Welcome to Buffyness and Nightlurkers Presents: Fray, Issue #5 – “Chapter Five: The Worst of It”! In the previous installment, Melaka Fray has enough flashbacks about her twin brother Hatch that we now know the whole story: Icarus confronted them, Melaka couldn’t stop him, Icarus bit Hatch, Melaka fell off a building, Hatch died, Erin blames Melaka. A sad story. We’ve all been there.

The encounter with Icarus was curious because he knew Fray’s name. Her reputation precedes her, and a little chat with Gunther reveals… nothing. But Fray gets knocked out during a Lurk fracas and Icarus takes her to his Master.

His Master is Hatch!

Eeek! Who saw that coming?! Not me, and I have an IQ of 303! Let’s see how Vamp Hatch is going to fuck with Melaka’s mind and cause her to cry and stuff. That’ll be fun.

Fray, Issue #5 [December, 2001]
Written by: Joss Whedon
“Chapter Five: The Worst of It”

Loo is getting bullied again. I hope this kid eventually faces her enemies and eats them alive, literally. Just sinks her teeth into someone’s fucking neck and sucks their blood out, just like a… a… um…

“I’m a Lurk! I’m a Lurk! I’m ‘a eat you!” yells the kid, chasing Loo around while she screams. This poor kid with the milky eye and the stumpy arm.

The kid trips over a rock, and then Loo jumps on his back. “I’m Mel! Can’t a Lurk in the world hurt Mel ‘cause she’s the slam!” Holy shit, I love that, “the slam”. I’m going to start using that in my daily life.

Loo recounts the tale of how Mel fucked up Icarus, but this other kid didn’t hear it that way. Loo gets mad! How dare you say a word about it? Loo was there, and she’s got Urkonn Goat-Face to corroborate the dang story! Zip the lip, son!

“My mom says Lurks are people God got sick of,” says the kid, mopey.

“Not even,” argues Loo. “It’s a social disease. You get it from making with people, then you want blood and all.”

Nope, Lurks are ‘cause of God, and one’s probably going to eat Loo if she doesn’t watch it. She yells as he walks away. She’s got Melaka, and ain’t no Lurk gonna mess with Loo lest it gets a face full of Melaka’s fists.

She sits alone, doubting herself a tad. TOM’S PREDICTION: Lurks are going to get Loo and Melaka won’t be around to stop them. How sad is that shit going to be?

Kiss me, you beautiful fool.

Vampire Harth sits atop a tall tower of scaffolding. “I’ll tell you the truth, Mel… I really missed you,” he smiles before leaping down gracefully from the tower.

“My brother has been dead for four years,” Melaka thinks, staring at her brother who hasn’t aged a day since she last saw him.

“It’s confusing, I know,” Harth says, brow furrowed. “And it’s not easy to explain. I guess we’d start… I guess we’d start with my death.”

DEATH FLASHBACK. Icarus gets bitey bitey, Harth gets bitey bitey. “It hurts, you know,” he tells her. “My throat torn open, the animal’s teeth scraping bone it was so eager to suck out my blood.”

Before he knew it, he was dying… and then, like a brief moment of total clarity, he knew what he had to do next. And that was rip a chunk out of Icarus’ cheek with his teeth. So he did that! And Harth smiles with bloody teeth.

Then he died. Like a chump.

“How did you know?” Icarus bends down to talk to the now-deceased. “How did you know you had to feed to become one of us?” Oh ho ho ho, Harth knows much more than that! You just wait and see.

“You don’t dream much, do you, Mel? I dreamed. Always. Before my earliest memories of the world, there were the dreams. There was the girl…”

Ooooooh, the girl? Was she the slam??

“She was different every time. But the same. A peasant, a priestess… hundreds of girls, from times we’ve forgotten, worlds we couldn’t picture. She was me. She wasn’t me. I loved her.”

What the fuck are you talking about, bro? Did getting vamped up screw with your head?… aside from the obvious.

“I killed her.”

Keep it in your pants, homeboy. You ain’t making a lick of sense besides. Mel seems to know what’s going on, being a twin and all. Twins have that creepy telepathic shit going on. Harth always thought that she and he were two halves of the same person. Probably because they are. Twins are creepy.

Some choose to look like David Duchovny. These are the most based of all…

Harth flashes Melaka the ol’ vamp face. He’s not one to bandy that about, though, because he thinks he’s better than that. Resting vamp face isn’t befitting of a man of his stature, the One Who Will Lead. Ah yes, mentioned in the previous issue, the One Who Will Lead is the biggest threat that must be stopped. Sibling against sibling, the oldest rivalry in the book. Literally. That whole Cain and Abel thing, right? That was a thing early on in a book.

“This world belongs to the demons. They were banished, exiled by one of your ambitious predecessors.” I can hear the sneer in Harth’s voice, but he might just be hungry for some Ben & Jerry’s. “I will open the gateway, and bring back the old ones.”

Melaka is turned away from him, tears streaming down her cheeks.

“And everyone you love will die screaming.”

She refuses to believe that the old Harth isn’t in there somewhere. “You only think those things because you’re infected. My brother would never hurt anyone.”

HA! Ain’t you watch Buffy? The only thing vampires want to do is hurt people! And watch Passions.

Melaka learns first-hand that, yes, Harth would hurt someone. He punches her right in the stomach as hard as he can. WHOMP. She gasps for air on the floor. “I love you, Melaka. I’ve never felt closer to anyone. I watched you. I knew what you were before you did. You wasted your talent grabbing for Gunther, so I used you to complete my collection.” Harth motions toward the very artifacts that Melaka was paid to steal. “The pieces that will help me open the gateway. Thanks to you, I have them all.”

Grabbing for Gunther. Tuesdays on FOX.

Melaka desperately grabs Harth’s shirt. She won’t let him hurt anyone! She can’t! She won’t! She shan’t! She couldn’t! She don’t!

Harth punches her right across the jaw, then throws her aside with incredible force! “The only question is, what do I do with you now?”

That’s going to tickle in the morning. So not the slam.

Harth had sent Melaka flying so fast and hard, she crashes right through the wall, then the ground, then lands facedown in the sewer water. “Oh. Okay. Oops,” Harth says, obviously not intending to possibly kill her… but he knows she’s not dead. He would know if she was dead! He’s got that, you know, death spidey-sense.

She flows out into the river, defeated! She lost the battle, but oh, she will… also lose the next battle. Then the next. Then she won’t necessarily win the war. She’ll just delay it.

Erin is returning to her Uppers apartment after a long day of Being a Cop. She is telling her partner, Broder, to give her a ringy-dingy if anything comes up. And also…

…someone’s in her apartment…

…Erin draws her gun, ready to blast some sap into a thousand bits and pieces…

…it’s Melaka…

BLAM!

Just kidding! She looks rough, though, like a blast from a futuristic laser gun would be just what the doctor ordered. “Erin, I’m… I’m sorry,” she cries. Then she catches Erin up on the current business.

“But he’s alive.”

“Not alive. You don’t understand.”

“I guess I don’t. He’s got infected, he’s a Lurk. But there’s gotta be a cure for that, right?”

“You ever hear of one?”

A lot of this breakdown involves convincing Erin that Harth is a vampire and that Melaka is the Slayer. It sounds like a bunch of malarkey. Not the slam.

The weird wrench in all of this is that they’re twins. He had the dreams, the knowledge, the heritage. That shouldn’t have happened. Melaka has none of that, but she has the strength. Something’s fishy, at any rate. It stinks like Gunther.

Erin doesn’t want to hear any of this. How is she supposed to trust her degenerate sister anyway? Just look at her hair! It’s two colors!

We’ve never seen eye-to-eye! That’s why I’m doing something with my life (Slaying) and you’re just a fucking asshole loser piece of shit (Cop).

“You’ve never had anything but contempt for me since the day Harth died and you know what? You’re probably right!” Erin doesn’t have anything to say to this, so she just lets Melaka keep on yackin’. It doesn’t matter if Erin doesn’t believe her, because why should she, but there’s no way in heaven nor hell (and don’t get me started on Hades) that she’s going to come into her apartment and make up stories about goblins and ghoulies. She needs help is what she needs. This much is true.

“He said everyone I love is gonna die screaming.”

“So I guess I’m safe,” Erin grins. Then she immediately regrets saying it.

Whatever then, you do you. As long as you don’t try to stop her. “I think we’ve got a war coming,” Melaka says as she walks out. “And I can’t win it.”

Erin tells her that Gunther gave her up. Don’t trust him.

“I don’t trust anyone,” she says simply. And she closes the door.

Melaka returns to her shithole neighborhood. Urkonn has been worried sick, young lady!

Well, shit.

Urkonn wasn’t the only one looking for Melaka. Her whole apartment has been ransacked. And they left a message in the form of a poor, little dead girl. Even Urkonn looks horrified, which isn’t much of a stretch anyway.

Melaka, emotionless, stares down at Loo’s body. Then she gets up and walks toward the large hole in her wall. “He said it. He said I couldn’t protect anyone. He was right.”

“I’m not even a real Slayer. All I can do is fight. So it’s time I started fighting.”

“Time to let them know I’m in this.”

“Urkonn…”

“It’s time for war.”

Final Thoughts

First of all, I’m mad that Loo got killed.

Second of all, like I said, she ain’t winning no war. There’s no such thing as winning this war! She’s going to delay it, then get killed, and the next Slayer is going to take her place. My guess is Taylor Swift XIV, her great great great great great great… you know what I mean.