deep_red_bells | Everyone is leaving, I'm still with you. (for elementof

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Everyone is leaving, I'm still with you. (for elementof_risk

It was probably really stupid, since they were just going for a walk, most likely to the park as Searchlight was in the middle of scenic nowhere, but she wanted to look pretty. Mainly because according to Hank, she'd very much resembled a dead fish for the last week. As if things hadn't sucked enough with the dreaming and the brain hijacking, she'd also looked like hell. Yay.

So she prettied up. She put on cute capris and a pretty sparkly top and fussed with her hair until it was frizz free and shiny. She put on a little makeup to give her features some color, since for some reason that pastiness was trying to hang around. She seriously considered sneaking down to the kitchen and snagging a shot or two of the brandy Denny kept stuck back (alcohol induced rosy cheeks were better than pastiness any day of the week), but eventually decided against it. Alcohol might make her sleepy. Sleep was the enemy for at least another week.

"Terry, Spike, anyone else that cares!!" she called as she hopped past the library, still trying to put on her shoes and retrieve a stake while tucking her cell phone into her pocket and oh yeah, walking. "Going out, be back later, have cell in case the world tries to end and all that, and PS, someone borrowed my turquoise slides while I was gone and unless I get them back the punishment is death if I find out who it was!"

"Nobody touched your sodding shoes, pet!"

"LIES, death I tell you!" she yelled back, at least half-teasing, sifted through a backpack full of stakes that stayed parked next to the kitchen door until she found one of the 'good ones.' She might be off active duty for a bit, but really, what kind of idiot vampire slayer left home without a stake? Now where was that boyfriend of her's...

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Sark had kept himself apart from most for the day, drifting through the shadows of the house, finding quiet places. He had neglected work the past week, unable to even read emails, so there were a great many there that needed sorting through, and burying himself in it had worked best to get through the day.

He'd slipped into khakis in the Nevada heat, a button down blue shirt, and nice shoes. Hearing the ruckus, he moved to follow the sounds, until he saw her, giving her a nervous sort of smile when he found her.

It wasn't every day you asked someone to marry you, after all. And not every day you had to spend waiting if she'd say yes.

She hated awkwardness, and it sucked that a fair amount of awkwardness had settled between them. She hated having to question how much she should touch or what she should say. "Hey, hi," she greeted, decided the stake in her hand was good enough and tossed the backpack to the floor. "Um...so...sun's about to go down, I thought, maybe, we could go to the park? Since there's not much light left, the kids'll be clearing out, and, it's close, so..."

He smiled back, relaxing a little just at her smile.

"The park sounds good," he agreed, casting a glance at the stake in her head. "Do I need weaponry?" Besides his gun, which was, as usual, tucked at his back. But he'd learned that did little for vampires.

"What? Oh. No no, I seriously doubt there'll be any undead variety trouble, it's just a...security blanket type thing." She shrugged sheepishly, slipped the carved shard of wood into her belt and reached for his hand, threaded her fingers with his and tugged him gently towards the door. "So...go now?"

"Go now," he agreed, winding his fingers back through hers as well, and letting her tug him along willingly.

With the sun down it was cooler, a fact for which he was grateful, as the heat of the desert often seemed oppressive to him. But this was lovely--the sun sliding away, the air warm and dry, and her there, next to him, not running in the opposite direction.

"How are you feeling?"

She wondered how long it was going to take for people to stop asking that question...though from him, she didn't mind it, and further wanted to answer honestly instead of with a generic 'I'm fine, really.' "A little...displaced, I guess. I think it's getting better."

He nodded. It wasn't the same, of course, but he had been locked in a small cell for 2 years, and smaller one for a few months. Displacement at least, he could identify with.

"It will," he assured her. "But I know. There we were in Amsterdam, and then here...I didn't know what else to do, where else to take you."

Which was her fault: she should've told him exactly what to do and who to call if something ever happened to her. She never thought about the things that she should and over analyzed everything that wasn't important. "You did perfectly," she replied with a soft sigh, tipped her head to rest her cheek against his shoulder. "I'm...so sorry, I didn't mean to scare you like that."

There was still terror leaking from behind the mask his eyes usually wore, still knots everywhere through him, tense and frightened and knowing it just wasn't over. Hank had scared him even further, and all of this dealing with the supernatural when he didn't know anything was frightening on an entirely different level.

"You couldn't..." Help it. But what if she could? He didn't know. He turned his head to kiss her forehead. "Cain ... offered to teach me. In a way." Sort of obliquely in between a great deal of talk about family nonsense.

She'd been informed of a bit of that conversation, of course, but certainly wasn't going to bring it up. She couldn't even begin to imagine his reaction to being told he was family. The Callahans were an odd bunch. "I should've...I don't know. Written down emergency contacts, at the very least. I shouldn't have taken that stupid tea. I should've...yelled at Ethan more. Something."

Julian wasn't really up for reliving that conversation either. Possibly ever. Just thinking about it tended to start the panic response again. The man didn't even like him.

"Well, the emergency contacts I figured out," he said, as soothingly as he could. "Though after speaking to him myself, I will agree with the yelling at Ethan more." He kept his peace about the tea, with effort, and with the idea of how very nice it would be to stake the vampire who'd given it to her.

She should've because the idiot wouldn't listen, but then, nobody was. And she couldn't blame them. She didn't even know what was wrong. 'Something' is a bit...unhelpful and vague.

"I don't guess it really matters," she murmured, tipping her head back to briefly gaze up at the dusky sky. "It's done...hm. It's pretty tonight."

He walked next to her in silence for a moment, casting a glance at the sky, something he rarely did. It was pretty.

The fact sort of surprised him.

"Is it?" he asked,though not about the sky. "Done, I mean."

She laid her head on his shoulder and nodded a little, fingers tightening around his reassuringly.

"They severed Dana's connection to the legacy," she explained quietly, figuring if he'd been with her, he'd missed all of the Watcher talk, unless someone had bothered to tell him. Which she doubted. She knew her Watchers better than that. "She's...gone." Part of her wondered if she should feel bad about that...but no. Any sympathy she'd had for Dana had dissolved, completely.

No one bothered to tell him much of anything at all. He had no clue who Dana was, even, and he gave her a blank look.

"I don't understand."

She blinked, brow furrowing as she turned her head to look at him and frown. Most of what she knew, Hank had informed her of during that freakish dreamsharing...thing, but hi, she'd been unconscious while the Watchers were doing their thing. He hadn't. "...Did anyone tell you anything?"

Sark looked at her blankly, and just a bit lost.

"No. They said...Cain said if I needed to know, he'd tell me, and I didn't need to do anything but stay put... When I asked...No one said anything...except Hank. That you were going to die. Something was going to kill you in your dream..."

Useless, stupid, useless people, and right now she hated them all, because there were parts of the story she would really have rather not go into so soon after everything if they'd stopped being such stupid useless people and told him what was going on she wouldn't have to.

"Dana...she was a Slayer," she began, releasing his hand to fold her arms tightly across her chest, almost defensively, trying to shield herself from a phantom chill. "When she was very young--still just a potential--her family was...killed. In front of her, and...the man that killed them took her, and he...hurt her." It was easier just to say 'he hurt her.' The details still made her want to throw up.

"She broke. Like Ruby, only she never got better, and...then she became a Slayer and she got even worse. She was very angry when she died, and...angry people make angry spirits. She was a Slayer, she was connected to the same chain as the rest of us, so that was her...manifestation, I guess? Through the dreams."

"The nightmares?" he asked, stopping. "The ones that were so much worse, that made you take the tea? That was because of her, of a Slayer...what? Trying to destroy all of you as well?"

Truthfully she didn't know what the hell Dana had been capable of...if she could've killed her or just kept her in that state forever, or...what? Taken her over completely? She didn't want to think about it. "Trying to make us see that the world...that no one in the world...was worth saving. That the world deserved to burn."

Sark wasn't completely certain the world didn't deserve to burn, personally, but he knew better than to say that to her.

"And now...they've gotten rid of her?"

She wasn't completely certain either...though how much of it was her own thoughts and what was Dana's influence, she'd probably never know.

"She can't get to us anymore," she assured him. "She's...gone on. To, wherever. The great beyond, the aether, whatever."

He reached to wind his arm around her, pulling her close to him, eyes falling closed just for a minute. "You're safe....from that at least?"

Because she was never really safe anymore than he was.

"From that at least." She relaxed her defensive posture when he pulled her in and rested her hands against his chest, fingers curling lightly in the skin-warmed material of his shirt.

"Kind of sucky," she remarked quietly, gaze a bit distant as she studied and fussed with his collar. "Watching someone walk out the door and having to wonder if they'll come back."

He frowned slightly at her comment, wondering exactly where she was going with that, but the comment was not one with which he could argue, all things considered. Too many people had walked out the door and failed to come back.

"It is, yes," he agreed, quietly.

Everyone is leaving, I'm still with you. (for elementof_risk

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