Recruitment
by Jaclyn // musicnotej@aol.com
09.13.03
Timeline: Pre-series.
Disclaimer: Whedon's!
A/N: Thanks to Becky for
(a) saying something that reminded me to dig up this old fic, and
(b) betaing it :)
Check out her new Lilah/SR message board at {siren.smurl.net}.
*
She stands in the center, looking at the sloping landscape. What she did (no) sucked the warmth right out of the surrounding air, and an aimless snow has begun to coat the ground; white, half-formed bits of dust falling, confused, from a perfectly natural sky. The sky is still blue, she tells herself, so the hills around me need not be bodies.
Now, with the snow blanketing this new world she's made, she can almost believe it.
"Look at this!" the middle-aged man exclaims gleefully. He is like a child, she thinks dumbly, this gray-haired creature who says 'Call me Holland' and laughs at death with the naivete of someone who thinks it will never happen to him. "This is beautiful!"
Her throat is dry. She sucks in a great gulp of cold air and forces out, "This isn't what I meant. At all."
There are so many dead. So many faces tinted blue, glassy eyes still wide with shock; so many limbs sprawled haphazardly next to bodies that were dead even before they fell. There is no blood. It makes all this unnatural death seem even more disquieting.
"So instead of killing the leader, you killed his followers. All of them, in one blow! Don't you know you can do something wrong and still do it well?" Holland brushes a fallen lock of hair behind her ear, then runs a fingertip fondly over the goosebumps that rose up at his touch. "Just because it wasn't exactly what you meant, you don't like it?"
"But it isn't anything I mean," she tries to protest, but it's easier to let him take her arm and lead her into the shiny black limousine, away from all those dead eyes and the dizzying snow that falls faster with every passing moment. Away from the ancient parchment with the spell they gave her, now running with water and still lying where she'd dropped it when all two thousand of her graduating classmates had turned into hills.
But I tried to do a good thing, she tells herself. I tried to save people. Shouldn't intent count more than action?
Slumped sightlessly in the backseat and she's still thinking about it. And suddenly she knows. "You knew this would happen." A bitter statement of fact. Not a question.
She is learning.
"We only want the best. The rest would just be a nuisance, muck things up."
"And those horrible-- those things you told me about the dean, that was all a lie."
Holland smiles. She is learning, yes, but she is still too innocent to pick up on the cruelty in his expression.
"Consider this your first lesson, Miss Morgan. Eliminate those who would try to eliminate you. There may be more glory in a war your opponent actually knows about, but there will be no guarantee."
She thinks, you bastard, I'll eliminate you all right! I'll go work for you in your stupid pretentious firm and make a shitload of money and then one day, when you're least expecting it, I'll--
Holland watches the righteous anger and fierce resolve flash across Lilah Morgan's face and thinks, another one fallen! Hook, line, and sinker, we got her. And then one day she'll wake up and realize it's too late to take us down. She already is us.
She will work on them and they will work on her until slowly, slowly, slowly, she has worked herself in too deeply to leave.
END