Some Devil 9/11
Title: Some Devil Author: twisted_reach Pairing: Spike/Angel, Will/Liam Rating: T Warnings: Starts with very strong language. Time frame: goes AU post NFA Summary: A take on how Shanshu might work - after the battle Spike wakes up to Will’s life. Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 He woke up feeling and looking pretty much like hell. After tidying up the mess from the day before, and generally brooding like the long lost poof himself, he couldn't stand being around himself a moment longer. He headed straight for the bar where Debbie worked, but where he knew she had the day off.
He looked up at himself in the mirror behind the row of bottles. He didn't know what he expected to see. He no longer recognised the face looking back.
Face now slightly tanned, hair newly bleached, but ungelled. Remnants of last night's eyeliner still clinging. Clothes that didn't quite fit the image.
He dropped his gaze back down to the glass in front of him. No capacity. Good thing or bad? Cheaper sure.
Fuck.
He'd fought for this? He'd wanted this? He didn't even know what to do with this life.
He threw back the drink and motioned Tony for another… yet another.
He could remember everything too clearly. Vampire-sense clarity. The memories wouldn't leave him alone, hadn't faded out as the new ones came in. And crappy as most of that existence had been, even compared to his relatively ordinary one now, he wanted it back so badly. At least some part of it. At least…
He clenched his teeth and breathed steadily through his nose.
Not going to make an arse of myself in public by crying.
Recomposed he told Tony to keep 'em coming, and set about getting well and truly rat-arsed.
Tony leaned back, polishing a glass like a cliché. He wondered if he should call Debbie. Decided against it. Dumb kid could drink himself stupid if he wanted to. He'd done it enough times himself, once upon a time. A customer came from a stall near the back to the far end of the bar. Tony left Will to slide lower on his chair.
"Yes sir. What can I get you?"
"Whiskey straight up. And I think he's had enough don't you?"
"He's a regular. Doesn't make a habit of it. Figure he's got his reasons today."
Whiskey straight up pulled a leather wallet from his coat and flashed a badge quietly at Tony.
"I think he's had enough. Don't you?"
"Yes detective, I think he probably has." Tony sighed and beckoned Abe, LA's biggest bus-boy, over to carry Will out.
"Hey, watcha doin?"
"Time to go home Will. Abe's going to walk you up the block okay."
He scowled at Tony, then made a show of gathering his jacket, cigarettes and lighter, paying for his drinks. Abe waited patiently beside him, then guided him unsteadily out the door.
Tony turned back to his customer, "One whiskey coming up."
Abe took Will to his door and waited silently while he glared up at him.
"Why'd you havta spoil a perfectly good drinking session?"
Abe shrugged his massive shoulders and pointed to the door. Will scrabbled in his pockets for the key.
"Cat got your tongue?"
He shook his head and raised an eyebrow blandly at Will.
"Christ, you're big. Why ain't you the bouncer?"
"I'm a pacifist. I'm going back to work now. See you Will."
He staggered upstairs to bed and troubled sleep.
"I thought you said you weren't going to drink yourself into a coma this year."
"A very fine morning to you too James." Will clutched his coffee and slid his sunglasses further up his nose.
"What's with the hair again?"
"It cover's the grey."
Jim followed him as he unlocked his office door.
"Are you going to leave me to die in peace or not?"
"Not. Why are you hung over?"
"Fine. Debbie dragged me out to a club on Saturday. Hence the hair."
"I like Debbie, she doesn't take your shit."
Will grunted, "I had a good time, then I managed to change it to a crap time. Then on Sunday I got so drunk even my local threw me out."
"You dickhead."
"Thank you for that assessment. Now let me die."
"Fine. Ditch the coffee and try the vitamin C again. Trust me."
Somehow he made it through the day without throwing up on any students.
He couldn't face going home and he couldn't face another drinking debacle. I must be getting old. He drove to the coast and sat watching the sun sink into the surf.
I've got to stop this. I've got to get over that life and live this one. I've got to stop fucking it up. Why is it so hard to let go?
And yet he had let go. He thought of the shadow of the girl he knew living inside her own head in an asylum, unable to let go of a life that wasn't hers, that she should never have glimpsed. He'd let go of what she couldn't. He thought of two college kids he knew but didn't, their faces displaying the innocence that was long gone from their more familiar estranged counterparts. His only interaction with either now, was to mark the young man's papers and recognise where the girl had given some input. He thought of a sweet blind date and a promising nascent relationship, broken off because it would have repeated something he didn't want anymore. He'd let go of so much. And he grieved, but he didn't want it back.
And yet he couldn't let go. A half heard voice in the next aisle of the supermarket. A broad-shouldered student on a football scholarship in the halls at work. A suit with a cellphone pressed to his ear two cars ahead in a jam on the freeway. The indistinct figure of a plain clothes policeman in the background of a news report. A faithless boyfriend with dark eyes and gelled hair on his knees in a toilet cubical. And every time his heart sped up, his mouth went dry, his palms began to sweat, and every time he hoped. And every time, the student would turn, the owner of the voice would round the corner, the news report would change, and hope would shatter and the shards would slice up his insides.
"Why can't I let him go?"
The sun slid beneath the horizon and kept its answers to itself.
He worked, he ate, he exercised, he got hooked on lame TV shows, he went out with friends and colleagues, he stopped himself from drinking alone, avoiding Tony's bar mostly out of embarrassment. He watched Jim and Isa's daughter turn one year old, he had the blond cut out once again, he provided a shoulder for Debbie to cry on when she and Lise fought, he smiled to himself when they got back together, he let the anniversary of being 'mugged' slip by, aware of the suppressed sighs of relief around him when he didn't break down or crack up, he watched another year of students graduate taking Willow Rosenberg and Daniel Osbourne with them onto better brighter things. He slept.
The dreams had abated with his own personal written therapy. Haphazard memoirs, not chronological, nor by importance, not even organised by relationship. Certainly not complete, but enough. Mostly… Only one facet of his past still haunted him with any regularity. Sure others appeared, but they were merely bit players now, guest appearances. No real pattern to the disturbed sleep, and no longer frequent enough to make him ill like it had, but still…
'I always kind of liked your poems, William.' 'You like Manilow!'
'Give me my ring you bastard.'
'Hold my hand.' 'Ahh. St Petersburg.'
'Don't worry I'll take care of her while you're… incapacitated. Won't I, Princess.'
'We were innocent victims, too, once upon a time.'
'Does that make me some kind of deviant?'
'You were my Sire, my Yoda!'
'What do you want, Spike?'
'Moving on.'
'They're going to get you!' 'But not you.'
He woke up with sweat-stained, come-stained sheets and salt-stained pillow, and felt sick. For the umpteenth time he remade his bed, showered, scrubbing at his face under the stream of water.
"Get out of my head, you bastard. Get out. Get out."
It seemed he couldn't write enough about him to clear his psyche. He still heard that voice with shifting accent, and saw that form or face every fucking where.
Less than a quarter of his combined lifetimes, no, less than a fifth, had been spent in the company of that… that… Irish wanker. Even less with any one of the multiple personalities. Why was he so bloody influential. Not even his proper Sire. Not his friend, not his lover.
'…never intimate…except that once…'
Yeah. Except that once. Intimate as opposed to the standard demonic power play that was sex between Angelus and his family. They'd both been drunk as lords on too much liquor and too little blood, without the women, snowed in, in some godforsaken Northern European town, with sod all else to do, and there had been an unspoken agreement when they awoke the next evening, on their big feather bed with limbs entwined and stinking hangovers, that not only would it not be happening again, but it never happened in the first place.
Hell, it hadn't even been all that great, sex wise. Good yeah, not great. But it had been… intimate.
That had been 1897. There was never an opportunity for it to not happen again. Souls, madness and slayers got in the way.
Then the bastard had to go and kiss him. One last mind fuck before the killing blow. God, how he hated him. And the worst of it was… he'd been too surprised to kiss him back.