Title: Vanilla Suicide

Author: Juliet DeMarcus

Rating: R

Spoilers: Buffy up to and including "Entropy." Angel up to and including "Double or Nothing."

Summary: Will the events of "Entropy" lead to a tragedy of near-Shakespearean proportions?

Disclaimer: "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Angel" are not mine. (But I can dream, right?) I'm not making any money, so don't sue me.











I know I've always complained about the bloody Anne Rice novels.



But if I'm honest (and why not at this point), I've always had a kind of secret affinity for them. After all, as ludicrous as they are, they do hold a sort of universal truth value.



I have read every book in the vampire chronicles. I read a lot so it's not saying that much. I read some great stuff, classics and the like, and I read some real trash as well. That's the buggered up messy mix of a man-monster I am, thanks that sappy sod, William. I'm sure it's his idiocy that has me reading Anne Rice. I'm absolutely one hundred percent bloody positive of it!



I guess part of it can be blamed on Drusilla as well. Dru adored the stories of Anne Rice. She would often have me read them to her during the days when she couldn't sleep. She was endlessly fascinated by the characters and seemed convinced that they were, in fact, real vampires, that existed, despite the fact that they're existence, the rules by which they lived were often opposed to our own.



Sometime before she left me for the fungus boy, back when we were still happy, she even had me take her to New Orleans to get a look at the author's hometown. Gotta say I enjoyed that. Bloody lovely place, New Orleans. Just as it was described in her writings.



We broke into St. Elizabeth's Orphanage on Napoleon Avenue, where Anne Rice keeps her personal doll collection. It's quite impressive -- massive collection of dolls, open to the public as a museum during the day. I might tell you, it's a bit creepy, even for a master vampire, but for Drusilla... She was in heaven there, my Dru. It was like the place was built for her. She brought Miss Edith, and introduced her to all the other lil dollies... We were there a while. I even held conversations with the dolls that had been fashioned into the likeness of Lestat and Louis. Argued with them over my Dru... She would laugh at that, so delighted in every way.



I was surprised she didn't ask to take any of the dolls with her. But then, as our time there went on, she became a lot more quiet, listening, apparently to what all these dolls were saying to her. She became pensive -- still sweet, childlike Dru...but, calmer. I'd almost say at peace. Because in truth, at her core I think Dru had no more peace than I did.



I remember as we were on our way out she stopped and turned to me. The look on her face, it was...I'll never forget. Looking at her then, I almost felt I knew what she was like when she was human. So sweet, so pure, so innocent. "Thank you," she had said simply. But her tone was different. In retrospect, it seemed almost...sane. I was taken aback enough but then she continued. "I know it's hard,... for you to take care of me. I'm...off. He hurt me, and...you take care of me. You're so good to me...," she had tears glistening in her eyes and my heart ached incredibly looking at her like that. I could never stand to see her cry. "I wish I could stay like this," I was thoroughly confused by her words of course. But nothing had prepared me for the question she asked me next.



She looked up, then looked back to me and said... "I'm insane aren't I? I'm evil...and I wanted to be good," her voice nearly broke and there was such sadness. Drusilla had never so much as spoken the word 'insane.' It was a concept she did not understand, for obvious reasons. But it was as if for a few moments she had been transported, taken back to some of the most basic elements of herself and I think...maybe deep down some self-recognition that was rare, if not entirely unheard of for her manifested. Though, my life, or unlife as you will, may have been easier had she remained in that state, I did not mind so much when it was over. I found it to be the most terrifying moment I had ever experienced in my time her.




The next night things were back to normal and we found ourselves standing outside the Rice residence, looking in on the creator of those vampire worlds. Ironic, isn't it? Lots of irony in my life... Because of where I am I think I'm just starting to see it.



Dru wanted to break into the house and meet the woman. Ask her sodding questions about her stories then kill her...told me with no small amount of enthusiasm that the blood would taste like Lestat *and* Louis. She was really drawn to both of them, almost to the point as to stir my jealousy at times. Fictional characters or not.



She always claimed I reminded her of Louis. No -- I tried to tell her. I was not Louis, if anything *I* was Lestat. That wanker Louis, reminded me of our ensouled sire. Definitely, if anyone could fill that git's brooding boots it was Peaches! I never understood why *she* didn't seem to see that correlation. Maybe it was because she never wanted to see Angel, just Angelus and that's how she always thought of him, as Angelus, as her daddy... But God, now I look at it again through the special kind of eyes you seem to grow once you know the end is coming, and I have to admit... we're both a bit like a mix of the two, if anything. And seeing it in that light I realized Angelus and his war with the soul of Angel is something similar to my never-ending war with William. Although technically different, it makes roughly half of us Lestat and half of us Louis...



Still, *I'm* more Lestat than he is!



"I want to drink them!," she had cried in delight, spinning around and around in the New Orleans streets like a madwoman in the full moon's light. I had to smile at my Dru. My magnificently mad princess. "I want to drink them all! Then they'll be inside me always and I will have new friends to talk with!" She giggled like a little girl and grabbed onto my arm, as she stopped spinning, almost pulling us both to the ground. I remember laughing with her as we swayed there. I don't know how I found the words to dissuade her that night. Usually I could never deny her anything, especially when she was like that.



"Should be delicious," I remember the dry sarcasm of the words that could not disguise my amusement at being in such a laughable situation and happiness at seeing my beautiful Drusilla smiling and so radiant.



Looking at the house with some sense of disbelief, I felt...far from myself, as well. Slightly embarrassed, and even more reluctantly I say, just a little in awe. A vampire in awe of a human, who writes fictitious vampire novels. This is a level that only Dru and I could stoop to. I'm far gone enough now to admit it. Must be something to do with the Poof, since we came from his line...maybe we have something in the way of a vampiric birth defect.



I persuaded her to wait. Let us come back in another twenty years or so... Or whenever she stopped writing the books, I'd explained. That way she'd have more stories I could read to her as well.



Since she wanted them in her head, I didn't think she'd buy it and then she had proceeded to study me so closely in the light of the full moon that I felt naked. Stripped bare. But not in the good way, that there always was with her. In a bad way. Like she was seeing through me, into something at the core, something deeply embedded that made her feel...sad, disappointed in me. That's why I hid it. I'd hidden it for so long I didn't even know what it was anymore, but looking into her eyes I saw what it drew out of her. Sadness. Displeasure. Disappointment. Most of all, I sensed the sadness...



Even to this day, I'm not sure why I turned Dru down that night. I mean, granted, Anne Rice is more high profile than your average Joe on the street, but not so high that Dru and I couldn't have taken her down with no trouble.



But I couldn't help wishing as I stared at the dark house before us. Couldn't help but long for it to all be true. Because if the realities of the vampires Anne Rice had written into being were true, then *my* reality, would therefore be false. And if I were still a vampire, I would at least be ... not as I was... I would be changed. It would all be different. A break in this...endlessness... It would change everything that had happened. Everything that we were. I mean, surely the reason humans die is because they would run mad if they had to live in one form, as one type of creature on this earth as long as we do.



Sure, the realities of her vampires were filled with pain and endlessness as well. But it was *different* from our reality of it. And though there was just as much pain in that fictional reality, it seemed less so because it was not my own.



I find myself reading those novels again now. Going through them one last time, wishing in vain once again that they were the truth and we were the myth. We, as in vampires, as we truly are.



Because now, if they were true, then I could go take part in the practice of burying myself...resting underground until I had the strength to rise again. Ridiculous notion. But it sounds so...tempting. I long to rest. To cease this pain and sodding uselessness for a decade, a century maybe. I could bury myself in her grave. The place where the scoobies had put her last summer...under the willow tree out in the woods of Sunnydale. Though if my body rested there...I would probably never rise, but instead would lie there until the end of time. Being dead in Buffy's former grave would be better than being alive in the world once she's gone. And she already is gone...in a lot of ways. Gone from feeling. Gone from freedom. Gone from me.



TBC…