How To Disappear Completely

by Lise and River

It starts with whispers at night.  Then it turns into a high pitched whine, like a dog or animal, leg caught in one of those traps.  Continues onto more whispering.  Backwards and forwards and backwards again, shrill whispers of things waiting for the other axe to drop.  It's the only thing they can hear.

If she were ever asked how she thought the world would look like after it ended, she'd never have picked this.  This wouldn't have been close to her vision of the new world if you'd asked her back when things made sense, but now they don't and now they can't, and this is where they find themselves.

They've been stuck here for almost a month, no change.  No change, no chance.

Sometimes, in the dilapedated warehouses that used to be along the seedy waterways, they can all hear tribal drumbeats; Amazon calls and the smell of insects, of jungle fever that danced in amid the crumbling buildings and barrels of brine.

When the first light comes it's always a thin little shock. It's like something strange, unfamiliar, intruding on their world of green, overgrown mystery.

Tara wonders sometimes at how easy it is to lose herself, here, find herself outside her own head and part of the trees and the howls and the wild birds. The others seem more a part of some urban-soul thing than ever, as though they carry civilization instead of the backpacks they lost three shifts ago. They recoil from this warm, liquid wilderness as though it's just as dangerous as it should be.

She sits in the light of pre-dawns and closes her eyes at orange glow on green, and doesn't even need to concentrate, doesn't need the words of any spell at all before she feels the heady thump of this jungle. The leaves, the colors, the roots, oh the roots are like a live human thing. They have their own heart beat.

With her eyes closed, sometimes she dreams up reality.  Pieces of jungle springing up around a warehouse district; crickets and parrots flying around concrete blocks and abandoned garbage trucks; alleys and bloodsucking spiders, vampires, all getting just a little withering and brown. She can never quite tell if this new-age tropical train wreck is really the world surrounding her now, or just the way the present is superimposed over memory, and it rarely seems quite important enough to try and decide.

When she opens her eyes, sometimes that face is just before her, almost-blank and suspicious. She blinks at it, wonders why it never gets any closer and never retreats, wants to answer some questions no one seems in the right mind to ask.

No one is in the right mind, here.

In more lucid moments, she thinks the drumbeats are like the city's code; the cult of the clinging vines, too stubborn to die quietly, and so they keep up the rhythms.  There are other people out there, of course, and maybe it's code, calling for help.  For salvation.  For company.  Magic code, yes, and voodoo as well, just clinging vines of people.  Other times, she feels it as just some branches, pounding against a fallen door, sititng in some dumpster at the end of a non-existent street, caught in a loop of noise forever.  Bang, bang, bang, forever and ever, just some random event caught in a strong enough wind to make it sound heavenly.

But it's not.  Lucidity has no place here.

Just before sunset, in blue and gold, in that warehouse district, Tara felt herself reborn each and every night.  Breath in, breath out, wail of something new and unused and unusual like newborn lungs, they lived on in the shadows and hues and animal noises of someone else's dream.  Each sunset, in blue and gold and colors she couldn't even name, they heard that music getting louder.  Heartbeat erratic, pulse irregular, city-- dying.

Grey and soft and breathing under her hand, the wolf has its own beat. The rhythm growls, it purrs, it wavers; it beats into her blood and up to her head and out of little cuts on feet she can't bring herself to imprison in dead things.

It won't come near anyone but her anymore, and the things it hunts tell her in her head as they die, and that's alright, it breathes, it's living.

She fears those rare nights when the moon wanes and disappears completely. That boy, his eyes are hollow and terrified, and he has no words for her. He has the fear scent of someone who was part of all this that surrounds them, and was torn out, and spends too little time in himself to climb back in.

For those three nights of barely perceptible, silver moonlight, she is the protector, and that naked, pale boy, who's skin matches hers in all the ways that count, that naked boy, he's prey.

She howls to the sky for him on nights like this, and behind the dead eyes of a human, the memory of life blinks out.

But it's nothing really new. Everything, all the time, everything howls, and so she howls often, anyway, in reply, in fear, in hate, in -- not in lust, but something close and akin.  In companionship.  They hack away at more vines to throw in the rusted oil drum, for the fire, because things are getting colder at night.  Things are getting darker, too.

She closes her eyes, and in the next block, where there's a pool for bathing and a glass-covered fishtank full of South-American piranhas, a huddle of people have taken a small dog and are roasting it over a fire much like the one her and the wolf share.

Everything needs to eat.

Each time, when the sky is blue and orange and grey in this approximation of a death-mask, she wants to go find out who is beating lifelessly.  What force of nature or suburbia, what twisted, inhuman thing is giving a soundtrack to these days.  But she doesn't, because she'd be leaving the wolf behind, and their fire, and so many complications that she can't deal with. Yet.

Tara is sitting cross-legged, on a pile of delicate leaves, watching for a pair of friends to return.  She knows they will; both Anya and Spike are survivors, and nothing can eat them, so there's no reason they shouldn't find themselves alive and healthy, or dead and healthy regardless, at the close of the evening.

She wants to see the face of her cult members, naked bodies huddled together for warmth, bellies empty, faces emptier.  She wants these pictures in her head, because she's longing for completeness in this landscape.

This. Alien. Landscape.  She wants to know it.

She thinks Anya knows this place, somehow, in memory or dream. She never seems to feel it the way Tara does, she sticks to the abandoned cement roads and building shreds the way the rest do, but --

They make themselves into alien things against this land, stark against the landscape, but they end up well and fed and making a derogatory remark about the lack of ice cream in this town.  Anya's joking, though, always comes across as more vibrant than the rest, and Tara wonders if it's because she's over a thousand years old, and whether she remembers Noah's flood.

She doesn't worry about them, or of them, or for them. She doesn't try to reach out and make them see the beauty of this.

This face, though --

Apprehensive. Suspicious, and wary, and she takes a step back every time Tara opens her eyes and looks back.

And Slayers are supposed to be survivors, but this one, every time Tara sees those liquid dark eyes, she remembers how the last one died with sudden beautiful, wild, irrepresible nature growing right through her belly.

Staring down with wide, horrified eyes, with hands of her own blood. And maybe this whole journey is one searching for the one who takes her place.

The world changes around them, but maybe, just maybe, centuries-long traditions hold.

Not so, for Tara. She has a wolf by her side, and of course, that dark, wild Slayer that sleeps beside her is looking for that replacement, someone to share an unceasing rhythm with, someone to put in place of those who've died and will never again sleep beside her--

But some people, they have far too many ghosts to choose from.

Tara smiles fondly down at the glorious fur curled up beside her, and strokes the wolf's neck once, twice, tender.  One yellow eye opens at her, full of understanding.  It snarls softly, knowing that Tara's thinking about how many times Faith has asked to share her bed, only to be turned down, given the cold shoulder, and a warning from a beast that knows the shadows have no room for living flesh just yet.

Where Anya and Spike got to, Tara couldn't say.  Where Faith went last week, even, she has even less knowledge over.  Tara's world has shrunk, bound by the quiet snap of insects, the noises she can hear.  It's the hum of machinery that has resisted a world holocaust and apolcalyptic transformation and is still whirring obediently-- some dockworker's wet dream, encased in metal and testifying to the stubborn will of the Industrial Revolution.  Sounds she can hear, just barely, overlap this; the growl of things on the hunt, and underneath it all, the beating of primitive drumsticks on stretched hide, thumping over and over... the chirp of crickets, and the far-distant howling that never ceases, no matter how she closes her eyes.

And underneath her ear, the funny little rumbling of small things being turned into wolf life.

She gets drowsy, easily, in this mood, and spends a lot of her time during the day asleep.  A lot of her time at night, too, but none of that is well-rested; when she can still here the parrots in the barred window-frames and the bustle in the underbrush that signals other people alive, it's better.  They've been trapped here for almost a month, nothing changing around them but the heartbeat of warehouse number 15-- that's what she calls it.  It's the fifteenth warehouse skeleton from the end, and it's the one where the cultists hang out.

Tara blinks, and feels her feet in communication with what's left of the world, more drug-induced illusion, and nothing to grab onto.  She thinks about whispering, asking if Spike or Anya, or any of the other blank faces, heartbeats, they're missing have shown up in color recently.  Anya will be back.  Anya always came back.

The girl crouched on her other side gives her an inquisitive, penetrating look. A finger reaches out, touches her cheek.

It's not soft, or yearning, or wanting. And Tara blinks at her, quietly, and lets the finger trace her cheekbone, like she would trace a vine of one of those branches overhead.

She wonders how Faith would look with half herself severed away, with some other -- Faith -- an other-world Faith to complete the missing part. Last image of a loved one, dark fire hair and darkdarkdark one interchanging. And green eyes on both sides of a fractured face.

Tara closes her eyes, and the drums in the distance cut off, a choked sound, like a baby being strangled, or the howl of a wild thing at the moon.

And when the screech begins, so strange amid all the sound, and the world flashes gold and purple and shifting, she almost wonders if she made it so.

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