TITLE: “Secret One: Dove”

AUTHOR: Polly Burns

EMAIL: go_rimbaud@hotmail.com You can ring my be-e-ell, ring my bell…

SUMMARY: Brief anecdotes of some of the events that made Andrew who he is.

SPOLIER WARNINGS: None, unless you count Tucker’s early obsession with hellhounds.

RATING: Oh, ah, PG-13, maybe, for badwords. I know, it’s not very exciting…

DISCLAIMER: Andrew, Warren, Tucker, et al are the intellectual property of that Joss Whedon guy. I certainly didn’t ask his permission to use them, but please don’t sue me, anyway. The lyrics below are not mine, either, I stole them off of Courtney Love (the song is Softer, Softest, from the album Live Through This)- that’s my roots showing…

NOTES: If you came here looking for a plot, you ain’t gonna find one. Nothing even vaguely resembling a plot will be found in this story. That’s right, there’s no plot in Polly Burns’ story- oh, there’s tons of imagery and a stream of consciousness flow, but no matter what anybody tells you, there is no plot in this story…

1 Dove

I’ll tell you everything/ I hope that you won’t tell on me/ And I’ll give you everything/ I hope you’ll give it back to me-

It had occurred to Andrew early on in his young life that he didn’t really like his mother, and, well, he felt guilty about it. He didn’t particularly care for any of the people he was related to, but disliking his mother felt bad. It wasn’t her fault, she wasn’t a bad person, just, he hated being tied to her, to any of them. Tucker had at least had the benefit of being the eldest, the “try-out kid”, as he liked to call himself. Tucker was the one they were allowed to mess up on, let go when it became obvious that he wasn’t born perfect and wasn’t gonna be perfect, no matter what Mom and Dad did. Andrew, however, born three years after his brother, conceived during Tucker’s especially terrible two’s, was the baby, the one to be coddled and held by the hand, pushed and prodded into the ideal shape. His father had stuck to a regular regimen of alternately browbeating and ignoring Andrew, while his mother doted on him terribly. He was still afraid of the old man, and flat-out hated him because of it, but his mother, who had both comforted and spoiled him, turned him into a helpless, petted thing, inspired a more ambivalent reaction. So, mainly, Andrew just said to himself and to the rest of the world, I don’t really like her all that much.

It was a miracle he’d gotten out of that house alive.

At almost nineteen, Andrew still harbored serious doubts that he was even related by blood to his mother, his father, Tucker, Aunt Martha, the whole passel of them. The people with whom he had spent eighteen years of his life seemed to him as far away as great-great aunts and uncles, seventh cousins a thousand times removed. Although he had seen the pictures of himself at just hours old, looking strangely calm in his stoned mother’s arms, he still thought that maybe, just maybe, he had been adopted. In his childhood, and secretly, into his early adolescence, he had loved fairy tales, especially the less well-known ones. Anything that took place away from the world he knew, his world of weekly panic attacks and the twin threats of visits to the school guidance counselor and having his head bashed in against somebody’s locker. His most favorites were those about changelings, which he had always, secretly, suspected that he was. He was the lonely blonde in a sea of brunettes, looking lost and strange and uneasy where his mother and father and brother seemed for all the world like they had everything stitched up just right, looking like they held the keys to the kingdom. Andrew wasn’t even sure where the kingdom was.

For a time, he let himself believe that he was what he had read about in storybooks, a changeling. When everyone else had gone to sleep, he would pad into the bathroom, and by the anemic glow of the nightlight, scour his body for marks, anything that didn’t belong there- for he had read that changeling-children often had some strange imprint on them. By day, he stared into his own eyes, in the bathroom mirror (the bathroom being the only safe room in the house), trying to see in his irises a fantastic hue that was not there, willing them to turn amber or violet or chartreuse, just for a moment, just to give him something to hold onto. As ever, they were pale, washed-out blue, with a sort of blank look to them, like a bird or a rabbit. It seemed inevitable that he would always feel like he didn’t belong, if only there were a legitimate reason, beyond him just being a fucking nerd.

He was regularly castigated for being flighty, unfocused, and sometimes someone even dared to say, dumb. Tucker heard this and ran with it, sometimes referring to Andrew as “my brother, the dumb blonde”. Andrew didn’t argue with this, as it was useless to argue with any of them; he knew what he had to do. In his mind, he went far away, across an ocean, over a forest… In his mind, he resolved, I just have to get out of this place. Instead, it was Tucker who went, away, to college. After the hellhound incident, which people only pretended not to know about, Tucker managed to still get accepted into a decent school- out of state, of course. To spite his obvious sociopathic tendencies, he was a good student. Andrew, however, was not, he was “flighty”, “unfocused”, “useless”, said their father, “he just needs some time,” said their mother- after he graduated high school, Andrew stayed in Sunnydale.

For a time, he lived with his not-family, as he thought of them; his father had given up on him sometime around his fifteenth birthday, so the abuse that had once been meant to make him a better person was now just for fun, Andrew supposed. His mother remained just as committed to waiting on him, but now Andrew was not so sure that he liked it. It was obvious that he couldn’t do a damn thing for himself, and over time, he had grown to resent it.

Each day, he made up a plan, usually just the same old plan: All right, today I am so going to pack up all my stuff and just leave. Usually, he threw in some bits about stealing the TV and pawning it, just to prove to himself that he did have some sense of pragmatism. He awoke before noon and was brimming with optimism; there was so much time, so much day in which to get away. As he showered, his would feel a fluttering in his belly, and then it would rise, all the way up to his heart. The masturbation fantasies that he had built up to an unbelievably detailed level in the past were brushed away; instead, he thought about where he would go, what he would do when he got there. He’d dry off and then get dressed, barely noticing what he did, sometimes slipping into clothes that didn’t match at all. With his hair’s unfortunate tendency to stand completely on end, he often looked like a mental patient, his mother observed more than once. On these mornings, though, he didn’t notice the way he looked; the key was to not notice. As long as he forgot who he was, forgot that this was his life, he could carry on with the illusion, with his plan.

Then, sitting down to eat breakfast, it always dawned on him. Andrew, you’re such an idiot, he would say to himself over his Cocoa Puffs, out loud, because nobody else was home to hear him. You’re going where?, he’d continue, to LA? What are you going to do in LA? What’s wrong with you? By the time he finished his cereal, he felt like weeping. So as not to do so, he watched the television (“Novocaine for the soul”, Tucker had once said. Andrew was pretty sure he hadn’t made that up himself), and before he knew it, the day, each day, every day, was gone.

Andrew still thought about the first demon that he had ever seen, often, and fondly. It was one of the few moments of unmitigated aliveness he had experienced in his existence. At the time, he had been twelve years old, creeping about the neighborhood at night. Tucker had just turned fifteen, and around this point in time, he’d gotten a lot meaner than he’d ever been; he delighted in torturing Andrew in any way that didn’t involve actual torture. This night, he had been telling Andrew some unpleasant stories about something called a hellhound, that liked to eat peoples’ brains, saying that one day he would actually find one of them, somewhere, and maybe give Andrew to it as a treat. So Andrew had “run away”. Really, he just wanted to get away from his brother for a while, he had no actual intention of going anywhere further than the public library, or maybe the Dairy Queen. Wouldn’t it be nice, though, he mused, to just run and run forever, to follow a road until it ends, and then pick up another road, and another…

When he got to the kiddie park a couple of blocks from his house, something began to feel not-right; a liquid chill seized his skinny limbs and turned the soft hairs on his arms into a petrified forest, it slid up the valley of his spine like a stream. He looked around, as though he had suddenly forgotten where he was, and he was uncertain of what to do. Should he run, or should he walk away quietly? Climb a tree, maybe? Before he could figure anything out, she was there, right in front of him.

The first thing he thought was, Oh, what a pretty lady, but then he realized that this was no lady at all. Ladies didn’t make you feel like somebody was walking on your grave, and ladies didn’t usually hang out in spooky places like deserted playgrounds after the sun had gone down. The next thing to change was “pretty”, because she wasn’t pretty. The woman- thing before him was far taller than Andrew, taller even than his dad, he guessed. Her skin was pale, white, he was certain, and it reminded him of a light bulb- she had a kind of glow about her. Running down her back like a train made of pheasant feathers, was her hair, smooth and copper-black, impossibly glossy. Her eyes, he somehow knew, were amber, set like two topazes above high cheekbones, the pupils not pinholes, but slits. She clutched a dark green, bed sheet, it looked like, to keep it around herself; it looked like that was all she was wearing. She had the longest, slimmest fingers- they were like spiders’ legs, and instead of round, pinkish human fingernails, she had claws. She’s not pretty, Andrew thought, she’s beautiful.

It wouldn’t be all that bad, to die at her long, white hands with those claws like hatpins made of quartz crystal. Will she eat me?, he wondered, not even afraid anymore, he was not afraid, but… something else. It was better than thinking about being fed to one of Tucker’s hellhounds, if he ever got any. He closed his eyes, and waited, for pain, for something, and then opened them again, not having felt anything at all.

The clawed woman shook her head a little bit, and then, she gave him a wink. She winked at me!, his own voice laughed inside of his head, as she opened her mouth, barring teeth that certainly weren’t human. She spoke: “Run along home, boy, and go to sleep.” Her voice was like chocolate syrup sliding down his throat, like a taste of raw honey. Years later, it could still make his throat and his skin pleasure-burn.

All the way home, he ran, up the batter-smooth night asphalt, and once he stopped, he was sick in the front yard.

“Where did you go?” his mother tried to ask him, her question aborted because he was about to be sick again.

“Were you doing drugs?” his father snarled. Drugs- his father was obsessed with them, apparently. When Andrew got hay-fever, his father thought he was doing cocaine, when he put on his mother’s apple-scented hand cream once, his father mistook the scent of it for that of marijuana.

“He wasn’t doing drugs,” his mother said, horrified at the thought, “it’s probably just something he ate. Did you eat anything while you were out, Andrew?”

“No,” he managed to choke out. His throat felt as though it had been scraped out on the inside.

“Andrew, what did I tell you about eating in strange places? You have a very sensitive stomach, you shouldn’t eat anything that I don’t make for you.”

“I didn’t-” Andrew began.

“Christ, Catherine, don’t make him into an even bigger sissy than he already is,” his father groaned. More bile dredged itself up from Andrew’s gut and exited him.

Finally, he was able to stop throwing up and got into his pajamas. Tucker was bitching about the vomit-smell, and Andrew was actually thankful for his mother’s obsessive, smothering love, for once, because she told Tucker to shut up and go to sleep.

Andrew only slept sporadically that night. He could not get the clawed-lady’s voice out of his head. She was wonderful. She was so frightening. She was beautiful. He wished that she were his mother, instead of the mother he had gotten, a small, round sparrow of a woman, always flitting about and chirping and making him nervous. It would be so nice to have a cat-woman, for that was what she must have been, for a mother, to have a cat-man for a father. If he had been born with claws, with amber eyes that had slitted pupils, maybe life would be easier. When he finally slipped into his longest period of slumber, he dreamt about living in the tree by the slide in the kiddie park, licking his own pale hand, which now had five little hooks at the ends of his five little fingers, and eating a sparrow for breakfast.

The next day, he searched through his collection of storybooks, quite disturbingly well rounded for a boy of his age, frantically tossing this one and that one aside until he found what he wanted. It was a school day, but he was being kept home because of the previous night’s vomiting; he was damned if he was going to waste his time lying about in bed. He didn’t even feel all that bad anymore. So, he searched and he searched until he found the book titled, Ghouls, Specters and Fiends: A Collection of Monster- Lore from Around the World. Sitting there cross-legged in his pajamas, by the window for light, he read each and every description in the book, tossing the words about in his head. Each beast’s name he wrote down on a piece of notebook paper, under the column marked Maybe or the column marked Not Likely. By the time he got to letter M (is for Manticore, is for Merpeople…), he was feeling a bit hopeless, and his head hurt. He stopped and ate some ice cream- ice cream was good, because if he started throwing up again, at least it wouldn’t hurt as much. After ice cream, he resumed his reading, feeling much more optimistic.

He got to ‘R’, and then, there she was again. Her name was “Rakshasa”, he read, sort of like a cross between a vampire (except not) and a werewolf (well, a weretiger). Those who wander into the Rakshasa’s territory suffer from stomach upsets immediately afterwards, Andrew read, this is due to a chemical signature released by the demon to keep trespassers away. Wow, that’s pretty smart, he said to the open book. She lives in a tree, Andrew thought, fondly. She eats blood and, oh!, brains, he thought, not so fondly. Why didn’t she eat me?, he wondered, and then found out why. Preferred victims are handsome young men, with whom she has sexual relations before consuming them. Oh!, Andrew gasped aloud, and blushed.

Sometimes, when he was in a certain kind of mood, Warren called Andrew his dove, because of how white he was, and because of his tendency to coo. Such things still embarrassed him- having Warren point out his quirks, his eccentricities, even if it was done so affectionately. Somewhere in the regions of his mind that were like murky water, places unpossessed by words or by logic, he still felt uneasy, felt alien, and every comment about him seemed to make the feeling worse. Even in Warren’s arms, he felt alone, no, not alone, that was stupid, he felt- well, he felt as though he wasn’t there at all. The ability to distance himself, to be someplace but not really be there, which he had cultivated as a child still remained with him. Somebody had told him once that he had far-away eyes, and it had made him think of this movie where there was this girl, and you couldn’t see your reflection in her eyes, all you could see was a forest somewhere, her home. Andrew wondered, when Warren looked into his eyes, what did he see? That was a silly question- Warren saw himself, always, in everybody and everything around him. Even after people and the things that people said and did, even after high school, Warren was comfortable inside of his own skin.

Sometimes, Andrew still stared into his own eyes in the mirror, hoping that their shade would shift and bend. He looked into his eyes, sometimes trying to see his own reflection, and sometimes looking for an image of Home- wherever that was- but all he saw, every time, was a sea of black pupil. If there were a sea, a sea of black water, would there be land on the other side?, he asked himself, nonsensically. If there were such a sea, he would very much like to be in a sailboat at its center, to dip his hand beneath its surface, to swim its night-waters, to drown in it and then float atop its waves like satin sheets… to fly across its obsidian mirror surface- like a