TITLE: All Through The Night
AUTHOR: Kita
RATING: Hard R
PAIRING: Connor/Fred, Connor/Spike- both non-shippy
AUTHOR NOTES: For my Fod.
WARNING: Key word psychopathic. Also, use of Spike’s penis as a plot device.


“Sleep, my love, and peace attend thee, all through the night. Guardian angels god will lend thee, all through the night.”
-Holtz, ‘Lullaby’.



The girl kneels on the stones, the underside of her ass peeking out from beneath her skirt, pale and round as a baby pig. Smoke from the vampire’s cigarette drifts down to curl around her hair. In the ugly yellow lamplight, it looks as if she has a halo.

(sacrifices must always first be made holy, son)

The vampire’s dick is in the girl’s mouth. His human face is turned toward the sky, his eyes closed.

When Connor’s boot connects with the girl’s chin, her eyes close too. She sprawls on the ground, bleeding. She will live to be someone else’s sacrifice.

Connor watches the vampire’s mouth curve into a grin, even as he shoves him back against the wall. He’s staring at Connor’s lips, and Connor flicks his tongue out, tastes bubblegum and shine. This close, the vampire’s skin is almost the same color as his teeth; the color of death and old bones.

“I know what you are,” Connor tells him.

The vampire’s cigarette has fallen to the concrete. His pants are still undone, Connor can feel his dick pressing against his thigh. It’s still hard.

“That right? Bet I know what you are too, pretty boy.”

“I doubt that,” Connor says, and smashes the back of the vampire’s head into the bricks.


**

Connor did not trust mirrors.

He found it peculiar to be able to see himself so clearly; after all this time, the picture inside the glass didn’t match the one he’d kept inside his head. His face was full in places where he was sure it used to be lean. His hair was evenly cut, and every morning he shaved the barely-there whiskers on his chin with a safety razor that could not be used as a weapon.

He nicked himself the first five days in a row anyway. And when Stephen reached up to wipe the blood off the right side of his neck, Connor’s hand wiped the left side instead. Mirrors showed everything backwards.

Tonight, the mirror told Connor that his lips were the color of apples, that his eyes were ringed with dark kohl and long lashes. But it was illusion, only tricks of stolen paint and borrowed light. The silver dust sparkling at the pulse of his throat was powder from a jar on Fred’s bedroom table, and not stars.

Mirrors lie.

**

“Do you have a name?”

Connor runs his knife down the vampire’s bare chest. No breath to catch, just sharp edge of ribs and blade.

“I have a fucking headache,” the vampire answers. He twists his arms, but the ropes securing him to the bed will hold. Tied like a beast (a sacrifice), blood from his head leaking across the mattress, and Connor sits across his hips, straddling his legs.

“You woke up twice on the way here. I had to hit you again.”

“That’s- where is here, exactly? And what the hell do you- Jesus!”

Knives are precise weapons. This one was made for skinning. Vampires bleed and bleed, like swine stuck for the slaughter, except that they can keep bleeding, and never die. Connor wipes the blade on his jeans.

“Do you have a name?” he repeats.

“Spike.” There are growls and hunts and night time curses in that voice. Connor has tracked the vampire for over a week, and not once seen him feed.

Instead, this vampire drinks beer, and ruts with blonde women in alleyways. Connor has never even seen his real face. He draws the knife gently across the vampire’s neck. The tip sparkles, the promise of a smile with teeth. Spike presses the back of his head into the pillow.

“That’s a stupid name,” Connor says.

“Thanks. Do I get the honor of yours, then, before you try and turn me into some kind of taxidermy nightmare?”

Connor holds the knife over the vampire’s belly, and frowns. “What?”

“Name. Come on. You must have a name.”

“I must,” Connor agrees, scooting down the vampire’s thighs. The flies of his pants come apart with one quick slash of knife.

“Fuck.”

“Back in the alley, you said you knew me.” Connor throws the ruined pants to the floor. He keeps hold of the knife. “Who did you think I was?”

“Karma,” Spike says.

**

Fred had taken up smoking in the hotel basement. When Connor first found her, she was curled round herself in one corner, a creature tucked inside its shell. She sat, staring at a pile of rubble: charred, broken pieces of tiny furniture, scraps of linens decorated with happy fluffy clouds.

(how long did Angel wait before he burned all of Connor’s things?)

Connor tapped Fred on the shoulder. She started and dropped the cigarette quickly, into a can by her feet. The tip was smoldering, the other end damp, crumpled with her spit. He picked it up and sniffed; it was ripe, sweet smelling, turned earth and child’s candy.

“What is this for?”

She ducked her head a bit as she reached out. Thin wrists above pale hands, she was so very bony and delicate on the outside. Her arms would snap easily as winter branches.

He handed the cigarette over, watched her touch the paper to pink lips, watched her eyelashes flutter when she took a breath. “It works on the chemistry in your brain, see, it’s like-” her voice sounded funny.

Connor frowned. “Medicine?”

“Sorta, yea!” Fred said, then wrinkled her nose. “Well, in the sense that it makes me feel better.”

“Like...when you’re sad.”

“Right!” She smiled.

(chocolate, new clothes, and girls named after sunshine; nice girls die)

Fred was too smart, though, to kill herself with her own medicine. She’d survived inside a demon dimension, and she had been all alone there.

Connor sat down next to her on the floor, and watched her try to hide her look of surprise. She glanced again at the stack of garbage, then turned back toward Connor, wiping at the hair sticking to her wet cheeks.

“When you got taken, Angel missed you so much,” she whispered.

Connor’s fingers closed into a fist on his lap, but her palm was gentle across his knuckles, as if he were made of something that could actually be broken.

(it was Angel who saved Fred, he found a way in, and he brought her home; she hadn’t even been waiting for him)

She wrapped her hand around his, held on. “Now you’re back, but he’s gone, and -you must miss him an awful lot, too.”

Fred’s eyes were big and shining; Connor could see himself inside. He looked into them, and lied. “Yeah, I really do.”

She wrapped her arms around his shoulders. He shut his eyes, and inhaled the scent of her, all cherry shampoo and clean, soapy girl skin.

(and underneath, just underneath, it clung to her: dying fires in waterless deserts, grime and tatters. Hell. Home.)

**

“You’re still hard.”

“Pretty much for the past hundred-fifty years.”

The vampire smiles with his lips pulled up on just one side. Connor studies his face. He’s seen demons laugh, he wonders if the yellow eyes can cry.

“Is it the hurting that does it?” Connor asks, drawing his blade across Spike’s thigh again. Blood wells but doesn’t spill, tide pools with no life inside them. Connor presses his fingers against cool and broken skin.

Spike doesn’t flinch. “Maybe it’s your mouth,” he says.

“You’re a filthy demon,” Connor tells him. He uses the knife tip to paint curlicues on the flat surface of Spike’s belly. His father taught him to write this way, bible verses, carved over and over into pale and dirty sand. “You enjoy pain.”

He slides the knife just under Spike’s navel, and the vampire grunts. Bucks his hips once, right beneath Connor’s groin.

“Yea,” he says. “What’s that make you, then?”

**

They didn’t sleep at night in Quor’Toth. The darkness there had claws and teeth, and closing your eyes inside of it was for prey. Connor rested when the demons did, in the cold, yellow first-light. His father marked time inside the margins of their bible, taught Connor about cycles and seasons. During summer months, when the suns were closest in their sky, daylight lasted up to four hours.

Connor still dreamed in shadows, when he slept.

He could hear them together at night in the Hyperion. Fred’s voice, full of high, excited breath; smoke and wind, fragile, untouchable. Gunn laughed, but his voice was too low to catch. From him, Connor could steal only the most important words- baby.love you.yes.

In front of Connor, they only discussed monsters.

Sometimes, he’d lay awake in his room and listen to the sounds they made together. Grind his dick into the grooves of his mattress, with the rhythm of their headboard against the wall.

They (always) finished first.

After, he came to stand at the foot of their bed. Fred was sprawled like a starfish, eyes closed, mouth open in the shape of a heart. Her nightshirt had slipped off her shoulder, baring the curve of one breast, one tiny, pink nipple. Gunn was naked, his legs tangled with Fred’s under crisp sheets. The room smelled warm and human. There were no weapons in view.

And Connor thought, this is how people sleep.

**

“Why are you letting me do this?” Connor asks, dragging the tip of his blade along the underside of the vampire’s dick. He follows the thin trail of blood with his thumb.

“I have a choice?” Spike’s voice is steady.

Connor looks at him. He doesn’t like the vampire’s eyes. They are too blue, too bright, traps and tricks. He could get lost inside of them, and never make his way out.

“Probably not,” Connor says. “But you haven’t even tried to fight me. And I’ve never seen you kill.”

“So it *was* you all week,” the vampire says, smiling again. Still. The blood on his chest has dried in random patterns. Connor begins to make more. “Then you know I can’t.”

His own dick is so hard, his teeth ache. When he grinds down a bit on the mattress, the vampire smiles wider. Connor jabs the knife point into the flesh of his right thigh. Smiles back at the low shout.

“You don’t like to kill? You think you’re special? Different?” Connor jabs the knife into Spike’s other thigh. It’s sharp, but it’s the wrong kind of blade. It doesn’t cut nearly deep enough.

“Never said I didn’t like to,” Spike’s fists wrap around the headboard. It is wooden, decayed, it would splinter easily into stakes. “Pay attention. Said I can’t.”

“Why?” Connor strips out of his jeans, and tosses them onto the floor.

“Because it hurts,” Spike says.

“Oh.” He settles between Spike’s knees, rubs the blood on his hands into soft, secret skin. “Good.”

**

Fred had smoked three of those cigarettes; her eyes were small and bright. Connor sat pliant while she painted his face with colored powders.

“Makeup isn’t just for girls, you know,” she was saying, as she tickled his cheeks with something made of feathers. “Lots of tribes paint the faces of their warriors. Oh, not that all warriors are boys, either. Like Cordelia-”

Fred kept talking while she worked, but Connor had stopped listening. Her breath was warm on his neck, and her bare leg rubbed up against his knee through his pants.

“No, no,” she said, lifting his chin with her thumb. “Keep your eyes closed, sweetie, I don’t want to get this inside them.”

Connor obeyed, opening his mouth for her, so she could rub something sticky across his lips.

When she was finally done, she dragged him in front of the mirror, and he stared into it, unblinking. His hair was wet and slick, his eyelashes looked like spider legs.

“Maybe I overdid it, huh?” Fred said, pulling her mouth into a frown.

His lips were the same ripe shade as hers, his bottom lip fat and sparkling. He bit into it, then licked his teeth. The boy in the mirror watched.

Connor tilted his head, until shadows covered both their faces on one side. He reached out and traced the darker ghost in the glass.

“I hear you at night,” he said, suddenly.

“What do you mean?”

“You. And Gunn. I hear you at night. When you’re rutting.” He turned away from the mirror and watched as real flush climbed Fred’s cheeks like the fire of sunrise.

“Oh, Connor. Uhm, people don’t rut. People make love. And you shouldn’t-“

“Do you love Gunn?” The bathroom was small, and the smoke hovered between them, a humid, secret fog. Fred was beginning to back away from him now; he wondered if she even realized it.

“Well, I mean, yes, of course I do.”

Connor nodded.

(make love)

Even under all the store-bought perfumes, and the stink of pine bathtub cleaner, he could smell Fred’s skin. It made Connor’s ears burn and his chest hurt. He leaned in, closer to her, and her heart sped up: rabbit, child, hunted thing. Fred’s eyes widened, but she didn’t move away. Her breath tasted like wisps of light, and her shoulder bones were delicate as a bird’s, and he had to dig his fingers in deep to keep her from flying up.

She pushed at his chest with soft little hands.

“It’s ok,” he said, against her mouth. He tightened his grip, “I don’t care if you love me.”

(love was something you could make)

“Connor- no.” Her voice had gotten high. The sound went straight to his fists and his teeth. He wanted to press her to the floor, lay on top of her, and put his tongue everywhere she smelled like him. He wanted to open her up, and dig inside her like earth. She would wrap herself around him, and he would be home.

(he could make her)

Fred’s knuckles connected with his jaw. She was stronger than she looked, just underneath. Connor’s head snapped back. He stared at her for the space of a breath; the splotches of color high on her face, the burn of tears in her eyes, her tiny, clenched fist. In that one ruined second, he was certain he loved her.

(he could make her)

“The hell’s going on?” Gunn was coming up the stairs. He stood blocking the doorway to the bathroom as Fred straightened her shirt, wiped her eyes, and smiled.

“Charles, we’re up here. Everything is fine, we just-“

Connor pushed past him, shoulder to chest, nearly knocking Gunn off his feet. He was out the front door, but he could hear Fred calling his name. Her voice was calm and sweet; the same lullaby tone she used at night, when she would tell him that his father would be back for him, that Angel would come home soon, that everything would be all right.

**

“You’re a liar.” Connor’s voice, pitched low and calm, is the same as his father’s (both of them) when he’s angry. He wraps one hand around the pale throat in front of him.

The vampire’s chest, thighs and stomach are decorated in his own blood, parchment thin skin carved through with sacred symbols (and names Connor does not look at.) They are through now with bedtime stories about military experiments and pain, and the vampire is not smiling so much anymore. But he won’t stop babbling, swearing, speaking in tongues: show you, forgive you, sorry sorry sorry, love you.

The words linger like smoke and secrets between them (prayers of the damned, swell of the surf, He saves the righteous from sacrifice, but no one ever saved Connor.)

“Fucking liar,” Connor spits, pressing his palm over the vampire’s mouth to stop the tide, pressing the vampire’s knees back, pressing himself forward, rubbing his dick against tight, unwelcoming skin until it breaks open-

and then all he can do is gasp.

Spear to earth, fist to heart; Connor wants to tear it all right out of him, all the words and all the blood and all the goddamned love. Because it’s a lie, it has to be a lie, it doesn’t matter what is shoved inside of them (cursed souls, little bits of machinery, hard and aching dicks) they will not can not ever be anything but monsters.

And Connor must be speaking (chanting) now too, because Spike is answering him. Thrashing beneath him, tugging his wrists loose of the ropes, saying he can and he is and he does.

(Love you, forgive you, show you, fucking fucking liar)

When Spike comes, he prays the name of some girl who deserves better, while he digs his fingers into Connor’s shoulders. He shuts those eyes as he cries.

The room (the vampire) reeks of sex and death; awful and familiar.

Connor follows the streaks of tears with his teeth, leaving tiny bite marks. He stops at the vampire’s neck.

**

The beach was warm even at dusk, the red horizon trying to turn water to sky. Connor climbed down to the shoreline, and wrapped his arms around his knees. Over the soft shush of ocean, he could hear the echo of Fred’s voice calling his name.

When Stephen was small, he used to hear Angel calling his (other) name. For years, he woke in Quor’Toth to the sound of his father’s voice searching for him. Even after he realized that Angel was never going to come, he heard that voice. Not anymore.

The sun sank lower, blurring the world around its edges. Connor could almost make out the curve of the earth here; circles and alchemy, everything returned to its rightful place. The waves shifted, silent, terrible, and endless, and beneath them, nothing stirred.

He lay back in the damp sand, let the peace of loneliness lap at his feet.

An hour later, he bashed Spike’s brains in. He was still wearing Fred’s lipstick.

**

Connor opens his eyes to the sound of water. The vampire is taking a shower. Connor didn’t even know this place had working plumbing. He picks Spike’s pants up off the floor, begins rifling through the pockets. A pack of cigarettes, two lighters, a few crumpled hundred dollar bills, a scrap of blue silk that looks like a girl’s hair ribbon. And in an otherwise empty wallet, a white business card.

He pulls it out of the billfold, drops it into his lap.

Spike comes out of the bathroom, clean of dried blood, but Connor can read the patterns he’d left earlier on that shining, damp skin. His hair is wet, and closer to his scalp it’s a completely different color, like a costume beginning to slip off.

“Why do you have this?” Connor says, holding up the card.

Spike shrugs, and grabs his jeans back from Connor, cursing when he realizes the fly on them is useless. “Not really your business is it, pretty boy.”

Then he looks up. Stares at Connor sitting naked, in the middle of the filthy sheets. “Oh- ohhhh- oh you have got to be kidding me.” He tugs on his pants, still staring, then finally shakes his head. “Karma my ass. You’re a fucking revelation.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I want to know if you’re trying to find Angel.”

“Was, yeah.” Spike says. “He’s never been what you’d call reliable. So do me a favor, seeing as you ruined my one pair of trousers? Run on home and tell the miserable old bastard--”

“I can’t tell him anything.” Connor tugs the blanket higher across his lap. “He’s gone.”

Spike’s laugh is short and unkind, a dog’s bark. “Got him a little too happy, did you? Typical, I suppose, I mean...” Spike waves a lit cigarette in Connor’s general direction, and Connor frowns. One more reference he will never understand, one more punch line he will never get.

“You must’ve looked in a mirror lately,” Spike says, dripping patience like ash on to the stained carpet. “Face full of blue eyes and cock sucking mouth. His tastes haven’t changed since the micks ran out of potatoes. Bet he still likes it when you call him daddy, too.”

The vampire says daddy but even Connor knows that he means something entirely different. Something that makes Connor’s stomach (dick) leap, even as he does, off the bed and across the room, hand once more wrapped around a long white throat. This time, Spike tugs it away.

“Already did that dance. Think it’s time for a new one.” He presses the tip of his cigarette out, drops it onto the floor, keeps holding Connor’s fist in his other hand.

“You can’t hurt me,” Connor says, twisting his wrist against Spike’s grip. The vampire squeezes tighter, until Connor feels his pulse throb inside of his fingers. Spike winces once, and lets go. Then he smiles, a slow smile, made of serpents and syrup. It creeps up the back of Connor’s thighs, as primal and instinctive as the fear of God or His enemies.

Connor’s back is pressed to the wall. He’s caught there, with Spike’s palms on either side of his head. The vampire’s pants are undone, his naked weight is a shadow, cool and empty, real and dark.

“Not that way, no,” he agrees, eyeing Connor’s bottom lip, rubbing his thumb over it. So gentle that the hairs on Connor’s arms stand up, so careful (reverent, holy relics and precious, cherished things) that the backs of his eyes burn.

Spike’s mouth is warm (it shouldn’t be, but it is) it's wet and insistent, it tastes of sugar, cigarettes and blood. And Connor wants to pull away, wants to bite-rend-tear-kill over this intrusion, this *presumption*. But. No one has ever been insistent. No one has ever touched him in any way that didn’t hurt and then kept touching and (touching) fingertips like ghosts, like water, over his face and chest and neck, then holding him up with strong hands when he feels his knees give, and Connor moans into the vampire’s mouth before he can tell himself to stop.

“Oh you are pretty,” whispers of tongue and teeth against his ear make Connor shiver, “so fucking pretty and sweet.” Kisses on his jaw, spinning fairytales inside Connor’s belly, and yanking them out through his dick. He digs his fingernails into Spike’s shoulders, gets a hiss.

(Connor can never make love because Connor can never make anything, by name and by birthright he can only destroy.)

That sure grip is around him, slipping over his sweating skin to the rhythm of breath and quick heartbeats, and the vampire’s hard on is pressed against his own, just as pulsing and needful, wrapped up tight in a fist that also kills. Spike leans away from him to watch; his fist, Connor’s face, and his eyes hold Connor in place (tied to a tree, drowned in the water, pinned to a filthy bed) until all he can do is gasp.

“That’s right, just like that, know what you need, gonna give it to you.” (And he can’t, he can’t, but he is and he does.) Connor arches his back and cries, desperate and ashamed and

“Why?”

“Because baby, daddy loves you.”

coming; endless, helpless, with a riot of salt in his throat.

Spike lets him fall. The floor smells sour, spoiled milk and stale sweat. Connor leans back, and does not open his eyes.

“If I see you again, I’ll kill you,” he says.

“Tell you what,” Connor can hear the smile, even though Spike’s voice is muffled as he pulls on his shirt. “If I see you again? I’ll let you try.”

**

Connor washed in the sink, waited for the sound of the front door closing before coming out of the bathroom. The sky was just beginning to lighten.

He found four Abaddon demons in an otherwise empty alley. Let the biggest one hit him twice, hard and full of meaty knuckles, on the right side of his jaw. Then he broke all their necks.

He was home before dawn.

Fred was lying on the couch in the foyer when he returned to the hotel. She opened her eyes as he opened the door, and pushed the tangles of hair off her forehead. When he came inside she stood up, tugging her blanket around herself like a shield.

“Connor! Where have you been?” Her voice was loud and steady, but she wasn’t coming any closer to him. There were little creases on her cheeks from sleeping on the rough material. They looked like tear stains.

Connor held himself very still , and ducked his head.

“We were worried. You can’t just go running off- what happened to your face?” She took a step toward him, reached out to touch the angry purple bruise on his jaw.

“Oh,” she said, “Oh, did I-?”

He flinched, and Fred made a kind of muffled noise as she pulled her hand away.

“I’m sorry,” Connor said, quickly, quietly. “I did something bad. I can’t always tell. I won’t do it again.”

She pressed her hands together, like prayer, or surrender. Her eyes were wet and shining. She’d waited up for him, here, all through the night.

He rubbed his jaw, and dropped his gaze to her feet. She wasn’t wearing slippers.

“Ok, it’s- it’s all going to be okay,” she told him.

Connor pressed his knuckles over his eyes. “I’m really tired.”

“Ok,” Fred said again. “Uhm. Why don’t you sleep for a while? I’ll call Charles and let him know you’re all right. We’ll- we can all talk later, ok?”

Connor nodded.

“Thanks,” he said, on his way upstairs. He could hear her talking to Gunn on her cell phone, until she walked out back, and shut the door.

In his room, he stripped, tossing his clothes on the floor. He put the bloody knife in a box under his bed, between the pages of his bible, next to Fred’s comb, and the key to a box that would never open.

Then he climbed beneath flannel covers, and slept.

Sunlight streamed through his windows, behind his eyelids, painting his dreams in blue and gold. He was in the bathroom again, with Fred; her skin was bare and soft and the color of milk. He touched her with careful hands, he kissed her without teeth, he made her whisper his name.

She wrapped her little hand around his dick, and he groaned, opening his eyes because he wanted to see her, wanted to see himself with her. But when he looked in the mirror, there was only a boy with freshly scrubbed cheeks, touching himself, looking back at him inside the glass.

-End




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