Girls' Night Out
By magista
Dialogue from "Darla" by Tim Minear
Thanks to buffyworld.com for their great transcripts, without which this story would not have been possible.
Howling shrieks rent the air, wordless cries of anger and anguish in equal proportion.
As flotsam driven before the clamour, Darla burst into the parlour, all ten yards of silk and lace and grosgrain ribbon and foaming crinolines barely managing to fit through the doorway. "I can't take any more of this," she said, without preamble. "When you said 'eternal torment', I didn't think you meant it to be for us."
Angelus looked up from his latest hobby and smiled wolfishly at his sire. "What's the dear girl done now, then?"
"All the Guy Fawkes preparations have driven her even further around the bend. Now she's claiming that those damn dolls of hers have been plotting treason against her. She's standing on the bed in her nightdress screaming she wants to burn them all - when she's not wailing that they're her only friends.
"You have to do something about her," she demanded. "You're the one who's responsible for siring the mad bitch."
Like a striking snake Angelus' hand grabbed her breast, squeezing it brutally until she cried out with the sudden pain. His fingers left bloody prints like roses on the fabric and her pale skin. "Now Darla, ye wouldn't call Rembrandt away from his canvas in the middle of a masterpiece, would ye?" He might as well have been caressing her cheek for all the change in his voice. "Why don't ye take her out to see the bonfires? Perhaps find her some new plaything to take her mind from Miss Edith's treachery. I'd do it meself, but as ye can see--" he released her and laughed. "I've got me hands full."
She seized his face in strong fingers, nails raking trails in his skin. "You do know that if you weren't my darling boy, she'd not be the only one with a new plaything tonight." Her teeth tore open his lip as they kissed. "Finish playing, and meet us at the Fields before midnight, then. You owe me that, at least."
He turned back to the bloody ruin that had once been the former owner of the house and picked up where he had left off, threading his entrails almost delicately through the open works of the grandfather clock. "All right, I'll be there. Now be a good girl and run along," he said over the man's incoherent moans.
Drusilla's tears dried instantly when Darla came in to demand that she dress to go out, and she clapped her hands together in glee. "Oh Grandmother, how marvellous - an adventure! We're off to find a handsome prince for me." She turned to the dolls lining the shelves of the room and scowled. "And I'll deal with all of you later. You shan't come along, on account of how horrible you've been to me." Darla rolled her eyes and - exercising uncharacteristic self-control - managed to say nothing.
Not an hour later, they were on the street and waving down the first hansom cab that came along. The streets were thronged with people making their way to any one of the dozens of bonfires that would be lit that night, and no small number of them seemed to be carrying a 'Guy' to be burned. But Darla knew that the crowds would be thickest where more than a hundred cart-loads of wood had been unloaded and arranged for the evening's festivities.
"Lincoln's Inn Fields," she demanded of the driver. "The Great Queen Street corner."
Drusilla's eyes were round with wonder and delight as the cab rattled along the gaslit cobblestones of Picadilly and into the Circus. In the distance, a number of bonfires could be seen already burning, lighting up the night. Ahead of them, flames sprang into the sky, lighting the underside of the perpetual clouds with a lurid glow. Here and there, shrieking sparklers whirled through the air, adding to the din.
The press of the crowds when they finally reached Great Queen Street was so great that the cab was slowed to little more than a crawl. Impatient, Darla leaned out the window and called for the driver to stop and they would walk the rest of the way. When he had pulled over, he put down the step for them and opened the door - whereupon Darla yanked him into the cab and sank her teeth into his throat before he even had managed to tell them the fare.
"He was a hearty one," she said afterward, wiping her lips delicately with her handkerchief. "Have some - he'll give you strength for the evening's festivities."
Drusilla wrinkled her nose in distaste and let the body slip from her grasp and slump bonelessly to the floor of the cab. "Oh no, Grandmother, he would taste much too much like manure. My prince will be bright and tingling on my tongue - a mouthful of light and champagne."
Darla's eyes narrowed, but she couldn't decide if the insult had been deliberate or just more of Dru's ordinary nonsense. "Come on." She took Drusilla by the wrist and hauled her out onto the street.
The press of the crowd was immediate, their noise almost drowned out by the roar of the bonfire in the distance, their earthy scent pervasive and intoxicating. Both women reeled under the sensory assault. Before they had gone even a dozen steps, they were surrounded by a crowd of boys, laughing and singing, with their hands out begging for coins, and Drusilla cried out in sudden alarm at the press of hot flesh.
Remember, remember
I see no reason
Knock at the door,
If you haven't got a penny
If you haven't got a ha'penny
the Fifth of November
is gunpowder treason and plot.
why gunpowder treason
should ever be forgot.
ring the bell.
Have you got a penny for
singing so well?
a ha'penny will do
then God bless you!
Darla smiled indulgently. "Shall we give these boys something for fireworks, Drusilla?"
Dru nodded vehemently. "Oh yes, please." At this point, she would have agreed to anything to get them away from her.
Darla reached into the satin purse at her waist and drew out a handful of farthings. The base metal coins glittered as precious as gold in the lamplight as she scattered them with a laugh onto the cobblestone roadway. The pack of grubby youths dived into the crowded street to claim their prize.
She watched them for a moment - then with a scream and a brutal slap, spooked the horse of the abandoned hansom cab so that it leapt away from the curb, crashing into and crushing several young bodies beneath its iron-shod hooves. The dull thud of battered flesh, popcrack of breaking bone and anguished cries momentarily drowned out all but the loudest revellers.
Both women drew back to admire the carnage. As horrified onlookers screamed, the two faded into the shadows of the street.
Drusilla stared in frank appreciation as a policeman came hurrying down the street, forcing his way past gawking observers. "Ooh, Grandmummy... look at the lovely bright eyes." Lamplight gleamed from the highly polished brass buttons of his uniform. "He's positively... resplendent," she cooed. "Can I have him?"
"I think there's a little too much attention on him right now to make that a good idea, Drusilla dear," Darla countered. "But we could come back for him in a little while, if that's what you'd like."
"He'd be my lovely boy," she rhapsodized. "And every day he would polish up his dear uniform brass, buttons and badge, and put on his tall cap. Then he'd wave his stick about and blow on his whistle. It's so very loud - it's like nasty angels screeching about in my head - and he's always trying to tell me what to do and Miss Edith never listens and oh Grandmummy, I don't like him at all. Make him go away."
Darla drew air for a theatrical sigh. It was going to be a very long night, indeed.
The bonfire at Lincoln's Inn Fields was as glorious a spectacle as London had ever seen. Brambles and peat and branches and all manner of woodscraps scavenged from about the neighbourhood had been stacked to tower over even some of the buildings lining the square. From this near endless fuel, flames rose wildly, streaking the faces of the revellers with red and gold. The lamps along the streets glowed only pale as witchfire, in comparison.
Men and women from all stations in life mingled freely as they would do on no other day. The fire had dressed them all the same, from the lowest dockworker to the most posh aristocrat, with trembling shadows and dancing flakes of light.
They made their way further south across the field, skirting the edge of the blaze, until they had reached the open space where the gibbets had been set up. There were a dozen in all, and suspended by the neck from each one was a straw-stuffed effigy of Guy Fawkes, in whose honour - or dishonour, perhaps - the day had been named. Two were already merrily ablaze, and a third was about to be lit.
"Oh, I want a hat like that for Daddy," Drusilla exclaimed in a childlike voice as a well dressed man walked by them on his way to a better view. Every individual hair of his beaver pelt top hat gleamed in the firelight. "Do you suppose he'd give it to me, if I gave him a kiss?"
"You could have him and the hat as well, if you wanted."
Drusilla pealed laughter as though Darla had made a most excellent jest. "Don't be silly - he'd be as stuffy as one of the Guys, with a taste like stale straw."
"What do you want, Dru?" Darla asked wearily. "Do you think you might manage to make up your mind tonight?"
"My prince will be able to charm even you, Grandmother. But nobody's told him that we're here waiting for him. He's oh so very clever."
Darla spotted a man in the black robes of a university scholar striding past. "If you want a clever man, Drusilla, he should be just the thing," she said, pointing him out.
Drusilla paused for a moment in consideration before dashing Darla's renewed hopes. "Makes my poor head spin, he would, with all his talk of the planets whirling round and round... and he doesn't even know the proper names of all the stars. They don't sing to him, dancing in the gardens." This thought amused her so much that she spent the next ten minutes whirling like a dervish and chasing sparks until she toppled dizzily to the ground. "Do you suppose the stars are all little bonfires?" she asked from amidst the untidy heap of her puddled skirts. "It must be lovely to live in the heavens, and burn men every night."
One by one Darla proposed candidates, and one by one Drusilla found reasons to reject them all. The dockworker 'probably never cleaned under his nails'; the farrier 'would taste of iron'; and the tailor, of course, was 'much too stringy'.
In desperation Darla even stooped so low as to suggest a grubby boy who had to have been one of the local Parker Street ruffians. Drusilla dismissed him without so much as a sniff.
After several hours of fruitless searching, they had made their way around the entire circuit of the bonfire. Finally conceding defeat, Darla took her reluctant charge by the hand and led her up to High Holborn where they might more easily find a cab to take them back to their temporary home. But as they rounded the last corner, Drusilla spotted a familiar figure and broke away to rush towards him.
"Daddy!" Drusilla squealed as she threw herself into Angelus' enthusiastic embrace. "Grandmother and I have been having the most wonderful time, haven't we?" Her smile turned just as quickly to a pout. "Except I have yet to find my lambent boy."
"Perhaps I can be of some assistance," Angelus said. No sooner had he spoken then he was striding across the street to accost a young man in a seaman's uniform.
"Pardon me, lad, but do ye have a match? I seem to have run out." The moment the sailor looked down and patted his pockets, Angelus was on him, dragging him into the alley mouth with one hand clasped tightly over his mouth. "Come and try a bit of this one then," he called to Drusilla. "But be careful - he's a lively one."
The sailor's efforts to free himself redoubled as he watched Drusilla's face transform into a monstrosity. His eyes bulged in his sockets with his efforts to scream through Angelus' muffling flesh, to no avail.
Drusilla wiped her mouth with the back of her hand as her face resumed its human guise. "Too salty," was her only verdict. At this rejection, Angelus dropped him unceremoniously to the ground.
Darla looked down at the body thoughtfully. "So beautiful. Not a blemish, not a freckle. Perhaps we should have preserved that beauty for eternity."
Angelus was unmoved by her argument. "Still, now he won't age."
"No, but he'll rot," Darla commented matter-of-factly. "Seems a pity."
"When I bit him, I could hear the ocean," Drusilla said, wonder colouring her voice.
"Of course you could." Darla looked over at Angelus, as if to say do you see what I've had to put up with all night?
Drusilla spun around with her arms wrapped tightly around herself. "I'm full and warm - yet all alone."
"That's not true, precious," Angelus said encouragingly. "You've got us."
Drusilla was quick to contradict him. "Not in the least. You won't even have me just a little bit."
"All you have to do is ask," Darla insisted.
"No. His head's too full of you, Grandmother."
"Stop calling me that." Angelus laughed, and she thumped his shoulder hard in retaliation before taking his arm to pull him down the street. Drusilla followed docilely behind them.
"Don't be cross," she murmured. "I could be your mummy."
"Well, if you're lonely, Dru, why don't you make yourself a playmate?" Angelus suggested. Darla frowned. Hadn't she been trying to get the witless girl to choose someone all night long?
"I could. I could pick the wisest and bravest knight in all the land - and make him mine forever with a kiss."
Just then a gawky young man, his face wet with angry tears, crashed into Angelus' shoulder as he careened down the street. The notebook and loose scraps of paper he had held crushed to his chest fell to the street and scattered.
"You - watch where you're going!" His voice was hoarse with the effort to conceal that he'd been crying openly a moment before.
He looked so frail, nearly drowning in a too-large morning coat that might have been his father's, that Drusilla couldn't help but watch him as he bent to gather up his scattered papers, closely written in an educated hand. The scent of tears on fresh-scrubbed skin was so intoxicating that she turned to watch him as he stumbled on his way.
Darla looked back over her shoulder to see what had so captivated their troublesome companion, and realized that matters had just been taken entirely out of her hands.
"Or you could just take the first fool that comes along."