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| a.connor a.doyle a.lindsey a.oz a.spike a.wesley a.xander a.other three.somes het.fic character.study |
| Title: Family (or some bastardization thereof) Author: Lips Like Candy Rating: PG13 Pairings: Angel/Spike, Angel/Darla, Spike/Connor. Non shippy, character studies. Setting: 'Not Fade Away' and its aftermath “The eyes of this nocturnal creature enlarge and glow. All claws and teeth, she strikes, she gorges; but nothing can console her for the ghastliness of her condition, nothing.” - The Lady of the House of Love, Angela Carter I. Darla wakes up to fighting and earth. The lawyers are expensive wine. She continues to drink long after she’s sated, just for the taste and the power. Holland Manners begs for his life. He must have a very low opinion of her, thinking he can bribe her, even with "the entire world". “I already have the world, Holland,” she says, low in his ear. He winces and dies a coward, tasting of fear. She leaves a lipstick mark on his neck. + Angel is nothing without Darla. She made him Angelus with her teeth and her whore’s blood, and then she fed him his gypsy poison. She remembers him telling her that the girl tasted like music. He always wanted to be a poet. With his new, ugly soul, he had the same face of an angel, and now he was self-righteous to claim the title as his name. She would hear of him, moping and brooding and trying to be good, and it made her sick to her stomach. But she always had the power to change him. Just her presence warped him into the new beast, the thing between Angel and Angelus, the good man doing the wrong thing. It was a temporary phase, and not a fun one for her. (But even burns fade eventually.) She remakes him from that thing, in her bed. Of course, she had been hoping he would return to his natural, pure state, and again she would have Angelus. Either way, she’s always been his catalyst. Could he even exist without her? Doubtful. The first time that anything Angelus did affected Darla was when he got her pregnant. + Their child is an abomination but that doesn’t mean it’s evil. She sits in Angel’s Hyperion, stares at the ceiling, doesn’t think of baby blankets and cribs and strollers, of days in the park. All the things she will never have, will never share with this tiny kicking parasite, she can’t bear to even imagine. Did she love the little thing? She doesn’t know that. Did she love Angelus, did she love the Master, did she ever love anything? The answer never seemed so terrible before. + She dies in an alley, dies for the fourth and last time in an alley, drenched through and exhausted. She doesn’t think of it as martyrdom, that she sacrificed herself for her child. She died because she was tired, and her baby wouldn’t have loved her, anyways. II. Angel dies fighting. How many times has death claimed him before? He’s unafraid, arrogantly unafraid. He trusts Powers that have long since given up on him. + Yesterday, they found each other in the lobby of the Hyperion. Angel was going to head up to see his (real) son. Spike was wasting his time, afraid to do something that would mean he was actually going to die tomorrow. They don’t speak. They don’t have anything to say. Angel bites Spike as hard as he can without ripping out his throat. He wants to break every bone in his body. He wants to fight. In this moment, he’s afraid to die. “Guess we shouldn’t worry about the mess,” Spike mutters, leaning back on his elbows in a pool of blood. “You know, you’re an asshole. That nearly hurts.” Angel doesn’t drink from him, doesn’t have any desire to have that cold liquid death on his tongue. His fingers find the bones in Spike’s shoulders. + He stumbles backwards onto someone's torch, and feels like an idiot. He tumbles to the ground, his knees buckling, his body failing, his sword slipping out of his grasp like quick silver, as the flames engulf him. He thinks of his son, not Spike, when he dies, rain and fire through his body. He lies on his stomach, his hands curling into the cement, and then it's over, finally over. He dies for the last time in an alley, and Spike’s boots send the dust-that-was-once-him everywhere. III. Spike finds the boy in a bar and takes a seat next to him. His knuckles are bright red, already scabbing over. Space and time spread out around them, limitless. “This city is fucking unlucky, if you ask me,” Connor says, turning to him, recognizing him in a split second. Half his brain says ‘dirty vampire made by Angelus’ and the other says ‘training room at Wolfram & Hart, hot blue girl’. “I’ll toast to that.” Spike gets whiskey. “What happened to your hands?” “Asked a guy what happened to Angel. He was reluctant.” The hand holding his beer is shaking. Tiny beads of amber liquid slip over the raw wounds. He licks them off in a motion that reminds Spike of a cat cleaning itself. “You aren’t twenty one,” Spike says, a few drinks later, still clear-headed and freezing cold. “My fake ID begs to differ,” Connor replies, too drunk to be careful. The bartender shoots them a look, and then shrugs, as if he were too lazy to be law-abiding. The damage was clearly done. “My parents both died here,” Connor adds, another three beers drifting through his bloodstream. “Fucking… fucking bad luck city.” Spike just nods. He doesn’t need to understand. + Spike dies with Angel – at least the person he used to be. He feels off-kilter, off-balance, like he’s missing a foot. His entire attitude was created to irritate Angel, to push and be pushed back. The wall he would run up against is gone, and now he’s running, running, running forever. He visits the alley. He doesn’t bring flowers or anything stupid like that. He smokes a few cigarettes, walks the length of it and back. It smells of sulfur and decay. The cement is cracked in several places, fissures that could go to the center of the earth as far as he knows. Ghosts sit here, there, their pearly bodies only visible if he’s not looking, wraiths of the fight. “They should put a fucking war monument,” Connor says, appearing from nowhere, staggering around. Spike can almost taste the liquor in the air. “Where did he die? Where exactly did he die?” Spike has no fucking clue, but he points to a random spot on the pavement. “There,” he says. Connor looks at it reverently. And falls over. + Spike dies with Angel in an alley. He doesn’t know who this is, now, what this body is for. Every word seems unnecessary, every motion useless. The boy smells like detergent and tastes like fire. He twists his hips like Angel did. My parents both died here, he said, and Spike understands, and somehow it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters to a dead man. IV. Connor fucks Spike in the alley where his father died. Spike doesn’t look at him, doesn’t look at anything, his eyes squeezed shut. He looks small, afraid, weak. “I thought you were a vampire,” Connor mumbles into his neck. He’s drunk. He usually is, these days. It’s an easier state of being. Spike burns against him, his eyes turn yellow. + Connor is having an identity crisis. He sits in the middle of the garden of the Hyperion. Spike smokes his way through a pack of cigarettes a few feet away. He sits and tries to piece himself together. He tries to figure out which life he should think of as his, and which is the other, the not-real Connor. Spike thinks he’s stoned and doesn’t interrupt. He might be stoned – it’s the first time he’s done pot, who knows if it’s having an effect or not. He makes a list. Things he wants to keep: Holtz, when he was alive, teaching him in his slow, cool voice Holtz, when he said he was proud of him Holtz, a body with no blood Holtz, a neck that needed to be severed Cordelia, before she had her memory. How cold her toes were. The way she laughed. Gunn’s jokes, only the funny ones Fred, because she always liked him, and her sandwiches Angel, when they were fighting together Angel, when they were fighting against each other His fake parents, his fake sister, the fake normal life, or at least the parts when he thought it was real Jasmine, his daughter He doesn’t want to remember Wesley, or Justine, or throwing his father in the ocean. He doesn’t want to remember Vail or fulfilling the prophecy. He doesn’t want to remember Cordelia when she was evil, or when she was near-dead, or killing the girl. He takes pieces of other people. Darla. He puts her sacrifice in with the things he wants to keep. Darla, the mother he never knew. Angelus, the way he used people like puppets. Faith’s determination. Illyria’s pride. In the quiet of the garden, he builds a person. Spike’s cigarettes are gone. His mouth curves. “Let’s go.” + Connor Reilly is dead. Connor Angel is dead. Stephen Holtz is dead. He feels lighter now, especially as he explains it all to Spike. “The only thing is, I don’t have a name now,” he says. “If only I could think of a name as super cool as yours.” Spike swerves violently around a corner. “What name could possibly be cooler than Spike?” He laughs, his forehead pressed against the dashboard. “I’ll just call you Tequila at the rate you’re going,” Spike replies. Connor looks at the bottle, and wonders when exactly it became empty. L.A. blinks happily at them as they drive away. -End Feedback |