Rating: PG-13 for language Pair: Spike/Illyria-ish Warning: aww factor. some language, many uses of the f-word, a brief moment of interrupted demon smut. Mega spoilers for After The Fall.
Note: After reading the second installment of the After The Fall comic, I was disturbed on Spike's behalf. But then I decided, hey, this is Joss, and he knows what he's doing. He's gotta, he hasn't failed us much before, right? Well, sort of. At any rate, I believe in the man, and I started to consider the subtle hints of background story implied by Spike when speaking to Angel. I *was* going to write a story about that, how Spike came to be the way we find him, but that was too much work and I know I'll end up getting Jossed anyway, so I found myself oggling that last image of Illyria fanatically and looking over my options. That's when I began to write this. It helped me to understand things, really, and I'm not so disturbed anymore. In fact, I'm starting to think ATF!Spike makes a strange kind of sense.
Summary: Written to the 2nd issue of the After The Fall comic. Spike thinks over his current role in Angel's life, and more importantly, his role in Illyria's.
Listen, mate. I didn't rise from the ranks of prisoner to prisoner with benefits to protector back to prisoner with benefits to Lord, just to have you come and muck it up. --Spike to Angel in After The Fall, #2
It was Angel's show, he knew it. They were extras in the sitcom of fucking life and nothing anyone did, no matter how significant, meant much beneath his hulking shoulders. Even Illyria, bless her, couldn't extend her godly reach above him... The Dark Avenger'd sucked the entire city of LA into Hell (to save the world, like), and this was his stinking mess from beginning to end. Spike was tired of cleaning after his fuckups--he'd drawn the line after burning up to save the world for the player's ex-girlfriend, but then yet another girl had to die, and now they were all stuck like insects on flypaper, writhing in the glue while the roaches took over the world. Fucking nonce. Still sleeping in his ivory fucking tower while little vamps like Spike bled for his mistakes. It never changed.
He didn't think it was presumptuous to say that he was tired. For a hundred and twenty seven years he'd been trying to be his own man, and for at least five of them he'd given his all one way or another for the Happy Meals With Legs without so much as a thanks. Even as a human being, he couldn't demand respect from his own mother, not really... if he were honest, no man or woman had ever respected him since his birthing into Victorian London. Hell, even after the soul, and all the bloody things he'd gone and done willingly, to himself, for the girl--even then, the fucker refused to respect him. Three weeks moaning in a basement, those were Angel's words on fairness. Never stopped, did it? Spike got the soul and wore the coat and fought the battle and came back as Casper to get his hands sawed off by a psycho slayer and mindfucked over Mountain Dew until he couldn't stand it anymore, and what came of any of it? All the good he'd done, tossed aside like so much disaster... it wasn't even the punishments he went through that drove him to give up in the end, it was the sufferings of the people of LA and the fact that even though a good portion of them weren't saints, he couldn't do a damn thing about it. No one but the Avenger could do anything because this was his fucking story. All those people, suffering fates worse than death under the monarchy of the Lords of Hell because a girl or two died and he had to bring on the action. What a stupid fucking bastard.
And yet, despite it all, Spike had been sure just before the battle in the alley that maybe he and Angel had finally...
No. He woke as a prisoner under the rule of a Hell God that made Glory best friends with Martha Stewart, and he gained a certain sense of perspective. The last time anyone had truly accepted him for what he was had been... he missed Joyce. He missed Tara. He missed Fred.
That was why when she'd claimed him, he'd allowed it. As the beloved pet of a primordial God-King, life wasn't always blood and sex, but it was all he could do to have a place beside her. It wasn't wrong to belong, was it? And that was the thing Angel failed to understand--belonging, and respect. Illyria might consider Spike a meaningless halfbreed that exists merely to amuse her, but she does respect him, he can see it in her eyes, in the way that she defends his every danger. She accepts his opinion, she treats him with care and dignity. She listens to him in her own brutal way, which is much more than Spike could say for anyone else he's ever belonged to in the past. Even Dru hadn't cared much for his say, in the end, not when Angel With An Us entered the picture. Not for slime demons, not for Miss Edith and the stars that spoke to her of horrors beyond his imagining.
Funny, that. Dru'd left him because he “tasted like ashes.” Sometimes he can't help but wonder if Buffy had tasted the same. Even now, he can still smell the amulet in his skin, lingering like a permanent scar through his hard-earned soul. If he wasn't so fixated on ignoring all the wretched guilt screaming in his head every night, he might even be a bigger brood than—nah. Never happen.
“So there I was, fighting the forces of darkness while Angel went on blubbering like over-sized vampire baby. Covered in gore from head to boots, I looked the Devil in his big red ugly face and yelled, 'Is that all you got, mate?' Devil did his best, I'll give him that. Wasn't enough, of course.”
“Oh, Lord Spike,” an anonymous green-skinned demon girl sighed with wonder. “That story gets better every time you tell it.”
And every time he tells it, she says the very same thing.
“Yeah well, as a reward for my hard work, Los Angeles was sent to Heaven and everyone here lives in bliss. 'Nother drink, Spider?”
“Yes, Lord Spike.”
And that was the thing of the matter. If he let himself drown in lies, sex and booze, maybe he could shroud himself so far into his vampire punk persona he won't even recognize the man the soul seemed relentless in remembering. William had no place in hell. At least Spike could make a decent home of it.
“Tell us another,” a three-eyed Arabian chick whispered in the nether regions of his dick.
As she swallowed him with a mouth built for oral sex, Spike sighed from deep in his gut. “Ever tell you the one about Slayer and the amulet?”
“Not since last week, Lord Spike.”
Right, then. “Well, the thing you oughta know is this bird is bloody special--”
“Pet. I demand your counsel.”
And here came the fun.
Gently tugging Three Eyed Arabian Chick's head away so he could think straight, he rolled out of his chair and zipped himself back to order in one smooth motion. He waved the girls off to do whatever it was they did when he was busy playing the part of amusing pet for the God-King. “Go have some fun, ladies. Blue Girl demands my services.”
They giggled in a mindlessly girlish way that even Dru had never done because it came with such a loss of dignity. He had no real respect for most of them because they were brainless and nullifying, and stood in stark contrast to the rest of the women he'd known in his life, including Cecily, even Harmony--but what else could he do to pass the time? A man couldn't be picky in Hell.
As for Illyria... sometimes, it still unnerved him that the residents never questioned their Lord serving another, but it made things simpler that they didn't. The human men and women who'd taken refuge in his make-shift heaven had collectively asked of her place once or twice, but for the most part even they didn't want to disturb any form of pleasure in hell if it meant they didn't have to sell themselves as sex slaves (his demon girls volunteered, no harm done), as gladiators, or worse. Spike had addressed it in form as a Lord only once, and it was right after he'd killed the last Lord, still shaking, delirious, and covered in her gore. Illyria had demanded that Spike clean himself up—he was sure she meant it only as Illyria-type worry for his health, but it sounded condescending to those who didn't know her, and one of the other slaves had asked why he would put up with that kind of attitude. “You're a Lord now, man, you don't have to put up with any of that anymore, especially from no chick.”
Clearly, hell was unaware of William the Bloody's reputation for women.
Spike told him in a rather careful way that Illyria was the ultimate exception, all the while thankful that the God-King in question chose to ignore the puny babbling to study the innards of the ex-Lord sprawled out on her ex-throne. Without saying so in so many words, he hinted that Illyria could kick his ass six ways from Sunday if she wanted to, and the fact that she didn't was enough for him. As long as she went on protecting Beverly Hills with her godly smiting, Spike would bow down before her and hail her grace in so much bad poetry she wouldn't be able to stand it. Besides, he sensed that as much as he might cater to her demands, she needed him just as well to keep grounded in the bizarre circumstances of their situation. For all her strength, she could be utterly fragile. He didn't expect the others to understand that.
It also helped he'd kind of grown to like the bitch. Some deep, raving part of him still blamed her for Fred's death, but he knew past was past and Illyria was all he had left of anything resembling sense. Which wasn't saying much, but hey, he'd had worse company.
“What's on your mind, luv?”
He leaned against the wall in a careless pose with his arms folded, one hand in his pocket, the other fingering a cigarette. He wished he had a lighter, but holding one at times like this usually helped him relax and she always seemed... happier, when he was relaxed. For once thing, he knew she hated to see him upset, which was bizarre, but that was probably part of the pet thing.
She tilted her head at him in that cat-like way she did when she was confused. “I've seen night visions of Gunn's mutilation. A demon took him. It struck despair within me that I have not felt since Wesley's death. My guide is deceased, Spike. Tell me why this haunts me.”
So Illyria had nightmares. That had been an interesting talk, back when they were both slaves for the last Lord. Okay, so Illyria wasn't so much a slave as humoring the masses for reasons unknown, kind of hard to contain a God-King. But she had mentioned it before, suffering vivid nightmares as a being that didn't sleep. He told her now what he told her then, careful tenderness he hadn't used since Buffy creeping into his voice.
“It's part of a process, Blue, everyone goes through it, even God-Kings. When you lose someone... it hurts. It hurts for a long time.”
“It sickens me,” she said with that distinct tremble he was never sure to associate with border-line mental breakdown or sheer disgust. Her blue eyes cast to him angrily, and slowly drifted to the floor with memory. In times past, she would've gone into a flowery rant of her rule over the universe, but she rarely bothered anymore. He was the only one left to listen, and he'd heard it all already.
He gently wrapped an arm around her shoulders, and she didn't shove him away. He'd learned that part of being a “pet” meant the allowance of doing such things to comfort and amuse her. But sometimes he found himself fulfilling poor Wes's role, explaining things like this to guide a woman who shouldn't seem so vulnerable in the face of humanity. But then again, this wasn't something that Percy could ever hope to understand. Spike, however, understood perfectly.
Carefully, he leaned against the wall beside her, head tilted with thought, and took an oddly shaky breath that ripped through the core of him. It hurt to remember things like this, especially since he had a whole new way of looking at them. But for her, he would recall anything.
“I get it,” he said. “Humiliated as... as a shell of your former self, robbed of your nature, starved, thrust upon vermin to survive. I get it.” His eyes grew dark at the memory of it. Even now, souled, world-saving and reformed, he still felt violated, knowing the Initiative had raped his mind and gotten away with it, simply because they were human. Bitterness, a small shudder. He felt her eyes boring into his skull with a heated intensity that rivaled the sun. She liked no one to harm him. But he gave no reaction.
“It happened to me.” He shrugged, then looked at her. Tried to make her understand without having to say the words. “Thing is to survive, luv. Doesn't matter how. You just do what's right.”
For a moment, she didn't respond. Then she said, “Put your arm back on my shoulder, Pet.”
He did as he was told, sure he was hallucinating because when he glanced at her face, there was very tiny smile there.
Her head tilted in an oddly similar fashion to his own habits, and she added, “You are a very good Pet, Spike.”
“I try.”
Yes, that was a smile. Illyria was smiling. Spike checked around him to be sure it wasn't the end of the world all over again, but the joke was lost when he remembered. The sky was scarred with ominous clouds, the moons creating havoc on the populous, and if he stretched his senses, he could smell the misery and the death lingering even at the heart of his peaceful territory. The world had ended in a sense, but he'd made the most of it, hadn't he? It was like retiring to a fantasy island, only with the added bonus of dragons and demons and Hell Gods and terrible fucking temptations that defined the misery of Hell itself. He knew he was doomed and this whole setup was going to cock up eventually, but he was too tired to bother. This was Spike giving up, Spike having already given up several pages ago, with a big fuck you to Angel The Bloody Disaster for the trouble. Let them figure it out for a change. He had his harem, he had his town, and he had his God-King. There was nothing else left.
Spike leaned his head on Illyria's shoulder, and she supported him with her stiff, powerful body, for the moment unwilling to push him away. He felt her arm gingerly wrap around his own shoulders, keeping him there, and a soft smile touched his lips because he knew she was trying to be generous.
He hadn't felt this secure since first arriving in Sunnydale several years ago. It was nice. He closed his eyes, and he let her keep him safe.