Summary: Darla and Dru on the road. 

~

It's a Jaguar, and Drusilla mouths the word at her from the passenger seat. Sloppy kisses of the usual delirium. The car is champagne, the interior a shade of cream Darla suspects would look better in sunlight.

Regret isn't something Darla has left in this new version of her old, old life.

The car's sound system is remarkable. She thinks that the boy who owned it must have loved it like a woman, or perhaps a boy, to have lavished so much attention on it. Invisible speakers are merged with the car's interior, and the radio swallows little silver disks of sound on command.

It was their first real argument. Such a terribly human one. The music:

There would be no Beethoven. There would be no British punk rock. Darla wants to wonder where Dru got her musical taste, but she knows, of course.

Of course. They're not going there. Settling finally on the glass voice of Billie Holiday, less because it's appropriate than because they both love her. Theirs, surely.

It's a death that might have been Darla's -- or at least the sick, stinking whore she'd been. Mad, destitute, with hundreds of dollars rolled up and hidden in her cunt. Refusing to give up that last shred of power.

Darla drives. All night. Sleeping in motel rooms by day, rough polyester curtains pulled over the windows and reinforced with anything they can move. Cash, as much as they could strip off the man's credit cards before they threw them away. Twice, they've just carved the attendant into lovely, bloody shreds, but sometimes she just wants to *sleep*.

Dru beside her. Naked and bright and dark. Pushed up on her hands and looking about every time Darla turns toward her. Drusilla will always be prey, of a sort.

Kissing her softly in the instants before and after she wakes.

Healing.

Mother, daughter. However it works. Darla isn't entirely sure she knows. She'd always thought William was just a natural mama's boy, but when Dru is upset...

It's an uncomfortable thing, a twist of the mouth thing, a ringless, thingless thing and sometimes Dru gets way down deep in her head. Sometimes she can feel her so *clearly*, a touch through a gauzy curtain...

Before she was Darla, there had been a party.

Drunken, filthy men, flea-ridden as herself. Makeshift stage in a public house and things had gotten rowdy. She had wound herself half a shroud in a great, thick curtain stolen from a better theater in better days. They'd pulled and pushed and groped her through it. Hours of it, muted, brutal touch leaving her so very *frightened*.

She'd been that young once.

Now Darla's the john, and Dru is a hazy moment's perfection when she wants to be. When she chooses to hold Darla that way, or when she's just hurting.

Now Darla knows it's something in the blood.

Dear, dead Angelus had created the perfect Daddy's Little Girl, too perfect to ever be without some kind of Daddy for long. It just happens to be Darla's turn now, and that's the way it goes, she supposes.

At least it's amusing.

*But women are funny that way*

Billie, Billie, Billie. Eats up the miles. Keeps Darla sane enough to just roll on down the road. White lines and black tar, and oh, she remembers. Sullen heat and strong backs bent double. Endless fields of slaves and sweet, sweet magnolias.

She remembers guesting at plantation after plantation, and never, ever wearing out her welcome.

She remembers slipping down to the shanty-towns, the fear and rage in their eyes. A good overseer always made sure the dark witches were beaten down, and there'd been nothing to stop her.

White white demon and blue blue eyes, taste the darkies' faint surprise...

Drusilla laughs beside her, a breathy chuckle in her endless dreams.

Strange fruit. Oh yes, Billie knew.

*blood on the leaves and blood at the root*

Blood on Drusilla's breasts, their last night in Los Angeles. On the city's edge, watching a two-alarm fire in the distance, killing small things and touching each other with them. Licking the blood, very carefully, into swirls on that white flesh.

Drusilla's Victorian fragility marked off in something that could have been henna in the darkness. Except. She could smell it. All the time. Burnt dead flesh. An abomination, or a perhaps another land's sacrament. It ruined the illusion, just the same.

Darla remembers marks like that, though, henna and ochre just barely visible on dark, dark skin. Crackling female in the darkness, somewhere in the Franco-Spanish world at the low end of the Mississippi. Before Angelus.

Before America.

Hips and breasts and hands and feet all marked and signing to warn her off. Like a high, thin fire hitting her. Standing tall and straight between Darla and the shantytown, and oh, so close she could feel it. Barely a fledgling and so hungry, the Master waiting among the gravestones far behind. Waiting for her to prove herself.

She'd leapt at the woman despite the panicked screams of the demon inside her, fell rolling to the ground with her, stuck to her and *melting* where her skin touched the markings and now, today, the pain is with her as clear as it had ever been.

The memory of pain and of being undone from the inside out. The witch-woman had fought like a she-bear, but her throat had peeled away as all throats do, in the end.

And after she had drunk her fill, Darla had played 'til dawn with the other slaves, finally returning to her Sire with a fine scalp, hair braided in looping, twisting, fantastic patterns.

*but don't take too much*

She had, of course, been punished severely for the mess she'd made.

Long nights strung by her wrists both more and less terrifying than that first time on the stage. Carved symbols on her belly that never quite matched the ones she'd seen. Carried through by her fascination. She'd learned how to make appropriate noises long before she met the Master, and in the grey haze she spent a lot of time thinking about the patterns she'd touched.

When she came up out of the cellar, three days later, she was very much like Drusilla is tonight. Weaving and singing softly, almost completely uninterested in the world around her.

Until the next scent caught her.

*Send me daddy move right in*

Darla pulls the car over to the side of the road. Gets out and walks around, steadier on her shoes' elevation than she would have been even a day ago. She would have been safe to walk in them, but. But. She could hunt in these shoes, now. Run with the heels never touching the ground, their tapered edges a reminder that her speed comes from the balls of her feet.

She could send Drusilla out into the desert, hunt her until morning. Sleek and pale as she is, it wouldn't even be difficult. Drag her back her at dawn by her long, long hair and sleep tangled together in the impossible heat of the car's trunk, all their bags piled into the seats.

Instead, she opens the door and catches Drusilla's wrist. Hauls her out and upright, and then just around in a circle that catches her a good one against the car door before she moves back a few steps. Drusilla stumbles and moans and laughs and they spin and spin until they're far into the desert proper.

Enough fun to ignore the stupidity, especially when Dru laughs so hard she vomits blood and faints.

Darla had missed her sense of humor as a human. Or bemoaned it.

Perhaps the same thing, in matters like these. If she ever sees Angel again...

No.

She almost decides to wait until Dru regains consciousness, but when she scents coyote on the wind she has to run, silent and swift across the hardpan. The air is as cold and clear as she feels, far away from Drusilla, further from Angelus and his bitter soul cage.

She feeds under the fingernail sliver of the moon, joyous in it, holding the coyote up over her face and letting the blood pour down and down and down until she's glutted and drenched and free of the sharpest edge of hunger. Lets the demon lead her back to Drusilla and the dozens of lizards and spiders and scorpions she's drawn to herself in her sleep.

Darla's shoes will be ruined, but there are always more shoe stores in this rich, fat land. Her land, all of it, from sea to shining sea.

A scorpion breaks its stinger on Darla's ankle and the others immediately fall on it, a clicking, whirring mass of savagery that wakes Drusilla to beam. The girl really is weary, and Darla knows they'll be killing yet another gas station attendant tonight.

Who knows? Maybe this one would have bathed recently.
 

End.