Fics for 2022 # 003 ~ My Tears They Cried Aloud (BtVS)

[kerk_hiraeth]

 

   TITLE: My Tears They Cried Aloud

   AUTHOR: kerk hiraeth

   FANDOM: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Hell'verse aka alt-S6)

   CHARACTER(s): Buffy Summers; Amy Madison; Dawn Summers; OC (Cissy aka Cecelia Martinez);

   LENGTH: 300;

   RATING: R (for adult situations)

   A/N: This story is set in a very bleak alternative season seven. Willow has gone over to something worse than the dark side in her head, and none of her friends can reach her.

           In the context of this story, Dawn accidentally discovered what had happened to Amy after the events ending season six; Buffy has found out and... well wishes she didn't know that her friend had become something even the darkness feared.

          The concept for this story has morphed several times; most may end up being stories in themselves; the genesis of this version began all the way back in the weeks after Seeing Red was aired.

         The title results from a misheard lyric to the Lacuna Coil song, The Ghost Woman and the Hunter, and that eventually hooked up with the slow opening to Cole Porter's Love for Sale.

 

     Buffy stalked Amy all the way from the abandoned Sanderson's warehouse to a barely lit shelter just south of the Ninth Street shelter; only one in Sunnydale that allowed demons; half-breeds anyway.

   There was Cissy; running her rickety old hot dog stand.

   Not that Cissy sold dogs, or anything really. Hard to know if she understood what she handed over to the strange; abandoned and derelict 'people' who handed over whatever coinage they'd managed to scavenge for holding their meagre possessions during the day.

   Grabbing Amy's wrist as she grasped the small packet; Buffy forced Will's old friend to open her hand. It was white, but it wasn't illegal for a Human to have it in their possession.

   Buffy wasn't sure she wanted to know what it was.

   No. She was sure she didn't.

   For a couple of seconds they stared into each other's eyes; one holding back tears, the other already half lost to oblivion.

   Whispered question answered; explanation proffered, worse than ever Buffy had imagined.

   Or feared.

   She never felt older than when she watched the wreck they had abandoned shuffling away; dulling her senses enough to pay for hell's protection.

   Long after Amy had disappeared, Buffy turned herself back home; all thought of patrolling drowned by tears that seemed endless.

   She silently opened the door to Dawn's room; softly sat beside her slumbering sister and began stroking her hair; crooning some barely remembered tuneless her mother had soothed her with.

   It didn't work.

 

   “After Rack there aren't many willing to risk her anger; the ones who sell the real stuff won't even risk her finding out they'd even been seen with me.

    Amy had shrugged.

     This will get me there faster, I guess.”

 

   Buffy eventually fell asleep, wetting Dawn's hair with tears that seemed to be crying themselves.  






    
    

     Goddess watch over you and those you love, 

     kerk hiraeth 

Comments

[elisi]

You weren't kidding, this is bleak. But well realised.

[kerk_hiraeth]

Fun fact - took nearly as long to find the right image as to put the body of the story on to DW.

I am feeling a need to write some less doom-y Amy fics though.

kerk

[dragonyphoenix]

It is bleak, but you have some beautiful language. This especially spoke to me: tears that seemed to be crying themselves.

[kerk_hiraeth]

I didn't actually realise until I was posting the story from the final draft, but that line is another way of writing the title, which is a misheard lyric.

Actually been wanting to write a story based on that concept; that one could be so distraught that your tears have tears, for almost twenty years.

Relieved that I came up with something worth the wait.

kerk

[yourlibrarian]

Definitely a future I could see for Amy. And there are things a Slayer just can't fix.

[kerk_hiraeth]

In most of the futures for Buffy (series & person) she strives to get across that; as in one story she tells Rona, "teach them (the younger slayers) to 'life'" Even in canon she'd learned that there were things you had to fight to make right, and things you just had to let go. In the one she sees Rona & Vi learning how to build a life outside Slaying; something she never really got to do; in this one she's struggling because the 'big bad' might just be her closest friend.

Gaining the wisdom to know the difference is the essence of the story behind this 'verse.

kerk