[FIC] Midas - S/A - R - (1b/4)
TITLE: Midas (1b/4)
AUTHOR: Jennie
EMAIL: Jenexell_fic@yahoo.co.uk
DISCLAIMER: All stuff BtVS and A:ts belong to joss and co. I’m not making any money from this so don’t bother suing me.
RATING: R for graphically disturbing imagery.
SPOILERS: general up to the end of both series.
DISTRIBUTION: My Site www.livingindreams.co.uk/whisper You want it? Take it! Just tell me where!
SUMMARY: Post NFA - If silence was golden then Angel truly had the Midas Touch.
PAIRING: S/A
Feedback: PLEASE.
A few Minutes later they were spread out on a couch each, two bottles of whisky on the table and a bottle each in hand. After ten minutes of silent intense drinking Angel pushed himself onto his side so he could see Spike on the other couch. Then he sighed and looked up at the ceiling. “I feel like I should be doing something.”
“Like what?” Spike asked, propping himself on his elbow.
“I don’t know… I just feel like… half of me is switched off. That I’m not really here.”
“Know what you mean… nothing seems real.”
“Can vampires suffer from shock?”
“Dunno… I know this is the first time in over hundred years I’m not spittin’ mad at you.”
“That’s… oddly comforting.” Angel replied. Then he frowned. “You know… I never stopped… thinking about you… and Dru and Penn. I was angry at Darla for a really long time, but I couldn’t help worrying about you. What you were doing, how you were, if you were ok.”
“You had a funny way of showin’ it mate. Every time we met in the last century you’ve tried to kill me.”
“I didn’t try to kill you on the submarine.”
“No… I’m not wrong. I distinctly remember being thrown out in the middle of the ocean two hours from sunrise.”
“I knew you’d make land. And see, I was right.”
“I couldn’t swim, Angelus.”
“Oh… sorry.” Angel cringed. He hadn’t known that. “Why didn’t I know that?”
“Because you never asked?” Spike offered but without any kind of malice. “Just a thought, but what’s with the sharing all of a sudden?”
“I just… Thought you should know… you know,” Angel stumbled.
“And this sudden desire to share before our impending demise didn’t strike you yesterday? You know, that other day we knew was our last.”
Angel couldn’t actually find an answer to that.
Spike could have read a lot into the silence, but instead he just seemed to bypass it. “It would have been nice to know… dunno why… I think I would have preferred that to…”
Angel looked over at the blond. “To what?... What did you do yesterday?”
Spike groaned. “I went to an open mike night at a biker bar and read poetry.”
Angel blinked. That had been something deeply personal. He looked back at the ceiling. “I went to see my son.”
“And oddly enough, you saying you have a son does not surprise me.” Spike said with genuine confusion rather than sarcasm. He thought about it and then said. “The super brat. The one who got a hard on for blue. He’s your son.”
“You knew?” Angel asked in shock.
“No… I just feel like I should have. It makes sense… I remember thinking that he looked like you, smelt like you… then he had Darla’s eyes. She is the mum right?”
“Yeah… this is weird.”
“You think it’s weird? I’ve just worked out I knew you had a son and I’m not surprised.” Spike huffed. “You got any other little tit bits you feel like sharing?”
“Err no? You?”
Spike thought about it and then he said. “I didn’t get my soul on purpose. I went to get the chip out.”
Angel took a minute to digest this information. “Do you regret it? The soul?”
Spike frowned. “Sometimes. Sometimes I forget you know? Forget how much things can hurt now. Then I regret it.”
Angel nodded. There was a feeling in the air. Like now as they languished in numbness it was the time to let out all the little secrets that had been niggling at them. All the little hurts and lies and distorted truths.
Angel took a deep breath. “I tried to get rid of mine once. It’s kinda how Connor happened.”
“Lucky you it didn’t work,” Spike observed. He felt it too, the safety net of ambivalence. “Just before the soul… I tried to rape Buffy.”
Angel pursed his lips; he felt like he should be reacting to that, but couldn’t actually bring himself to exert the effort. Instead he asked softly. “What happened?
Spike glared at a particularly offensive crack in the ceiling. “She fought me off. I left town.”
Then the confessions just came. Torrents of little things and the occasional big thing. Indiscretions overlooked, motives embellished. Self glorifications exaggerated in their constant battle of one-up-man-ship. A constant stream of words eased along by strong spirits and empty souls. Still the numbness prevailed. That was until Angel said three words that sent Spike reeling.
“I missed you.”
“What?!?”
Angel sighed; he was more than a little drunk now, but no less sincere. “I missed you. All these years, I missed you. Missed what we used to have.”
“What we had was a dirty little affair you were too ashamed to acknowledge,” Spike spat. Something other than numbness was starting to burn, but he wasn’t sure yet if it wasn’t just Dutch courage.
“You can’t forgive that can you?” Angel whispered.
“I don’t know.” Spike sighed. “Give me a reason, doesn’t matter if it’s a lie just give me a reason why you never acknowledged me, not then, and not now.”
Angel nodded wearily. “Then is easy. Darla would have killed you. Not because she was jealous, she just hated homosexuals, even if they were vampires. Now… would you have wanted me to? Really? You said it once yourself, you outgrew me.”
Spike’s lips pursed. “I think I said surpassed.”
Angel shrugged. “Same result in the end. And for the record I was never ashamed of you, even after my soul, I was always proud of you. You can hate me all you like, Spike, you can deny that I’m even your sire.” He shot Spike a pointed look. “We’ve seen more of each other in the last decade than we did the hundred years that came before and in that time you’ve tried to kill me more times than I can count. Almost succeeded three times. You’ve become a trusted friend and ally of people I tried desperately just to connect to. Every time we’ve spoken, you’ve belittled, insulted and undermined me. You’ve slept with the only woman I’ve ever loved and you’ve rubbed that fact in my face everyday you’ve been here in LA. You stole my mission, my hope and my belief in myself, just to prove you were better than me when I could have just told you. You left me with just my pride and my pride wouldn’t let me tell you. And now… it doesn’t even matter anymore.”
Spike closed his eyes and let the words rattle around his head for a moment. The fledgling that exists in every vampire bounced around the corners of his mind in excited glee at the praise yet cowered slightly at the knowledge of having slighted its sire. The master in him scoffed scornfully and the man… the man bit his tongue until everyone else had shut up.
After a few minutes, Spike took a pull on his bottle and sagged back onto his couch. Angel seemed to have folded inwards after his long speech and was laid out on his couch his own bottle held in the crook of his arm, his forehead pinched between thumb and forefinger like he was trying to squeeze out a headache. It started with a huff, and then Spike found himself letting out a series of huffing bursts that could have been laughter between incredulous shakes of the head.
“Great,” Angel sighed, pulling his hand down across his face. “Can’t you take anything seriously?”
“Didn’t you ever wonder why?” Spike asked in a quietly disbelieving voice before releasing another burst of huffs and taking another long drink.
Angel sighed wearily and scratched the back of his head. “Why what?”
“Why I hated you. Why I did all those things. Why I could.”
“I’m not an idiot; I know why you hate me, Spike” Angel replied.
“I used to worship you,” Spike said bluntly. Angel rolled his head to the side so he could see the blond; he couldn’t help but notice how tired he looked, but he could imagine that he looked much the same. Spike swung his feet up on the coffee table and titled his head back so he was staring at the ceiling. “I used to think like you’d hung the bloody moon. I wanted to be just like you. And you… I never knew where I was with you. One minute you were pullin’ me into dark allies to screw me ’gainst a wall, next you make like you’d willin’ly tread in dog shit if it got you away from me quicker.”
“That’s not true,” Angel interjected quietly but firmly.
Spike snorted. “Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. But I deserved more from you. I deserved a little respect. If you couldn’t treat me like a lover, you should have at least treated me like someone you could stand.”
“It tore me apart,” Angel admitted. “Knowing what she’d do to both of us if she found out. It made me so angry. And sometimes I hated you for it, because…”
“Because?” Spike prodded.
Angel took a deep breath. “Because Darla always taught me that Vampires couldn’t love, but you could and… every time you walked into a room I couldn’t even look at you in case she found out that I could too.”
Spike’s jaw clenched as he continued his in depth study of the ceiling. There was another decidedly offensive crack a little to the left and he glared at it.
“Who started these tiresome games we play?” He whispered solemnly.
Angel, who had also taken up a study of the ceiling, sighed. “I don’t know, Will.”
Spike’s head snapped down to look at Angel, his brow marked with a frown. It had been a lifetime at least since Angel had called him that. He got unsteadily to his feet and moved round to the other couch, studiously ignoring that Angel was just as studiously ignoring his approach. Then before the older vampire had time to object, he was straddling his lap.
“Wha…!?” Angel started in surprise, but Spike put a finger to his lips.
“No, it’s my turn.”
Angel pursed his lips and watched him silently.
“The thing is mate, I’m so angry at you most of the time I can barely stand the sight of you. I’m sick of it. Sick and tired of fighting you and playing these silly games we play because we’re both too stupid to give them up.” He paused, taking a shallow breath through his nose. “You should have told me all this stuff a hundred odd years ago and maybe I should have spoken up sooner, but we didn’t and now we’re here. The world as we know it is gone, Angelus. We’re dead men walkin’ and I don’t mean coz we’re vampires. If that second wave comes we won’t be standing at the end of it. We were lucky last night, we had Blue and Gunn and you playin’ Popeye with Hamilton brand spinach. It’s just us now, just us against the worst the worst can send.” Spike glanced away from Angel’s face and sighed tiredly. “And the scariest part is… I really don’t care. I’m tired of it, all of it.”
Spike went to move off Angel but he sat up, a hand on Spike’s thigh keeping the other vampire from moving. Once he was sitting, he raised his hands to Spike’s face and cupped his cheek. When he spoke his words were whispered but gut wrenchingly heartfelt. “I’m just as tired as you are, Spike. I’m tired of fighting, tired of hurting, tired of living. But I don’t want to die not knowing…”
“Not knowing what?” Spike whispered back, their faces only inches apart, the gap getting smaller without either consciously meaning it to.
“If you’ll let me do this.”
Spike chose that moment to forget how to breathe. Angel’s lips were just how he remembered them but with none of the harshness that had come before. His hands groped for Angel’s shoulders then crawled his fingers up to tangle in the soft downy hair at the nape of the older Vampire’s neck. The kiss deepened, neither willing to break the contact and both grateful that they didn’t need to breathe.
Angel’s hands were doing some wandering of their own, skirting around his injured back and coming to rest on his waist, caressing and kneading the skin. Spike began to push Angel back down onto the couch and Angel let himself be guided. A small act of surrender that had monumental significance to them both.
This was it, their first and last time together in a century. Their first and last meeting as equals. As Angel’s hands started to claw at the waist band of Spike’s jeans, the blond broke the kiss and reared up. They were both still shirtless from earlier and Spike took a second to rake his gaze down the perfect chest that had changed so little in over a hundred years.
“What are we doing?”
Angel looked up at him and Spike moaned. He’d seen those eyes determined, hateful, angry, and lust glazed, but he’d never seen them as they were now. They shone with love and trust and pride, but they were dulled by desperate fear and hopelessness. He was seeing his sire at his most vulnerable. The battle and their confessions had stripped them both bare and now as he looked into Angel’s eyes he knew he was seeing a mirror of his own. The past no longer mattered and there was no future.
Angel reached up and pulled him down so their lips were barely touching. “Does it matter?”
“No,” Spike whispered in reply. When their lips met again they both knew the time for words had passed; all that was left was need and no words could ever articulate the desperate need to drive away the fear of tomorrow that was suffocating them today. They rolled, forgetting the narrow couch they’d been precariously perched on. Spike’s back hit the floor and he hissed, arching into Angel to escape the pain. Angel’s arm shot out, violent moving the coffee table out of their way and they were rolling again, Spike regaining control and finding himself lying between Angel’s thighs.
Hands moved frantically as their lips and tongues continued to duel. They broke only briefly as pants were shed hastily, but even that tiny moment of time seemed too much and they pounced on each other as soon as they were free. Spike trailed kisses along Angels jaw and throat, pausing to lick and nibble. Angel ached helplessly below him, his hand clinging to Spike as he surrendered to the skilful mouth of his youngest and dearest childe.
Spike continued to journey lower, feeling Angel’s need dragging along his stomach as his lips trailed across soft skin. His lips closed around a pert nipple making Angel buck up into him. Angel moaned loudly as lips changed to teeth that tugged then a cool tongue that soothed. Spike began to feel high on the power he now had. He knew this surrender had not been of his own making but came from Angel’s utter defeat, but he didn’t feel he’d been robbed of its personal import. Had he been anyone else, perhaps even Buffy, Angel would have kept his masks, but for him, for Spike, he had let his defences down.
“Spike please.”
Spike let go of the nipple he had been torturing and looked up. Angel laid spread below him, a banquet to be devoured, his head thrown back, his chest rising in sharp pants. He knew, without doubt, he could do whatever he wanted to Angel now and Angel would let him. Again the three major parts of his self splintered in different directions at that revelation. The fledgling watched on curiously, unsure and confused, weeping slightly at seeing its fallen god. The master crowed and cheered; revelling in its victory and salivating at the thoughts of what it could now do with its newfound power. And the man… the man begged he not take advantage of such vulnerability.
Tbc…