Willow Character Study #2

Apologies for not posting this earlier, but my cluster only just came back up. As for the essay I'm due to write - I'll post it on a day when no one else is due to, hopefully soon!

Title: Still.
Author: velvetandlace
Distribution: Anywhere at all, just let me know.
Rating: PG-13? I’m really not sure.
Pairing: N/A, just Willow.
Timeline: Wishverse!
Summary: A glimpse into Wishverse’s Vamp-Willow
A/N: 500 words.



A smile – low, close – draped carelessly from her lips, and she threw back her head. Hair, a confetti stream of red, catching the weakened moonlight. The night is calm, its heavy warmth dulling the glittering, swordlike motion of nails (claws), cutting through the air, raking through fiery strands.

Somewhere nearby, a bird still sings.

A child laughs.

And still she stood.

Poised, ready. Playfully dangerous. Out of context, wrong for this pleasant night. The only brief tint of threat in the balmy air was her and her stance. Deceptively harmless. Almost casual. Almost. She was too still.

The hand returned, fingers splayed, to her hip, and she was silent (screaming). The child – a boy – still laughed, skipped between two parents. Parents, who smiled at each other but let their eyes wander. Eyes resting on her. Alarm and awe. Tugging the child’s hands.

Her smile grew. A challenge. Not an open challenge – she didn’t play well with most others – but for herself. Deadly in the moonlight. Incongruously beckoning.

There’s a breeze. A breeze that flitters across the park, across her carefully arranged features, an answering quirk of a brow. Lifting her hair (in the wind), a shimmer of red, reaching with flyaway strands that seemed to have their own agenda. To take, claim, pervade the stillness. Even her self-made stillness.

The smile fades.

“Bored now.”

Her voice is another contrast. The second clue in a game of “What Doesn’t Belong?” It is meek. Quiet, childlike mewling. Had it been anyone else, it would have contradicted their intimidation. It only strives to enhance hers. Danger and power and a childlike voice.

The boy isn’t laughing anymore.

The parents can’t take their eyes away from her. They’re in a fog, slow-moving. Scared of a girl – can’t be more than eighteen – with staged poses and a predatory, playful voice. Unnatural girl, with tight clothing and hair like fire. Translucent, ethereal.

She steps forward. Slow. Deliberate. Toward the three, whose eyes widen simultaneously (amusing her). Hands release, instructions whispered; the little boy runs away.

The parents aren’t fast enough. Pulsing, hidden veins revealing themselves to her. A swift motion, and daggerlike hands cut through the breeze, encircling an arm each. Hard, vicious, her smile never wavering. She hears their hearts – faster now.

They don’t trust her. They don’t know why.

Her face shifts, and now they know.

The space between them dissipates and without a word, she’s buried in the neck of the mother, gently stroking the hair of the father.

Incongruous.

But real.

Shell of the mother hitting the ground, body of the father following. She delicately wipes the blood from her mouth, shifting to her mask, her human visage. Voice low, unnoticed in the silence of the still pleasant night.

“That was fun.”