a.connor  a.doyle  a.lindsey  a.oz  a.spike  a.wesley  a.xander  a.other  three.somes  het.fic  character.study           
Title: Founding Fathers
Author: Wirrrn
Pairing: Angelus/That Would Be Telling
Rating: Hard R
Setting: Early BtVS

PART 1: NOW.

He walked away from me again. Even after I put all the cards on the table for once. No hidden agendas, no teasing half-truths. Just my lips finding his,stubble rasping on stubble. Just my hand clinging like a limpet pulled into the tidal pool ebb of his cloth-constrained crotch.

The Vampire body lives essentially forever, but our minds are just as fallable as yours. Seventy, eighty, ninety years is as far back as mostof our memories can accurately reverse, before everything dissolves into a blurred sensory soup- random flashes of scenery and vaguely familiar faces, disassociated, startling sounds, the odd smoky fragrance.

But my tongue maps his mouth, my fingers traverse his cock, with inate confidence that they know exactly how to make him moan until he's hoarse. Over the Centuries, we've been here so many times before that the actions themselves are reflex, scoured into our bodies; the wear marks oft-used muscles leave behind on the underlying bone of the skeleton.

The memory of nerves.

He leans into my touch, my name forming behind his lips- I can see itcoming up on a soft breath at the back of his throat. Those beautiful eyes, nesting as unreadable as ever beneath the solid flesh cliff of his brow,seem to search mine with a kindness long absent.

-Then he pulls away. Straightens his cclothing. Half-heartedly shows me his demon when I reach out to pull him back. He turns his broad shoulders on me, and walks away just as fine as you please. As if I'm the only one screaming inside.

Like I said, I can remember. But he seems to have forgotten- maybe on purpose. I wish I could blame him.

Today's Our Anniversary.

PART 2: THEN.

Slayers have not always been only girls.

It's shocking, I know. The Watcher's Council goes to extraordinary lengths to cover it up, to the extent of totally purging their records and Watcher Diaries from before 1800

//I'm so not feeling guilty about that//

but it's true. Of course, since then-Since me-the Slayer job's become a Girl Power thing, but before that, there were male Slayers too.

Even back then though, it was rare, Not unheard of, but uncommon. The Powers-That-Be seemed to prefer their champion without a Y-Chromosome,and the Watcher's Council- archaic Old Boy's Club that they were and still are- definitely did.

Every now and then though, the Council's Seers get a dust bunny in their crystal balls, or draw a joker in their Tarot pack, or whatever the Hellit is they use these days. At any rate, someone fucks up big, and the woman they'd been monitoring drops a boy instead of a girl. By then, the Slayer energy, which arrives at the moment of the child's first breath, is alreadysettled and can't be taken back.

Or, as happened to me, you're born one of twins. Your sister, The Slayer,dies in utero, and the power is transfered to you. Presto- Male Slayer.

I was well aware of my uncommon background, and my less-than-ideal status amongst the closed ranks of those liver-spotted old farts at the headquarters in London. Not thatI minded. I've always revelled in my deviance, in being the odd one out, and this was no exception. I set about making myself the best damn Slayer the world had ever seen, as it would no doubt piss The Botcher's Council off no end that the Slayer with the Dick was doing a better job than the traditional, Council-approved,non-dangly bits version.

It worked too. In less than three years, I'd faced and bested three vampire masters and several dozen of their minions. Word of my reputation began to spread amongst Councils in other regions, and before long I was traveling around to the various areas my -very- grudgingly impressed superiors sent me. I was a roving warrior, a Nomad who walked softly and carried a pointy stick. In a couple of years, I'd dispatched a clan of ice-trolls in Sweden, went to Greece and faced off against one of the two remaining Gorgon sisters- I think it was Stheno rather than Euryale, but it pays not to look too closely when you're fighting a Gorgon- and closed Hellmouths in Berne and Luxemburgh.

Then came Copenhagen, and the beginning of my Fall. My Fall from theWatcher's Council.

And my Fall into him.

It seemed that in this fine Year of Our Lord 1773, the city had fallenunder the thrall of a particularly vicious Nosferatu. Though still a fledge, it had cut a swathe of steaming viscera through the British Isles and had now begun slaking its dread thirsts in Denmark.

The moment I stepped off the train, I was accosted by terrified localswho were only too happy to fill in the grisly details of the things arrival. Boarding a passenger steamer,the vampire had torn apart and fed on all the menfolk on board within a day, then used the rendered fat of their women and children to stoke the barge's engines. Apparently, the banks of the Danube still stankof burnt carrion, marking its entrance to the city.

A vampire so fair of face that those who saw him and lived had christened him Angelus. A breathtaking beauty that masked a monster so dreadfully base it defied description.

My Watcher in Copenhagen was Tomas Ragnor, a great, misshapen orc of a man whose Viking ancestry was readily apparent in his stenorphonous speech, in his mottled, pock-marked face. When he angered, he flushed such a virulent red that its pitted surface resembled a great, rotting strawberry.

When he opened his door to me, his eyes- fierce and watery blue likea sled dog's- had pinned me to the snow outside the stoop.

'You'll be no match against this one, boy-Slayer." He boomed. "Angelus'll have split that pretty skull, cracked that pigeon-chest open, and dangled your balls from your ribs before they've ever had a chance to drop."

I locked my gaze with his.

"Master Ragnor" I said, politely. "If I may so ask- Did your mother realise she'd wed an Orang-Utan before or after she'd shared the Marriage bed with it?"

The gigantic Watcher stared at me for an eternal instant, eyes starting from their sockets, thick lips opening and closing, great ruddy blotches flushing out on the skin and completing his likeness to a salmon flopping and dying amidst its spawning grounds.

He moved forward then, and I fully expected him to attempt murder.

Instead, the huge florid jowls split into a berserker grin, and he barked laughter loud enough to shake an avalanche in miniature of fresh fallen snow from the eaves above the door.

"Ho!" He roared. "Ho ha! Angelus would do well forthwith to mind the sharpness of your *tongue* at any rate!"

Slapping me on the back with one thickly haired leg-ham sized paw, Ragnor laughed again, wished me luck, and gave me the location of Angelus' bolt-hole.

* * * * * * *

PART 3: STYGIA.

The lair turned out to be in the labyrinth of musty tunnels of a long abandoned railway station in the heart of Copenhagen's industrial district.The tunnels had fallen into neglect and disuse many decades past, when the rats that had bred on the darkened tracks were found to be carrying the Black Death.

Now, a different kind of vermin made its nest here. And carried a vilenew form of contagion.

I saw no evidence of any rats, mice, vesper-bats...not even the humble stinsect, as I picked my way through the dim, rusted ribs of fallen girders,the collapsed archways of dusted brick.

//Wait...no animals?!!!//

Scarcely had a sinister and panic-forming reason for the absence of lowly life in the tunnels occurred to me, when I received confirmation that this series of tunnels was indeed being used as a proxy home by the vampire, Angelus.

Confirmation of the snarling, sulfur-eyed and profanity-spitting sort ,in the form of two of Angelus' brood- from the crimson hair and starburst constellation freckles of the woman and the exquisitely handsome Eurasian features of the man, they had to be Aibhilin and Eoseph- charging at mefrom the lightless maw of the tracks, claws and fangs extended and snicking.

I slipped a sharp pale of timber between Aibhilin's ribs nigh on immediately,and watched as she detonated into grey ash, her final cry still rich with the County Cork streets she'd trod as a baker's assistant before being claimed by the vampire.

Eoseph though, would be a problem; faster and younger than his broodmate as he was.

Snarling at me from behind the falling curtain of detritus that usedto be his dark sister, Eoseph slashed at me with his hands, his fingertips and face no longer appearing in any way anthropoid.

I ducked back, but the cursedly fluid youth moved with me, quicksilver fingers grabbing for and snaggling in the knotted bodice of my silks. Sneering he pulled his hands up and back, tearing my entire shirt from my body withthe movement.

The vampire backed off briefly, plucking shredded fabric from his claws.

Cocking his head, he took in my half-naked state. When his dark, almond-shapedeyes lifted from my bare torso to meet mine, they crackled with a new hunger.

"You look for Father?" the creature smiled, and for a moment, the ghostof the man he might have become shone through- handsome, confident, and somehow...sad. Then the light glinting off the tracks shone anew from thefangs, and the smile became awful.

"I should think he will grant you an audience" Eoseph hissed. "Yessss-he's always been fond of comely young things."

Eoseph feinted to the right, and I'm ashamed to admit that I fell for it. The vampire darted back, mamba-quick, and I suddenly found myself in the cold grasp of a marble statue.

Eoseph's foul, meat-smelling unbreath chilled my proffered throat, a little plume of fog bouncing from my skin into the air where his frigidexhalation met the clammy air of the tunnels. He licked at my bare flesh with his tongue, the icy muscle sliding into the hollow of my clavicle, then sliding a slick trail down to my goose-pimpled chest.

I squirmed -not from fear- and tried to suppress a moan, but failed.As I said before, I delighted in my difference, but right then I would've taken the hand in marriage of any woman Ragnor threw at me just to have Eoseph fail to notice the growing state of my trousers.

He saw, of course. Saw and smiled wider, so that the lines in his already wrinkled demon-face became veritable cracks, but curiously, made no move to touch me.

//and damn his vain glorious hands, how I wanted him to!//

Instead, he gave me a chaste and curiously friendly pat on the shoulder.

"Father *shall* likeyou, Slayer...Come to think of it, One wonders which of you will derive the most pleasure from his... ministrations..."

Realizing I was completely unable to break free of the creature's determined caresses, I chose instead to lean into them. Caught off guard by my action, Eoseph overcompensated as he attempted to balance us, and we both pitched to the slag-strewn ground.

As I had hoped, the demon-youth landed squarely on the malformed section of railroad track I as had spied, that twisted up at gnarled right angles into a rough cruciform shape.

Eoseph screamed and flailed at his stomach where the metal was pressing. A moment later, courtesy of my favourite stake, his screams intensified and then ceased in a rain of exploding motes.

I staggered to my feet, and began to walk down the lightless recessesof the passage that, if the vampire was to be believed, lead to my quarry.

Angelus.

The air was not kind to my shirtless upper body, but there was no helpfor it. To distract myself, I mulled at length on what the young fledgling had said.

//...comely young things...//

It gave me a certain amount of pride in my deductive ability that theunfortunate boy had essentially confirmed what I had been suspecting for some time.

I had gathered from Ragnor that the council was most vexed over Angelus'clear preference for siring beautiful young men into his fold, other all other types. Older or ugly men he usually simply killed- Penn being the exception, but it seemed to be the chance to revel in religious debauchery that drove that turning. No older or men that were not winsome were rarely made into his childeren,and women seemed to interest him even less-Aibhilin was the first we knew of, and his almost vehement dislike of being physically approached by even his Dark Mother, Darla, has long been on record with the Council.

Several of our scholars took the vampire's fondness for young masculinity as a manner he cultivated to yet again mock God's creations- they believed he derived abhorrent pleasures from watching the handsome faces of his victims turn sallow and wrinkled under the dread weight of bearing their demonic passengers.

I was not convinced. Given my own...proclivities, and Eoseph's hissed innuendo, I was now convinced that Angelus preyed principally on young ,handsome males because he desired them, physically.

I could scarcely bring this up in front of the Council, however. To do so in polite company would be unseemly, and if suspicion of my *own*desires were founded...well, I had no desire to be sent to the gallows.

-My musings were hereby rudely interruupted by a great roar that split the air of the tunnel ahead of me.

"Fee Fi Fo Fum..." came the words, followed by a howling laugh. It seemed the thing was awake, aware of my presence, and in possession of a healthy sense of humour. I had to prevent my own lips from quirking up in a smile.

Then I saw something that stole the smile from my lips. I was halfway convinced that they would never form that expression again.

Up ahead of me, about three horselengths hence, stood a pale, well-built young man of about Five and Twenty, with a face of unrivaled beauty.

A face I *knew*.

The last time I had seen it was some years before. It had wavered in an out of my grossly drunken vision, as its owner's melodic Gaelic voice informed me of a plan to steal his arrogant, rich bastard of a father's silverware, to finance more drinking. I had blacked out before the scheme had been properly hatched, however, and had assumed he'd gone off to get drunk on his own.

I had not seen him since, had even thought him dead somewhere in a filth-addled ditch, but here he was, my best and oldest friend, looking pale, but whole and alive.

Wait.

Pale. Alive.

Pale.

//Oh God//

I spoke to him then. I had to know. "Liam? Liam Horrigan?"

The man in front of me smiled, and nodded, slightly. "Once I answered to that name. As did you, before you answered to your new title. Slayer." He rolled the word around in his glorious mouth, as if testing it on his tongue. He did not seem remotely hostile.

Yet.

"Liam...You...You're..."

He stepped more fully into the light, yawning deliberately so I couldsee the fangs. They were huge. Then he answered.

"Angelus, yes." He smiled at me again through the stalactites of his teeth.

"Hello, William."

* * * * * * *

PART 4: IN THE HALL OF THE MOUNTAIN KING.

I stepped forward-whether to stake or embrace him, I knew not, but my legs went towards him entirely under their own power.

"Liam, Oh God..."

The first inkling on a dour expression crossed that incredible face."I don't recognize those names any more. Either of them."

Then his jaunty manner was back. Allowing his human guise to slide back in place over his demon, Li...Angelus walked casually forward, stoppingabout a double horse length distant, and leaned back against a collapsed wall covered with tattered papier mache slag that had once been poster sfor shows and plays that had been closed for decades, their players probably long dead. With a distant jangle of irony, I noted the one nearest his head was a faded flyer for a production of "Varney the Vampyr".

"I heard Eoseph and Aibhilin die" Angelus said, looking at me with casual interest, as though we were discussing the weather or time of day rather than the slaughter of two of his brood. Where was the rough beast that had held Cornwall quaking in his shadow, that had practically razed Highgate to the ground? Why was he being so...civil?

"I'm not very happy to be losing Eoseph" the vampire continued. "The boy had a most prodigious mouth. Aibhilin wasn't working out. She listened to too much of Penn's inane talk of rebellion, I fear. You didn't kill*him* on your way to me?"

I shook my head no.

"A shame. You would have saved me the trouble. Damnable whelp."

In an instant he was scant centimetres from my face. I hadn't blinked,or taken my eyes from him, but still had no idea how he came to be here so fast.

But here he was. Right in front of me, human visage melting away before my very eyes; fangs extruded, pupils dilated to leonine slits, irises became molten ochre.

"I suppose we'll have to kill each other, now" the demon purred through my old friend's lips. But though he moved closer still, the expression on his face belied the threat.

"Tell me Will...a Slayer? All the years we knew each other- what was it...seven?"

"Nine."

"-Nine..." His eyes focussed on somewhere long distant in both timeand space for a moment, then clicked back. "And you kept it a secret from me? Will, Will, Will..." he made a tsk-ing sound of amused disapproval behind his fangs. "...I thought we were friends."

I caught myself leaning in to him, and had to make a physical effort to draw back.

//It's not him. It's not him. It's not-//

"Wh...Why are you doing this? Why are you gentled so- vampire?"

He caught a whisp of my long, errant hair where it had once again escaped from its braid, and rubbed it affectionately between thumb and forefinger,smiling at the slight residue left on his skin from the cochineal I usedto tint my too-common black tresses slightly auburn in the sun.

"*Because* I thought we were friends, William. Because I thought we were more than just friends..."

His lips pursed on my neck then. I didn't stop him. God help me, I didn'tever want to. The stake was still in my hand, still pressed to that proud chest, but I couldn't wield it. I just couldn't.

This was *Liam*. Changed, yes. Monstrous, without question. And yet his breath on my skin quickened my own the same, his hands carded through my hair the same, his mouth found my pebbling nipples as quickly as they had on all those nights when his absent pig of a father had gone to Ballykeaon business. We'd break into his study -the first few times drunk, after that gloriously sober- leaped up together on his huge, antique ivory desk,and...

I pulled away."I can't." Somehow I formed the words. "You say I kept secrets? Four years, Liam. Four years and no word. You might have been dead."

He stared at me behind unreadable eyes. "I was."

"You could have come to me. I might have been able to help you."

"A vampire seeking help from a Slayer? And a male one at that. And how would that have looked to the other fledglings?" But his words lacked heat.

My vision was blurring, thick with brine. "I would have done *something*. Hidden you, sheltered you. Something, Liam...Angelus. You were my best friend."

He smiled then, the expression small and somewhat- sad."I know."

I brought my hand up to his face, caressed the cold brow, making the eyes beneath roil with pleasure.

"I loved you" I said.

"...I know.

The kiss, when it came, surprised us both with its rawness, its ferocity,considering the strange, gentle politeness of our reunion. But gentle no more. Our mouths crushed together at force, our tongues only too eager to battle each other where the rest of our bodies were reluctant. I felt his fangs receeding back into his gums even as I let the stake fall from my fingers. It landed with a remote clatter somewhere far removed from us as we kissed away four years worth of separation and nine years of secrets, everything between us melting into a pulsing,white hot core of pure *need*.

Then Angelus stiffened in my arms. Stiffened, and suddenly drew back.

No, not drew. Was *drawn* back.

Returning to my senses, I saw Angelus, once again ochre-eyed and betoothed,spitting, snarling and clawing vainly at the hulking shape of my Watcher, Tomas Ragnor.

In one hand, Ragnor held a long-handled, iron pitchfork, which he had run through the vampire until the tines had sunk into the wall, pinning him there. With his other hand, he struggled against the reverberations traveling through his body long enough to fully withdraw the wickedly long,oaken stake from his jacket.

"Ragnor!"

He turned to me, a mixture of triumph and disgust on his face. "Ah,Will. So the council was right about you all along. An invert". He spat on the ground after saying the word, as though he couldn't abide the taste of it in his mouth. "So it seems that the Slayer was, in some ways at least,a woman after all."

Angelus' struggles against the massive Watcher had not ceased- in fact,after seeing the stake, they had INcreased- but Ragnor was uncommonly strong. He shoved on the end of the pitchfork harder still, and it sank deeper into the wall, and the vampire also. Angelus screamed.

Turning back to me, Ragnor scowled. "Still, some good may have come from your debauchery, catamite. Your demon consort is found, led to us by you. We shall end him now, and then turn to your own fate."

He appeared to consider something.

"Possibly, your earlier successes for us will spare you the gallows,boy. I seem to recall that the Watcher's Chambers in Rome are built on a dungeon that is barely tenanted..."

"Watcher!" Angelus, chin and lips dripping with his own crimson fluids,yelled at Ragnor in low Gaelic, then switched over to Danish. "Leave him alone!"

Ragnor's eyes flicked to him. "Silence, filth" , he replied in kind, then, reverting to English, turned again to address me.

 "If you have any words of goodbye for this creature, I sugges-"

The mountainous mass of flesh grunted as my fist impacted into his gut. Unable to find my stake on the darkened floor, I had resorted to using a seven-inch long, rust-covered railroad nail that I had pried up from the disintegrating track.

Even now, bleeding and drooping organ's from his abdomen, the damnable man would just *not* die. His huge hands closed around my neck, encircling it completely, and he SQUEEZED. Even as I removed the nail from his midsection and rammed it again and again into his chest, he refused death. I stabbed and stabbed, until he finally began to flag. But still he squeezed...

The room span around me, faded-

And brightened again to find me lying prone in Angelus' lap, as he cradled my head. His wounds, I was glad to see, where healed. Strangely, so too where my own, except for a fiery pain overy my jugu...

Oh.

I looked at him. "You turned me?"

He nodded. "I had to, Will. He crushed your windpipe. You would have died. I...I couldn't face that."

Love for this creature, this man, radiated through me.

"The Council will be looking for me, now."

Angelus smiled. 'Not to worry, my Childe. I'll take care of you now. Perhaps you could die your hair?"

I smiled at his suggestion as he helped me to shaky feet, supported me as we walked down the tunnel together.

"Oh yes, that'd be just great, *Sire*... What's next, a wax nose? A false moustache? A new name?"

"A new name might not be such a bad idea...One that gave you some merit and standing in the vampiric community." He handed me the blood-stained railroad spike. "I even have one or two suggestions..."

* * * * * * *

EPILOGUE. NOW, AGAIN: YOU DON'T BRING ME FLOWERS ANYMORE.

He walked away from me again. Even after I put all the cards on thetable for once. No hidden agendas, no teasing half-truths. Just my lip sfinding his, stubble on stubble.

And he walked away.

207 years ago today we found each other again. 207 years ago today, I saved him, and he killed me to save me.

Rival. Friend. Lover. Father. But does he even care?

I get my answer sooner than expected. Slowly down and stopping before he's even walked ten steps, Angel turns, looks and me, and runs...not walks mind you but *runs*, back into my open arms.

After the kiss breaks eventually, he looks at me and smiles. That same small, sad smile that I'd first seen on the mouth of a demon. A demon thatI now shared with him.

"I can't do it, Spike. I can't walk away. I love you too much."

I settle him tighter in my ams, content for now just to hold him. We have time.

"...I know".


END


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