I'm still alive (and so are my fics)!
Hi everyone! It's been so long since i have been on LJ but thoughts of my favorite vamps have always been on my mind. I took the time this weekend to write more of this story, which I hope people are still interested in.
Title: The Boundaries of Love (7/?)
Pairing: Spangel
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: Joss is God. I’m only a minor servant, borrowing his playthings.
Summary: Angsty. This is one of my more serious fics. Spike gets a mysterious visitor after the whole Cup of Perpetual Torment business. A sacrifice is made, setting off a chain of events that will change Spike forever and test the boundaries of his love for Angel.
Note: This is unbetaed so all mistakes are mine. Please point them out if you see one. By the way, please feel free to offer constructive criticism.
Previous parts here.
Desire licked a dark, destructive trail up his skin before digging its talons deep into his shriveled heart, making him ache for the drug that would cease its sweet torture.
Power.
Hamilton hated and loved it in equal measure, schemed and plotted his way toward possessing it for as long as he could remember. After so many years, a seat at the table of the Senior Partners was almost within grasp, with only one obstacle remaining in his path.
“Look again,” Hamilton hissed at his underlings, who fearfully redoubled their efforts upon hearing the whip crack of his voice.
Oh, power was so addictive and Hamilton had only just possessed a small taste of it. No one was going to come between him and it, especially not amateur Slayer bitches who claimed to have turned to the dark side - claimed being the key word. He just didn’t buy her story.
After all, he couldn’t sense that same all consuming lust for power burning in Mina as it burned in him. She didn’t and wouldn’t ever understand the sacrifices it took to worship at that altar.
“What are you hiding, little girl?” His dark gaze swept through her apartment, noting each and every detail.
So far, she had maintained a good act, delivering what she had promised. Angel was becoming increasingly isolated and he kept unconsciously turning to her in his weakest hours. It wouldn’t take much for her to bring him over to the dark side.
But, at times, Hamilton thought he could see a certain softness in her eyes as she regarded the souled vampire and he didn’t believe that she would backstab her lover like that. If the Senior Partners couldn’t see that, perhaps they were getting old and senile. All of them, except his mentor, of course.
“The expected may prove unexpected,” his mentor had often quoted to him. “Triumph lies not with the chosen.”
The Senior Partners and the Powers both believed that Angel was the one to play the deciding role in the Apocalypse. Thus, Mina’s plan to tip the scales in the Partners’ favor was welcomed by all the Partners except for Hamilton’s longtime mentor, who had secretly revealed to him an older prophecy, often quoting lines from it.
Victory would come from an unknown source and his mentor had believed him to be it.
He was lucky to have such a mentor. All through the years, the man had never guided him false. In fact, his mentor was the one who pointed out to him that Mina wasn’t all that she seemed to be. If he could find out what Mina was hiding and expose her, his ascension to Partner status would be assured.
With that in mind, he had patiently bided his time for the chance to find a crack in her game while dutifully reporting her successes to the Partners, though it pained him. When both her and Angel had been drawn away to England, he had pounced on the perfect opportunity to ransack her apartment for clues.
His instincts told him that the key lay in those few days that she had disappeared from Wolfram and Hart, apparently on some mission of the Council’s, as she had told Angel. She had deftly evaded the surveillance team that he had sent to tail her and they had been unable to ascertain where she had gone.
“Marcus!” one of the Seers suddenly called out to him urgently.
Barely able to contain his excitement, he quickly strode over to where she was standing. In front of them lay a pile of clothing that had been carelessly left on the floor by the bed.
“I sense a faint connection to the earth,” she observed. “It’s very cleverly hidden among the usual outdoors dust and other earth elements that had accumulated on her clothes.”
“What does that mean?” Hamilton demanded. “I thought the magical scans didn’t pick up anything.”
“It’s not magic,” she explained with a wry smile. “It’s the unique signature that we leave upon every person or thing that we come into contact with. Some creatures may become very adept at hiding it but there’s always a signature left behind, no matter how faint.”
“And?” Hamilton tried to keep from sounding too excited.
“Very recently, Mina met with a strong magic user, who had a very old connection to the earth here…”
Hamilton smirked. He could already taste the sweetness of Mina’s downfall. Maybe the Partners would even allow him to handle the Slayer’s punishment, he thought darkly, licking his lips.
“You all heard her.” He turned to his underlings. “Get me a list of magic users in L.A. I want this figured out as soon as possible.”
Stalking out the door, he left them to straighten up the mess they had made of the apartment before Angel and Mina got back.
His mentor would be pleased. Luck was indeed smiling on them.
************
“Or you could just take the first drooling idiot that comes along…”
Sometimes, he wondered if it was all preordained. What one dismissed as luck was destiny in another’s eyes.
The more he watched her from his vantage point in the shadows of the alley, the more he was convinced that it was meant to be. That this was meant to be.
“The wisest and bravest knight,” she whispered in a hushed, almost reverent tone, gaze filled with awe and just the slightest hint of something that could be regret.
Just how much had she seen, he wondered sadly, of what the future would hold?
Watching the gentle poet eagerly drinking down her promise of power, he experienced a strong, sudden compulsion to stop the man and save them all from an eternity of regret and pain but, upon meeting Drusilla’s clear, almost sane gaze, he knew he couldn’t.
It was her choice and he knew now, without a doubt, that she had made it despite knowing how it would all end ultimately.
But, why start something that was doomed to fail?
“Love,” she replied simply, as if hearing his innermost thoughts.
Then, in the blink of an eye, it was Cordelia standing in her place.
Stunned, he stood frozen, unable to move a muscle.
“Love allows for no boundaries,” she murmured solemnly. “That’s what makes it dangerous and at the same time, powerful…”
He looked at her in confusion. She seemed to be trying to convey some sort of message to him.
“Cordy…”
“No. You need to listen, Angel.” She staved off his questions with her sharp tone. Her next words were cut off as William abruptly began suckling harder at her neck, as if wanting his presence acknowledged.
That propelled Angel’s frozen body into action. Snarling, he quickly yanked the fledgling off of her, catching her before she fell. Blood gushed out all over his hands as teeth left neck. He tried desperately to staunch the flow but it was futile.
Clasping his arm with surprising strength, Cordelia struggled to get her next words out even as her voice began to grow faint.
“He will try to take it all from you.”
“Who?” he asked, totally baffled.
She made no answer, remaining limp in his arms, eyes wide and unstaring - haunted, even in death, by the possibility that her efforts to warn him had not succeeded.
For an eternity, he stood numbly, unable to make sense of anything, only knowing that holding her dead body for the second time around was just as devastating as the first. He knew not how much time he spent standing there for each moment of bleakness dragged on the same way in his eyes.
Then came a spark of color in the lifeless alley. He watched dazedly as an eerie blue tinge gradually spread across Cordelia’s face, obliterating her features and replacing them with that of another.
Fred.
Horrified, he dropped her and backed away, his body shaking in denial. He bumped into someone and reflexively, he turned around.
With lips still dripping her lifeblood, William appeared in front of him, eyes bright with a certain blend of madness that some would call love.
“She’s…she’s my destiny.”
************
Angel always knew that those words would come back to haunt him.
Of all the things that the older vampire had been to Spike and of all the things he wished he could’ve been, his destiny had never been one of them.
Perhaps, it was for the best, Angel thought. He caused enough deliberate destruction as it was.
Drusilla, William, Cordelia and now, Fred.
Sweet Fred…whose life had been worth that of a thousand souls…
Even the motors in Wolfram and Hart’s private jet weren’t fast enough to take him away from the scene of his greatest failure. Sleep offered no escape either.
Lifting a brandy that the stewardess had brought him, he brooded over his strange, troubling dream, all the while careful not to dislodge the comforting hand delicately wrapped around his larger one.
Jolting awake from unconsciousness in a cold sweat, the boundaries between reality and dream had blurred for a moment. He had thought himself holding Cordelia’s hand and had been confused to see that the hand had actually belonged to a slumbering Mina in the seat next to him.
Slowly, her rhythmic breaths and heartbeat had calmed him, her presence chasing away the details of the dream.
The way she made him feel, either with her touch, her look or her proximity - it was inexplicable.
His lips tingled in remembrance of the one night that they had slept together. She had kissed him hungrily as if she was drowning, as if at any moment she would ripped away from his embrace. It was arousing and good and…
…just like the way William used to kiss him.
As Angelus, he had always found it intoxicating, the way William had offered everything up in a single kiss. As Angel, however, he had simply found it saddening.
Goodbye had underlay William’s every action. It seemed as if he had been preparing for the worst, preparing for what he believed was inevitable - the moment that his lover would leave him - and so he had tried to get as much out of everything as he could before it all ended.
Angel shook his head, trying to make sense of the conundrum. How could two different people be so similar?
Wesley had suggested that maybe it was all in his mind. The Englishman had listened patiently when he had finally broken down after the night with Mina and sought the other man for advice. In the course of that talk, he had at last admitted to his feelings for Spike - a century’s worth of suppressed emotions that Mina had dug up.
The most logical conclusion Wesley could come up with was that he had been desperate to find a replacement for Spike and had merely latched onto the most convenient person. Nobody deserved to be a substitute, Wesley had then said, urging him to end the affair. He had agreed with a heavy heart, knowing that it was the right thing to do.
Which probably meant that he should pull his hand away now.
Yet, he couldn’t. The familiarity of the situation held him in its thrall. How many mornings had he woken up to the comforting sensation of William’s fingers intricately interlaced in his, like fibers in a thread?
He had always thought that he would have forever with William. Each death - Doyle, Buffy, Darla, Cordy and now, Fred - had simply reinforced the notion that Spike was the only one who would be with him always. Each death had brought him one step closer to telling the younger vampire how he felt.
Smiling bitterly, Angel reflected on how it had taken Spike’s death for him to finally admit his love for the blonde. He still remembered those drunken, but no less heartfelt, declarations he had made to Mina about Spike. For some strange reason, he had a feeling that Spike would have heard them and it had eased the heartache and regret within him.
The vampire turned his attention back to the girl who had given him so much peace and comfort in his darkest hours. Studying the troubled lines on her sleeping face, he wished, in a sudden burst of selflessness, that she had never come into his world - a world of pain, loss and hopelessness. She was so young and she deserved better than what he could offer her.
Carefully slipping his hand from hers, he told himself that it was for the best, ignoring the pang in his heart.
Like a curse, destruction trailed in his wake. It was as if all the pain and torment he had once visited on his victims were now taken out on the ones dearest to his heart.
If she didn’t stay away, he would destroy her as well and he couldn’t allow that to happen.
“Charlie boy…” she suddenly whispered.
Angel frowned. Only Spike called Gunn that.
“Don’t drink it,” she pleaded desperately, guilt pervading her tone.
He felt a chill run down his spine. What was she talking about? Don’t drink what?
Where there was once love, now there were the first tendrils of suspicion. This was one too many coincidences for him to comfortable with.
Notions, which had been simmering in his subconscious mind for a while, finally floated up into his consciousness.
Wasn’t it convenient that she woke up from her coma just in time to step into and fill the gaping wound that the blonde vampire left behind? Nobody ever questioned how easily she had insinuated herself into the group and Angel’s heart and how she just happened to know so much about all of them. At the time, she had mentioned offhandedly that she had had many visions about them and they had accepted that and the fact that maybe she was just exceptionally intuitive.
Cordy’s words of warning echoed in his mind.
“He will try to take it all from you.”
Maybe Mina was working with someone who knew them very well, an old enemy with a vendetta against him.
The minute they got back, he intended to call Giles and find out more about her. That is, if Giles and the Council could still be trusted.
“How long?”
Angel jerked in his seat, startled out of his brood. An awake Mina looked at him quizzically. Quickly, Angel composed himself, hoping that his face didn’t betray his thoughts.
“What did you say?” he asked, stifling the repulsion he felt by the concern for him registering in her blue eyes, which he was sure was fake.
She was an amazing actress and a formidable enemy. He would have to be careful around her.
“Are you ok?” she queried, staring at him earnestly.
“Just tired,” he lied.
She nodded slowly as if satisfied by his explanation. “How long til we land?”
“Two hours,” he replied tersely before turning away from her and closing his eyes.
They had only two more hours together before he could be free of her.
Only two more hours left to not think of how much her betrayal hurt, and how much their combined betrayal of Fred would hurt Wesley.
************
“The air is choked with grief. It is most repulsive to me.”
Spike lifted his red-rimmed eyes to regard Illyria from where he was sitting on the steps in the lobby. If only he could’ve visited Kalynine earlier, he would’ve come up with a plan with her earlier, and this stranger clothed in a familiar form might not be standing in front of him.
Illyria, God-King, who had planned her resurrection millennia ago, knowing that she would be murdered by a rival. Of all the people she could’ve chosen, why did she have to pick Fred?
Even while he seethed inwardly at her blatant disregard for the pain she had caused, he couldn’t help but compare her situation to his. Both of them had taken over the bodies of girls, who had once been loved by family and friends. Impostors, they both were.
The only difference was that while Illyria had made no efforts to hide herself, he had played so many different roles that sometimes he himself couldn’t keep them straight.
Between the two of them, who was worse, he couldn’t tell.
“Well I’m truly sorry, your highness,” Spike sneered, his self-loathing and grief making him lash out at her. “I know our grief is nothing compared to the devastation of losing a kingdom but some of us just happen to care more about people than kingdoms.”
“You would invest so much of yourself…in a mere mortal shell?” she questioned, a hint of something indefinable in her tone.
“She was more than a mortal shell, you stupid bint!” he shouted. Illyria cocked her head at him inquisitively and he quickly moved on from his slip, hoping that nobody noticed.
“She was like a sister to me.” His jaw tightened as he remembered everything Fred had done for him. “Not that I would expect you to understand that.” Swallowing a lump in his throat, Spike stood to go but her next words stopped him.
“I…once had kin as well…”
The words were clipped, as if it took great effort for Illyria to force them out of her throat.
“Yeah?” Spike murmured, eyes softening a little as he regarded the God-King. “Did you love your kin?”
She stiffened. “Love is a weakness that I will not tolerate. I cannot fathom why any creature would desire to weaken himself in such a way.” Hidden beneath the disdain was the unmistakable tang of bitterness.
Spike stared at her thoughtfully. “But even you,” he pressed insistently, “must have felt some sort of affection for family, if not love.”
Illyria smiled, a hard line stretching across her implacable features.
“Even you would find it difficult…” She paused, looking straight into his eyes with such intensity that he shifted uncomfortably.
“...to feel affection for a brother who has taken your life.”
With that, she stalked away, leaving him speechless.
Title: The Boundaries of Love (7/?)
Pairing: Spangel
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: Joss is God. I’m only a minor servant, borrowing his playthings.
Summary: Angsty. This is one of my more serious fics. Spike gets a mysterious visitor after the whole Cup of Perpetual Torment business. A sacrifice is made, setting off a chain of events that will change Spike forever and test the boundaries of his love for Angel.
Note: This is unbetaed so all mistakes are mine. Please point them out if you see one. By the way, please feel free to offer constructive criticism.
Previous parts here.
Desire licked a dark, destructive trail up his skin before digging its talons deep into his shriveled heart, making him ache for the drug that would cease its sweet torture.
Power.
Hamilton hated and loved it in equal measure, schemed and plotted his way toward possessing it for as long as he could remember. After so many years, a seat at the table of the Senior Partners was almost within grasp, with only one obstacle remaining in his path.
“Look again,” Hamilton hissed at his underlings, who fearfully redoubled their efforts upon hearing the whip crack of his voice.
Oh, power was so addictive and Hamilton had only just possessed a small taste of it. No one was going to come between him and it, especially not amateur Slayer bitches who claimed to have turned to the dark side - claimed being the key word. He just didn’t buy her story.
After all, he couldn’t sense that same all consuming lust for power burning in Mina as it burned in him. She didn’t and wouldn’t ever understand the sacrifices it took to worship at that altar.
“What are you hiding, little girl?” His dark gaze swept through her apartment, noting each and every detail.
So far, she had maintained a good act, delivering what she had promised. Angel was becoming increasingly isolated and he kept unconsciously turning to her in his weakest hours. It wouldn’t take much for her to bring him over to the dark side.
But, at times, Hamilton thought he could see a certain softness in her eyes as she regarded the souled vampire and he didn’t believe that she would backstab her lover like that. If the Senior Partners couldn’t see that, perhaps they were getting old and senile. All of them, except his mentor, of course.
“The expected may prove unexpected,” his mentor had often quoted to him. “Triumph lies not with the chosen.”
The Senior Partners and the Powers both believed that Angel was the one to play the deciding role in the Apocalypse. Thus, Mina’s plan to tip the scales in the Partners’ favor was welcomed by all the Partners except for Hamilton’s longtime mentor, who had secretly revealed to him an older prophecy, often quoting lines from it.
Victory would come from an unknown source and his mentor had believed him to be it.
He was lucky to have such a mentor. All through the years, the man had never guided him false. In fact, his mentor was the one who pointed out to him that Mina wasn’t all that she seemed to be. If he could find out what Mina was hiding and expose her, his ascension to Partner status would be assured.
With that in mind, he had patiently bided his time for the chance to find a crack in her game while dutifully reporting her successes to the Partners, though it pained him. When both her and Angel had been drawn away to England, he had pounced on the perfect opportunity to ransack her apartment for clues.
His instincts told him that the key lay in those few days that she had disappeared from Wolfram and Hart, apparently on some mission of the Council’s, as she had told Angel. She had deftly evaded the surveillance team that he had sent to tail her and they had been unable to ascertain where she had gone.
“Marcus!” one of the Seers suddenly called out to him urgently.
Barely able to contain his excitement, he quickly strode over to where she was standing. In front of them lay a pile of clothing that had been carelessly left on the floor by the bed.
“I sense a faint connection to the earth,” she observed. “It’s very cleverly hidden among the usual outdoors dust and other earth elements that had accumulated on her clothes.”
“What does that mean?” Hamilton demanded. “I thought the magical scans didn’t pick up anything.”
“It’s not magic,” she explained with a wry smile. “It’s the unique signature that we leave upon every person or thing that we come into contact with. Some creatures may become very adept at hiding it but there’s always a signature left behind, no matter how faint.”
“And?” Hamilton tried to keep from sounding too excited.
“Very recently, Mina met with a strong magic user, who had a very old connection to the earth here…”
Hamilton smirked. He could already taste the sweetness of Mina’s downfall. Maybe the Partners would even allow him to handle the Slayer’s punishment, he thought darkly, licking his lips.
“You all heard her.” He turned to his underlings. “Get me a list of magic users in L.A. I want this figured out as soon as possible.”
Stalking out the door, he left them to straighten up the mess they had made of the apartment before Angel and Mina got back.
His mentor would be pleased. Luck was indeed smiling on them.
************
“Or you could just take the first drooling idiot that comes along…”
Sometimes, he wondered if it was all preordained. What one dismissed as luck was destiny in another’s eyes.
The more he watched her from his vantage point in the shadows of the alley, the more he was convinced that it was meant to be. That this was meant to be.
“The wisest and bravest knight,” she whispered in a hushed, almost reverent tone, gaze filled with awe and just the slightest hint of something that could be regret.
Just how much had she seen, he wondered sadly, of what the future would hold?
Watching the gentle poet eagerly drinking down her promise of power, he experienced a strong, sudden compulsion to stop the man and save them all from an eternity of regret and pain but, upon meeting Drusilla’s clear, almost sane gaze, he knew he couldn’t.
It was her choice and he knew now, without a doubt, that she had made it despite knowing how it would all end ultimately.
But, why start something that was doomed to fail?
“Love,” she replied simply, as if hearing his innermost thoughts.
Then, in the blink of an eye, it was Cordelia standing in her place.
Stunned, he stood frozen, unable to move a muscle.
“Love allows for no boundaries,” she murmured solemnly. “That’s what makes it dangerous and at the same time, powerful…”
He looked at her in confusion. She seemed to be trying to convey some sort of message to him.
“Cordy…”
“No. You need to listen, Angel.” She staved off his questions with her sharp tone. Her next words were cut off as William abruptly began suckling harder at her neck, as if wanting his presence acknowledged.
That propelled Angel’s frozen body into action. Snarling, he quickly yanked the fledgling off of her, catching her before she fell. Blood gushed out all over his hands as teeth left neck. He tried desperately to staunch the flow but it was futile.
Clasping his arm with surprising strength, Cordelia struggled to get her next words out even as her voice began to grow faint.
“He will try to take it all from you.”
“Who?” he asked, totally baffled.
She made no answer, remaining limp in his arms, eyes wide and unstaring - haunted, even in death, by the possibility that her efforts to warn him had not succeeded.
For an eternity, he stood numbly, unable to make sense of anything, only knowing that holding her dead body for the second time around was just as devastating as the first. He knew not how much time he spent standing there for each moment of bleakness dragged on the same way in his eyes.
Then came a spark of color in the lifeless alley. He watched dazedly as an eerie blue tinge gradually spread across Cordelia’s face, obliterating her features and replacing them with that of another.
Fred.
Horrified, he dropped her and backed away, his body shaking in denial. He bumped into someone and reflexively, he turned around.
With lips still dripping her lifeblood, William appeared in front of him, eyes bright with a certain blend of madness that some would call love.
“She’s…she’s my destiny.”
************
Angel always knew that those words would come back to haunt him.
Of all the things that the older vampire had been to Spike and of all the things he wished he could’ve been, his destiny had never been one of them.
Perhaps, it was for the best, Angel thought. He caused enough deliberate destruction as it was.
Drusilla, William, Cordelia and now, Fred.
Sweet Fred…whose life had been worth that of a thousand souls…
Even the motors in Wolfram and Hart’s private jet weren’t fast enough to take him away from the scene of his greatest failure. Sleep offered no escape either.
Lifting a brandy that the stewardess had brought him, he brooded over his strange, troubling dream, all the while careful not to dislodge the comforting hand delicately wrapped around his larger one.
Jolting awake from unconsciousness in a cold sweat, the boundaries between reality and dream had blurred for a moment. He had thought himself holding Cordelia’s hand and had been confused to see that the hand had actually belonged to a slumbering Mina in the seat next to him.
Slowly, her rhythmic breaths and heartbeat had calmed him, her presence chasing away the details of the dream.
The way she made him feel, either with her touch, her look or her proximity - it was inexplicable.
His lips tingled in remembrance of the one night that they had slept together. She had kissed him hungrily as if she was drowning, as if at any moment she would ripped away from his embrace. It was arousing and good and…
…just like the way William used to kiss him.
As Angelus, he had always found it intoxicating, the way William had offered everything up in a single kiss. As Angel, however, he had simply found it saddening.
Goodbye had underlay William’s every action. It seemed as if he had been preparing for the worst, preparing for what he believed was inevitable - the moment that his lover would leave him - and so he had tried to get as much out of everything as he could before it all ended.
Angel shook his head, trying to make sense of the conundrum. How could two different people be so similar?
Wesley had suggested that maybe it was all in his mind. The Englishman had listened patiently when he had finally broken down after the night with Mina and sought the other man for advice. In the course of that talk, he had at last admitted to his feelings for Spike - a century’s worth of suppressed emotions that Mina had dug up.
The most logical conclusion Wesley could come up with was that he had been desperate to find a replacement for Spike and had merely latched onto the most convenient person. Nobody deserved to be a substitute, Wesley had then said, urging him to end the affair. He had agreed with a heavy heart, knowing that it was the right thing to do.
Which probably meant that he should pull his hand away now.
Yet, he couldn’t. The familiarity of the situation held him in its thrall. How many mornings had he woken up to the comforting sensation of William’s fingers intricately interlaced in his, like fibers in a thread?
He had always thought that he would have forever with William. Each death - Doyle, Buffy, Darla, Cordy and now, Fred - had simply reinforced the notion that Spike was the only one who would be with him always. Each death had brought him one step closer to telling the younger vampire how he felt.
Smiling bitterly, Angel reflected on how it had taken Spike’s death for him to finally admit his love for the blonde. He still remembered those drunken, but no less heartfelt, declarations he had made to Mina about Spike. For some strange reason, he had a feeling that Spike would have heard them and it had eased the heartache and regret within him.
The vampire turned his attention back to the girl who had given him so much peace and comfort in his darkest hours. Studying the troubled lines on her sleeping face, he wished, in a sudden burst of selflessness, that she had never come into his world - a world of pain, loss and hopelessness. She was so young and she deserved better than what he could offer her.
Carefully slipping his hand from hers, he told himself that it was for the best, ignoring the pang in his heart.
Like a curse, destruction trailed in his wake. It was as if all the pain and torment he had once visited on his victims were now taken out on the ones dearest to his heart.
If she didn’t stay away, he would destroy her as well and he couldn’t allow that to happen.
“Charlie boy…” she suddenly whispered.
Angel frowned. Only Spike called Gunn that.
“Don’t drink it,” she pleaded desperately, guilt pervading her tone.
He felt a chill run down his spine. What was she talking about? Don’t drink what?
Where there was once love, now there were the first tendrils of suspicion. This was one too many coincidences for him to comfortable with.
Notions, which had been simmering in his subconscious mind for a while, finally floated up into his consciousness.
Wasn’t it convenient that she woke up from her coma just in time to step into and fill the gaping wound that the blonde vampire left behind? Nobody ever questioned how easily she had insinuated herself into the group and Angel’s heart and how she just happened to know so much about all of them. At the time, she had mentioned offhandedly that she had had many visions about them and they had accepted that and the fact that maybe she was just exceptionally intuitive.
Cordy’s words of warning echoed in his mind.
“He will try to take it all from you.”
Maybe Mina was working with someone who knew them very well, an old enemy with a vendetta against him.
The minute they got back, he intended to call Giles and find out more about her. That is, if Giles and the Council could still be trusted.
“How long?”
Angel jerked in his seat, startled out of his brood. An awake Mina looked at him quizzically. Quickly, Angel composed himself, hoping that his face didn’t betray his thoughts.
“What did you say?” he asked, stifling the repulsion he felt by the concern for him registering in her blue eyes, which he was sure was fake.
She was an amazing actress and a formidable enemy. He would have to be careful around her.
“Are you ok?” she queried, staring at him earnestly.
“Just tired,” he lied.
She nodded slowly as if satisfied by his explanation. “How long til we land?”
“Two hours,” he replied tersely before turning away from her and closing his eyes.
They had only two more hours together before he could be free of her.
Only two more hours left to not think of how much her betrayal hurt, and how much their combined betrayal of Fred would hurt Wesley.
************
“The air is choked with grief. It is most repulsive to me.”
Spike lifted his red-rimmed eyes to regard Illyria from where he was sitting on the steps in the lobby. If only he could’ve visited Kalynine earlier, he would’ve come up with a plan with her earlier, and this stranger clothed in a familiar form might not be standing in front of him.
Illyria, God-King, who had planned her resurrection millennia ago, knowing that she would be murdered by a rival. Of all the people she could’ve chosen, why did she have to pick Fred?
Even while he seethed inwardly at her blatant disregard for the pain she had caused, he couldn’t help but compare her situation to his. Both of them had taken over the bodies of girls, who had once been loved by family and friends. Impostors, they both were.
The only difference was that while Illyria had made no efforts to hide herself, he had played so many different roles that sometimes he himself couldn’t keep them straight.
Between the two of them, who was worse, he couldn’t tell.
“Well I’m truly sorry, your highness,” Spike sneered, his self-loathing and grief making him lash out at her. “I know our grief is nothing compared to the devastation of losing a kingdom but some of us just happen to care more about people than kingdoms.”
“You would invest so much of yourself…in a mere mortal shell?” she questioned, a hint of something indefinable in her tone.
“She was more than a mortal shell, you stupid bint!” he shouted. Illyria cocked her head at him inquisitively and he quickly moved on from his slip, hoping that nobody noticed.
“She was like a sister to me.” His jaw tightened as he remembered everything Fred had done for him. “Not that I would expect you to understand that.” Swallowing a lump in his throat, Spike stood to go but her next words stopped him.
“I…once had kin as well…”
The words were clipped, as if it took great effort for Illyria to force them out of her throat.
“Yeah?” Spike murmured, eyes softening a little as he regarded the God-King. “Did you love your kin?”
She stiffened. “Love is a weakness that I will not tolerate. I cannot fathom why any creature would desire to weaken himself in such a way.” Hidden beneath the disdain was the unmistakable tang of bitterness.
Spike stared at her thoughtfully. “But even you,” he pressed insistently, “must have felt some sort of affection for family, if not love.”
Illyria smiled, a hard line stretching across her implacable features.
“Even you would find it difficult…” She paused, looking straight into his eyes with such intensity that he shifted uncomfortably.
“...to feel affection for a brother who has taken your life.”
With that, she stalked away, leaving him speechless.