Title: Never Kill a Boy on the First Date (aka You Crazy Bitch)
Fandom: So Weird
Rating: R
Genre: Angst/Romance/Drabble(?)
Author's note: Written for soweird100's Buffy title challenge. It was supposed to be a drabble. But I believe it went over, word-wise. I guess it's a quasi-drabble, then? Pseudo-drabble? The little drabble that could? Beats me. Why am I rambling? Better yet, why are you still reading this rambling? On with you!
Warnings: Character death (obviously); perversion; general lewdness; cruelty; irony; ambiguousness; surprises; overall unfairness. And probably some other stuff I can't be arsed to mention, as well.
Summary: "there's a dead boy leaning against the car horn and waking up the neighbors"
Clu has a knife in his chest and Annie is vomiting out stale popcorn and Diet Coke.
This is probably not what either one of them had expected at the end of their first date; all those shy looks and wet dreams and that hesitant, "So…do'ya want to go out with me Saturday night?" and by this point they should maybe be in the back of Clu's car with her tongue in his mouth and his hand up that cute miniskirt she got on sale from the mall, but they're not.
Annie's maybe pretty fucking crazy and Clu's definitely pretty fucking dead, and how the hell did things manage to get like this?
All Annie knows is that one minute Clu was kissing her and working his hands up her knee and hip towards a shy and fumbling grope, and the next her panther was growling—snarling with fangs bared—and there was this voice in her head telling her to slip her dainty little hand into his pocket where she knew he always kept a handy pocket knife and flick it open (just like that, girl. good.) and—
Then there are three/four/five/sixteen dribbling stab wounds gaping garishly red and wet on his crisp white shirt, and her hand is holding the hilt of that silly little blade where it's still imbedded in Clu's shuddering torso.
And she wants to scream, then; but, instead, she carefully takes away her hand and fumbles for the suddenly hard-to-operate car-door handle, and Clu stops breathing and just—slumps—as she flings the door open and falls, retching, to the ground.
The pavement bites at her tender white knees and the palms of her hands as she empties the contents of her stomach onto Molly's clean sidewalk, but she doesn't care.
She doesn't care about anything but the fact that there's a dead boy leaning against the car horn and waking up the neighbors and there's blood all over her—all over her, for Christ's sake!—and her panther is nuzzling her sweaty golden hair.
After what seems like ages (but was probably only minutes—she's not sure), paramedics and policemen arrive, carting Clu away in a wailing ambulance and blocking off as much as they can with official-looking yellow tape.
She is packed up and taken to the police station in the back of one of their uncomfortable cars—already behind bars, in the back seat; she has spittle on her chin and there's a heavy, ugly stink on her favorite shirt, and there are tears crusting over on the corners of her eyes. Her panther isn't there.
They seat her in a dingy white room with windows they can see through from the other side; and she tells them everything (because they're the good guys, right?).
Sometime between her confession and the time the shrink came in to talk to her and say (in soothing tones), "I see," and "Go on," and "How did that make you feel?" while writing notes on her bright white notepad about psychotic manifestations/schizophrenia/multiple personality disorder(/what a freak this girl is?), Annie realizes that she is being recorded; she hopes that someone (Clu?) will pop in and say, "Surprise! You're on Candid Camera. Were you fooled?" but no one does.
This isn't G-rated broadcasting entertainment, and there will be no miraculous plot developments here; Annie is sentenced to time in an asylum where people will protect her from herself and her imagination with tiny, happy pills.
But even those don't block out the memory of Irene's anguished wails (You crazy bitch! You killed my baby—you killed my Clu!—I'll kill you, you crazy fucking loon!).
Annie keeps taking them anyway.
She rocks herself back and forth (back and forth, back and forth) in her soft, cozy room and takes her million pills a day, and pretends that everything she sees is all in her head (in your head, little girl, there's something wild in your head, you crazy bitch).
And, somewhere, Bricriu is laughing.