden doll things."

"What...what, specifically, do you do? You and Vlad. When you drive around, saving people, wh-what are you saving them from?"

In the meantime, she examined Cassie a little more closely. They seemed to be similar to each other in age, but it was easy to see with just one glance that Cassie had lived multiple lifetimes in a short time.

Cassie sighed. A loaded question. She'd crossed her arms beneath her breasts and moved to lean against the side of the van.

"Okay. There's bad people in the world, right? Murderers, rapists, etc and so on? Well, they get caught and they die a violent death. But they don't stay dead. They become 'Slashers' - or 'Revenants' as the G-Men call 'em - they're harder to injure and they hate everything good in the world. And they don't stop unless you put them down for good. Serious mortal wounding."

Cassie was quiet for a moment as she let that sink in. "And that's why I do. I hunt down Slashers and fuck them up before they can hurt anyone else."

Wow. So Cassie was dealing with soulless demons of a different variety. Enemies that had once been mortal, but still never 'human,' never with a soul. It was a world difficult for her to imagine in some ways, but not so much in others.

"You slay them, these--these soulless, undead creatures. My friend slays vampires. I-It's not much different, in some ways. But...are you the only one? D-Does anyone else try to stop these Slashers?"

Cassie wanted to correct Tara in saying that they weren't soulless. For a brief, shining moment, her mother was alive recently. Thanks to that psycho Dr. West and his reanimator potion or whatever the fuck it was. Her mother and father were together as they should have been.

But then something went to shit and her mother had accidentally stabbed her father - accidentally being that she'd intended to stab an innocent and he'd leapt in the way to save the woman - and Cassie, with the help of Dr. West, killed her mother again.

Heartbreak burns in her chest, her eyes, her throat and she blinks several times. "I haven't run into anyone else who does. Vlad, I told you about him, he's the only one I know for sure. And that's only because we go everywhere together."

"You kill Slashers, and Slashers...all Slashers were once bad people? B-Before they died?" Tara wanted to clarify this, anyway, because this was an entirely new subject to her, after all. "And Vlad--how did he...start doing that? The slaying?"

"Apparently, slashers come from a specific type of people. Loner. Individualist. Obsessive. Prone to violence. My..." Cassie swallowed hard, her throat tightening up on her again. "My mom was a good woman until my dad left us. Then when the kids at my school were mean to me, she snapped. She just wanted the other kids to be nice to me." If she'd been any other person, Cassie might have broken down crying as she said those words.

"So she started murdering the kids. And when I'd found out, I'd called the police. She committed suicide by shoving her head in a pot of boiling gravy. So, I guess...either they started out wrong, like the Freddy Krueger kid or they get pushed over the edge."

Cassie cleared her throat, wetting her lips before answering Tara's question about Vlad. "There was a slasher in Chicago and I mistook Vlad for him. When I realized I was wrong, I offered him a chance to help me hunt down the man that was to blame for the murders. He was raised by a butcher who taught him how to be handy with a knife."

Tara is bereft of words at the moment. She's never been much of a talker, like Buffy or Willow, so that doesn't come as a total surprise, but this is the sort of subject that makes her pause those extra few seconds longer than she normally would.

She honestly didn't know what to say about Cassie's mom, and it was a delicate subject, so she wanted to tread carefully.

"People...they can be pushed far enough sometimes, so-so far that they seem completely different. It happens, I-I think, when it comes to the people they love most. So when your mom saw you in pain-it pushed her far enough."

Tara hesitated again. But she wanted to give her answer more meaning, so she finally continued, "My girlfriend, Willow--in my world, she struggled with an addiction to magic. She wasn't like that when we first met, but...she changed. We--I had to leave, for a while, for her own good. And-And then she was killed."

She swallowed heavily. "Since I've been here, I found out that in-in an alternate reality, it was me who died, not her. And when I was killed, it was the thing--the thing that pushed her over the edge. She almost destroyed the world because of it."

Tara met Cassie's eyes again, full of sincerity and understanding. "I thought you were a hero, before, but now...I know. And I'm glad you have someone like Vlad."

Cassie listened to Tara, a small frown marring her features and she took all of it in. Everyone was capable of something. They could be capable of great things or terrible, horrifying things. It was all a matter of their surroundings, how they react to them.

Hearing about Tara's girlfriend caused Cassie's chest to hurt. To be away from someone, then to reunite, only to have her murdered. That had to be seven kinds of heartbreaking.

The alternate realities thing made Cassie's head spin. Was it possible that in another world, she was regular Cassie Hack, college student? With a mom and dad who were happily married with 2.5 kids and a pickett fence.

Cassie couldn't keep Tara's gaze when Tara called her a hero. She lowered her eyes to the ground, her brow furrowing. "Please stop calling me a 'hero'."

"I'm sorry," Tara replied, earnestly. Cassie might not like the assignation, but Tara was happy enough to continue believing that Cassie was a hero, anyway; an unconventional one, a troubled one, perhaps even an unlikely one, but a hero in her eyes nonetheless. "I-I'll stop."

Tara crossed her arms over her chest again, looking down briefly.

"How long have you been here? Do you have a place to stay?"

"Thanks," Cassie muttered, chewing at the inside of her bottom lip.

At Tara's question, Cassie glanced down to her wrist where the tablet was connected and her brow furrowed for a moment. "About a week. And since I found the Deadmobile," Cassie said, gesturing to the white van behind her, "I've been sleeping in the back."

Tara still felt a bit unsettled about the whole 'hero' issue, and took Cassie's mannerisms to mean the young woman was as well, but it was better to just let the issue lie entirely.

She wouldn't invite her to the Summers house, because she still barely knew the girl, and it needed to be okayed by everyone else, and they simply didn't have any more room. But she could offer companionship. A bit. Or, at least try to.

"My-my friends and I have a place. Not very far. You could stop by anytime, and-and if you wanted something bigger, a place with a bedroom, there are places like that here."

"I'm still trying to wrap my mind about how everything's free here, man. Like, I'm used to sleeping in the van when Vlad and I didn't have enough for a shit motel room or the Holiday Inn," Cassie sighed, looking over to one of the hatches just outside the Sanctuary.

Her gaze shifted to Tara at her offer to visit, and her brow furrowed for half a second. After giving her the Cliff's notes on her fucktastic life, Tara still wanted to try and be friends? Man, the people here. "Thanks. Maybe I will," Cassie nodded, a ghost of a smile crossing her face.

"It is weird. Not paying for anything, being so far away from home," Tara ruminated. Her voice quieted when she said, "Sometimes I'm not sure i-if I want to go home."

Going home meant returning to a world without Willow, and that wasn't something she could even contemplate without feeling an intolerable ache inside.

"I'm not far away. If-if you ever need anything..."

Tara smiled. "I'm here. There. Um, near?"

Cassie made no comment to Tara saying how she wasn't sure if she ever wanted to go back home.

"You're easily reachable, is what you're saying, right?" Cassie replied with a small smirk.

She then nodded. "Thanks."

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[ Voice ]

[Location: Sanctuary]

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject