Chapter Text
There isn’t a dress code.
That’s about all Rey can say for the office. It’s “open plan,” which is to say that it’s a desolate room on the Red Hook end of the Gowanus Canal without anything approaching temperature controls, and the desks are folding tables with four workers at each. (Are they workers? Writers? Typists? Back-alley plastic surgeons of content, taking in news and sending it out to stalk the internet, mutilated beyond recognition? Technically, of course, they’re contractors, or consultants, whichever leaves them with the least rights and the fewest benefits.)
There are “free snacks,” but Platt makes sure every new hire hears the story of the guy who got fired for taking more than one pack of Cheetos in one day. They have to bring their own computers. Rey’s got a ten-year-old iBook with a refurbished SSD and a shell held together with packing tape after the battery warped and cracked the plastic. She hopes Platt’s standing nearby on the day it finally explodes.
Because of course the worst part is Platt himself. If he just underpaid them, it would be miserable. But he makes it miserable and humiliating. Every payday they’re called into his office (the only place a space heater does any good) while he reads off their hours and their Chartbeat stats. He hands over the check, then, and asks if they understand why it isn’t higher. Makes them agree that hustle is the most important thing for a writer to have. Asks them what they plan to do to improve.
The only answer he accepts is “Hustle harder.”
But there’s no dress code. So there’s that.
Long hours, humiliation, pitiful pay, and no benefits, but at least she can wear leggings. Then on a particularly grey and shitty September Thursday, Tito tells her, not for the first time, that if she really wants the hits she should make a listicle of shots of her ass. She goes home and looks at her two pairs of jeans, and her single pair of interview slacks. Consultants don’t have sexual harassment protections.
She has a bottle of two-buck Chuck for dinner. Every time she pours a little more into her glass she thinks about how she should be writing a long-form, working on a pitch, a personal essay, something. But all she can really latch onto on is a vision of kicking Tito and Platt into the canal and leaving them to choke on the Superfund sludge.
Your parents wouldn’t be proud of you, a reproving voice in her head says, and then she falls asleep.
It’s past midnight when Rey wakes up. Not scared, exactly, though she dreamt of blood and death. She feels wired, like she drank a gallon of coffee, which is bad, because she has to be up at five if she’s going to get in to the office before six, which she has to, because she needs to have six new pieces to tweet out at twenty-minute intervals to attract the bored commuter audience during rush hour.
Her chest is heaving, so she gets out of bed and tries to tire herself out, or at least put her sudden burst of energy to use. She holds a plank until she gets bored, and does deep squats for ten minutes. It doesn’t seem to touch her, or the weird energy that’s thrumming through her. She tries to do a pull-up, digging her fingers into the little ledge of the bathroom door’s frame.
The frame cracks. She drops, a broken strip of wood clutched in her hands.
She doesn’t think about what she does after that, which is pull on her shoes and go out into the street. If anybody were there to ask her why she does it, she might say that she smelled something funny. Or that she dreamt about hunting. Neither of which is a very good reason for going out into the Brownville streets at one in the morning in September in a tee shirt, leggings, and tennis shoes, clutching a chunk of broken door frame. She still feels that same numb, untouchable feeling, like it’s all a video game someone else is playing.
Or maybe she’s still dreaming, because a man’s voice behind her says, “Hello, sweetheart.”
And maybe this is how she gets mugged the one time she’s not carrying even five dollars. Or maybe Platt’s come to tell her that if she had hustle, she’d be at work right now. Or maybe it’s her dad, who always called her sweetheart. She thinks she remembers that.
But no. It’s just some wispy blond twerp who looks like he’s trying to start a record label with his parents’ money. Only instead of sitting at home wanking over his expensive editing equipment, or thirsting in Brandy Jensen’s mentions, or whatever a man like him normally does at the hour, he’s out here. Staring at her.
“Do you need something?” she asks him pointedly. “Directions to the A? Friendly life advice on talking to girls? Because calling strange women ‘sweetheart’ is really not it, chief, and – “
His face changes. Not his expression: his face. With a terrible crunch of shifting bone, his eyes sink and his cheeks warp and his brow hardens and she’s not looking at a human being anymore. He’s a yellow-eyed, white-fanged, slavering predator, and he’s lunging straight for her.
She doesn’t question her own impulse to lunge forward, not away; she doesn’t question how she knows where the heart is; she doesn’t consider the convenience of the sharp shard of wood in her hand; all she thinks is my leggings have endured so fucking much – now blood, too?
But there is no blood. There isn’t even a corpse, heavy and smelly and likely to draw Law & Order-type attention. There’s just a fine cloud of dust, which briefly holds the shape of a man before Rey stumbles through it on momentum and scatters it on the asphalt of Throop Ave.
She stands there for a long minute, waiting. The wind picks up, chilling her and ruffling the strings of the curbside trash bags. Rey waits. A horn honks, somewhere. Rey waits. When a sleepy-eyed man with an eager dog gives a wide berth to the crazy white girl with the pointy stick, Rey starts to realize that she’s not waking up any time soon, and grips her broken wood tighter, wondering what the fuck this dream is going to throw at her next.
“So you’re the girl,” says a low, dark voice out of the darkness, and all the hairs on the back of Rey’s neck stand on end.
“What girl?” The splintered edges of her accidental weapon dig into her hand.
He steps from the shadow of a stoop, tall and pale, with loose dark hair and a fencer’s rapid stride and a long Modigliani face. “The only one in all the world.”
“What am I, XX: The Last Woman?” Rey has extremely mixed feelings about this dream. He’s coming closer. There’s a scar down his face that runs like a rivulet down his throat until it disappears into the collar of his tidy gingham shirt; the wind is cold but his sleeves are rolled up to show off long, corded forearms.
“There’s a demon inside you.”
“What are you, my therapist?” Not that she can afford a therapist. Or needs one. Or would want one who’d look at her with liquid dark eyes and purse his wide soft mouth like that.
“They don’t like to tell you that part,” he says. “It makes them uncomfortable. Them and the girls.”
They’re almost toe-to-toe. “I thought you said I was the only one. The only girl.”
That soft mouth hardens into a shape something like a smile. “The only one, but not the first.”
“Here I thought I was special.” She says it lightly. She’s never special.
His face is serious again. “You are special. And someone had to die for it to happen.”
“What?” Her blood runs cold. She doesn’t care about his mouth anymore; she doesn’t like this dream. “What happened? Who?”
No answer. “Just remember. Later. What you’re made of. Demons and death.” He leans in so close she could lick his cheek if she wanted to, which she doesn’t. “Just like me.”
There’s a car coming, something quiet, the engine nearly silent but the wheels hissing as it speeds. It almost screeches into its stop at the corner, then hurtles towards them in a glare of headlights. Maybe if the car hits me, I’ll wake up, Rey thinks. But it stops, six feet short of her, and a woman who’s considerably short of six feet jumps out.
“Rey,” she says, like she, a total stranger, knows who Rey is. “I felt the call. Has anything happened? How do you feel?”
“I would like to wake up now,” Rey says decidedly. That’s how dreams work, right, once you know they’re dreams? She turns her head to take a last look at the big hot man that her subconscious summoned up to try and scare her or something. He’s gone. “I would really like to wake up now.”
The woman sighs, and gives a small chuckle. “I know. You must have a lot of questions. But – ” she points to the wooden shard in Rey’s hand “ – your instincts are clearly in good working order.” She shuts the car door and steps forward to take Rey’s hand. “Rey Jacobs. I’m Leah Organa, and I’m your Watcher. You have been called, and you are the Slayer.”
“I can hear the capital letters in that,” Rey says, dazed. Leah’s hand is warm. It shouldn’t feel so real. “I don’t think I like the capital letters.”
“What has happened to you tonight, Rey?” Leah asks gently.
“Well,” she says, counting with the fingers of her free hand against her thigh, trying to stay practical about the way this keeps feeling more and more like it’s not a dream, “I woke up feeling like I’d drunk a pot of third rail, I literally tore my apartment apart trying to work off some steam, I got attacked by a trust-funder with a fucked-up face and I stabbed him in the heart with a piece of my torn-up apartment and he turned to weird grey dust?” She gestures to the dust that lingers in the folds of her tee shirt. It’s the kind of detail reality has, that the dust is still there. That man, too – the second, dark one - his sad, unmonstrous face – somehow it’s the realest thing, realer than this woman and her practical hybrid coup, realer than Tito and Platt and the stink of the Gowanus, realer than her student loans or her phone bill or the few precious Likes on her latest tweeted link –
“Ah, that was a vampire,” Leah says. “You’re the Vampire Slayer, you know,” and forget it – none of this is real. It is all much, much too silly.
“Well? Wasn’t I right?” Snoke asks him.
“Yes. You were right.”
“Hell has many mouths, Kylo Ren. The Slayers come to them, just as we do; they come like carrion birds to the watering hole.”
Kylo Ren is silent, because she was not a carrion bird – something come to clean the dead and carry mortal flesh into the sky, exchanged for the beating of wings. She was something crueler, something brighter.
“You’ve never met a Slayer before, have you?” Snoke asks shrewdly. “So many years of reading, studying. But you’ve never seen one with your own eyes.” He leans back in his chair. The apartment is dark, but neither of them needs light. Kylo can see his eyes as clear as day, sharp and knowing. “Never smelled one before either, eh boy?”
Kylo swallows. Like spice cookies warm from the oven. Like the strong dark tea to dip them in, like the honey to drizzle on top. Like sweat, fresh and female. Like blood, hot and mortal. His lips are wet when he parts them to answer. “No, Master.”
Snoke smiles, fangs gleaming. “You’ll taste her, my boy. She has a destiny. And so do you.”