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BtVS Meta: Race, Roses and Orchids - Commentary on Vex Not the Roses
I started writing this not long after the fic was posted. I've become very interested in all the thought that goes into writing, regardless of the length. It's fascinating to me to see what goes into it, how much gets left out and the path one takes to arrive at a completed piece. Vex was a piece that I actually thought very hard about. I don't usually externalize the writing process nearly as much I did on this. This is long, so don't feel the need to read it or comment on it. I enjoyed writing the fic and the commentary.
Race, Roses and Orchids: on writing Vex Not the Roses
Title: Vex Not the Roses
Author: seraphcelene
Summary: The demons, the things that go bump in the night, the monsters under your bed, are real.
A/N: I wrote it in the 11th hour. After two weeks and four different versions this is the one that decided to finish itself. It’s all over the map. Unbeta’d. Written for minim calibre for the Character of Color Multifandom Challenge. The prompt is at the end of the text so you don’t laugh too hard at how far off the map I went.
Spoilers: Hush
Rating: NC-17
I. The Frame
Vex Not the Roses was written for the Character of Color Multifandom Fic Challenge hosted by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
choc_fic. I saw the nature of the forum and challenge as a license to explore one of the most problematic/taboo subjects in fandom -- race. How do we interpret Olivia's presence in an episode with limited dialog? As a "person of color" (so polite) I wanted to invest Olivia with some of what it might mean to be black and to be a black person dating outside her race. I don't think this is a case of Mary Sue. Most of what occurs in the piece is fictional, extrapolations of minor events in my life, the lives of friends, and what I've read and seen on TV and in the media. Like all good writers, I took all of those sources, threw in a dash of imagination and ran with it.
To begin at the very beginning, this was not my first attempt at writing color into fic. The very first fic I ever wrote was Coffee, a Roswell fic that appropriated a throwaway character, Serena (End of the World), to introduce a little color into a white washed cast. Literally, I was laying on my bedroom floor, enjoying a cup of coffee -- for real -- watching TV and thinking of the WB's shift from programming directed towards a black audience to its sudden, apparent, "whiteness". Admittedly, I had never watched much of the WB's "black" shows because I don't watch sitcoms and the majority of what is offered up to ethnic audiences appears to be half-hour situational comedies. Drama, although they may contain 'non-white' (token) cast members, rarely provide complex, three-dimensional characters. Of course, there are exceptions: Homicide, Firefly, Grey's Anatomy.
I decided to make Serena bi-racial to make her more "palatable." (I was nervous about my potential audiences reaction to an inter-racial relationship.) Not an unusual device, the mulatta was a popular character in American literature as late as the 1960's. Years later, as a graduate student, I wrote my theses on the socio-political impact of the mulatta on identity in the Harlem Renaissance. The mulatta's ability to bridge class and race was part of the discussion.
Serena is probably the closest I've ever come to Mary Sue-ing a character. I loved Kyle and the girl was black and pretty and basically an OC. But let's remember it was my first fic EVER!
The point is that Serena was my response to 'my' absence on the shows I watched. At the time: Buffy, early (pre-Gunn, I think) Angel, Roswell and Farscape. Buffy did offer us Kendra, a one-dimensional near-stereotype with a bad accent. (Sorry, my best friend is Jamaican and I grew up around Jamaicans. They don't really sound like Kendra.) But Kendra was killed off. One cultural in-joke is that black characters are disposable tokens. They are the first ones to be killed. In support of that theory: Kendra bites it and Mr. Trick goes the way of the stake. Coloring up Slayerdom has ever been problematic, and although we can dismiss Kendra's death as the natural conclusion to the Slayer's destiny (the same with the Chinese Slayer and Wood's mother), we are still left with a noticeably homogenized Sunnydale: the beautiful, white and middle class center that fails to incorporate even a regular ethnic/minority character.
I'd like to suggest that the minority role has been re-assigned in Sunnydale to the demonic. The 'Racial Other' has been literally 'othered', and therefore Kendra, and other ethnic characters, cannot take-up permanent residence in Sunnydale. There is, simply, no place for them. Rather they are forced deeper into the margins; they are background bodies filling space and waiting to be rescued or killed, never to be named or known. Robin Wood began a negotiation of the space between Sunnydale's outer margins and the othered Other, but his presence on the show is limited to plot device. I'd love to read an analysis of his function within the text if anyone's up for it.
The First Slayer and the slayer's origins in Africa are almost stereotypical and comical. I could read Buffy's resistance to the First Slayer as the dominance of the white majority over the ethnic minority but that's way too simplistic and, I think, rather wrong headed. But it can be read that way.
Okay, so now we have characters of color on our TV's and in our shows. What now? The question I ask is do we or don't we address issues of race and racism or do we go along as if being 'other' doesn't mean anything, largely because 'Other' has been appropriated and re-assigned? Us versus Them is no longer Black versus White or whatever dominant group versus whatever minority. It is Human versus Monster. Does humanity expand and suddenly become more inclusive? I would argue that in the Real World it would not and that in Sunnydale it does not. There is always an Us versus Them and within the context of whoever makes up Us and whoever makes up Them, there are derivations into sex and race. For example, in fandom, one component of the sexual divide falls out as Het versus Slash, and Slash versus Fem-Slash.
I would argue that just because the Other now has fangs and bumpy foreheads does not erase previous discourse on the Racial Other. It can't and shouldn't mean that particular discourse ends. In Buffy, what I see is a further marginalization of those characters and their attendant issues. The only character that I recall who makes comment on Sunnydale's whiteness is Mr. Trick (an othered Other) and he has moved from one marginalized group into another. Indeed, he is allowed to remain in Sunnydale because he has found a place in the resident minority population, among the demons.
Yet, with the exception of that one comment, there is still a noticeable absence of racial dialog. We get the sexual: all Slayers are females. Slayers, females, are destined for death (and I actually have an essay in the works on that topic). We get openly gay characters, closeted gay characters and sub-texted bi-sexual characters.
All of these thoughts informed Vex Not the Roses, and I wondered as I wrote and after I posted, who would get it. Without coming right out and saying it, who would recognize and understand the comment that I was trying to make? I didn't think that anyone would get it and if they did, they probably wouldn't mention it because race seems to be as much an issue (or should I say non-issue) in fannish text as it is in canon. The very place that makes room for Slash, Femslash, non-con, torture, rape, and incest, very reluctantly touches upon matters of skin color and cultural difference.
II. The Text
The prompt left by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
minim_calibre was Olivia, power and irony. My thoughts were rather stereotypical: Black British, obviously of African descent, ancestors were probably relatively recent migrants. There has to be something that involves magic or demons, otherwise we don't get the irony. The easiest thing to do was to make the magic voodoo and what do most people think of when they think voodoo, besides zombies? They think Haiti or, at least in America, Creole. I went with Haiti. Realistically, I should have gone with somewhere in Africa, the actress's features look more sub-continent than island, but my access to research was limited due to my extreme disinterest in getting my butt up and to the library. So I snuck it in at work. Mostly, through Wikipedia. I figured I could cheat on the rest because voodoo already has its own literary/film tradition. All I had to do was go with the popular interpretations, which I discovered aren't at all accurate. Big surprise that.
Again, because of the very nature of the challenge, I felt comfortable, indeed challenged, to deal immediately with race and not just to write a story featuring a character of color. I also wanted very much to "tie" it into the themes of BtVS: alienation, isolation, the desire for normalcy. So, I wanted to reflect Olivia's desire for acceptance as two-fold, racial and social. I wanted those desires to be intertwined, to feed each other. I wanted to create a connection, a circle.
"Haiti is in your blood," Marie always told her granddaughter. Long before Olivia gave up straightening her hair. Long before the afros and the wild curls. Long, long before the locs.
I focused on her hair to convey a sense of developing identity. Straight hair, then afros, curls and finally the locs she wears in Hush, moving from mainstream standards of beauty and into an ethnic (read Afrocentric) identity. Nothing overt, Olivia never struck me as Mighty!Black or Uber!Black. Just a girl confident enough in herself, comfortable enough with her '"blackness" to date outside her race. Yes, I know that Race in Britain is different from Race in the U.S. I lived in the UK for a year and I definitely noticed the difference in attitudes and social acceptability.
"Haiti is in your blood", she would say, as she taught Olivia the prayers of the Sevis Gine. Marie showed her granddaughter the proper way to make sacrifice. Who to call on and how. And Olivia's parents were, happily, none the wiser until the one time with the zombie.
The magic, the voodoo, is our secondary location of Other, so we get that two-fold effect represented in canon by Mr. Trick. I also wanted to differentiate between generations. The grandmother who migrated late in life and is preserving her traditions by teaching them to her granddaughter because her own daughter worked very hard to assimilate. So even within her own family structure there is an Us versus Them, a separation that will be mirrored throughout the fic.
I also wanted the voodoo to be not such a big deal, sort of something that's ingrained, natural. Not unlike learning your grandmother's secret family recipes, only one time something went a little wonky and there was a zombie. In my early notes, I also decided to give myself bonus points if I could work in at least one zombie. Luckily, I managed two. Hi!
After that, Olivia was packed up and sent away to boarding school.
Moving Olivia into a foreign environment was very important. It was meant as a movement from the margins into the center. If we think of home as part of the margins (a sheltered environment that exists, primarily, outside of a larger spotlight/world influence) and the school as The World, then we have Olivia's shift from outside in. Just as Mr. Trick and Kendra arrive in Sunnydale, from the margins of the show (off-screen) and into the center, Olivia moves from home to Boarding School and later from England (the margins) to Sunnydale (the center).
***
"The demons, the things that go bump in the night," Rupert says, "the monsters under your bed, are real."
Olivia pretends that she does not know this. Stares absently into space, gently petting his forearm crossed beneath her breasts.
“Scary,” she says distantly, dreamily.
“Too scary,” Rupert asks.
“I don’t know.
The lie is almost easy to tell. Smooth, but perhaps too quick off the tongue. It doesn’t change anything, not really. She was never planning to stay.
This is verbatim from the show. That first sentence is from the WTTH and after that the dialogue is from Hush. Re-watching the Olivia parts in Hush, I was struck at how much she *wasn't* present. Her purpose is totally obscure in context of the episode. She's never been mentioned to that point and she's never mentioned again. Except as a plot device, let's show that Rupert has a life outside of Buffy and the gang, she's superfluous. Sure, she gives us that great sketch but let's not imagine that for a second they wouldn't have figured out what The Gentlemen looked like at some point without her.
As I watched that scene, I was very taken with her distance. She just lays there in Rupert's arms giving very non-committal answers, not especially disturbed by what's happened. In fact, throughout the episode she doesn't seem particularly disturbed or surprised.
***
Boarding school made Olivia cry. Her British parents and her Haitian Grandmother made her cry. The loneliness and the stares, and she missed the smell of Peze in the morning.
Exoticizing Olivia was probably the obvious next step. After inserting her into the center, her Otherness becomes uncomfortable and problematic. The opening paragraphs established her otherness as an introduction aimed at the reader. It's my personal comment on blackness, but here, she's othered in tension with the text. She misses the things that are familiar to her but alien to us. Things that she can't find in this New World at the boarding school.
I remember moving to Scotland for the year when I was twenty and being incredibly nervous. I didn't know how diverse Scotland was and kept anticipating racial tension. I was surprised to find more ethnic people then I could find in Santa Barbara. However, there was still a sense that I was unusual. I came to discover that it was because I wasn't African, I was African-American and we just look different. For Winter break I traveled the continent and spent a week in Switzerland. I remember that I didn't see another "person of color" for that entire week. I also remember that for the first time since I'd arrived in Europe, I felt uncomfortable. Little kids stared at me like they'd never seen a black person. That was really, really, really weird and I would imagine that's what they mean by being under a microscope. It was very discomfiting and it really makes you just want to go home.
And then she met Astor, a beautiful boy with red lips and the bluest eyes she had ever seen. Astor kissed her once, told her she was beautiful: "The Queen of Sheba," he said and Olivia loved him.
Astor, in all his mainstream ignorance refers to Olivia as The Queen of Sheba. It plays back into literary trends in hyper-sexualized black female characters prevalent in literature through the late eighties, before it became un-PC.
I really like repeating images and phrases, and later Rupert mirrors this moment, although it will receive a very different reception from an older and more jaded Olivia. I also wanted to make a point of highlighting the distance between Astor and Olivia just in terms of skin color. She sees this red and white boy and he sees a dark, exotic girl. It's a trap that inter-racial couples, I think, sometimes tip-toe around. I think that even when you're in it, it's hard to acknowledge, let alone verbalize and in the beginning, with Olivia being so young, I wanted her to step right into that trap. This is not to demonize Astor at all because she is as attracted to his otherness as he is to hers.
He took her for long walks on the grounds. Held her hand by the lake. Kissed her in the theater balcony.
Olivia's relationships in the fic are always contained. Astor keeps her restricted to environments where they are not likely to be seen: empty grounds, quiet lake, empty theater balcony. Her relationship with Rupert, per canon, is limited to the confines of his apartment.
***
Olivia leans up and kisses him. Dips her tongue into Rupert’s mouth and tastes the bitter sweetness of the wine he’s been drinking. I do not like wine. I think it tastes bitter and it gives me a headache. However, I thought that bitter sweetness was a nice way to represent the tone of her relationship with Astor and with Rupert. Presses her mouth hard against his as if she can eat his disappointment away. For a moment Rupert is tense, no longer the pliable, passionate lover who greeted her at the front door. Olivia pulls back gently, coaxing him with her mouth to follow. A breath. Rupert gives her that. A moment of hovering rejection before he leans in and closes the space between them.
The negotiation between love and rejection here is my first attempt to distinguish between Rupert and Astor. I'm obviously setting up a comparison between them but I wanted to make it clear very early on that Rupert is "better" than Astor. He is a better man, a better choice and for more reasons than that he is older and more sophisticated. I wanted it to be clear that he really does care for Olivia because in that last scene in Hush, I got the feeling that he really is disappointed by her reaction to his confession. He really does care for her and we know that in this point in canon he's struggling with finding a place, establishing an identity, outside of his role as Watcher. Olivia is a step in that direction, and I wanted it clear that he wants that, he wants her.
It’s a smooth move, but perhaps too quick. The press of his mouth on hers too desperate, too much of please stay and not enough goodbye. Leaving is going to hurt, she can tell already.
Hello, repetition. He holds back as much as she does. Tries to pretend as much as she does. I tend to use repetitive language to imply an unspoken understanding, a way to acknowledge similar thoughts or responses between characters.
He bites into the overripe fullness of her bottom lip and then licks away the small hurt.
Okay, that line is two-fold. One, I think Olivia's lips are utterly bite-able. Two, it's a reminder that she is black. Get it? The whole stereotype that black people have big lips. Well, the actress really does, and that attraction to an overt symbol of stereotypical blackness (as well as sexualized blackness) is paralleled later with Astor.
***
It took less then two months for Astor to coax Olivia into bed. The first time was in the greenhouse surrounded by the scent of blooming orchids.
She loved his red lips and his hands and the way that he seemed so full of light. So very different from her own darkness. She loved to watch his hand smooth over her skin, loved to watch his body plunge into hers.
Like post-Colonial trends for suspending/distancing the threat of societal contamination by the Racial Other by placing all activity outside of the Empire, the greenhouse becomes the appropriately removed and contained space where their relationship is allowed to exist. They are together where others are not. The orchids were my attempt at further impressing the idea of the exotic. The orchid is also a very overt representation of the sexual function of flowers. Plus, Olivia is not your common English Rose, she is a beautiful, exotic hot house flower.
***
They undress, there, in the living room with the lights on and the curtains drawn. Perhaps the front door is locked, though neither of them can remember.
Rupert suckles at the round puff of her nipples, blackberries he once teased, and Olivia did not find it funny. The half-smile died slowly when her eyes rolled heavenward.
Moving the accidental racism (Astor and the Queen of Sheba) into the present, Rupert makes a dumb crack about her nipples that would be for me on par with the "I've never kissed a black girl" comment. The difference is that this comes after Astor, after Olivia has dated a variety of men and races, it also comes after Rupert and she have dated a bit and they've slept together and he's comfortable (Gee that's an awkward sentence). Rupert's too sophisticated, too aware, to make an off-color remark until he's more relaxed. I'm thinking of Rupert, not as he was while dating Jenny Calendar, but as someone closer to Ripper, a more confident, more aggressive Giles. I've found that referencing physical differences can be annoying or uncomfortable dependent on your personal hang-ups. I knew a girl who hated when people asked to touch her hair. She wore locs and it made her so irritated. I wanted to take it a step further and make it really uncomfortable and they are having sex after all. And on a personal note, although I've never had something like this happen with an intimate partner, I have had guys say "I've never kissed a black girl." For the record, it's a total turn off!
After the crack about her nipples, Rupert never says anything un-PC. He never asks Olivia questions about her hair or how it's possible that even she manages to darken in the summer sun. I have to say that even I am startled by how much I tan in the summer. And the first time I got a sunburn? OMG, forget it! There is something about his tentativeness that she likes. I was thinking here about power and the way that political correctness sometimes goes too far. Some people are overly sensitized to what they think of as racial slurs, basically waiting for any off-color remark regardless of whether it's meant to be derogatory or not. Anything is fair game. There is a certain power in that ability to make another person uncomfortable or wary of saying the wrong thing. I didn't want it to be as obvious as that for Olivia, but I wanted to hint at an awareness of her own superiority because he is perpetually worried about giving offense and with that anxiety comes the potential for her to ridicule. But in bed nothing changes. Even when she watches him hunched over her, a ghost in the darkness, she can’t control her body’s reaction.
Mostly she keeps her eyes closed.
Olivia, having been around the block, rolls her eyes. She's dated white guys before and this response/observation is not new. It's always the same thing for her: lips, ass, nipples, hair, skin color. What she has learned is that being drawn to the differences between herself and the man she is with, the "ghost in the darkness", can be painful and/or embarrassing. Or both. Not unlike having your boyfriend ask you about your afro after you've just washed your hair. Gah! (Tip: Never ask a black woman about her afro after she washes her hair if her hair is typically flat-ironed straight or she wears a weave.) So, Olivia keeps her eyes closed during sex, specifically to block out memories of Astor, and generally to ignore the obvious differences in their skin color. In retrospect, I might have also been thinking of the image of them in bed and how she was such a shadow and he was not.
Although, she feels dumb that he may make a dumb comment, she is drawn to him nevertheless. Dreads what he will say as much as she yearns for him as a person and as a lover. Rupert, in response, begins to go out of his way not to mention any racial/cultural differences.
***
Olivia and Astor took walks less and less frequently. He never held her hand. Then just before Christmas she asked him about Alison, a white-blonde Dresden doll that all the boys had been chasing since the end of summer.
Total. Stereotype: blond, blue-eyed girl. A perfect opposite/foil for Olivia.
Astor shrugged. “Depends on what you’ve heard,” he said.
“Astor…”
“You know I like you, Olivia. You’re so beautiful. Your skin. Your hair. Your eyes.” He pressed his thumb into the lush fullness of her lips. “Your mouth.” And he kissed her.
I wanted this to also be as much about relationships as it is about race. So you have the guy who sleeps with the girl and loses interest. Astor, initially attracted by the superficial differences between them, discovers that there isn't really a difference after all. He hasn't gotten to know her as a person, their relationship is located in the superficial. After the sex there's really nothing to sustain them, there's no real emotional connection. Olivia has sort of attached herself to the first guy who shows real interest as an anchor in this new environment. For Astor, there really isn't a difference in fucking her or fucking Alison. It's my own buried commentary on the hyper-sexualized black female caricature. It exists in Astor's brain, although it isn't as deliberate as that. Astor isn't deep enough as a character to think of it in those terms. He's just a kid, really. When I shift him into the replacement relationship, it's to a girl that he feels more comfortable introducing to his friends and to taking home for the holidays. And there's a very sharp return to her physical Otherness, an echo of Rupert and Olivia's bite-able lips.
***
Rupert tells Olivia how much he loves the way her body curves and bends. The sinewy length of her legs and arms. The narrowness of her hips always seems to surprise him.
(I just realized this very moment, how the shift from past to present is focused on / linked by physical descriptions of Olivia.) The actress who plays Olivia has that great West African build and I wanted to mention that.
He moves down her body, licking across the rise of her belly, just beneath the navel. He slides a finger inside her and Olivia arches hard against his hand.
"Built like a racehorse. For running," she says as he traces his mouth across her thigh. His fingers work ceaselessly.
She chokes, a hoarse moan breaking from her throat and she can feel his smile on the most secret part of her.
And sex. Yay!
***
A week later Astor and Alison were officially a couple. He walked her from Russian Literature to the lunchroom. Picked her up from swim practice and held her hand in the hallway. Olivia saw them, everywhere. Alison watched Olivia from the corners of her eyes. She leaned up and whispered into Astor’s ear, slid her arm around his waist and they laughed.
For two weeks Olivia let it go. She didn’t cry, didn’t scream. Bad behavior wouldn’t win him back. Tantrums wouldn’t fix anything.
I think that I fell back on exhaustion. I wanted so much more out of this fic than what I gave. I struggled with the language and the framing. How much to tell and how much to leave out. Where do we start? There were four very different drafts. The week before this was due, I scratched out what we get here. There are obviously places where it can be improved upon, but this isn't about my abilities as a writer, it's about a comment I wanted to make.
Astor courts Alison in public, the opposite of Olivia's courtship. He takes her to where they can be seen. Astor comes up with sly, disparaging remarks to make about Olivia and the looks/opinions that Alison has are not just the response of a woman jealous of her new boyfriend's old lover but also the insecurities of someone faced with the desired Other. The hyper-sexualized Other reflected in the eyes of the jealous competition.
***
Rupert bites and suckles, Olivia cries and shakes against his mouth and hands. He crawls up her body, licking across her belly and her breasts, those blackberry nipples. When he reaches her face, he kisses her, pauses as he tastes the goodbye on her lips and the flavor seems to decide something in him. Makes him rougher than usual as he pushes her thighs apart and settles between them.
“Olivia,” he calls. “Look at me.”
Gently rubbing himself against the outside of her body, he calls her name.
Olivia shakes her head, tilts her hips to take him; Rupert forces her down.
“Look at me,” he says.
It was important for me to show Rupert outside of the light that I worked to build around Astor. I wanted Rupert to insist that Olivia see him as an individual and as a person. Making her look at him is that effort.
***
The poppet nailed to the tree in the cemetery was the beginning. No tears. No wailing. No objections, a sort of message left for those who knew how to read it. A doll, her hem dipped in blood, nailed to a tree.
With the invocation of the spell, I moved Olivia into the prompt. Her power and the fact that she has it and Rupert doesn't know. Through her magic, Olivia becomes accepted. I didn't want the voodoo to be especially overt (intrusive or jarring) and since it already has its own language, I didn't feel the need to really expand the spell or complicate the ritual. It's just brief enough and just specific enough to get my point across. And it made use of the symbol everyone recognizes, a voodoo doll.
Alison, swimming laps during Swim Practice, went under with a cramp. There were many arms splashing in the pool. Hers were not unique.
Someone screamed when the body floated to the surface.
After that Astor held Olivia’s hand in the hall. Walked her from Geometry to the Common Hall. He kissed her beside the lake and made love to her in the greenhouse amidst the blooming roses.
The spell also creates an interesting shift, something I didn't really think about until after I posted. Throughout the fic I tried to represent both sides of a racial/racist discourse. At the very least reflecting Astor's unintentional racism in Olivia. When Olivia casts the spell that turns Astor into a zombie, for lack of a better term, it's another moment of reflection. Her sexualized body is replaced by his.
What I did fully intend was that Olivia move from the margins into the center. She inserts herself into the space left open by Alison, she moves from the exotic, distant unique and into normal. I copped out on the ending and should have gone more in depth on the emotional fallout of her affair with Astor. It's rather dispassionately done, and I wish that I had invested it with a little more emotion, provided a greater sense of her isolation.
Their lovemaking among the roses rather than the orchids is another shift in her position from the margins into the primary narrative. She is no longer the exotic Other represented by the Orchid, but has become the accepted English Rose.
Olivia took Astor home for Easter. Introduced him to her parents and took him to visit her Grandmother.
Marie did not let him into the house. “No,” she said, staring hard at Olivia. “You have been very wicked, ma petite.” She looked at Astor and shook her graying head. “This,” she said. “This is no good. Take him home. Let him go. This is no good.” And she closed the door.
Olivia thought about keeping him. Wanted to keep him. She told him to call her The Queen of Sheba and he did.
In the end she remembered her Grandmother’s face and she sent him home.
She did not tell her Grandmother about the poppet on the tree or about her deep satisfaction at the sight of Alison face down in the pool.
When Maria looked at her granddaughter sideways, out of the corners of her eyes, Olivia thought she knew the truth anyway.
Power: It's important that I point out that it isn't necessarily evil and I didn't want the power that Olivia has, the voodoo, to be evil. So, her grandmother's response which was initially different, is to turn away Olivia and her unnatural lover. Olivia, I didn't want to identify as good or bad, either. I wanted a more organic gray. At this point of her life, she's more a kid who makes a mistake, albiet a very violent one. I pictured her as somewhere around sixteen and I think her actions, as a young person with Power, makes a little more sense than Willow in Season Six who really should have known better. Although, I understand the point she was supposed to be making, I think. Maybe. I still love dark!Willow, though.
***
Olivia opens her eyes and stares up at her lover. She watches as he pushes inside her. Watches as he begins to break beneath his own rhythm.
She does not tell Rupert even as her body reaches for him, begging. Olivia does not tell him how although she is not manbo, she knows the spells and the rituals, the knowledge kissed into her forehead by her grandmother before she learned to walk.
Olivia does not tell him that there are more than just things that go bump in the night. She does not tell him that she knows. Never mentions a distant cousin sent away to leave with her teacher, her Watcher.
Olivia never tells Rupert that his secrets aren’t really secrets. She does not tell him that there are worse things then The Gentlemen, Les Messieurs. She does not tell him that perhaps she is one of them.
She is not staying, after all.
Finally, Olivia's longing and the reason that she cannot stay is a longing for normalcy. I wanted to make her desire mirror or reflect the underlying theme of BtVS. Olivia as Other, disconnected from the primary cast, is a visiting figure who can, theoretically, achieve that desire by leaving Sunnydale. One, she moves away from the "white washed" location where her physical appearance is unique. Two, she refuses a place within the margins as defined by the show. And what I'm trying, rather poorly, to get at is that she rejects a place within the minority community of Sunnydale (among the demons, vampires, supernatural) that being a manbo would potentially make available to her. I don't think it's implied or explicit in the fic, but she is not practicing. That's pretty much something only I would know and it was actually a very prominent plot point (try saying that three times fast) in a previous version of the story.
Despite the intimacy of her relationship with Rupert, despite the implication of a past and possible future, Olivia is consigned to the ether. In the context of Vex Not the Roses, she is unwilling to sacrifice her desire for a normal, average existence. She does not wish to be unusual or unique. Meta-textually, it's enough that she is Othered by Race and that she doesn't want to add an additional layer by inserting herself into a story that would push her further outside into the margins.
One final note: The title was actually very deliberately a reference to the English Rose. Here is Olivia, this dangerous Orchid, masquerading as a demure English Rose and you'd better not piss her off!
Prompt: Olivia, power and irony
ETA: Ha! On reflection, I don't think that even Made sense.
Updated: Now with slightly more commentary, better grammar and the results of my quality time spent with Mr. Spellcheck.
I started writing this not long after the fic was posted. I've become very interested in all the thought that goes into writing, regardless of the length. It's fascinating to me to see what goes into it, how much gets left out and the path one takes to arrive at a completed piece. Vex was a piece that I actually thought very hard about. I don't usually externalize the writing process nearly as much I did on this. This is long, so don't feel the need to read it or comment on it. I enjoyed writing the fic and the commentary.
Race, Roses and Orchids: on writing Vex Not the Roses
Title: Vex Not the Roses
Author: seraphcelene
Summary: The demons, the things that go bump in the night, the monsters under your bed, are real.
A/N: I wrote it in the 11th hour. After two weeks and four different versions this is the one that decided to finish itself. It’s all over the map. Unbeta’d. Written for minim calibre for the Character of Color Multifandom Challenge. The prompt is at the end of the text so you don’t laugh too hard at how far off the map I went.
Spoilers: Hush
Rating: NC-17
I. The Frame
Vex Not the Roses was written for the Character of Color Multifandom Fic Challenge hosted by
choc_fic. I saw the nature of the forum and challenge as a license to explore one of the most problematic/taboo subjects in fandom -- race. How do we interpret Olivia's presence in an episode with limited dialog? As a "person of color" (so polite) I wanted to invest Olivia with some of what it might mean to be black and to be a black person dating outside her race. I don't think this is a case of Mary Sue. Most of what occurs in the piece is fictional, extrapolations of minor events in my life, the lives of friends, and what I've read and seen on TV and in the media. Like all good writers, I took all of those sources, threw in a dash of imagination and ran with it.To begin at the very beginning, this was not my first attempt at writing color into fic. The very first fic I ever wrote was Coffee, a Roswell fic that appropriated a throwaway character, Serena (End of the World), to introduce a little color into a white washed cast. Literally, I was laying on my bedroom floor, enjoying a cup of coffee -- for real -- watching TV and thinking of the WB's shift from programming directed towards a black audience to its sudden, apparent, "whiteness". Admittedly, I had never watched much of the WB's "black" shows because I don't watch sitcoms and the majority of what is offered up to ethnic audiences appears to be half-hour situational comedies. Drama, although they may contain 'non-white' (token) cast members, rarely provide complex, three-dimensional characters. Of course, there are exceptions: Homicide, Firefly, Grey's Anatomy.
I decided to make Serena bi-racial to make her more "palatable." (I was nervous about my potential audiences reaction to an inter-racial relationship.) Not an unusual device, the mulatta was a popular character in American literature as late as the 1960's. Years later, as a graduate student, I wrote my theses on the socio-political impact of the mulatta on identity in the Harlem Renaissance. The mulatta's ability to bridge class and race was part of the discussion.
Serena is probably the closest I've ever come to Mary Sue-ing a character. I loved Kyle and the girl was black and pretty and basically an OC. But let's remember it was my first fic EVER!
The point is that Serena was my response to 'my' absence on the shows I watched. At the time: Buffy, early (pre-Gunn, I think) Angel, Roswell and Farscape. Buffy did offer us Kendra, a one-dimensional near-stereotype with a bad accent. (Sorry, my best friend is Jamaican and I grew up around Jamaicans. They don't really sound like Kendra.) But Kendra was killed off. One cultural in-joke is that black characters are disposable tokens. They are the first ones to be killed. In support of that theory: Kendra bites it and Mr. Trick goes the way of the stake. Coloring up Slayerdom has ever been problematic, and although we can dismiss Kendra's death as the natural conclusion to the Slayer's destiny (the same with the Chinese Slayer and Wood's mother), we are still left with a noticeably homogenized Sunnydale: the beautiful, white and middle class center that fails to incorporate even a regular ethnic/minority character.
I'd like to suggest that the minority role has been re-assigned in Sunnydale to the demonic. The 'Racial Other' has been literally 'othered', and therefore Kendra, and other ethnic characters, cannot take-up permanent residence in Sunnydale. There is, simply, no place for them. Rather they are forced deeper into the margins; they are background bodies filling space and waiting to be rescued or killed, never to be named or known. Robin Wood began a negotiation of the space between Sunnydale's outer margins and the othered Other, but his presence on the show is limited to plot device. I'd love to read an analysis of his function within the text if anyone's up for it.
The First Slayer and the slayer's origins in Africa are almost stereotypical and comical. I could read Buffy's resistance to the First Slayer as the dominance of the white majority over the ethnic minority but that's way too simplistic and, I think, rather wrong headed. But it can be read that way.
Okay, so now we have characters of color on our TV's and in our shows. What now? The question I ask is do we or don't we address issues of race and racism or do we go along as if being 'other' doesn't mean anything, largely because 'Other' has been appropriated and re-assigned? Us versus Them is no longer Black versus White or whatever dominant group versus whatever minority. It is Human versus Monster. Does humanity expand and suddenly become more inclusive? I would argue that in the Real World it would not and that in Sunnydale it does not. There is always an Us versus Them and within the context of whoever makes up Us and whoever makes up Them, there are derivations into sex and race. For example, in fandom, one component of the sexual divide falls out as Het versus Slash, and Slash versus Fem-Slash.
I would argue that just because the Other now has fangs and bumpy foreheads does not erase previous discourse on the Racial Other. It can't and shouldn't mean that particular discourse ends. In Buffy, what I see is a further marginalization of those characters and their attendant issues. The only character that I recall who makes comment on Sunnydale's whiteness is Mr. Trick (an othered Other) and he has moved from one marginalized group into another. Indeed, he is allowed to remain in Sunnydale because he has found a place in the resident minority population, among the demons.
Yet, with the exception of that one comment, there is still a noticeable absence of racial dialog. We get the sexual: all Slayers are females. Slayers, females, are destined for death (and I actually have an essay in the works on that topic). We get openly gay characters, closeted gay characters and sub-texted bi-sexual characters.
All of these thoughts informed Vex Not the Roses, and I wondered as I wrote and after I posted, who would get it. Without coming right out and saying it, who would recognize and understand the comment that I was trying to make? I didn't think that anyone would get it and if they did, they probably wouldn't mention it because race seems to be as much an issue (or should I say non-issue) in fannish text as it is in canon. The very place that makes room for Slash, Femslash, non-con, torture, rape, and incest, very reluctantly touches upon matters of skin color and cultural difference.
II. The Text
The prompt left by
minim_calibre was Olivia, power and irony. My thoughts were rather stereotypical: Black British, obviously of African descent, ancestors were probably relatively recent migrants. There has to be something that involves magic or demons, otherwise we don't get the irony. The easiest thing to do was to make the magic voodoo and what do most people think of when they think voodoo, besides zombies? They think Haiti or, at least in America, Creole. I went with Haiti. Realistically, I should have gone with somewhere in Africa, the actress's features look more sub-continent than island, but my access to research was limited due to my extreme disinterest in getting my butt up and to the library. So I snuck it in at work. Mostly, through Wikipedia. I figured I could cheat on the rest because voodoo already has its own literary/film tradition. All I had to do was go with the popular interpretations, which I discovered aren't at all accurate. Big surprise that. Again, because of the very nature of the challenge, I felt comfortable, indeed challenged, to deal immediately with race and not just to write a story featuring a character of color. I also wanted very much to "tie" it into the themes of BtVS: alienation, isolation, the desire for normalcy. So, I wanted to reflect Olivia's desire for acceptance as two-fold, racial and social. I wanted those desires to be intertwined, to feed each other. I wanted to create a connection, a circle.
"Haiti is in your blood," Marie always told her granddaughter. Long before Olivia gave up straightening her hair. Long before the afros and the wild curls. Long, long before the locs.
I focused on her hair to convey a sense of developing identity. Straight hair, then afros, curls and finally the locs she wears in Hush, moving from mainstream standards of beauty and into an ethnic (read Afrocentric) identity. Nothing overt, Olivia never struck me as Mighty!Black or Uber!Black. Just a girl confident enough in herself, comfortable enough with her '"blackness" to date outside her race. Yes, I know that Race in Britain is different from Race in the U.S. I lived in the UK for a year and I definitely noticed the difference in attitudes and social acceptability.
"Haiti is in your blood", she would say, as she taught Olivia the prayers of the Sevis Gine. Marie showed her granddaughter the proper way to make sacrifice. Who to call on and how. And Olivia's parents were, happily, none the wiser until the one time with the zombie.
The magic, the voodoo, is our secondary location of Other, so we get that two-fold effect represented in canon by Mr. Trick. I also wanted to differentiate between generations. The grandmother who migrated late in life and is preserving her traditions by teaching them to her granddaughter because her own daughter worked very hard to assimilate. So even within her own family structure there is an Us versus Them, a separation that will be mirrored throughout the fic.
I also wanted the voodoo to be not such a big deal, sort of something that's ingrained, natural. Not unlike learning your grandmother's secret family recipes, only one time something went a little wonky and there was a zombie. In my early notes, I also decided to give myself bonus points if I could work in at least one zombie. Luckily, I managed two. Hi!
After that, Olivia was packed up and sent away to boarding school.
Moving Olivia into a foreign environment was very important. It was meant as a movement from the margins into the center. If we think of home as part of the margins (a sheltered environment that exists, primarily, outside of a larger spotlight/world influence) and the school as The World, then we have Olivia's shift from outside in. Just as Mr. Trick and Kendra arrive in Sunnydale, from the margins of the show (off-screen) and into the center, Olivia moves from home to Boarding School and later from England (the margins) to Sunnydale (the center).
***
"The demons, the things that go bump in the night," Rupert says, "the monsters under your bed, are real."
Olivia pretends that she does not know this. Stares absently into space, gently petting his forearm crossed beneath her breasts.
“Scary,” she says distantly, dreamily.
“Too scary,” Rupert asks.
“I don’t know.
The lie is almost easy to tell. Smooth, but perhaps too quick off the tongue. It doesn’t change anything, not really. She was never planning to stay.
This is verbatim from the show. That first sentence is from the WTTH and after that the dialogue is from Hush. Re-watching the Olivia parts in Hush, I was struck at how much she *wasn't* present. Her purpose is totally obscure in context of the episode. She's never been mentioned to that point and she's never mentioned again. Except as a plot device, let's show that Rupert has a life outside of Buffy and the gang, she's superfluous. Sure, she gives us that great sketch but let's not imagine that for a second they wouldn't have figured out what The Gentlemen looked like at some point without her.
As I watched that scene, I was very taken with her distance. She just lays there in Rupert's arms giving very non-committal answers, not especially disturbed by what's happened. In fact, throughout the episode she doesn't seem particularly disturbed or surprised.
***
Boarding school made Olivia cry. Her British parents and her Haitian Grandmother made her cry. The loneliness and the stares, and she missed the smell of Peze in the morning.
Exoticizing Olivia was probably the obvious next step. After inserting her into the center, her Otherness becomes uncomfortable and problematic. The opening paragraphs established her otherness as an introduction aimed at the reader. It's my personal comment on blackness, but here, she's othered in tension with the text. She misses the things that are familiar to her but alien to us. Things that she can't find in this New World at the boarding school.
I remember moving to Scotland for the year when I was twenty and being incredibly nervous. I didn't know how diverse Scotland was and kept anticipating racial tension. I was surprised to find more ethnic people then I could find in Santa Barbara. However, there was still a sense that I was unusual. I came to discover that it was because I wasn't African, I was African-American and we just look different. For Winter break I traveled the continent and spent a week in Switzerland. I remember that I didn't see another "person of color" for that entire week. I also remember that for the first time since I'd arrived in Europe, I felt uncomfortable. Little kids stared at me like they'd never seen a black person. That was really, really, really weird and I would imagine that's what they mean by being under a microscope. It was very discomfiting and it really makes you just want to go home.
And then she met Astor, a beautiful boy with red lips and the bluest eyes she had ever seen. Astor kissed her once, told her she was beautiful: "The Queen of Sheba," he said and Olivia loved him.
Astor, in all his mainstream ignorance refers to Olivia as The Queen of Sheba. It plays back into literary trends in hyper-sexualized black female characters prevalent in literature through the late eighties, before it became un-PC.
I really like repeating images and phrases, and later Rupert mirrors this moment, although it will receive a very different reception from an older and more jaded Olivia. I also wanted to make a point of highlighting the distance between Astor and Olivia just in terms of skin color. She sees this red and white boy and he sees a dark, exotic girl. It's a trap that inter-racial couples, I think, sometimes tip-toe around. I think that even when you're in it, it's hard to acknowledge, let alone verbalize and in the beginning, with Olivia being so young, I wanted her to step right into that trap. This is not to demonize Astor at all because she is as attracted to his otherness as he is to hers.
He took her for long walks on the grounds. Held her hand by the lake. Kissed her in the theater balcony.
Olivia's relationships in the fic are always contained. Astor keeps her restricted to environments where they are not likely to be seen: empty grounds, quiet lake, empty theater balcony. Her relationship with Rupert, per canon, is limited to the confines of his apartment.
***
Olivia leans up and kisses him. Dips her tongue into Rupert’s mouth and tastes the bitter sweetness of the wine he’s been drinking. I do not like wine. I think it tastes bitter and it gives me a headache. However, I thought that bitter sweetness was a nice way to represent the tone of her relationship with Astor and with Rupert. Presses her mouth hard against his as if she can eat his disappointment away. For a moment Rupert is tense, no longer the pliable, passionate lover who greeted her at the front door. Olivia pulls back gently, coaxing him with her mouth to follow. A breath. Rupert gives her that. A moment of hovering rejection before he leans in and closes the space between them.
The negotiation between love and rejection here is my first attempt to distinguish between Rupert and Astor. I'm obviously setting up a comparison between them but I wanted to make it clear very early on that Rupert is "better" than Astor. He is a better man, a better choice and for more reasons than that he is older and more sophisticated. I wanted it to be clear that he really does care for Olivia because in that last scene in Hush, I got the feeling that he really is disappointed by her reaction to his confession. He really does care for her and we know that in this point in canon he's struggling with finding a place, establishing an identity, outside of his role as Watcher. Olivia is a step in that direction, and I wanted it clear that he wants that, he wants her.
It’s a smooth move, but perhaps too quick. The press of his mouth on hers too desperate, too much of please stay and not enough goodbye. Leaving is going to hurt, she can tell already.
Hello, repetition. He holds back as much as she does. Tries to pretend as much as she does. I tend to use repetitive language to imply an unspoken understanding, a way to acknowledge similar thoughts or responses between characters.
He bites into the overripe fullness of her bottom lip and then licks away the small hurt.
Okay, that line is two-fold. One, I think Olivia's lips are utterly bite-able. Two, it's a reminder that she is black. Get it? The whole stereotype that black people have big lips. Well, the actress really does, and that attraction to an overt symbol of stereotypical blackness (as well as sexualized blackness) is paralleled later with Astor.
***
It took less then two months for Astor to coax Olivia into bed. The first time was in the greenhouse surrounded by the scent of blooming orchids.
She loved his red lips and his hands and the way that he seemed so full of light. So very different from her own darkness. She loved to watch his hand smooth over her skin, loved to watch his body plunge into hers.
Like post-Colonial trends for suspending/distancing the threat of societal contamination by the Racial Other by placing all activity outside of the Empire, the greenhouse becomes the appropriately removed and contained space where their relationship is allowed to exist. They are together where others are not. The orchids were my attempt at further impressing the idea of the exotic. The orchid is also a very overt representation of the sexual function of flowers. Plus, Olivia is not your common English Rose, she is a beautiful, exotic hot house flower.
***
They undress, there, in the living room with the lights on and the curtains drawn. Perhaps the front door is locked, though neither of them can remember.
Rupert suckles at the round puff of her nipples, blackberries he once teased, and Olivia did not find it funny. The half-smile died slowly when her eyes rolled heavenward.
Moving the accidental racism (Astor and the Queen of Sheba) into the present, Rupert makes a dumb crack about her nipples that would be for me on par with the "I've never kissed a black girl" comment. The difference is that this comes after Astor, after Olivia has dated a variety of men and races, it also comes after Rupert and she have dated a bit and they've slept together and he's comfortable (Gee that's an awkward sentence). Rupert's too sophisticated, too aware, to make an off-color remark until he's more relaxed. I'm thinking of Rupert, not as he was while dating Jenny Calendar, but as someone closer to Ripper, a more confident, more aggressive Giles. I've found that referencing physical differences can be annoying or uncomfortable dependent on your personal hang-ups. I knew a girl who hated when people asked to touch her hair. She wore locs and it made her so irritated. I wanted to take it a step further and make it really uncomfortable and they are having sex after all. And on a personal note, although I've never had something like this happen with an intimate partner, I have had guys say "I've never kissed a black girl." For the record, it's a total turn off!
After the crack about her nipples, Rupert never says anything un-PC. He never asks Olivia questions about her hair or how it's possible that even she manages to darken in the summer sun. I have to say that even I am startled by how much I tan in the summer. And the first time I got a sunburn? OMG, forget it! There is something about his tentativeness that she likes. I was thinking here about power and the way that political correctness sometimes goes too far. Some people are overly sensitized to what they think of as racial slurs, basically waiting for any off-color remark regardless of whether it's meant to be derogatory or not. Anything is fair game. There is a certain power in that ability to make another person uncomfortable or wary of saying the wrong thing. I didn't want it to be as obvious as that for Olivia, but I wanted to hint at an awareness of her own superiority because he is perpetually worried about giving offense and with that anxiety comes the potential for her to ridicule. But in bed nothing changes. Even when she watches him hunched over her, a ghost in the darkness, she can’t control her body’s reaction.
Mostly she keeps her eyes closed.
Olivia, having been around the block, rolls her eyes. She's dated white guys before and this response/observation is not new. It's always the same thing for her: lips, ass, nipples, hair, skin color. What she has learned is that being drawn to the differences between herself and the man she is with, the "ghost in the darkness", can be painful and/or embarrassing. Or both. Not unlike having your boyfriend ask you about your afro after you've just washed your hair. Gah! (Tip: Never ask a black woman about her afro after she washes her hair if her hair is typically flat-ironed straight or she wears a weave.) So, Olivia keeps her eyes closed during sex, specifically to block out memories of Astor, and generally to ignore the obvious differences in their skin color. In retrospect, I might have also been thinking of the image of them in bed and how she was such a shadow and he was not.
Although, she feels dumb that he may make a dumb comment, she is drawn to him nevertheless. Dreads what he will say as much as she yearns for him as a person and as a lover. Rupert, in response, begins to go out of his way not to mention any racial/cultural differences.
***
Olivia and Astor took walks less and less frequently. He never held her hand. Then just before Christmas she asked him about Alison, a white-blonde Dresden doll that all the boys had been chasing since the end of summer.
Total. Stereotype: blond, blue-eyed girl. A perfect opposite/foil for Olivia.
Astor shrugged. “Depends on what you’ve heard,” he said.
“Astor…”
“You know I like you, Olivia. You’re so beautiful. Your skin. Your hair. Your eyes.” He pressed his thumb into the lush fullness of her lips. “Your mouth.” And he kissed her.
I wanted this to also be as much about relationships as it is about race. So you have the guy who sleeps with the girl and loses interest. Astor, initially attracted by the superficial differences between them, discovers that there isn't really a difference after all. He hasn't gotten to know her as a person, their relationship is located in the superficial. After the sex there's really nothing to sustain them, there's no real emotional connection. Olivia has sort of attached herself to the first guy who shows real interest as an anchor in this new environment. For Astor, there really isn't a difference in fucking her or fucking Alison. It's my own buried commentary on the hyper-sexualized black female caricature. It exists in Astor's brain, although it isn't as deliberate as that. Astor isn't deep enough as a character to think of it in those terms. He's just a kid, really. When I shift him into the replacement relationship, it's to a girl that he feels more comfortable introducing to his friends and to taking home for the holidays. And there's a very sharp return to her physical Otherness, an echo of Rupert and Olivia's bite-able lips.
***
Rupert tells Olivia how much he loves the way her body curves and bends. The sinewy length of her legs and arms. The narrowness of her hips always seems to surprise him.
(I just realized this very moment, how the shift from past to present is focused on / linked by physical descriptions of Olivia.) The actress who plays Olivia has that great West African build and I wanted to mention that.
He moves down her body, licking across the rise of her belly, just beneath the navel. He slides a finger inside her and Olivia arches hard against his hand.
"Built like a racehorse. For running," she says as he traces his mouth across her thigh. His fingers work ceaselessly.
She chokes, a hoarse moan breaking from her throat and she can feel his smile on the most secret part of her.
And sex. Yay!
***
A week later Astor and Alison were officially a couple. He walked her from Russian Literature to the lunchroom. Picked her up from swim practice and held her hand in the hallway. Olivia saw them, everywhere. Alison watched Olivia from the corners of her eyes. She leaned up and whispered into Astor’s ear, slid her arm around his waist and they laughed.
For two weeks Olivia let it go. She didn’t cry, didn’t scream. Bad behavior wouldn’t win him back. Tantrums wouldn’t fix anything.
I think that I fell back on exhaustion. I wanted so much more out of this fic than what I gave. I struggled with the language and the framing. How much to tell and how much to leave out. Where do we start? There were four very different drafts. The week before this was due, I scratched out what we get here. There are obviously places where it can be improved upon, but this isn't about my abilities as a writer, it's about a comment I wanted to make.
Astor courts Alison in public, the opposite of Olivia's courtship. He takes her to where they can be seen. Astor comes up with sly, disparaging remarks to make about Olivia and the looks/opinions that Alison has are not just the response of a woman jealous of her new boyfriend's old lover but also the insecurities of someone faced with the desired Other. The hyper-sexualized Other reflected in the eyes of the jealous competition.
***
Rupert bites and suckles, Olivia cries and shakes against his mouth and hands. He crawls up her body, licking across her belly and her breasts, those blackberry nipples. When he reaches her face, he kisses her, pauses as he tastes the goodbye on her lips and the flavor seems to decide something in him. Makes him rougher than usual as he pushes her thighs apart and settles between them.
“Olivia,” he calls. “Look at me.”
Gently rubbing himself against the outside of her body, he calls her name.
Olivia shakes her head, tilts her hips to take him; Rupert forces her down.
“Look at me,” he says.
It was important for me to show Rupert outside of the light that I worked to build around Astor. I wanted Rupert to insist that Olivia see him as an individual and as a person. Making her look at him is that effort.
***
The poppet nailed to the tree in the cemetery was the beginning. No tears. No wailing. No objections, a sort of message left for those who knew how to read it. A doll, her hem dipped in blood, nailed to a tree.
With the invocation of the spell, I moved Olivia into the prompt. Her power and the fact that she has it and Rupert doesn't know. Through her magic, Olivia becomes accepted. I didn't want the voodoo to be especially overt (intrusive or jarring) and since it already has its own language, I didn't feel the need to really expand the spell or complicate the ritual. It's just brief enough and just specific enough to get my point across. And it made use of the symbol everyone recognizes, a voodoo doll.
Alison, swimming laps during Swim Practice, went under with a cramp. There were many arms splashing in the pool. Hers were not unique.
Someone screamed when the body floated to the surface.
After that Astor held Olivia’s hand in the hall. Walked her from Geometry to the Common Hall. He kissed her beside the lake and made love to her in the greenhouse amidst the blooming roses.
The spell also creates an interesting shift, something I didn't really think about until after I posted. Throughout the fic I tried to represent both sides of a racial/racist discourse. At the very least reflecting Astor's unintentional racism in Olivia. When Olivia casts the spell that turns Astor into a zombie, for lack of a better term, it's another moment of reflection. Her sexualized body is replaced by his.
What I did fully intend was that Olivia move from the margins into the center. She inserts herself into the space left open by Alison, she moves from the exotic, distant unique and into normal. I copped out on the ending and should have gone more in depth on the emotional fallout of her affair with Astor. It's rather dispassionately done, and I wish that I had invested it with a little more emotion, provided a greater sense of her isolation.
Their lovemaking among the roses rather than the orchids is another shift in her position from the margins into the primary narrative. She is no longer the exotic Other represented by the Orchid, but has become the accepted English Rose.
Olivia took Astor home for Easter. Introduced him to her parents and took him to visit her Grandmother.
Marie did not let him into the house. “No,” she said, staring hard at Olivia. “You have been very wicked, ma petite.” She looked at Astor and shook her graying head. “This,” she said. “This is no good. Take him home. Let him go. This is no good.” And she closed the door.
Olivia thought about keeping him. Wanted to keep him. She told him to call her The Queen of Sheba and he did.
In the end she remembered her Grandmother’s face and she sent him home.
She did not tell her Grandmother about the poppet on the tree or about her deep satisfaction at the sight of Alison face down in the pool.
When Maria looked at her granddaughter sideways, out of the corners of her eyes, Olivia thought she knew the truth anyway.
Power: It's important that I point out that it isn't necessarily evil and I didn't want the power that Olivia has, the voodoo, to be evil. So, her grandmother's response which was initially different, is to turn away Olivia and her unnatural lover. Olivia, I didn't want to identify as good or bad, either. I wanted a more organic gray. At this point of her life, she's more a kid who makes a mistake, albiet a very violent one. I pictured her as somewhere around sixteen and I think her actions, as a young person with Power, makes a little more sense than Willow in Season Six who really should have known better. Although, I understand the point she was supposed to be making, I think. Maybe. I still love dark!Willow, though.
***
Olivia opens her eyes and stares up at her lover. She watches as he pushes inside her. Watches as he begins to break beneath his own rhythm.
She does not tell Rupert even as her body reaches for him, begging. Olivia does not tell him how although she is not manbo, she knows the spells and the rituals, the knowledge kissed into her forehead by her grandmother before she learned to walk.
Olivia does not tell him that there are more than just things that go bump in the night. She does not tell him that she knows. Never mentions a distant cousin sent away to leave with her teacher, her Watcher.
Olivia never tells Rupert that his secrets aren’t really secrets. She does not tell him that there are worse things then The Gentlemen, Les Messieurs. She does not tell him that perhaps she is one of them.
She is not staying, after all.
Finally, Olivia's longing and the reason that she cannot stay is a longing for normalcy. I wanted to make her desire mirror or reflect the underlying theme of BtVS. Olivia as Other, disconnected from the primary cast, is a visiting figure who can, theoretically, achieve that desire by leaving Sunnydale. One, she moves away from the "white washed" location where her physical appearance is unique. Two, she refuses a place within the margins as defined by the show. And what I'm trying, rather poorly, to get at is that she rejects a place within the minority community of Sunnydale (among the demons, vampires, supernatural) that being a manbo would potentially make available to her. I don't think it's implied or explicit in the fic, but she is not practicing. That's pretty much something only I would know and it was actually a very prominent plot point (try saying that three times fast) in a previous version of the story.
Despite the intimacy of her relationship with Rupert, despite the implication of a past and possible future, Olivia is consigned to the ether. In the context of Vex Not the Roses, she is unwilling to sacrifice her desire for a normal, average existence. She does not wish to be unusual or unique. Meta-textually, it's enough that she is Othered by Race and that she doesn't want to add an additional layer by inserting herself into a story that would push her further outside into the margins.
One final note: The title was actually very deliberately a reference to the English Rose. Here is Olivia, this dangerous Orchid, masquerading as a demure English Rose and you'd better not piss her off!
Prompt: Olivia, power and irony
ETA: Ha! On reflection, I don't think that even Made sense.
Updated: Now with slightly more commentary, better grammar and the results of my quality time spent with Mr. Spellcheck.
