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Oct. 16th, 2005 12:56 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elgrey Belonging, Part Two
Spike was getting that now familiar sinking feeling. They had been forced to move out of the factory because Angelus’s idea of fun included playing Bait the Psycho Watcher with roses and corpses, and although Spike was a lot more mobile than he wanted to let on to Angelus he certainly wasn’t in tip top physical condition. So, of course this was the time that Angelus decided to start playing with his food. There had been a time when he would have been all for it. A game the four of them could play; all on the hunt together; allies, friends even, as much as Angelus was capable of being friends with anyone. But now Angelus was the enemy. Spike had thought it was the soul that divided them but that had been just self-deception. Angelus being back with them had reminded him what a nasty shit he was and always had been. Right now, the Slayer, the humans, every damned happy meal on legs in Sunnydale, none of them were bothering him as much as his bastard grandsire who took so much pleasure in pointing out that now Spike was in a wheelchair Dru was going to be getting all her jollies from him.
“Daddy’s coming....” Drusilla clapped her hands together and Spike groaned inwardly.
“Hang on while I blow up some balloons. Oh wait – no breath, sorry, no can do.”
“He’s got a present.” She beamed at him cheerfully.
Spike shrugged and reached for his lighter. “What is it this time? Nun? Virgin? Or another of those greasy little kids that taste of ketchup?”
“Virgin.” Drusilla waved a reproving finger. “But not for long. Bad Daddy.”
Spike rolled his eyes at the tedious predictability of the old wanker, and was in the act of lighting a cigarette when Angelus made his usual dramatic entrance, kicking the door open and hauling in his evening’s swag, who appeared to be an insurance salesman, going by the look of him, someone in a tailored suit, still clinging to a briefcase.
“What you got us?” Spike enquired. Tonight’s dinner looked young and fresh enough but a little on the bony side to make a good meal for three.
Angelus gave his hapless victim a shove that sent him into the middle of the room and onto his knees. He gazed up at Angelus with wide-eyed wonder, and Spike rolled his eyes again. Oh great, this was all Angelus needed to prop up his already hugely bloated ego, some guy looking up at him as if he was the scariest baddest vamp in the whole wide world. Angelus gave Spike a smug smile. “Watcher.”
Spike felt an uncomfortable jolt as he tried and failed not to be a little impressed. “Bit young, isn’t he?”
“They decided Rupert the Librarian needed an assistant. Sent him out special delivery nice and fresh, straight from the old country. Your old country, that is.”
Angelus danced up and down the staircase, making a meal of it even though Fred Astaire he so wasn’t, before jumping down to where the Watcher was still on his knees. Drusilla clapped her hands. Sometimes she was way too easily impressed. The Watcher gazed up at Angelus.
“You’re really him.”
Spike frowned. Not just a vampire then, that wasn’t the impressive thing, but being…Angelus? He looked at the face of his grandsire and saw that he wasn’t the only one intrigued. Angelus caught the kneeling Watcher and yanked his head back, the perfect alpha male demonstration of careless strength, the not so subtle threat that a twist of his fingers was all it would take to snap the Junior Watcher’s long slender neck. “Does it speak?”
“You’re him,” the Watcher gasped. “You’re really…Angelus.”
And yes, there was fear there, but wonder too. Angel smiled at him nastily. “Immortal, remember? Or don’t they teach you that at Watcher School?”
“But…I wrote my dissertation about you....”
Spike rolled his eyes again. Oh great, a fan. Angelus was going to be impossible if someone didn’t snap that little waste of space’s neck soon. Angelus followed the Watcher’s gaze to his briefcase and then abruptly released him, holding out a hand for the briefcase. The Watcher handed it over gingerly, like someone feeding a tiger through the bars. Angelus yanked it open and plucked out the folder on the top, raising an eyebrow as he looked across at Spike. “He’s got a file on me.”
“Just give him a damned autograph and then kill him, will you?” Spike complained. “I’m hungry.”
Drusilla was looking at the new arrival fixedly, and now began to glide around him. He was too busy gazing at Angelus to notice, while Angelus was flicking through his file with every sign of interest.
“He’s not for eating,” Drusilla crooned. “Daddy wants to play with him.”
Spike took refuge in his cigarette. “Great, first he doesn’t feed us then he spoils our appetite with his usual sick fuckery.” That had been different when he’d been a part of it. They’d been a maelstrom, a firestorm; they spun into a town or a city or a quiet little village cowering under a mountain somewhere and turned everything to blood and ashes, and it was wonderful; a party only the four of them could play. He’d revelled in the twisted limitless depths of his grandsire’s imagination in those days. But that had been the past and this was the present and nothing Angelus did now was for Spike’s amusement, only his own.
Drusilla crouched down in front of the Watcher and stroked a finger along his jaw. It was only with the greatest effort that he could drag his gaze from Angelus, who was still avidly reading the contents of the folder that bore his name, but when the boy finally noticed Drusilla, his eyes widened in recognition.
Spike wished afterwards he hadn’t been looking at the Watcher when he did that, when he recognized Drusilla, because if not he wouldn’t have seen the way his gaze showed not what would have been an entirely appropriate gibbering terror, but rather that terrible spasm of sympathy. “Drusilla....”
“You know me?” She brightened at that.
“You’re the poor girl whose family Angelus killed – the girl with second sight. The one he drove mad with his fiendish cruelty.”
Angelus held up a hand in mock humility. “Please, no flattery.”
Drusilla stretched out a finger and stroked it across the Watcher’s mouth. As always when she touched another male, even a pathetic specimen like this one, Spike felt a spasm of jealousy. She whispered: “I’m his masterwork.”
Angelus leant across to gather up a handful of her hair and press it to his lips, glancing across at Spike with sly mockery as he did so. “Yes, you are.”
Drusilla gazed earnestly at the Watcherboy. “You want your Daddy to be proud of you, too, the way my Daddy’s proud of me, but he never will be.”
The Watcher darted a fearful glance up at Angelus, clearly still having to come to terms with the fact that the vampire was real. Angelus was basking in it, Spike could see, the old poof just loving how impressed the dozy little git was. In the past there had been witchhunters and vampire killers in number and their gazes had always been steely with resolve as they encountered them or else full of fear as they were recognized; but it was a while since Angelus had been reminded what a legend he was by someone who really knew his rep. He wished this little runt would stop looking at Angelus like he was Elvis, but the fact he was actually in the same room as the bona fide Scourge of Europe himself was clearly something Watcherboy wasn’t going to get over any time soon.
Drusilla was still stroking a finger across the captive’s lips. “I bet you’d taste sweet. Sweet as honey. Virgins always do.”
“I-I really don’t think that’s any of your....”
As the boy blushed, Spike rolled his eyes again. Oh great, an untouched, untried, stammery little Watcher with a hard-on for reading about the exploits of the nastiest vampires in the world; no way was Angelus going to kill this one for a week at least, and he’d probably want to keep his skull as an ashtray even then.
Angelus turned the page of what seemed to be the Watcherboy’s essay while the boy himself divided his nervous attention between Angelus and Drusilla, who was now stroking her fingers through his hair with one hand while undoing his tie with the other.
“Wrong date,” Angelus observed.
The boy looked bewildered. “What?”
“We were in Budapest in 1797, not 1796.”
“The church records said that the massacre at the abbey took place in December 1796.”
“Well, they’re wrong. It was January 1797. We spent Christmas in Prague. They just wanted to call it the Christmas Massacre because it sounds catchier. We definitely didn’t get to them until the first week in January.”
The boy actually reached for a pen. Spike shook his head in disbelief. How dumb was this stupid little bleeder? Very dumb evidently, as he was gazing up at Angelus with that same awe and murmuring politely, “Could I…?” Christ, he wanted to annotate his dissertation now?
Angelus was amused by that; really amused. The kind of amused that made Spike uneasy. He could see Angelus deciding this boy just had to become his next project, and whenever Angelus was working on a project everything else went by the board, including basic common sense half the time. Three hours ago he’d been all about trying to end the world using some kind of statue thing, and now he could see the statue was going to be all yesterday’s news and it was going to be Watcherboy all the way. Spike’s eardrums were going to be perforated from the screaming.
Angelus plucked the pen from the boy’s fingers. “I’m going to mark this for you.”
“Thank you,” the boy said lamely.
“Any inaccuracies will have to be punished,” Angelus told him, before slapping the essay down on the desk and sitting down to correct it as if he were the headmaster of some minor public school.
Drusilla’s eyes widened with excitement and she pulled off the boy’s tie. “Ooh, Daddy loves punishing naughty boys and girls. Have you been naughty, Wesley? Is Daddy going to have to give you a spanking?”
“You know my name…?” he said in disbelief.
Spike almost pointed out to him that his name was on his sodding briefcase but Dru was on a roll. She stroked her fingers through his hair again, trying to disorder it, which Spike could understand as that brylcreem was definitely in need of removal. “Course I do. I know lots about you. All that working, working, dark places, not even star shine, crying and crying and crying because Daddy didn’t love you. Such pretty scars inside. Just want someone to love you, don’t you, precious?”
“You understand the concept of love?” He gazed at her intently; still the Watcher, still the curious student. Spike felt an acute spasm of embarrassed identification; thinking of the bespectacled little mummy’s boy he’d once been, writing his poetry and sighing over his Cecily. “Even now? As you are now…?”
“We are love,” Drusilla told him. “And hate. And death. And life. We’re all fallen angels; falling, falling, closer to hell and fires burning bright in the forest of the.... Especially Daddy. Can’t you see his wings? The soul clipped them but now he’s soaring again.”
“Do you remember what he did to your family?”
“Yes.” She put her hands up to her head. “Remember my mummy singing to us, and the little ones eating cake, all so happy we were before he came.”
Watcherboy flinched and Spike flinched along with him, remembering Dru crying over it sometimes, wanting her Mummy to sing her to sleep again, wanting to tell him their names, all the little children who had tasted so sweet to Angelus. When she ate kids these days it was as if she was trying to find that sweetness again; the sweetness of being human somewhere in their marrow.
“But you love him even though he killed them?”
She slapped her hands together. “Daddy takes and Daddy gives. Takes one family, gives another. He let me have my Spikey, my own child, even better than brothers and sisters. All mine he is.”
The Watcher glanced over at Spike and the vampire felt himself catalogued, being slotted into a mental ‘William the Bloody’ folder. Apparently, next to Angelus and Dru, Spike wasn’t so exciting though as he didn’t get the big blue impressed eyes. “What about Darla?” The Watcher looked around in half fearful anticipation and Spike wondered how dumb a human had to be to actually want to meet Darla.
Dru wrinkled her pretty nose. “Turned to dust. Poor grandmummy. He did it, the Angel-beast. The one who locks Daddy away.”
“The souled version of Angelus?” Watcherboy looked across at Angelus and once again did that double take because it was so incredible that he was here in a room with Angelus. Spike felt like throwing something at him. If he hadn’t been tied to the role of sitting in a wheelchair he would have ripped his scrawny little spine out just for the whole fanboy thing. Watcherboy turned back to Drusilla. “Do you remember what it was like to be human?”
She stroked her fingers through his hair tenderly. “Kind to my Spike, you are. And oh how you love Daddy. See you looking at him, wanting him to tell you you’re a good boy. I see it all. So misty, but I see it....”
There was that look on his face again, and what right did that useless little snack-in-waiting have to be pitying his Dru? Spike’s midnight Queen, his princess of the underworld, who could twist off that stuffy little Watcher’s head on a whim. But he did feel oh so sorry for her, it was there in those expressive eyes. Dru put her head on one side and stroked her finger down his chest. “Eyes like little Anne, you have, all big and blue. Bet they taste sweet.” She bent her head and licked his face. He closed his eyes then, so scared that his skin would be salt with it, extra lickable. Dru ran her tongue over her lips. “Daddy’s going to love the taste of you. So frightened. So warm.”
Watcherboy touched her hair, very gently and Spike almost got up and walked across the room just to smack his hand, but the way he was looking up at her, so full of compassion.... Something caught in Spike’s throat and the contradictory urge to kill him and save him hit him again.
“Do they have pictures of me in your books?” Drusilla asked him.
“Yes.”
“Do I look pretty?”
He was still gazing at her. “Not as pretty as you really are.”
She smiled at that. “You think I’m pretty?”
He kept looking at her, that expression of compassion on his face. Spike knew he was terrified, could hear the hammer of his heart, smell the fear on his skin, but the Watcher only nodded. “Very pretty. Would you like me to show you the picture?”
She nodded and he inched towards his briefcase, glancing between Angelus, who was busy marking the Watcher’s essay with lots of self-important scribblings in the margin, and Spike, who shrugged at him as if to say he didn’t give a damn what he did as, unlike Angelus and Dru, he didn’t believe in talking to one’s food.
The Watcher plucked a book out of his briefcase, turned the pages and held it out to her. “There’s a daguerrotype of you.”
She pounced on the picture eagerly, laughing and clapping her hands. “I’m famous!” She snatched up the book and ran across the room to show it to Spike. “Look, Spike, I’m famous! Got my picture in a book....”
Spike saw a few lines of print: …tragic victim of the notoriously imaginative and sadistic vampire, Angelus… “That isn’t what she is,” he told the Watcher shortly. “We made our own lives since then. Good lives.” Unlives technically, of course, but who was quibbling?
“What about Miss Edith?” Drusilla waved the doll under the Watcher’s nose. “Have you got a picture of her?”
He shook his head. “No. Is she…significant?”
“She likes watching when they die. They all do. All my pretties.”
The Watcher touched the doll’s hair and then dress and there was that look in his eyes again, the one that made Spike want to snap his neck, rip out his throat, save him from Angelus, he wasn’t even sure which; stupid Watcherboy looking from the calm bisque face of that Victorian doll to the mad beauty of his Drusilla, eyes full of pain because he saw the doll as proof that Drusilla had been little more than a child when Angelus had driven her crazy and stolen her soul. He gave her immortality, you twonk. But it was a change all the same, from someone just seeing her as evil, seeing her as scary; the Watcher didn’t know what he was looking at, but at least he was trying to see the Dru that Spike loved. Trouble was he was coming at it from completely the wrong direction; trying to find the person she wasn’t any more in the free soulless immortal she was now. But Spike knew it all the same, although he would have denied it with his last…well, he didn’t have breath any more, last or otherwise, but he would have denied it all the same, that there was a part of him that remembered how it felt to be human, a part of him that hungered for their warmth, that pulse of their delicious blood beneath their thin skin, maybe part of what made them taste so sweet was their humanity, and maybe he remembered sometimes, maybe Dru did too; maybe they were both as contaminated as the Judge had told them. But you had to understand your prey to catch it, didn’t you? To know them was to eat them.
Dru ran her fingers across the Watcherboy’s chest, brushing the light fuzz of hair there, feeling the warmth of his skin. Spike wanted to lick him, taste him, drink from him and feel that warmth for a moment, that delicious pulse of hot blood from the artery hitting the back of his throat.
“We could get a camera,” Spike offered. “Take some up to date pictures. Maybe take Miss Edith’s too.”
Angelus looked up from his ‘marking’. “Yes, because helping the Watcher’s Council to kill us all is what we’re about now.”
“You’re the one who brought Wesley the Wonder Watcher here, gitface,” Spike snapped.
Angelus rose to his feet, all poised on the balls of his feet, showing off just because he wasn’t in a wheelchair, skipping across the room like the great poof he was to wave that essay under the Watcher’s nose. “Lots of mistakes. I couldn’t give you more than a ‘C’.” He shoved the boy onto his knees. “And show proper respect when you talk to your betters.”
The Watcher looked shocked; he was using some of his brain for fear, certainly, and that overpowering ‘it’s Angelus’ awe, but there was another part that looked confused and…miffed. “Mistakes…?”
“Lots.” Angelus brushed the essay across his mouth, pulling down his lower lip with the stiffness of the paper. “Can’t have that kind of sloppy work going unpunished. I think I’d better punish you.”
Drusilla clapped her hands together in glee. “Spanking!”
“I triple checked every date and place from at least three eyewitness accounts whenever possible,” the Watcher protested and Spike realized that Angelus had stung him by criticizing his essay’s factual content. He shook his head in disbelief. The stupid little git was about to get dragged off by Angelus, probably to have his fingers bitten off one by one before his entrails got pulled out through his eyesockets, and he was whining about Angelus marking down his dissertation.
“Do humans get stupider every generation?” Spike demanded of no one in particular.
Angelus beamed down at the Watcher who still didn’t seem to have realized that his mouth was on a level with the vampire’s crotch even as Angelus stroked a thumb across his mouth salaciously. “Oh, I hope so.” His fingers closed in the Watcher’s hair with casual cruelty and he yanked him to his feet in one smooth motion that made the human yelp with fear and pain.
And then Angelus was smacking him around, just for the fun of it, and Dru was clapping her hands. And the human did all the wrong things, which were all the right things to keep Angelus wanting to extend his about-to-become-very-unpleasant existence for as long as possible, flinching, cringing, bleeding, and then whimpering.
Spike gritted his teeth at the little snatched breaths, and those big shocked eyes because apparently no one had told Watcherboy in all his years of intensive training that vampires could be really mean sometimes, and would not only drink the blood of an infant from its crib, but hit you hard and often for using the English name for a German town when writing your essays about them.
“There. Is. No. ‘i’. In. Hameln. Dumpkopf!”
Watcherboy still didn’t get it, that Angelus was just getting himself turned on by the pleasant warm up of the sound of fist on flesh, too busy making those little whimpering noises that were absolutely the worst thing to do, because now he sounded like a frightened child or a frightened puppy, and if he’d read his reports on Angelus he would know exactly what Angelus liked to do to those things.
Spike looked at Angelus’s groin; not a difficult thing to spot with him wearing those leather pants; fuckin’ exhibitionist; and wheeled himself across the room to where the Watcher was currently cringing, putting up a hand to a cut across his cheek while Angelus doubled his belt and slapped it against the air, enjoying the sounds it made, and Drusilla danced around both of them, clapping her hands because the chaos was like fire to her, and the rising panic in the captive intoxicating as brandy. Brandy.
Spike rolled himself between the stupid little bleeder cringing on the floor and Angelus and said impatiently, “So, can I eat him now? Because you’re just wasting all that perfectly good blood.”
Drusilla giggled. “I told you, he’s not for eating. He’s for playing with. Isn’t he, Daddy?”
Angelus gave her a slow-burning smile and began to run a hand up her thigh; never more than a victim’s flinch away from a hard-on at the best of times and so currently horny as hell. “Sure he is.”
Dru pulled Angelus against her, eyes bright. “Dance with me. Spikey can’t now. Dance with me, Daddy....” And then she was pulling Angelus away, the glance she gave Spike as she did so, scarily sane, and Spike knew he had one shot at this. He pulled the handful of pills out of his pocket, the uppers and downers and the ones that had blurred the pain in his crushed back to dreams of poetry taking flight across rooftops whose chimneys spewed blood-coloured smoke. The ones Dru had stolen for him from the hospital that you should absolutely never combine with each other or alcohol especially not in these kinds of quantities. And then he had a hand across the Watcher’s mouth and was hissing, “Swallow, you stupid little tit” before he yanked out the whisky bottle from its place in his chair and said, “Open wide”, making it sound as dirty as possible.
Angelus looked around and, seeing Spike forcing the neck of the bottle into his prey’s mouth, said, “That better be all you’re planning on shoving down there. This one’s mine.”
“You always were greedy,” Spike retorted, rubbing the Watcher’s throat to make him swallow it, swallow it and keep it down, pills and whiskey, more whiskey, another gulp and another, and Spike’s eyes telling him to keep fuckin’ swallowing unless he wanted to end up another horror story they told little Watchers around the campfire on field trips. Watcherboy kept looking at him in wide-eyed confusion, even as he gulped, swallowed, choked, fought to keep it down and somehow managed it, gaze fixed on William the Bloody Idiot, who had just done something ridiculous for a reason he couldn’t have explained. Why this one? Why, out of all of them, try to make this one’s nightmare easier? What did he care what became of a stupid human with a stupid soul just because he was bookish and earnest and skinny and had taken one look at Drusilla and seen what Spike saw? And was he kind of asking and answering his own questions here?
“What are you doing anyway?” Angelus demanded.
Spike shrugged. “Thought you might want a liqueur after dinner, Your Wankership. You’re the one who taught me about spiking their blood with a nice shot of old scotch to get that burn when you bite ’em.”
“Marinate your own food,” Angelus retorted. And then he was touching Drusilla in places that made Spike want to drive a stake right into his dead heart and she was closing her eyes and whimpering with pleasure, and then Angelus shoved Dru away so she had to hold herself up with Spike’s shoulders, then he was snatching up the coughing Watcher by the hair and dragging him off to his bedroom.
“Miss Edith wanted to watch!” Drusilla protested.
Spike slid a hand up her thigh, still feeling the place where Angelus had touched her, still smelling him on her, that musty arousal that was now all the Watcher’s and good luck to him with that; and he slipped his fingers where Angelus’s had been and she whimpered with pleasure and he closed his eyes and licked her skin and tried not to hear the sounds from Angelus’s bedroom.
***
Wesley woke up drunk. Not just a little drunk; drunker than he had ever been in his life. He tried to focus on his fingers and they blurred at him, shimmering a little like a heat haze and when he tried to take in his surroundings he found that the walls were sliding around in a most unaccountable fashion. He blinked several times, but it didn’t help; there were pillows dissolving in front of him, metal struts merging and separating like ink blot art. Not just drunk then. He appeared to have consumed more alcohol than he had ever encountered in his life and a number of hallucinogenic drugs at the same time. Definitely not a Council party then. Was this how they behaved in Sunnydale?
A hand closed around his throat and pulled him a foot across the bed. Even through the candy-coloured cottonwool and disco mirrorballs in his mind he felt sure that staying a dead weight was definitely the best thing to do, and not struggling, definitely no struggling of any kind. Given how separated he felt from his body, and how slurred everything was, physically and mentally, it was much easier than he might have expected to just let it happen. He wasn’t entirely sure it was happening to him anyway, just to someone in his vicinity who might or might not be borrowing his body for the occasion.
“Morning, sweetheart.”
Wesley gazed into the brown eyes of the Scourge of Europe and thought – given their dependence on something as evanescent as mercury vapour – that the photographic processes from those days, were really extraordinarily accurate. “Angelus....” It came out as a sort of muffled squawk, not just to do with the very strong, very bruising fingers currently around his neck, but due to the soreness of his throat. He seemed to have done a lot of talking recently or – given his present company – screaming. He definitely remembered writing that people who met Angelus in the silence of dark alleyways tended to depart from him with the echoes of their own screams in their ears. Being frightened seemed like an appropriate response then. He needed to remember how to do that. Parts of his body, particularly his spine, made an ineffectual attempt to climb out from under his skin and run away, but it only led to a weird starfish-like lurch that did absolutely nothing to stop the vampire hauling him up against his cool hard chest.
Angelus smiled at him in a way that made Wesley think that he should probably scream again if he’d done any screaming before, but his throat was sore so he just opened his mouth and then closed it a few times.
Angelus was practically purring as he ran a hand through Wesley’s hair. “See, I bet you Watchers tell everyone I’m just a wham, bam, thank you, ma’am kind of guy, but I know how to snuggle.”
Wesley made another sound that came out not unlike ‘Urp!’
“They train you for that too?”
“Iggle?”
“Lying back and thinking of England?”
“Snurg, snigdurkle.”
“Are there any braincells I didn’t fry?” Angelus was unmistakably in a good mood. A hand that was probably not Wesley’s moved down a body that either was or wasn’t Wesley’s and touched him in a place that it probably shouldn’t be touching whoever it belonged to but which he couldn’t summon any strong feelings about one way or another at the moment. The wallpaper was sliding off the walls like blue jam from a spoon. If there was any blue jam, which he was no longer sure about. Wesley tried to look down but he couldn’t remember the movements. Like normal speech, coordination seemed to have deserted him.
“I didn’t even know Watchers could get their voices that high. Did you used to be a choirboy, Wes?”
“Can’t sing.” He was almost certain that was English. Or possibly Flemish. He had not liked Flemish as a class. It had taken place in a cold room on the northern side of the building and the radiators had definitely not been turned on as often as the fees charged by the academy would lead one to expect. He didn’t much care for Flemish art either. He preferred Renaissance. “Is this England?”
“No.” Angelus stroked a finger across his mouth and then slipped his thumb in between Wesley’s lips. “Suck it.”
Wesley had been going to say something else but finding that thumb in his mouth concentrated on gingerly sucking it. It seemed an odd thing to ask someone to do and he wondered if it was something Angelus found comforting. Angelus’s thumb was smooth, uncalloused, and tasted salty. He remembered no record of this behaviour in any of the Council records. They had seemed to suggest he preferred raping, torturing, maiming and murdering to having his digits sucked for comfort. He sucked Angelus’ thumb for some time while the wallpaper continued its surreptitious dissolution and the pillows rocked gently as a pendulum, and then sucked possibly a finger or possibly something else which tasted decidedly…odd. He listened to the sound of distant things ticking and banging, unsure if it was water in the pipes or possibly some machinery of some kind, while Angelus touched someone who might perhaps be him but could just as well be a third party to whom he had no recollection of being introduced. Angelus seemed extremely curious and thorough in his exploration and when Angelus touched them particularly hard or particularly deeply with things that were sharp or hot or long or thick, the person whose body it was definitely made sounds in a language that Wesley did not recognize. There were even flashes of…sensation. But they were so muffled he could not tell if they were meant to be good sensations or bad ones; they were just…feelings. Something buzzed like a trapped wasp for a while and something really tickled and he giggled a lot and tried to wriggle and Angelus laughed as if he was surprised about something. Then he had several bouts of feeling that he wanted to escape from something pressing at him, but on the whole his limbs were so heavy and so remote from him that he had no opinion one way or the other about the ways in which this body, which might or might not be his, was moved around and opened and closed and tied up and untied.
He sobered up enough at one point to find Angelus gazing at him with something that looked oddly like affection and saying, “I think I’ll keep you as a mascot. Send pictures back to the Council. What do you think, Wes?”
Pictures. He remembered a bisque doll with sad eyes and what would almost certainly be real hair. “Miss Edith?”
Angelus smiled and Wesley wondered if he was going to show him his fang face again. He had a feeling that the first time he’d seen it, he might have passed out, and it would be interesting to see it again. “Scrambled Watcher. Perfect. I love it when they break like glass. This is going to hurt. Describe it to me.”
Then there was that strange sensation again that was possibly happening to someone else or to him.
“Odd.”
Angelus beamed. “No one’s ever called it that before. Do you like pain, Wes?”
Wesley tried to remember. “I don’t think... Is this pain? What colours does it...? Too noisy to be....” He tried to remember how to form a sentence but it was too difficult.
Angelus bared his teeth in a smile of absolute satisfaction. “You may turn out to be even better than Dru. Do you remember what we did?”
“Did?”
“You and me. We did lots of things together last night. Things with ice cubes and body parts and things that take batteries. Remember?”
Wesley looked at the wallpaper which was now surreptitiously changing from blue to green. Or had it always been green? “Am I dead?” It occurred to him that he might be a vampire now, which would be terribly useful for writing those essays where you had to imagine what it might be like to be a soulless demon in a particular strategy situation in order to thwart yourself.
“Nope, still warm and sticky, Wes. The way I want you.” The fingers that were or were not Wesley’s touched the body parts that were or were not Wesley’s again, pinching and pulling in a way that made that third party shift uncomfortably or possibly pleasurably. If the wallpaper hadn’t been quite so fascinating, Wesley would have been able to give it more of his attention.
“I’m going to make you stickier now.”
It sounded like a threat but then he lost its echo and it could possibly have been a nice treat he was being offered. Wesley tried to think of sticky things but couldn’t think of anything that wasn’t honey. He knew there were pink sticky things that stuck things to other things and that he absolutely wasn’t allowed to have, ever. “What do they call it?”
“This is going to hurt.”
Wesley wondered if Angelus was talking to him or someone else and then something happened that made one of the strange sensations turn up its volume until it was all over the room like white noise and he didn’t know if there was a radio playing much too loud or if there was possibly something hurting him. But then he remembered and said, “Chewing gum!” triumphantly.
Angelus said, “What?” as if Wesley had just told him that two and two absolutely never added up to four.
“Sticky....” Wesley offered.
The wallpaper had changed colour at least three more times before the thought occurred to him that something large and unpleasant being repeatedly thrust in and out of his body might also feel like that radio sounded, but as there seemed no reason for that to happen he concentrated on watching the edge of the pillow change almost imperceptibly from violet to lilac and back again. When it did it three times, he giggled again, and Angelus said something very bad in a language that probably wasn’t Flemish.
***
Spike was getting that now familiar sinking feeling. They had been forced to move out of the factory because Angelus’s idea of fun included playing Bait the Psycho Watcher with roses and corpses, and although Spike was a lot more mobile than he wanted to let on to Angelus he certainly wasn’t in tip top physical condition. So, of course this was the time that Angelus decided to start playing with his food. There had been a time when he would have been all for it. A game the four of them could play; all on the hunt together; allies, friends even, as much as Angelus was capable of being friends with anyone. But now Angelus was the enemy. Spike had thought it was the soul that divided them but that had been just self-deception. Angelus being back with them had reminded him what a nasty shit he was and always had been. Right now, the Slayer, the humans, every damned happy meal on legs in Sunnydale, none of them were bothering him as much as his bastard grandsire who took so much pleasure in pointing out that now Spike was in a wheelchair Dru was going to be getting all her jollies from him.
“Daddy’s coming....” Drusilla clapped her hands together and Spike groaned inwardly.
“Hang on while I blow up some balloons. Oh wait – no breath, sorry, no can do.”
“He’s got a present.” She beamed at him cheerfully.
Spike shrugged and reached for his lighter. “What is it this time? Nun? Virgin? Or another of those greasy little kids that taste of ketchup?”
“Virgin.” Drusilla waved a reproving finger. “But not for long. Bad Daddy.”
Spike rolled his eyes at the tedious predictability of the old wanker, and was in the act of lighting a cigarette when Angelus made his usual dramatic entrance, kicking the door open and hauling in his evening’s swag, who appeared to be an insurance salesman, going by the look of him, someone in a tailored suit, still clinging to a briefcase.
“What you got us?” Spike enquired. Tonight’s dinner looked young and fresh enough but a little on the bony side to make a good meal for three.
Angelus gave his hapless victim a shove that sent him into the middle of the room and onto his knees. He gazed up at Angelus with wide-eyed wonder, and Spike rolled his eyes again. Oh great, this was all Angelus needed to prop up his already hugely bloated ego, some guy looking up at him as if he was the scariest baddest vamp in the whole wide world. Angelus gave Spike a smug smile. “Watcher.”
Spike felt an uncomfortable jolt as he tried and failed not to be a little impressed. “Bit young, isn’t he?”
“They decided Rupert the Librarian needed an assistant. Sent him out special delivery nice and fresh, straight from the old country. Your old country, that is.”
Angelus danced up and down the staircase, making a meal of it even though Fred Astaire he so wasn’t, before jumping down to where the Watcher was still on his knees. Drusilla clapped her hands. Sometimes she was way too easily impressed. The Watcher gazed up at Angelus.
“You’re really him.”
Spike frowned. Not just a vampire then, that wasn’t the impressive thing, but being…Angelus? He looked at the face of his grandsire and saw that he wasn’t the only one intrigued. Angelus caught the kneeling Watcher and yanked his head back, the perfect alpha male demonstration of careless strength, the not so subtle threat that a twist of his fingers was all it would take to snap the Junior Watcher’s long slender neck. “Does it speak?”
“You’re him,” the Watcher gasped. “You’re really…Angelus.”
And yes, there was fear there, but wonder too. Angel smiled at him nastily. “Immortal, remember? Or don’t they teach you that at Watcher School?”
“But…I wrote my dissertation about you....”
Spike rolled his eyes again. Oh great, a fan. Angelus was going to be impossible if someone didn’t snap that little waste of space’s neck soon. Angelus followed the Watcher’s gaze to his briefcase and then abruptly released him, holding out a hand for the briefcase. The Watcher handed it over gingerly, like someone feeding a tiger through the bars. Angelus yanked it open and plucked out the folder on the top, raising an eyebrow as he looked across at Spike. “He’s got a file on me.”
“Just give him a damned autograph and then kill him, will you?” Spike complained. “I’m hungry.”
Drusilla was looking at the new arrival fixedly, and now began to glide around him. He was too busy gazing at Angelus to notice, while Angelus was flicking through his file with every sign of interest.
“He’s not for eating,” Drusilla crooned. “Daddy wants to play with him.”
Spike took refuge in his cigarette. “Great, first he doesn’t feed us then he spoils our appetite with his usual sick fuckery.” That had been different when he’d been a part of it. They’d been a maelstrom, a firestorm; they spun into a town or a city or a quiet little village cowering under a mountain somewhere and turned everything to blood and ashes, and it was wonderful; a party only the four of them could play. He’d revelled in the twisted limitless depths of his grandsire’s imagination in those days. But that had been the past and this was the present and nothing Angelus did now was for Spike’s amusement, only his own.
Drusilla crouched down in front of the Watcher and stroked a finger along his jaw. It was only with the greatest effort that he could drag his gaze from Angelus, who was still avidly reading the contents of the folder that bore his name, but when the boy finally noticed Drusilla, his eyes widened in recognition.
Spike wished afterwards he hadn’t been looking at the Watcher when he did that, when he recognized Drusilla, because if not he wouldn’t have seen the way his gaze showed not what would have been an entirely appropriate gibbering terror, but rather that terrible spasm of sympathy. “Drusilla....”
“You know me?” She brightened at that.
“You’re the poor girl whose family Angelus killed – the girl with second sight. The one he drove mad with his fiendish cruelty.”
Angelus held up a hand in mock humility. “Please, no flattery.”
Drusilla stretched out a finger and stroked it across the Watcher’s mouth. As always when she touched another male, even a pathetic specimen like this one, Spike felt a spasm of jealousy. She whispered: “I’m his masterwork.”
Angelus leant across to gather up a handful of her hair and press it to his lips, glancing across at Spike with sly mockery as he did so. “Yes, you are.”
Drusilla gazed earnestly at the Watcherboy. “You want your Daddy to be proud of you, too, the way my Daddy’s proud of me, but he never will be.”
The Watcher darted a fearful glance up at Angelus, clearly still having to come to terms with the fact that the vampire was real. Angelus was basking in it, Spike could see, the old poof just loving how impressed the dozy little git was. In the past there had been witchhunters and vampire killers in number and their gazes had always been steely with resolve as they encountered them or else full of fear as they were recognized; but it was a while since Angelus had been reminded what a legend he was by someone who really knew his rep. He wished this little runt would stop looking at Angelus like he was Elvis, but the fact he was actually in the same room as the bona fide Scourge of Europe himself was clearly something Watcherboy wasn’t going to get over any time soon.
Drusilla was still stroking a finger across the captive’s lips. “I bet you’d taste sweet. Sweet as honey. Virgins always do.”
“I-I really don’t think that’s any of your....”
As the boy blushed, Spike rolled his eyes again. Oh great, an untouched, untried, stammery little Watcher with a hard-on for reading about the exploits of the nastiest vampires in the world; no way was Angelus going to kill this one for a week at least, and he’d probably want to keep his skull as an ashtray even then.
Angelus turned the page of what seemed to be the Watcherboy’s essay while the boy himself divided his nervous attention between Angelus and Drusilla, who was now stroking her fingers through his hair with one hand while undoing his tie with the other.
“Wrong date,” Angelus observed.
The boy looked bewildered. “What?”
“We were in Budapest in 1797, not 1796.”
“The church records said that the massacre at the abbey took place in December 1796.”
“Well, they’re wrong. It was January 1797. We spent Christmas in Prague. They just wanted to call it the Christmas Massacre because it sounds catchier. We definitely didn’t get to them until the first week in January.”
The boy actually reached for a pen. Spike shook his head in disbelief. How dumb was this stupid little bleeder? Very dumb evidently, as he was gazing up at Angelus with that same awe and murmuring politely, “Could I…?” Christ, he wanted to annotate his dissertation now?
Angelus was amused by that; really amused. The kind of amused that made Spike uneasy. He could see Angelus deciding this boy just had to become his next project, and whenever Angelus was working on a project everything else went by the board, including basic common sense half the time. Three hours ago he’d been all about trying to end the world using some kind of statue thing, and now he could see the statue was going to be all yesterday’s news and it was going to be Watcherboy all the way. Spike’s eardrums were going to be perforated from the screaming.
Angelus plucked the pen from the boy’s fingers. “I’m going to mark this for you.”
“Thank you,” the boy said lamely.
“Any inaccuracies will have to be punished,” Angelus told him, before slapping the essay down on the desk and sitting down to correct it as if he were the headmaster of some minor public school.
Drusilla’s eyes widened with excitement and she pulled off the boy’s tie. “Ooh, Daddy loves punishing naughty boys and girls. Have you been naughty, Wesley? Is Daddy going to have to give you a spanking?”
“You know my name…?” he said in disbelief.
Spike almost pointed out to him that his name was on his sodding briefcase but Dru was on a roll. She stroked her fingers through his hair again, trying to disorder it, which Spike could understand as that brylcreem was definitely in need of removal. “Course I do. I know lots about you. All that working, working, dark places, not even star shine, crying and crying and crying because Daddy didn’t love you. Such pretty scars inside. Just want someone to love you, don’t you, precious?”
“You understand the concept of love?” He gazed at her intently; still the Watcher, still the curious student. Spike felt an acute spasm of embarrassed identification; thinking of the bespectacled little mummy’s boy he’d once been, writing his poetry and sighing over his Cecily. “Even now? As you are now…?”
“We are love,” Drusilla told him. “And hate. And death. And life. We’re all fallen angels; falling, falling, closer to hell and fires burning bright in the forest of the.... Especially Daddy. Can’t you see his wings? The soul clipped them but now he’s soaring again.”
“Do you remember what he did to your family?”
“Yes.” She put her hands up to her head. “Remember my mummy singing to us, and the little ones eating cake, all so happy we were before he came.”
Watcherboy flinched and Spike flinched along with him, remembering Dru crying over it sometimes, wanting her Mummy to sing her to sleep again, wanting to tell him their names, all the little children who had tasted so sweet to Angelus. When she ate kids these days it was as if she was trying to find that sweetness again; the sweetness of being human somewhere in their marrow.
“But you love him even though he killed them?”
She slapped her hands together. “Daddy takes and Daddy gives. Takes one family, gives another. He let me have my Spikey, my own child, even better than brothers and sisters. All mine he is.”
The Watcher glanced over at Spike and the vampire felt himself catalogued, being slotted into a mental ‘William the Bloody’ folder. Apparently, next to Angelus and Dru, Spike wasn’t so exciting though as he didn’t get the big blue impressed eyes. “What about Darla?” The Watcher looked around in half fearful anticipation and Spike wondered how dumb a human had to be to actually want to meet Darla.
Dru wrinkled her pretty nose. “Turned to dust. Poor grandmummy. He did it, the Angel-beast. The one who locks Daddy away.”
“The souled version of Angelus?” Watcherboy looked across at Angelus and once again did that double take because it was so incredible that he was here in a room with Angelus. Spike felt like throwing something at him. If he hadn’t been tied to the role of sitting in a wheelchair he would have ripped his scrawny little spine out just for the whole fanboy thing. Watcherboy turned back to Drusilla. “Do you remember what it was like to be human?”
She stroked her fingers through his hair tenderly. “Kind to my Spike, you are. And oh how you love Daddy. See you looking at him, wanting him to tell you you’re a good boy. I see it all. So misty, but I see it....”
There was that look on his face again, and what right did that useless little snack-in-waiting have to be pitying his Dru? Spike’s midnight Queen, his princess of the underworld, who could twist off that stuffy little Watcher’s head on a whim. But he did feel oh so sorry for her, it was there in those expressive eyes. Dru put her head on one side and stroked her finger down his chest. “Eyes like little Anne, you have, all big and blue. Bet they taste sweet.” She bent her head and licked his face. He closed his eyes then, so scared that his skin would be salt with it, extra lickable. Dru ran her tongue over her lips. “Daddy’s going to love the taste of you. So frightened. So warm.”
Watcherboy touched her hair, very gently and Spike almost got up and walked across the room just to smack his hand, but the way he was looking up at her, so full of compassion.... Something caught in Spike’s throat and the contradictory urge to kill him and save him hit him again.
“Do they have pictures of me in your books?” Drusilla asked him.
“Yes.”
“Do I look pretty?”
He was still gazing at her. “Not as pretty as you really are.”
She smiled at that. “You think I’m pretty?”
He kept looking at her, that expression of compassion on his face. Spike knew he was terrified, could hear the hammer of his heart, smell the fear on his skin, but the Watcher only nodded. “Very pretty. Would you like me to show you the picture?”
She nodded and he inched towards his briefcase, glancing between Angelus, who was busy marking the Watcher’s essay with lots of self-important scribblings in the margin, and Spike, who shrugged at him as if to say he didn’t give a damn what he did as, unlike Angelus and Dru, he didn’t believe in talking to one’s food.
The Watcher plucked a book out of his briefcase, turned the pages and held it out to her. “There’s a daguerrotype of you.”
She pounced on the picture eagerly, laughing and clapping her hands. “I’m famous!” She snatched up the book and ran across the room to show it to Spike. “Look, Spike, I’m famous! Got my picture in a book....”
Spike saw a few lines of print: …tragic victim of the notoriously imaginative and sadistic vampire, Angelus… “That isn’t what she is,” he told the Watcher shortly. “We made our own lives since then. Good lives.” Unlives technically, of course, but who was quibbling?
“What about Miss Edith?” Drusilla waved the doll under the Watcher’s nose. “Have you got a picture of her?”
He shook his head. “No. Is she…significant?”
“She likes watching when they die. They all do. All my pretties.”
The Watcher touched the doll’s hair and then dress and there was that look in his eyes again, the one that made Spike want to snap his neck, rip out his throat, save him from Angelus, he wasn’t even sure which; stupid Watcherboy looking from the calm bisque face of that Victorian doll to the mad beauty of his Drusilla, eyes full of pain because he saw the doll as proof that Drusilla had been little more than a child when Angelus had driven her crazy and stolen her soul. He gave her immortality, you twonk. But it was a change all the same, from someone just seeing her as evil, seeing her as scary; the Watcher didn’t know what he was looking at, but at least he was trying to see the Dru that Spike loved. Trouble was he was coming at it from completely the wrong direction; trying to find the person she wasn’t any more in the free soulless immortal she was now. But Spike knew it all the same, although he would have denied it with his last…well, he didn’t have breath any more, last or otherwise, but he would have denied it all the same, that there was a part of him that remembered how it felt to be human, a part of him that hungered for their warmth, that pulse of their delicious blood beneath their thin skin, maybe part of what made them taste so sweet was their humanity, and maybe he remembered sometimes, maybe Dru did too; maybe they were both as contaminated as the Judge had told them. But you had to understand your prey to catch it, didn’t you? To know them was to eat them.
Dru ran her fingers across the Watcherboy’s chest, brushing the light fuzz of hair there, feeling the warmth of his skin. Spike wanted to lick him, taste him, drink from him and feel that warmth for a moment, that delicious pulse of hot blood from the artery hitting the back of his throat.
“We could get a camera,” Spike offered. “Take some up to date pictures. Maybe take Miss Edith’s too.”
Angelus looked up from his ‘marking’. “Yes, because helping the Watcher’s Council to kill us all is what we’re about now.”
“You’re the one who brought Wesley the Wonder Watcher here, gitface,” Spike snapped.
Angelus rose to his feet, all poised on the balls of his feet, showing off just because he wasn’t in a wheelchair, skipping across the room like the great poof he was to wave that essay under the Watcher’s nose. “Lots of mistakes. I couldn’t give you more than a ‘C’.” He shoved the boy onto his knees. “And show proper respect when you talk to your betters.”
The Watcher looked shocked; he was using some of his brain for fear, certainly, and that overpowering ‘it’s Angelus’ awe, but there was another part that looked confused and…miffed. “Mistakes…?”
“Lots.” Angelus brushed the essay across his mouth, pulling down his lower lip with the stiffness of the paper. “Can’t have that kind of sloppy work going unpunished. I think I’d better punish you.”
Drusilla clapped her hands together in glee. “Spanking!”
“I triple checked every date and place from at least three eyewitness accounts whenever possible,” the Watcher protested and Spike realized that Angelus had stung him by criticizing his essay’s factual content. He shook his head in disbelief. The stupid little git was about to get dragged off by Angelus, probably to have his fingers bitten off one by one before his entrails got pulled out through his eyesockets, and he was whining about Angelus marking down his dissertation.
“Do humans get stupider every generation?” Spike demanded of no one in particular.
Angelus beamed down at the Watcher who still didn’t seem to have realized that his mouth was on a level with the vampire’s crotch even as Angelus stroked a thumb across his mouth salaciously. “Oh, I hope so.” His fingers closed in the Watcher’s hair with casual cruelty and he yanked him to his feet in one smooth motion that made the human yelp with fear and pain.
And then Angelus was smacking him around, just for the fun of it, and Dru was clapping her hands. And the human did all the wrong things, which were all the right things to keep Angelus wanting to extend his about-to-become-very-unpleasant existence for as long as possible, flinching, cringing, bleeding, and then whimpering.
Spike gritted his teeth at the little snatched breaths, and those big shocked eyes because apparently no one had told Watcherboy in all his years of intensive training that vampires could be really mean sometimes, and would not only drink the blood of an infant from its crib, but hit you hard and often for using the English name for a German town when writing your essays about them.
“There. Is. No. ‘i’. In. Hameln. Dumpkopf!”
Watcherboy still didn’t get it, that Angelus was just getting himself turned on by the pleasant warm up of the sound of fist on flesh, too busy making those little whimpering noises that were absolutely the worst thing to do, because now he sounded like a frightened child or a frightened puppy, and if he’d read his reports on Angelus he would know exactly what Angelus liked to do to those things.
Spike looked at Angelus’s groin; not a difficult thing to spot with him wearing those leather pants; fuckin’ exhibitionist; and wheeled himself across the room to where the Watcher was currently cringing, putting up a hand to a cut across his cheek while Angelus doubled his belt and slapped it against the air, enjoying the sounds it made, and Drusilla danced around both of them, clapping her hands because the chaos was like fire to her, and the rising panic in the captive intoxicating as brandy. Brandy.
Spike rolled himself between the stupid little bleeder cringing on the floor and Angelus and said impatiently, “So, can I eat him now? Because you’re just wasting all that perfectly good blood.”
Drusilla giggled. “I told you, he’s not for eating. He’s for playing with. Isn’t he, Daddy?”
Angelus gave her a slow-burning smile and began to run a hand up her thigh; never more than a victim’s flinch away from a hard-on at the best of times and so currently horny as hell. “Sure he is.”
Dru pulled Angelus against her, eyes bright. “Dance with me. Spikey can’t now. Dance with me, Daddy....” And then she was pulling Angelus away, the glance she gave Spike as she did so, scarily sane, and Spike knew he had one shot at this. He pulled the handful of pills out of his pocket, the uppers and downers and the ones that had blurred the pain in his crushed back to dreams of poetry taking flight across rooftops whose chimneys spewed blood-coloured smoke. The ones Dru had stolen for him from the hospital that you should absolutely never combine with each other or alcohol especially not in these kinds of quantities. And then he had a hand across the Watcher’s mouth and was hissing, “Swallow, you stupid little tit” before he yanked out the whisky bottle from its place in his chair and said, “Open wide”, making it sound as dirty as possible.
Angelus looked around and, seeing Spike forcing the neck of the bottle into his prey’s mouth, said, “That better be all you’re planning on shoving down there. This one’s mine.”
“You always were greedy,” Spike retorted, rubbing the Watcher’s throat to make him swallow it, swallow it and keep it down, pills and whiskey, more whiskey, another gulp and another, and Spike’s eyes telling him to keep fuckin’ swallowing unless he wanted to end up another horror story they told little Watchers around the campfire on field trips. Watcherboy kept looking at him in wide-eyed confusion, even as he gulped, swallowed, choked, fought to keep it down and somehow managed it, gaze fixed on William the Bloody Idiot, who had just done something ridiculous for a reason he couldn’t have explained. Why this one? Why, out of all of them, try to make this one’s nightmare easier? What did he care what became of a stupid human with a stupid soul just because he was bookish and earnest and skinny and had taken one look at Drusilla and seen what Spike saw? And was he kind of asking and answering his own questions here?
“What are you doing anyway?” Angelus demanded.
Spike shrugged. “Thought you might want a liqueur after dinner, Your Wankership. You’re the one who taught me about spiking their blood with a nice shot of old scotch to get that burn when you bite ’em.”
“Marinate your own food,” Angelus retorted. And then he was touching Drusilla in places that made Spike want to drive a stake right into his dead heart and she was closing her eyes and whimpering with pleasure, and then Angelus shoved Dru away so she had to hold herself up with Spike’s shoulders, then he was snatching up the coughing Watcher by the hair and dragging him off to his bedroom.
“Miss Edith wanted to watch!” Drusilla protested.
Spike slid a hand up her thigh, still feeling the place where Angelus had touched her, still smelling him on her, that musty arousal that was now all the Watcher’s and good luck to him with that; and he slipped his fingers where Angelus’s had been and she whimpered with pleasure and he closed his eyes and licked her skin and tried not to hear the sounds from Angelus’s bedroom.
***
Wesley woke up drunk. Not just a little drunk; drunker than he had ever been in his life. He tried to focus on his fingers and they blurred at him, shimmering a little like a heat haze and when he tried to take in his surroundings he found that the walls were sliding around in a most unaccountable fashion. He blinked several times, but it didn’t help; there were pillows dissolving in front of him, metal struts merging and separating like ink blot art. Not just drunk then. He appeared to have consumed more alcohol than he had ever encountered in his life and a number of hallucinogenic drugs at the same time. Definitely not a Council party then. Was this how they behaved in Sunnydale?
A hand closed around his throat and pulled him a foot across the bed. Even through the candy-coloured cottonwool and disco mirrorballs in his mind he felt sure that staying a dead weight was definitely the best thing to do, and not struggling, definitely no struggling of any kind. Given how separated he felt from his body, and how slurred everything was, physically and mentally, it was much easier than he might have expected to just let it happen. He wasn’t entirely sure it was happening to him anyway, just to someone in his vicinity who might or might not be borrowing his body for the occasion.
“Morning, sweetheart.”
Wesley gazed into the brown eyes of the Scourge of Europe and thought – given their dependence on something as evanescent as mercury vapour – that the photographic processes from those days, were really extraordinarily accurate. “Angelus....” It came out as a sort of muffled squawk, not just to do with the very strong, very bruising fingers currently around his neck, but due to the soreness of his throat. He seemed to have done a lot of talking recently or – given his present company – screaming. He definitely remembered writing that people who met Angelus in the silence of dark alleyways tended to depart from him with the echoes of their own screams in their ears. Being frightened seemed like an appropriate response then. He needed to remember how to do that. Parts of his body, particularly his spine, made an ineffectual attempt to climb out from under his skin and run away, but it only led to a weird starfish-like lurch that did absolutely nothing to stop the vampire hauling him up against his cool hard chest.
Angelus smiled at him in a way that made Wesley think that he should probably scream again if he’d done any screaming before, but his throat was sore so he just opened his mouth and then closed it a few times.
Angelus was practically purring as he ran a hand through Wesley’s hair. “See, I bet you Watchers tell everyone I’m just a wham, bam, thank you, ma’am kind of guy, but I know how to snuggle.”
Wesley made another sound that came out not unlike ‘Urp!’
“They train you for that too?”
“Iggle?”
“Lying back and thinking of England?”
“Snurg, snigdurkle.”
“Are there any braincells I didn’t fry?” Angelus was unmistakably in a good mood. A hand that was probably not Wesley’s moved down a body that either was or wasn’t Wesley’s and touched him in a place that it probably shouldn’t be touching whoever it belonged to but which he couldn’t summon any strong feelings about one way or another at the moment. The wallpaper was sliding off the walls like blue jam from a spoon. If there was any blue jam, which he was no longer sure about. Wesley tried to look down but he couldn’t remember the movements. Like normal speech, coordination seemed to have deserted him.
“I didn’t even know Watchers could get their voices that high. Did you used to be a choirboy, Wes?”
“Can’t sing.” He was almost certain that was English. Or possibly Flemish. He had not liked Flemish as a class. It had taken place in a cold room on the northern side of the building and the radiators had definitely not been turned on as often as the fees charged by the academy would lead one to expect. He didn’t much care for Flemish art either. He preferred Renaissance. “Is this England?”
“No.” Angelus stroked a finger across his mouth and then slipped his thumb in between Wesley’s lips. “Suck it.”
Wesley had been going to say something else but finding that thumb in his mouth concentrated on gingerly sucking it. It seemed an odd thing to ask someone to do and he wondered if it was something Angelus found comforting. Angelus’s thumb was smooth, uncalloused, and tasted salty. He remembered no record of this behaviour in any of the Council records. They had seemed to suggest he preferred raping, torturing, maiming and murdering to having his digits sucked for comfort. He sucked Angelus’ thumb for some time while the wallpaper continued its surreptitious dissolution and the pillows rocked gently as a pendulum, and then sucked possibly a finger or possibly something else which tasted decidedly…odd. He listened to the sound of distant things ticking and banging, unsure if it was water in the pipes or possibly some machinery of some kind, while Angelus touched someone who might perhaps be him but could just as well be a third party to whom he had no recollection of being introduced. Angelus seemed extremely curious and thorough in his exploration and when Angelus touched them particularly hard or particularly deeply with things that were sharp or hot or long or thick, the person whose body it was definitely made sounds in a language that Wesley did not recognize. There were even flashes of…sensation. But they were so muffled he could not tell if they were meant to be good sensations or bad ones; they were just…feelings. Something buzzed like a trapped wasp for a while and something really tickled and he giggled a lot and tried to wriggle and Angelus laughed as if he was surprised about something. Then he had several bouts of feeling that he wanted to escape from something pressing at him, but on the whole his limbs were so heavy and so remote from him that he had no opinion one way or the other about the ways in which this body, which might or might not be his, was moved around and opened and closed and tied up and untied.
He sobered up enough at one point to find Angelus gazing at him with something that looked oddly like affection and saying, “I think I’ll keep you as a mascot. Send pictures back to the Council. What do you think, Wes?”
Pictures. He remembered a bisque doll with sad eyes and what would almost certainly be real hair. “Miss Edith?”
Angelus smiled and Wesley wondered if he was going to show him his fang face again. He had a feeling that the first time he’d seen it, he might have passed out, and it would be interesting to see it again. “Scrambled Watcher. Perfect. I love it when they break like glass. This is going to hurt. Describe it to me.”
Then there was that strange sensation again that was possibly happening to someone else or to him.
“Odd.”
Angelus beamed. “No one’s ever called it that before. Do you like pain, Wes?”
Wesley tried to remember. “I don’t think... Is this pain? What colours does it...? Too noisy to be....” He tried to remember how to form a sentence but it was too difficult.
Angelus bared his teeth in a smile of absolute satisfaction. “You may turn out to be even better than Dru. Do you remember what we did?”
“Did?”
“You and me. We did lots of things together last night. Things with ice cubes and body parts and things that take batteries. Remember?”
Wesley looked at the wallpaper which was now surreptitiously changing from blue to green. Or had it always been green? “Am I dead?” It occurred to him that he might be a vampire now, which would be terribly useful for writing those essays where you had to imagine what it might be like to be a soulless demon in a particular strategy situation in order to thwart yourself.
“Nope, still warm and sticky, Wes. The way I want you.” The fingers that were or were not Wesley’s touched the body parts that were or were not Wesley’s again, pinching and pulling in a way that made that third party shift uncomfortably or possibly pleasurably. If the wallpaper hadn’t been quite so fascinating, Wesley would have been able to give it more of his attention.
“I’m going to make you stickier now.”
It sounded like a threat but then he lost its echo and it could possibly have been a nice treat he was being offered. Wesley tried to think of sticky things but couldn’t think of anything that wasn’t honey. He knew there were pink sticky things that stuck things to other things and that he absolutely wasn’t allowed to have, ever. “What do they call it?”
“This is going to hurt.”
Wesley wondered if Angelus was talking to him or someone else and then something happened that made one of the strange sensations turn up its volume until it was all over the room like white noise and he didn’t know if there was a radio playing much too loud or if there was possibly something hurting him. But then he remembered and said, “Chewing gum!” triumphantly.
Angelus said, “What?” as if Wesley had just told him that two and two absolutely never added up to four.
“Sticky....” Wesley offered.
The wallpaper had changed colour at least three more times before the thought occurred to him that something large and unpleasant being repeatedly thrust in and out of his body might also feel like that radio sounded, but as there seemed no reason for that to happen he concentrated on watching the edge of the pillow change almost imperceptibly from violet to lilac and back again. When it did it three times, he giggled again, and Angelus said something very bad in a language that probably wasn’t Flemish.
***
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Date: 2005-10-16 10:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-10-16 10:44 am (UTC)