Title: Orleans

Fandom: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Pairing: Buffy/Faith
Categories: femslash, AU (canon AU), dark
Length: medium, 6369 words
Warnings: unhappy endings, character death (file under "Wishverse")

Author on LJ: n/a
Author Website: Hth on AO3

Summary: There's a big daddy vampire out of Missouri who used to keep alligators as pets. There's a Slayer. And there's Faith.

Review: You have a crossbow strapped to your back under your jacket, you have three twenty-dollar bills and a bus ticket in your pocket, and this could be your last day on earth.

Or not. Either way, it's nobody's damn business but yours and your victims'.

Last week, I wanted to rec something with badass women and couldn't bring anything to mind that hit the note I was looking for. A few days later someone on my friends list was good enough to re-rec this story from years back with a new AO3 link... and talk about stories that stick in your mind for years...

It's the Wishverse in the dying days before Buffy's trip to Sunnydale, and Buffy and Faith in St Louis, a tale of cults and vampires, alligators and mass sacrifices, bathed in religious imagery and blood and heat, and you know it's not going to end well but the journey down is so captivating you can't look away.

This fic. The structure, the language, the weight of the metaphor and imagery, this fic is a thing of beauty. I can't think of much else I've seen told with the same intensity, and I've never seen a second person narrative work much better than in this.

Orleans