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Title: Always The Blade
Author: Abhainn Realta
Rating: PG
Setting: Post 'Reunion'



There is blood on the walls.

I don't know why that surprises me. There was a
massacre here, in lawyer blood and payback, and she
was never a stickler for precision. It was bound to
happen sooner or later; was I expecting anything else?
Drusilla and Darla, my Childe and my Sire, although
not, I suppose, my Sire any longer. My Grand-Childe,
her haphazard artwork, and a warning that I can kill
my fears but they will always return. A reminder that
we are Eternal and Infinite, our only constraints
lying with government hardware and unstable minds and
tangled gypsy curses.

And lest we forget or deny, the blood is a message; to
the finders, to the survivors, and most of all to me.
My very own memento mori. The blood is a connection to
the world, to the reality of their crime, which is
probably why I'm touching it, and of course it's why
I'm tasting it. There can be no other reason why the
last remnants of thirteen sorry lives is coating my
fingers and my fangs, copper-tang and hot flavour
despite its age, and it is so long since I've tasted
human blood...

//...katie...what are you afraid of...//

There is a sword in my hand, though I haven't used it
yet. Perhaps I will find something later that deserves
my wrath, a demon who crosses my path, and I will kill
it for every reason and no reason at all, because it
is evil and that is what I destroy, because it is
alive and that is what I crave, because it is *free*,
goddamned free of destiny and the fight and the
omniscient, short-sighted Powers. I will kill it
because I am myself. Will kill because I am fickle and
I am weak, and that is why I am in this fucking room
in the first place. Because here is where I feel shame
and fear and anger, and I don't remember ever being
this angry before, don't remember ever feeling so
consumed by the flames of my fury and the futility of
my regret, the pull of my dreams and the never-ending
opus of my being.

And when I sleep the chorus is loudest of all, a
symphony of terror in my dreams, and it is
blood-covered swords and severed limbs, it is helpless
humans that I cannot, will not save, it is the sound
of Their sorrow as I dismiss Them from this pointless,
pious quest, and most of all...most of all it is the
timpani crash of those goddamn doors, double doors,
pulled fast and sealed, the echoing crack of the lock
my loudest and surest censor, and I will remember
their faces for a thousand years...

//...for god's sake *help* us...//

Yes, I looked in their eyes. Looked into the horror
and pain and swirling, desperate fear, looked into
Lindsey's sea-green tempest and the slate-grey sky of
Lilah, changing patterns of their master's gaze and
the motley shades of a dozen other colours, dozen
other lives, and they said more than words. And if the
eyes are the windows to the soul then they are more a
demon than I, for in their eyes I saw nothing save for
space and time; the awful, darkling emptiness of a
human life gone wrong, and I closed the door because
the weight of their atrocities was not mine to bear.
Closed it because despite everything I am and all that
I aspire to be they had no right to salvation by my
hand, because I saw only the evil in their finite
years, and with no reflection save the one painted in
their blood and their mortal, stinking fear, I closed
the door on the knowledge that the shadow-black void
of their eyes was the truest, most sickening mirror of
my own.

And what has it gained me, this act of defiance? This
step on the path to my madness, this backward, sick
ironic twist of the knife in their plan to seduce me
to my own deadliest enemy, my most feared and
worshipped incarnation...what has it achieved? Am I
better for it? Darker? Have I earned my place in
Heaven or Hell? Have I gained nothing at all? And the
only reply comes back to me in a thousand day-sleep
nightmares, and it is whispered to me, spoken, it is
called, yelled, *screamed*, by a million voices I
should recognise but won't, my faceless, nameless
victims, answer swathed in pain, blood-wine and lace,
the bitterest tang of forever.

You have won your Self.

And this is the final truth. For it is what I ever
was; the Demon. What I ever have been. And I am the
Man, and the Angel, and the everything in between, the
only one who suffers under this mantle of regret, this
merge and split of three divergent, belligerent
beings, who claw at me and tear and rip my heart and
soul to shreds.

So perhaps that is why I sit here now, blade in my lap
glinting cruel silver stars in the weary half-light,
cold steel heavy against my thigh. Perhaps it is why I
have sat here every day for a week, simply staring at
this wall, watching and wondering, needing to
know...to know what They are doing.

It's a sickness, this state of mind, invading with
hints of the Beast, cajoling me and coaxing, forked
honey-tongue in my brain until I snap, push them away
with nothing remaining of the Angel but a human
façade, and even that is permeable at best. And then
He leaves me, and my own smirk graces His lips, and I
am alone in the darkness, nothing but the human guilt
and the perfect fucking soul, and no one to share it
with but Him, my demon, my Self, the only one who
cannot even repent, the only one who will never *ever*
understand.

I see them sometimes, outlined in artificial aureate
glow of the streetlights, drinking,
talking...laughing. And for a moment it makes me
angry, so fucking *angry* that they dare to laugh
without me, that they dare to simply *be*, when I am
not there to Be alongside them. So I follow them in my
shadows, walk within my silence, and I carry the
blade, always the blade, and sometimes I even think
about using it. But then he smiles, and she flicks
hair from her eyes, and I am reminded exactly why I
follow them in the first place.

Because they're human. Because they're love. Because
they're mine.

And no matter what, come lawyer, come Scourge, come
blind woman, crazy Childe and fire-bright, beautiful
Sire, they are all that keeps me here, where I belong,
their life and their blood and the certainty that if
they will not forget then they will at least one day
forgive...these...these are the only things that pull
all of me together, the only things that keep my Soul
from losing faith and my self-crafted tight-weave
fallacy from losing its tainted lustre.

So the sword will stay in my coat, and I will watch
them from a distance. For now...and with exceptions.

//...it's our desires that make us human...//

Wesley still visits me every once in a while. Of
course he does, he is mortal and fallible, easily
swayed, every sense he should have dampened and
destroyed by that fierce fire of his lust. And I know
that he doesn't want me, know he comes to me only to
appease a side of himself he refuses to even
acknowledge, know that when I hold him beneath me he
does not hear me whisper his name, mind so lost in
wretched fantasies of his own humiliation, feeling the
phantom cold scrape of fangs along his spine and
seeing nothing but the yellow in my eyes. I know all
this, but I will do it nonetheless, open my door and
my sanctuary, offer my body and sex just to make me
forget.

One day I will give him a taste, just a sip of what he
dreams of, one day my strength will be faded enough
for me to break him, cowering under me and realising
the truth, that *this* is what he wanted, *this* is
what they feared, this is what I have known was the
ultimate inevitable end since I submitted to their
power just five short years ago.

Oh yes, they have power, those humans. The power to
make you hope. And it's so destructive, hope is, and
it eats away at your desires and breaks your will,
makes you believe that you are promised, that you are
saved, that you are free.

But I am the demon, my children, and I will never be
free of my Self.

And *my* hope most of all, the Angel's hope, so
impotent and fragile and now so utterly crushed,
sprinkled like tiny crystal shards of glass on the
image of everything I hold dear, while I am simply
swept along by prophecy and this careening will to
survive, to play the game, to fool myself that the
Powers mean everything they say...yes, Angel, we will
save them, Angel, we will stop the knife, we will halt
the flow, we will lead them down paths of silver to
their safety...and yes, Cordelia will grow old, and
yes, Gunn will know love, and yes, oh yes, your
soap-scented, dark-dreaming Watcher will not find
everything he yearns for at the twist of his neck and
the turn of your ever-changing mood.

Try to believe that their reward means anything more
than nothing, that the heartbeat and pulse in my
thoughts is my own and not the lullaby song of my
victims. Hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands of
crimes, and my tears fall like rain every night of my
life, but it does not stop that awful, delicious
truth: that in the black of my day I still dream of
re-enacting every single one.

I tell no one; there is no one left to listen, and
certainly no one who would listen in anything more
than horror, for not even my own mind can comprehend
what it is I truly desire. No, I will not understand
why I wake up every evening bathed in sweat and come
and my own, sticky-hot blood, head still filled with
all the dark whispers of a yesterday I can never
regain and body aching for the sweet, sweet music of
blood-rivers, rushing and pulsing through their bodies
at every single moment of the day, winding innocently
through my mind and heart and veins, humming with my
demon and crashing cymbals on my soul, drowning out
everything that's ever lived for goodness.

So I visit this place because that freedom is mine
here. I come because the dream is more visceral than
the reality, because here I am all and nothing, three
and one, and my crimes may sit easy with my
righteousness and truth. Because there is sunrise
here, and death, spoken in silent tongues, murmured on
still air with a flavour of dust and blood, and it
smells like home...

And if I close my eyes, if I can forget for a single
moment all the trouble they have caused, all the
suffering and pain and death that they have wrought,
then I can feel the way I used to. I can choose which
Self I wear, woven like a blanket around my body and
mind, and to Hell with my Spirit because it's never
had anything much to do with any of us.

Yes. If I can...if I can then the air will feel
lighter and the bloodstains will fade away, scarlet to
rust to nothing and never, and the scent will be
jasmine and honey and leather and lace, and I will
know their touch again. Feel it, like the fluttering
of feathers on softened skin, questing mouths and
reverent hands, the taste of sweat on my tongue and
the cold, welcome sound of oblivion.

Oh, I recognise the lie, but still I disregard its
truth, for the fantasy is all that feels real these
days. Let my focus linger on the memory of our
Eternity, memory of the Four, children of the twilight
and mist, with Sickness in the mind and War in the
words, blood of Hunger never sated and the ice-blue
flames of Death dancing unbridled in glittering golden
eyes.

And I do know it was not all simple then, that I
romanticise it even for myself as a source for more of
that goddamned brooding, that my boy was not the only
one who screamed, and his princess not the only one
who wept. I remember that clarity was sometimes only
found beyond the haze of my suffering, the veil of
loving them and never being able to say it aloud.
Somewhere in my mind, I care. But not here, not now,
not in this room that warms my skin with a
conflagration born of my vengeance and my shame, the
legacy of my life echoing in the quiet air.

Now I simply watch, silent, as my blood drips slowly
to the floor, random patterns of dead, hopeless
essence, hold the blade to my arm and sigh.

I will not come here again.

~finis

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