ⲁngel (faceofanangel) wrote in dust_till_dawn, @ 2008-10-16 23:05:00 |
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Angel worked open his eyes against the shore of sleep, listening to the rolling of its waves; raising himself to consciousness was like crawling from a honeycomb of thick panic and dream, hands coming up by reflex to protect his eyes, his elbows out, warding off a vicious cocktail of vertigo combined with sea-deprived seasickness. It wasn't until his own arrested breathing started again that he recognized the sound as a voice, and for a moment he thought it had been his own. Then he heard it again, a three-step tone rising from gut-deep bellow to scream to shriek and then cutting off as though the pain or the terror had gone off the scale and into the silence of absolute excess. He could see in his mind's eye the mouth stretched wide and soundless. Beyond the cruelly bladed tortures, behind the visionary agonies and impenetrable targets of chartreuse eyes was an unreachable fathom of otherness, the throne room of a lost soul where temptation constantly bled, never lit by grace. Buffy was all that he had left, his albatross, and even there she was threaded with the venal snakes of corruption.
He'd pictured her so many times, rendered imagined shape and form real through so many hours and days and months of fantasy, that his first thought was that he must be crazier than he'd thought, and consequently he was hallucinating. Surely there could be nothing hiding behind that wall of remembrance as appalling as the century he'd spent wreaking havoc on a largely innocent world. The very worst thing about this, Angel decided, was that he wasn't completely sure his senses were any more to be trusted than his memory. Bad enough not to be sure where he had been, but never to know where he was and where he wasn't? Genuine, gold-plated insanity. And at the moment, Angel wanted very much to be insane. Because he'd forgotten. Somehow, he had blocked it from his mind, the blind terror of helplessness in the face of bone-deep wrongness, the sickening invasion and forcing of a soul onto a mind already mazed and fissured with too much pressure. He was dying, but because his flesh was not mortal, he was not allowed the deliverance of death.
No nightmares, these. But base enough, animal enough - monster enough that Angel's cheeks flushed with shame - eyes a cello dark mesmer - before his mind could shuffle out the heap of stolen images, hopeful last seens and gray in memoriams that seemed to breed quite on their own. When those awful memories would finally come it was looking in the one mirror that held Angel's long lost reflection. He broke it again and again, sent shards flying, and always, always, Angelus was still there. Taunting, teasing, fucking reminding Angel of - everything. Everything he regretted and, worse, all the things (more) that he didn't regret. That he should hate himself for, hate himself for remembering with fondness and an aching nostalgia purred into his ear with the sugary sweetness of too much truth. The demon wasn't dead, though, and was setting its house to rights. Would it hurt so much if Angel weren't haunting it?
When Angel opened the chilling wetness of his eyes he was momentarily dizzy - disoriented, an arrow fletched raggedly. Its momentum carried him back to his bed, blinking blind in the dark, lashes painting long, fimbriate shadows on colorless cheeks until the chills that felt like spiders became familiar, gossamer warmth. There was something in this strange place that both comforted and disturbed him, some forgotten thing that spoke of momentous, desperate choices, and memories of unexpected tenderness dragged out from suspended animation.
He blinked.
His old apartment.
In the middle of drawing a deep, desperate breath when two separate things intruded upon his still steadying wakefulness with a jarring thud - the first was a Sargasso Sea of scent, incongruously light and joyful within the framework of his inner gloom; the second was a low, penetrating vibration which had passed unnoticed until now - Buffy.
Angel rose with all the weight of the truly damned, wrapping the thick duvet around his negligently clothed body. It wasn't hard to guess where she would have gone; the balcony door slid open soundlessly, and he stepped out into the fading night, the wind lifting his hair. He'd been right, it wasn't light yet - which, hey, less with the burning to ash - but this kind of dark was worse in some ways. His eyes slid furtively, seeking purchase, the city draped like tinsel over their surface. Shadow staining out the brown as he transfixed Buffy with their delicacy and detail.
"Are you okay?" Buffy chanced softly, with the air of a woman who'd been standing there just a little too long.
Awareness engendered deeper dismay, an empty-stomach sensation of appalling susceptibility. "Fine," he lied and his voice was flattened and colorless, too, by the time it came to Buffy's ear, the edge of bitterness and complaint worn away by the indistinct light and the humid, heavy air. "Too tired to sleep, I guess."
Over Justice Harvelle and their coarse, bloody intimacy - the tight harmonics of their gashing hatred and red ruthlessness - the arching, driving way they flew again and again into one another's murderous embrace, locking together, craving each other's assaults with the force of the junkie who kills for his drug.
". . Does it hurt?" she asked at last, voice a delicate whisper against the city's four-way veins stretched out beneath them.
Angel could only nod. His throat had closed, the pain inside him sharper now. He held himself in tightly, afraid to move for fear of what would happen if he did. God, there was so much - too much - he wanted, needed, to apologize for. To ask her for.
Something squeezed behind his ribs, a cold pressure that had rested at the center of him for so long that he had stopped feeling it ages ago - it had become so much a part of him that he didn't even recognize it any more, couldn't even hold the entirety of that deep, bone-chilling terror inside his mind. He had thought himself without fear, and hadn't understood that he was filled with it, irrevocably split, that it had spread so far through him that he was made of it, no room for anything else. He couldn't breathe - which made the fact that he didn't have to a minor miracle - it was suddenly so real and present within him - because what if this was all there was? What if there was no end to it? What if all that would ever be was this deep and endless chasm of loss, of aloneness and himself the only enduring thing, going on and on, to the elusive and merciless end, watching everyone he'd ever cared about die because of him?
"God, Buffy—I don't . . want to remember, but I do. I do and there's nothing I can—" Angel pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes, trying to stop the stinging, the clenching of moisture.
"That wasn't you."
"I killed." He spoke forcefully, amazed that Buffy didn't seem to be getting it. "I thought I could control it, I thought it was the best thing to do. But how the hell can I trust myself?" Angel raised his arms and let them cradle his sides, tilted his head like there was a god up there to commiserate with him or to take the blame. Finding none, he muttered, "I know I have evil in me, I know I can't ever get rid of it. But after all that with . . with the demon, and with Justice . . I thought I'd figured it out. I was trying so hard to do the right—"
"—to do the right thing," Buffy chimed in with him, speaking in unison, and he gave a short humorless laugh. "I know."
An icy needle slid into the vulnerable hollow at the base of his skull, making tiny lights flicker at the edges of his vision and a nerve-jarring ache run through his ears, his jaw and the bones of his face. A familiar discomfort turning vibrating quakes into body-length shivers. He laughed soundlessly, a grim exhalation in the dark. Of course it could be worse - it could always be worse. Why did he keep forgetting that?
"You can't change what you are. You can ignore it, you can forget, but it doesn't change you. I told you before I couldn't do it again, and I won't, Buffy. I won't become a monster."
"We've all done things we wish we hadn't, small and large, but you have to believe me - we'll get through this." The vampire moved instantly away, skittish as a stray, with an almost childlike hostility in hurt eyes. But Buffy seized him by the arms, hands biting into his muscles, forcibly prevented him from moving. "Angel, please!"
With a swift, sudden movement Angel pulled free from Buffy's grip and reversing their positions slammed her against the railing. Distemper was written all over him, unmistakable; written in his face, averted and moonpale with shame, in the mortifying tremors he couldn't control and that Buffy must surely be able to feel. His thoughts spun, unable to find purchase; denial was what he needed but denial wouldn't come. There was only this mute, helpless surrender to the weight of that proprietary touch against the hollow at his spine telling him none of this was real.
Angel's voice turned husky, layered with intimate, dark promise, and goose flesh rose on the slayer's nape. "You think it's easy to see any kind of upside to what I've done?" I almost killed you, Buffy. I raped you. I wanted to! Angel shivered hard, nothing he could have controlled, and between one breath and the next he was lost in a memory, vivid and visceral, blood and Buffy and irrepressible lust walking an internal knife's edge. "Life guarantees nothing. Not health, or longevity. Or redemption. There's no salvation for me. Not here. Not ever!" Angel was wavering. This was how it would always be: moment to moment, veering. Loose in the wind, the soul clinging by threads, determination over grace. He'd have no grace. No grace, but no hell, either. Oh, how he envied Buffy her cage, its smallness and neatness; his cage, Angelus' cage, was the whole forsaken world, the long flow of eternity stretching out endlessly. Angel wasn't sure he could face that anymore.
Buffy was shaking her head, and Angel was surprised to see the soft green-hazel eyes brimming with tears. "Why? Because you're alone? Because it's just you against all that evil? You're not alone," she cried. "Not out here - and not in there. Please, Angel."
And that hurt more. Hearing the worry beneath the gentle chastisement. Feeling his response to it, hungry and instinctive, like a plant to sunlight. Without effort, it went through the defenses Angel had been trying to rebuild, undercut every shred of rational caution he'd managed to hold together. His arms tightened around Buffy involuntarily, and he closed his eyes against the painful surge of feeling. For one long second the words lodged in his throat behind a story of ruin. But the closeness, the absence of walls between them tonight, had fed his soul in a way he hadn't even known he needed, all the more devastating for the knowledge that it couldn't possibly last, could it? All his fabled self-control slid away, evaporated into the ether. Somehow she was in his arms and he was in hers and she was real and alive and he knew that nothing could keep them apart.
"I'm so sorry." It caught in his throat and tasted like ash, escaping him in a soft, breathless sound that felt too close to something more vulnerable than mourning. "I'msorryI'msosorry." He trailed off, floundering, unable to express his previous convictions. He felt like he was choking on his own foolhardiness, faced with the knowledge that he'd done everything he could, and it hadn't been enough. Buffy was rocking him in a gentle but insistent embrace when he went to his knees, and suddenly Angel was excruciatingly aware of the danger here. He wanted this, even in this time of loss; he couldn't turn away from his need to be touched, to be reminded that he, once again, was still alive.
It wasn't supposed to be this way.
That seemed like a statement so obvious it didn't bear thinking about: like the sky is blue, water is wet, fate is cruel, winter is cold and death is inevitable. A will to go. A heart to stay. The need to escape Justice; the desire to remain for Buffy. His only love bound by his only hate. Inseparable. And insurmountable.
It wasn't supposed to be this way - but it was.