Date: June 17th, 2001
Disclaimer: All Praise Our Lord Joss - the big lug. I really, really don't
own them.
Distribution: List archives, Charles, Lar, Jess, and Donna may do as they
will. Otherwise, ask.
Spoilers: The Gift. Big huge ones.
Rating: R for blood, angst, and guts.
Pairing: Angel/Spike
Summary: Responses to grief.
Notes: Kinesis - Movement or activity of an organism in response to a stimulus
such as light. First section is Angel's pov, second section is Spike's. //denotes
quotes// from "And Death Shall Have No Dominion" and "Do Not Go Gentle Into
That Good Night" by Dylan Thomas.
Feedback: Yes, please.
Thanks: Donna for saying I can reduce her to babbling incoherency, and Jess
for "yesssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss"
~~~~~
Wanna see you.
On your knees.
Whispering, screaming, ranting out, please, please, please. Words drowned
in saliva and throat raked raw from hours of pleading. Come, go, stay, just
don't stop.
So pretty when you cry and your face gets color. Cherry reds and pastel pinks,
blooming over the angles and planes of your face. Need to lick the pale spaces
raw, until they ripen into flesh color, watch it fade out into pallor.
I want to believe you're not. Dead. Undead. If I see the blood, watch it slide
down your shoulder blades, between your plump, perfect ass, then I can believe
that you are alive. That touching you won't freeze me. The blood will have
the tang sweet spice of humans. And her.
It won't, and just knowing that makes me want to slit you from pelvis to chest,
let the truth swing out. You would smile even as your guts literally spilled
out at my feet.
Minutes, hours, seconds, years, maybe centuries have passed and still I'm
wishing that you were more. Obedient. Pleasing. Like me.
Can't stand the smirk on your tender, thin lips. Etched there like acid in
metal, immutable. It's as much a part of you as the moniker you adopted, now,
and I ache with the desire to scratch it off. Bear it away into memory, and
make the old hesitant, almost genuine smile come back. Better the mimicry
of gentle humanity than the hammer hard façade of reckless death.
Against the dying of the light, we rage, words of the poet, and they make
all too much. Perfect. Fucking. Sense.
I hate it.
Hate endings, beginnings, and brave words smeared in blood and sacrifice.
I feel heart sick. Like I've walked into living suspension, and I hear the
words, my own words, rattle and explode in my ears, over and over and over
again.
It's….not saying her name. I can't make my mouth form the consonants and vowels
and release the word into being. As if not saying it, not completing the thought
again, will make it not real.
It is. It's terribly real, and you'll be here. Kneeling. Because you know
it's real, and you know it hurts. I don't want to know you have your own terror.
Loss of the guiding sunlight. I don't want to know that something of the human
imprinted vampire remains in the carbon copy of evil that parades around today.
Always the one who loved, and loved, poured out a honest, screaming emotion.
Infinitum.
I just want you on your knees. Under me. Taking me. In you. Scrapping you
raw and bloody and warm.
Until it's not real anymore.
When it's real, I can't walk into my life, unlife, and be brave. I can't mock
the human and squash the demon. The terror of the real needs a harness, and
you accept that. If you take a personal satisfaction in being the only thing,
only action, standing between me and emotional implosion, so be it. I can't
give you her, and I can't get her, but I can mold you into a semblance of
color, warmth, and sunlight.
Give the dream form, and let your skin by my avenue. Walk along the valleys
with my fists, pound new bright red rivers with my feet, suckle the lacerated
breasts with fangs. Through you, and in you, I lose the terrible certainty
that I can't be without her. By opening your skin muscle bone to the wonders
of the world, it's easy to drown in the denial.
Of an end.
Of gifts.
//Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion. //
~~
I dreamed once of a fallen night, soft cotton of darkness over my face, stars
like pinpricks of pleasurepain on my body. Gentle sweet goodness covered me
there, and we touched, and rolled into the soft grass. And loved.
It never fucking happened, and it never fucking will, and it's a terrible,
awful thing to be where I am. Fucked up one way and down another. Try to shut
off the voices. It's like trying to hold my hands to a bloody water fountain
and say ever so politely, please stop gushing, you're fucking annoying.
Should have stopped her, should have done. Anything. Had to happen. You're
a failure. Rotten man. Pansy ass. Terrible poet. Neutered demon.
Your mighty hands pluck and draw at my body until my eyes run red and my hair
drifts free to the ground. I'm drowning in my own blood, lungs that don't
need breath leveling out with dark blood, no oxygen, no color, and I cough
just to see the brilliant spray of drops against the ground. You think I'm
enjoying this, you see the outside, and like fucking always, that's what you
see.
Me on my knees.
Me begging.
Me offering you this terrible excuse for humanity. As a way to cross the bridge
of grief. As a way to make yourself feel. Better. Giving you a way to react
without hanging lost in screaming loss forever. I'm the stop-gap in the well
of fear and ache that trembles out through your limbs, fingers, hands. Into
my slick pale smooth skin. Hitting until you see. Blood. Rising, freshening
the death with stolen life.
Oh, you stupid man. Colossal arrogance to be so sure, to assume, that what
you see is what is. She was lovely and bright and true, and she had her own
dark demons and desires that fell for you under what she was. For you. And
only you, because we all saw her as incomplete without her innocent cruelties
and false words. Only the men and demons allowed to love her let the light
blind them to frailties. Failures.
She was only fucking human, and you never let yourself accept. Her imminent
death. And what it meant. You ran, you let yourself be separated by time and
space and new lives from the one thing that gave your sorry-ass existence
meaning. Before her, you were a pathetic shell of a vampire. After her, the
soul had purpose. And you saw that. You accepted that. You, at times, reveled
in that.
Dunno, I suppose that it had to happen. All that fucking tripe about you being
bad for each other, and not being happy little warriors for the light and
being lovers. Didn't work. Too much death and pain happened when you tried.
Yeah, well, fucker, I accepted it. I accepted being in the shadows of her
life, because at least I was in her life. At least I finally made her see
the man in me, more genuine and authentic than the demon. Yes, I relish death.
The kill. The act of opening into someone a conduit of death and forcing their
life into me. Fierce, fast, and pumped. I love the kill. But I love. Death,
Drusilla, Cecily, and a tiny blonde Slayer.
I loved.
And I'd like, just once, as I kneel before you, meeting your glassy eyes straight
on, for you to admit that you were never even half the man I still am. The
man she respected. The man she entrusted her baby sister to.
Most of all, I need you to break. Find the place in me that you can't get
past, can't shatter, can't shred to naked, bare bits, and stop. You're in
a fucking suspension, and it galls me to say it. I get to save the day. I
get to be sacrificial fucking lamb. Somewhere in my flesh, you damn well better
find a way to grieve.
Me:
In the rain of blows, I find resolution;
In the flow of sticky red fluid, I find peace;
In the mind-fucking physical agony, I find the man.
//And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.//
~end~