023: Everyone Learns Faster on Fire [Location: the Ninth Floor Kitchen]

[a-pretty-fire.livejournal.com]

The city - so much smaller than it had been a few nights ago - was balanced on the edge of a knife. One mischievous breeze would be enough to push them off and send them tumbling into the fire. The humans were running in circles, unable to focus on what they really needed to be frightened of. The vampires were butting heads and burning bridges and losing themselves in the woods.

Drusilla could already feel the flames licking at the hem of her dress.

With her head in the storm clouds, she wound her way up to the kitchen on the ninth floor to find herself a mug of blood. It was a good job that the silly little man hadn't poured their supper away. The hamsters were wicked things, but at least they'd had the good sense to give the cats something else to eat when they locked them into the cage with the mice.

She climbed up on to the counter once her stomach was full and, when she tired of the heat that came from dangling over the edge and too close to the flames, stretched herself out like a cat in a patch of sunlight.

It had been so many years since she'd seen the sunlight.

The vampire gazed up at the ceiling, both seeing and unseeing. The stars were hidden from her here - there were too many barriers and bars between them - but she could still see things that other people missed. She could still see what mattered.

"We have all the pieces," she murmured, "But they're not ready to use them."

Comments

[patternal.livejournal.com]

"That, Lady, is a skill I've noticed most women possess." He almost couldn't help but smile--there was something almost perversely enjoyable about this conversation. At the very least, he hadn't had one like it in a while, and he was enjoying himself.

"And, much as I'd like to know what they are, it is beyond the purview of gentlemen to ask. A Lady is entitled to her secrets, after all. In a way, they may even make her more desirable, knowing there's a mystery to be solved."

[a-pretty-fire.livejournal.com]

It was hard to be yourself when part of you - the teeth and claws that backed up her lyrical threats - was kept under lock and key. But she could pretend. She could pretend and she could play along with a demure smile and bright eyes.

"I didn't know they had proper gentlemen here," she said, sitting up at last. "Have you been hiding away?"

[patternal.livejournal.com]

"Hiding, no." He hadn't been trying to, anyway. But when they could actually leave the building, the city was somewhat bigger--big enough to get lost in, anyway, as much as he hated to admit it. Proximity bred a lot of things, though.

"I'd prefer to call it 'busy.'"

[a-pretty-fire.livejournal.com]

"Waiting?" she offered. She liked that word. They were waiting - all of them were waiting - but they were not defeated. They were hunters in the shadows and the whispers on the edge of the mind. "We're all waiting here."

[patternal.livejournal.com]

"Waiting is, perhaps, the best way to put it, Lady." It made it sound less like they weren't leaving, anyway, less like they were stuck here forever. They were just...waiting for the reight moment to spring the cage and fly away.

"Waiting, yes. But how many ever wait for the same thing?"

[a-pretty-fire.livejournal.com]

There was no such thing as forever. Even immortals - like her great grandfather, like Angelus, like Drusilla herself - faded away eventually. Only their legends were left. Taxon was large and loud, but it wasn't eternal.

"We're all waiting to soar away," she pointed out. "We want to be free again."

Whatever that meant.