skip the light fandango

Title: Eye of the Beholder
Author: Maren
Pairing: Nina & Cordelia
Rating: G
Words: ~1200
Summary: They say perfection is in the eye of the beholder.
Setting: Set in an alternate AtS 5 where Cordy sticks around after waking up
Author Notes: Written for demasduitdream for the Nina round of femslash_minis. Requests were for genfic with girl talk. Thanks to southernbangel for the quick beta.



They meet here for Happy Hour every Friday night, miles away from Wolfram & Hart even though they could drink for free in the firm’s lounge. The Senior Partners are worried about what they are capable of, together, the power they hold over the thoughts and emotions of people that the partners have invested too much in to lose, so they recruited Megan to sit alone at the bar every Friday night too. She knows her bosses have something in store for her, for them, but they’re very careful not to let her see what that might be and she’s too frightened of them to push against the barriers. Instead she comes and she sits and she waits.

It’s Megan’s job to watch them, and it’s a job for which she’s particularly suited. Not because she has perfect vision, which she doesn’t, as evidenced by the coke-bottle thick glasses that anyone who might bother to look at her couldn’t help but notice. And not because, in fact, no one ever actually does notice her, like she’s so bland that she blends into whatever surrounds her.

It’s more the opposite, actually. Things bleed when they’re in Megan’s presence, not blood but energy and something inside her sucks it all up and makes sense of it. She doesn’t know how it works; she just has to open herself up to it and it (whatever it is) happens. Sounds, feelings, sometimes even memories that are so vivid she isn’t sure until after that they aren’t happening in the here and now.

It used to make her feel special. So what if she had lank brown hair and skin that was always too pale for a girl who grew up in a California beach town? She had something better, something extraordinary, something that was only hers and no matter how pretty and popular other girls were, they would never be as good as her. They would never be able to see her, hear her, feel her the way that she could them.

Then she’d been assigned to watch Nina Ash and Cordelia Chase. Now everything is different. Megan is different, sure. . . but not as different, not as special as she once thought.

"You do realize I’m a werewolf, right? Three days every month I go hairy and I think I might actually froth a little at the mouth. And then there’s the other three days around the full-moon. God help the population of L.A. if they ever coincide—I’m not exactly your average friendly Teen Wolf, here."

"Please, I saw scarier things than werewolves in the locker room during cheerleading camp. Anyway, you’ve got nothing on me. I’ve been pregnant with demon-spawn not once, but twice, and I have a stretch mark to prove it. Of course it goes without saying I’ll call animal patrol on you if you ever breathe a word about that to anyone."

"Like stretch marks are a big deal. If that was traumatic I’d have been institutionalized after my breasts went up two cups sizes in a month when I was 14. I’m a vegetarian who craves raw meat and a week ago I actually caught myself contemplating whether my neighbor’s cat would taste better rare or medium rare. Unless you drink blood to survive like your boss, I think I win the ‘grossest side effect’ award."

"No, but I go all glowy. . . completely useless power, by the way, unless you’re stuck in the dark without a flashlight. I got seriously screwed in the supernatural abilities department. I wonder if there’s a complaint line?"

The way they banter makes Megan’s gut twist with jealousy, the biting, lightning quick wit that flows from brains to mouths so fast she can barely sense the movement before it's out. No one has ever bantered with her that way, never smiled as they said something mean and meant the smile, not the words. Not that it matters. Even if someone had tried, Megan knows she’d never have been able to think of something to say in time. She’d spent too many nights lying awake thinking of the perfect thing to say hours after it was the perfect time to say it. But the two of them, they talk like oil flows, slick and quick and oh so smooth and Megan doesn’t like the way it makes her feel like molasses in comparison.

And the banter is just the tip of the iceberg. It’s the feelings and thoughts that precede and follow that give what happens between them meaning. Like she knows that when Cordelia jokes about being a higher being, there is a part of her that is screaming in terror and rage and that it’s work for her to make the twist of her lips wry instead of agonized. And she knows that Nina isn’t as oblivious as she pretends, that she winks and rolls her eyes to give Cordelia a focus for her forced amusement. Sometimes, when the talk gets too serious and Cordelia’s energy feels like glass, Nina reaches out to brush her fingers against Cordelia’s, every digit warm and soothing and the strength that passes between them is so thick that Megan thinks if she was close enough, she could touch it.

Sometimes Nina touches Cordelia’s thigh instead of her fingers, and something else passes between them. Megan doesn’t have a name for that, but it makes her tingle, makes her want to brush her fingertips over her lips to see what they feel like. It’s been happening more and more lately and it throws her, distracts her so much that sometimes she loses minutes lost in that warmth.

There are other things that make her warm, like Nina’s laugh. . .

"Why does every guy who is under the age of 95 think it's ok to ogle any semi-attractive woman under the age of 30? I’d rather date my art professor, with her Frida Kahlo eyebrows and Buscemi bug-eyes, than the majority of the men who are sliming us with their eyes right now."

or Cordelia’s eyes, when they dance with amusement. . .

"You are like, the one person in America who can pull off wearing a peasant skirt without looking like you’re pretending to be the clichéd cool but poor art chick. . . oh, wait. . . "

and sometimes when they’re together and quiet and peaceful with being that way, like they couldn’t even imagine what it might feel like to be stuck in an awkward pause because they’re so comfortable together.

Megan can’t relate, but she wants to. She’s always wanted to. She grew up surrounded by girls like them, beautiful and confident and smart, but Megan had learned to ignore it because she was special. Except she doesn’t feel that way any more, not in the weeks she’s been watching them for the Senior Partners. It never occurred to Megan that there might be girls out there like them—lucky in all the ways that Megan is not, and special too. The knowledge eats at her every day, with every encounter with a part-demon-past-demi-god and her werewolf buddy, with every memory she leeches of super powered girls with perfect bouncy blond hair or dark, powerful beauty that screams sex.

It’s not fair, and it’s driving her crazy.

She thinks she’ll be ready, when the time comes, to do whatever the Senior Partners have planned for her.

~~End