Fic - Darkness Visible
I've finally built up the courage to start posting my new - well, newish - fic. This is a development of Darkness, originally written for a challenge at
good__evil.
I'm now some way into Chapter 4 in the writing - it's looking as if it'll end up at about seven or eight chapters all told - so I gave myself a firm talking-to and decided to post a chapter a week, a rate surely I ought to be able to manage?
As it's been extended and rewritten, I felt I ought to leave the original title, stolen from a Byron poem, with the original fic, so here for your delectation, is Darkness Visible (title stolen from Milton instead.)
This is my first post-NFA fic and it's broadly gen rather than a ship, though some Spuffiness is likely to ensue eventually.
Title: Darkness Visible
Pairing/Character: Spike, Drusilla at present - more familiar characters will appear later.
Rating: G
Summary: Post NFA, Spike is hungry and he's far from being the only one.
Spoilers: Everything up to and including NFA
Disclaimer: I wish they were mine, especially Spike, but they are Joss’s. He said we could play though, honest!
Many thanks to
spikes_heart for the original beta of Darkness and all her encouragement, and to
bogwitch for being strict with me.
Chapter One.
A pall of smoke hung over the city.
Didn’t really matter what time it was any more - nobody was likely to see the sun or feel its warmth for one hell of a long time. Rats skittered boldly along the centre of the road, and one paused to gnaw at something. Something that had once been human - a leg-bone, half a boot still attached. Spike could hardly be bothered to do it, but a bloke had to eat.
The planes of his face shifted and he leapt forward, snatching the vermin from its feast and ripping into its neck before it had time to squeak. He sucked it dry in a second, dropped it and shook his face smooth again.
It had been a day or so since he’d had any company. The few people he saw shrieked and ran as soon as look at him. Because they looked at him, more like. Nice to know the Big Bad still had it.
Who was he bloody fooling? Not himself at any rate. Even for LA these days he looked odd . He could hardly gaze in a mirror for confirmation, but he could feel half his face was uneven, crispy in places, seared by dragon-breath, and the hair on the same side was stubble which fragmented under his finger tips. Not much swagger left either. Vampire healing or not, he could feel his hip-bones grate as he struggled painfully where once he had strolled. Not that he was in a strolling mood, anyway. Signs that anything existed to spark him out of the deepest depression known to man or demon were few and far between. There had been too much loss, too much pain and too much chaos for him to stroll casually through the ravaged remnants of the town he should have died in.
Something in the mid-distance caught his eye and he limped towards it.
There was a crowd: famished, ragged, hollow-eyed, but recognisably human. They huddled on the steps of a church, and a flickering glow was reflected by the shards of glass still clinging to the window-spaces. The outer ring gazed hungrily inwards. The inner ring didn’t stir.
Warmth was hard to come by in the artificial chill of this city. Light was almost as rare. Now all the burning buildings had dulled to embers, any sort of flame drew haunted figures to it, cold, skeletal hands scraping and tearing, feeble breath trying to push life into feeble glow.
Some bugger, somewhere must be constructing a theory to do with earthquakes - cloud cover, radiation, nuclear winters - whatever it took. Anything but demons, battles, dragons and monsters. No matter how many citizens had seen them, the human mind was at its most creative when it came to denial. Any day now They -- the authorities -- would come with food parcels and shelter and reassuring bureaucracy. To think otherwise was to accept that the madness had no end. Well over a century he’d seen these wankers deny the horrors in front of their own faces. Another apocalypse wasn’t going to change that any time soon.
So what? He knew the madness had no end. He stared dully at the people. Once he’d have looked for familiar faces. Before that he’d have looked for the tastiest prey. Now? He felt nothing. This was the essence of all that was dead - his friends gone, his world crushed beyond recognition. He doubted if he’d even know them now, any of them, even supposing some had survived. The past was dead and best forgotten.
Spike pushed his way through the mob. There was little resistance. He never expected any - not these days. Not as if anyone had energy to waste any more. The fire at the heart of the group was surprisingly bright. His eyes narrowed. The fuel wasn’t only the heap of wood flooring and shattered furniture he’d come to expect. The brilliance and speed of the flames was explained too easily - they hungrily licked at the pages of books and papers, with a few oil paintings curling and blackening in the heat. He looked up. Yes, the steps led to a church - but next to it was a library with a gaping hole where a door had once been.
He’d really thought nothing could worry him any more. He’d seen close friends eaten, for Chrissakes, and not in a simple vampire way. What did a few battered volumes matter in the wasteland that was Tinseltown? Not exactly whole packs of booklovers in Superficial City, were there? As he looked closer, though, the titles leapt into focus - not just books, but precious first editions and classics. There, a leather-bound Byron, beyond it a Dickens and something by Hardy. These wankers were burning treasure for a few seconds of light and heat.
He bellowed in rage; his face shifted, his fangs descending as he groped into the flames, reaching for one of the few things even more combustible than himself. The pain was intense, but he managed to clutch a few smouldering books to his chest before he had to leap back, defying any attempt to wrest his trophies from him.
But then he froze. A demented laugh, familiar yet unfamiliar broke the air.
“Just look at the little boy! He wants his storybooks more than he wants the light. I don’t think he wants to play with us.”
He looked into a pale face, dark eyes, tell-tale brow-ridges. The woman - no, vampire - was emaciated, scarred badly across one cheek and temple, with livid mottling to her skin. Tattered rags of lace and velvet hung from her body, and a few patches of charred hair barely hid her skull. Her eyes glowed with a strange intensity and her rounded cheekbones clashed oddly with the sharpened brows. She danced from one foot to another, waving her long fingers aloft, and spiralled in the fireglow. A twisted smile lit her face for a moment and she stepped forward, almost in recognition and welcome. Did he know her?
The female blinked, stared at him for a moment, before shaking her head. The smile became even broader, more disturbing, then she snarled, “Get him!”
Suddenly he realised the outer ring of observers had also shifted into game face. Golden eyes glinted at him as the grinning squad closed in. Bugger it! He’d assumed it was a random mob of warmth-seekers - now it was more a sheep-pen surrounded by wolves. Wolves were pack animals and didn’t take kindly to interlopers. Vampires? Even less with the cosy fun-seeking.
No time now to worry if or where he’d seen their dark mistress before. The sheer joy of the fight, the lust for justifiable mayhem, took over. The books flew out of his hands. He booted a conveniently-placed pair of bollocks and continued the fluid movement, bringing his leg up to let him grasp the sharp weapon, kept down his boot just in case. Twisting on the ball of his foot, he lunged forward, shoving the stake neatly into the heart of an assailant and using the reaction to right himself before his victim dusted. Hooting with delight, he flipped backwards, and, two steps higher than the pack and, with a column behind him, kicked out at a harsh, demented face, forcing its luckless owner off-balance and into the throng. Two swift jabs meant two clouds of dust, and a clear exit towards the road.
Perhaps too clear - as he launched himself forward a burly vampire stepped neatly into the space. Shit! This bugger was huge, and there wasn’t a lot of space to get by him. His eyes glowed fiercely and his paw rammed forward towards Spike’s face. With another scream of elation, Spike twisted in mid-air and his fist connected with a jawbone. His opponent swore and hesitated for just long enough for Spike to grip the creature’s shirt, pull sharply and ram his forehead into the bridge of its nose. Following through with a stake-thrust, he leapt backward, choking a little on the dust.
Close call, that.
Somehow he’d been forced closer to the fire. Not a problem, really. He bent for a second and rose, more salvaged books in one hand, a burning chair-leg in the other. Now this really was a weapon. He advanced on the scarred female, holding the brand out. She laughed manically, but retreated and he dashed between her and her nearest minion, up the steps and into the one place he felt they were unlikely to follow - the church.
Sure enough, the enemies halted at the door, giving him time to look around in the gloom for a weapon. Near the entrance was an altar with a cheap plaster statue and, yes, something he could use. Spike winced as he gripped a crucifix, but the look of horror on their faces was enough to make the pain bearable. He slammed the huge doors shut and used the cross as a makeshift bar. Any water in easy reach was too likely to be holy, so he spat on his smouldering hands and slapped at his jeans to extinguish the last flames.
There was a smell of charring - not flesh but paper. What the fuck? He looked at the floor. The books he’d somehow salvaged from the flames lay there. These weren’t the Byron and Dickens he’d hoped to save, but they were still precious. This new world had no-one to snark at, no-one even to talk to in coherent sentences and without words he was nothing. These would have to do.
A single candle, astonishingly, burnt on the altar and he limped closer to examine his haul. Three volumes - two paperbacks and one leather-bound. You never know - might even be worth something. He settled down on the step to look more closely.
The Betrayed Heart. He couldn’t choose between heaving and snarling. All that priceless literature and he had to save trash like that. Schmoopy, fluffy rubbish with no redeeming features - not even a good disembowelment.
He flung it away, bouncing it off a particularly unpleasant wall-painting. Then he and turned to the others. One was a collection of plays - Jacobean Revenge tragedies, the sort of pseudo-Hamlet stuff with bizarre murders, poisonings, perversions and incest - real comfort reading. He stashed it carefully in his inner pocket. Webster and Middleton were always good for a laugh.
He gave his attention to the remaining book. Nice tooled leather, but crumbling a little even where it wasn’t charred. It smelled old too, and when he opened it there was a crackle of parchment. Interesting. He flicked idly through the pages. Not so interesting. Some sort of devotional thing, with rogue crosses drawn on pages almost at random, as if to catch the unwary. Bloody hell, that stung. He jerked back his thumb just in time to avoid smoking and sucked on it, swearing accompanying the hissing noise.
The quick flick of his hand jarred something in the spine of the book and a small slip of paper floated to his lap. Nowhere near as old as the volume, obviously - it was paper, after all - but fragile and browning. Intrigued, he dropped the book and held the sheet to the light with both hands. Spidery writing, brownish ink and rusty blotches of foxing. Definitely old, then.
As he peered at the faded script something stirred in the dark recesses of his brain. This was a lady’s hand. How did he know that? Memories churned in his skull. A dark princess, skin like marble, nails dripping blood. His princess.
With a start he realised the identity of the female vampire outside. Christ, she had changed so much - but so had he. In the famished cold and bitter darkness neither had recognised the other. Her face had become a hideous mask and her supple body had twisted into a mockery of its former self. He laughed harshly at the irony. So much for eternal love and destiny. Angelus at least would have been amused.
No, don’t go there, Spike. He had buried all the layers of memory for a reason. There were horrors too strong even for his stomach, explanations for the darkling sky, the shroud that lay over the city even at noon. It might give him freedom to move, something he’d once craved, but there was no point in that any more.
As he looked down at the paper, the Victorian script stirred something. The words were empty, meaningless - some girl a century or more before had been doodling to while away the boredom of a sermon. Even the darkest night will end. This was the darkest night he’d ever known. There had been no sun, to the best of his calculations, for two months now.
Outside he could hear screams as the vampires began to feed on the victims who had ignored the fight, still mesmerised by the flames.. He shifted his shoulder to shut out the noise. As he stirred, the book in his pocket shifted. Those plays. The heroes were a bad lot in the main. Antiheroes. Murdering bastards, to be more precise. But they hadn’t just given in. Even at the darkest hour they’d fought on or fought back. They didn’t huddle in some buggering church, afraid to face nastiness. They went out in a dramatic flourish or battled their way through to the light.
It had been Angel, not him who’d chosen to make the melodramatic gesture last time. He’d agreed to it, though. Champions against Evil, wasn’t it?
Bugger. He couldn’t just cower in here. Someone had to stand up to them. The sound of the feeding had died down a bit, but those vamps were still out there and they weren’t going to stop just so the world could be made safe again for fluffy puppies. He didn’t need to look round to see other Champions were a tad thin on the ground. Besides, that wasn’t the point any more.
If he was going to go out to face them, to deal with his lost love, properly, this time it had to be for himself alone. Perhaps cleaning up the last vampires in town would bring back the light. Perhaps then he could move on.
Probably not, but at least he was going to try. Goodnight, sweet sodding Prince.
He stood and turned towards the door.
I plan to cross-post this at
spike_fics and in my own LJ - possibly elsewhere later.
good__evil.
I'm now some way into Chapter 4 in the writing - it's looking as if it'll end up at about seven or eight chapters all told - so I gave myself a firm talking-to and decided to post a chapter a week, a rate surely I ought to be able to manage?
As it's been extended and rewritten, I felt I ought to leave the original title, stolen from a Byron poem, with the original fic, so here for your delectation, is Darkness Visible (title stolen from Milton instead.)
This is my first post-NFA fic and it's broadly gen rather than a ship, though some Spuffiness is likely to ensue eventually.
Title: Darkness Visible
Pairing/Character: Spike, Drusilla at present - more familiar characters will appear later.
Rating: G
Summary: Post NFA, Spike is hungry and he's far from being the only one.
Spoilers: Everything up to and including NFA
Disclaimer: I wish they were mine, especially Spike, but they are Joss’s. He said we could play though, honest!
Many thanks to
spikes_heart for the original beta of Darkness and all her encouragement, and to
bogwitch for being strict with me.
Chapter One.
A pall of smoke hung over the city.
Didn’t really matter what time it was any more - nobody was likely to see the sun or feel its warmth for one hell of a long time. Rats skittered boldly along the centre of the road, and one paused to gnaw at something. Something that had once been human - a leg-bone, half a boot still attached. Spike could hardly be bothered to do it, but a bloke had to eat.
The planes of his face shifted and he leapt forward, snatching the vermin from its feast and ripping into its neck before it had time to squeak. He sucked it dry in a second, dropped it and shook his face smooth again.
It had been a day or so since he’d had any company. The few people he saw shrieked and ran as soon as look at him. Because they looked at him, more like. Nice to know the Big Bad still had it.
Who was he bloody fooling? Not himself at any rate. Even for LA these days he looked odd . He could hardly gaze in a mirror for confirmation, but he could feel half his face was uneven, crispy in places, seared by dragon-breath, and the hair on the same side was stubble which fragmented under his finger tips. Not much swagger left either. Vampire healing or not, he could feel his hip-bones grate as he struggled painfully where once he had strolled. Not that he was in a strolling mood, anyway. Signs that anything existed to spark him out of the deepest depression known to man or demon were few and far between. There had been too much loss, too much pain and too much chaos for him to stroll casually through the ravaged remnants of the town he should have died in.
Something in the mid-distance caught his eye and he limped towards it.
There was a crowd: famished, ragged, hollow-eyed, but recognisably human. They huddled on the steps of a church, and a flickering glow was reflected by the shards of glass still clinging to the window-spaces. The outer ring gazed hungrily inwards. The inner ring didn’t stir.
Warmth was hard to come by in the artificial chill of this city. Light was almost as rare. Now all the burning buildings had dulled to embers, any sort of flame drew haunted figures to it, cold, skeletal hands scraping and tearing, feeble breath trying to push life into feeble glow.
Some bugger, somewhere must be constructing a theory to do with earthquakes - cloud cover, radiation, nuclear winters - whatever it took. Anything but demons, battles, dragons and monsters. No matter how many citizens had seen them, the human mind was at its most creative when it came to denial. Any day now They -- the authorities -- would come with food parcels and shelter and reassuring bureaucracy. To think otherwise was to accept that the madness had no end. Well over a century he’d seen these wankers deny the horrors in front of their own faces. Another apocalypse wasn’t going to change that any time soon.
So what? He knew the madness had no end. He stared dully at the people. Once he’d have looked for familiar faces. Before that he’d have looked for the tastiest prey. Now? He felt nothing. This was the essence of all that was dead - his friends gone, his world crushed beyond recognition. He doubted if he’d even know them now, any of them, even supposing some had survived. The past was dead and best forgotten.
Spike pushed his way through the mob. There was little resistance. He never expected any - not these days. Not as if anyone had energy to waste any more. The fire at the heart of the group was surprisingly bright. His eyes narrowed. The fuel wasn’t only the heap of wood flooring and shattered furniture he’d come to expect. The brilliance and speed of the flames was explained too easily - they hungrily licked at the pages of books and papers, with a few oil paintings curling and blackening in the heat. He looked up. Yes, the steps led to a church - but next to it was a library with a gaping hole where a door had once been.
He’d really thought nothing could worry him any more. He’d seen close friends eaten, for Chrissakes, and not in a simple vampire way. What did a few battered volumes matter in the wasteland that was Tinseltown? Not exactly whole packs of booklovers in Superficial City, were there? As he looked closer, though, the titles leapt into focus - not just books, but precious first editions and classics. There, a leather-bound Byron, beyond it a Dickens and something by Hardy. These wankers were burning treasure for a few seconds of light and heat.
He bellowed in rage; his face shifted, his fangs descending as he groped into the flames, reaching for one of the few things even more combustible than himself. The pain was intense, but he managed to clutch a few smouldering books to his chest before he had to leap back, defying any attempt to wrest his trophies from him.
But then he froze. A demented laugh, familiar yet unfamiliar broke the air.
“Just look at the little boy! He wants his storybooks more than he wants the light. I don’t think he wants to play with us.”
He looked into a pale face, dark eyes, tell-tale brow-ridges. The woman - no, vampire - was emaciated, scarred badly across one cheek and temple, with livid mottling to her skin. Tattered rags of lace and velvet hung from her body, and a few patches of charred hair barely hid her skull. Her eyes glowed with a strange intensity and her rounded cheekbones clashed oddly with the sharpened brows. She danced from one foot to another, waving her long fingers aloft, and spiralled in the fireglow. A twisted smile lit her face for a moment and she stepped forward, almost in recognition and welcome. Did he know her?
The female blinked, stared at him for a moment, before shaking her head. The smile became even broader, more disturbing, then she snarled, “Get him!”
Suddenly he realised the outer ring of observers had also shifted into game face. Golden eyes glinted at him as the grinning squad closed in. Bugger it! He’d assumed it was a random mob of warmth-seekers - now it was more a sheep-pen surrounded by wolves. Wolves were pack animals and didn’t take kindly to interlopers. Vampires? Even less with the cosy fun-seeking.
No time now to worry if or where he’d seen their dark mistress before. The sheer joy of the fight, the lust for justifiable mayhem, took over. The books flew out of his hands. He booted a conveniently-placed pair of bollocks and continued the fluid movement, bringing his leg up to let him grasp the sharp weapon, kept down his boot just in case. Twisting on the ball of his foot, he lunged forward, shoving the stake neatly into the heart of an assailant and using the reaction to right himself before his victim dusted. Hooting with delight, he flipped backwards, and, two steps higher than the pack and, with a column behind him, kicked out at a harsh, demented face, forcing its luckless owner off-balance and into the throng. Two swift jabs meant two clouds of dust, and a clear exit towards the road.
Perhaps too clear - as he launched himself forward a burly vampire stepped neatly into the space. Shit! This bugger was huge, and there wasn’t a lot of space to get by him. His eyes glowed fiercely and his paw rammed forward towards Spike’s face. With another scream of elation, Spike twisted in mid-air and his fist connected with a jawbone. His opponent swore and hesitated for just long enough for Spike to grip the creature’s shirt, pull sharply and ram his forehead into the bridge of its nose. Following through with a stake-thrust, he leapt backward, choking a little on the dust.
Close call, that.
Somehow he’d been forced closer to the fire. Not a problem, really. He bent for a second and rose, more salvaged books in one hand, a burning chair-leg in the other. Now this really was a weapon. He advanced on the scarred female, holding the brand out. She laughed manically, but retreated and he dashed between her and her nearest minion, up the steps and into the one place he felt they were unlikely to follow - the church.
Sure enough, the enemies halted at the door, giving him time to look around in the gloom for a weapon. Near the entrance was an altar with a cheap plaster statue and, yes, something he could use. Spike winced as he gripped a crucifix, but the look of horror on their faces was enough to make the pain bearable. He slammed the huge doors shut and used the cross as a makeshift bar. Any water in easy reach was too likely to be holy, so he spat on his smouldering hands and slapped at his jeans to extinguish the last flames.
There was a smell of charring - not flesh but paper. What the fuck? He looked at the floor. The books he’d somehow salvaged from the flames lay there. These weren’t the Byron and Dickens he’d hoped to save, but they were still precious. This new world had no-one to snark at, no-one even to talk to in coherent sentences and without words he was nothing. These would have to do.
A single candle, astonishingly, burnt on the altar and he limped closer to examine his haul. Three volumes - two paperbacks and one leather-bound. You never know - might even be worth something. He settled down on the step to look more closely.
The Betrayed Heart. He couldn’t choose between heaving and snarling. All that priceless literature and he had to save trash like that. Schmoopy, fluffy rubbish with no redeeming features - not even a good disembowelment.
He flung it away, bouncing it off a particularly unpleasant wall-painting. Then he and turned to the others. One was a collection of plays - Jacobean Revenge tragedies, the sort of pseudo-Hamlet stuff with bizarre murders, poisonings, perversions and incest - real comfort reading. He stashed it carefully in his inner pocket. Webster and Middleton were always good for a laugh.
He gave his attention to the remaining book. Nice tooled leather, but crumbling a little even where it wasn’t charred. It smelled old too, and when he opened it there was a crackle of parchment. Interesting. He flicked idly through the pages. Not so interesting. Some sort of devotional thing, with rogue crosses drawn on pages almost at random, as if to catch the unwary. Bloody hell, that stung. He jerked back his thumb just in time to avoid smoking and sucked on it, swearing accompanying the hissing noise.
The quick flick of his hand jarred something in the spine of the book and a small slip of paper floated to his lap. Nowhere near as old as the volume, obviously - it was paper, after all - but fragile and browning. Intrigued, he dropped the book and held the sheet to the light with both hands. Spidery writing, brownish ink and rusty blotches of foxing. Definitely old, then.
As he peered at the faded script something stirred in the dark recesses of his brain. This was a lady’s hand. How did he know that? Memories churned in his skull. A dark princess, skin like marble, nails dripping blood. His princess.
With a start he realised the identity of the female vampire outside. Christ, she had changed so much - but so had he. In the famished cold and bitter darkness neither had recognised the other. Her face had become a hideous mask and her supple body had twisted into a mockery of its former self. He laughed harshly at the irony. So much for eternal love and destiny. Angelus at least would have been amused.
No, don’t go there, Spike. He had buried all the layers of memory for a reason. There were horrors too strong even for his stomach, explanations for the darkling sky, the shroud that lay over the city even at noon. It might give him freedom to move, something he’d once craved, but there was no point in that any more.
As he looked down at the paper, the Victorian script stirred something. The words were empty, meaningless - some girl a century or more before had been doodling to while away the boredom of a sermon. Even the darkest night will end. This was the darkest night he’d ever known. There had been no sun, to the best of his calculations, for two months now.
Outside he could hear screams as the vampires began to feed on the victims who had ignored the fight, still mesmerised by the flames.. He shifted his shoulder to shut out the noise. As he stirred, the book in his pocket shifted. Those plays. The heroes were a bad lot in the main. Antiheroes. Murdering bastards, to be more precise. But they hadn’t just given in. Even at the darkest hour they’d fought on or fought back. They didn’t huddle in some buggering church, afraid to face nastiness. They went out in a dramatic flourish or battled their way through to the light.
It had been Angel, not him who’d chosen to make the melodramatic gesture last time. He’d agreed to it, though. Champions against Evil, wasn’t it?
Bugger. He couldn’t just cower in here. Someone had to stand up to them. The sound of the feeding had died down a bit, but those vamps were still out there and they weren’t going to stop just so the world could be made safe again for fluffy puppies. He didn’t need to look round to see other Champions were a tad thin on the ground. Besides, that wasn’t the point any more.
If he was going to go out to face them, to deal with his lost love, properly, this time it had to be for himself alone. Perhaps cleaning up the last vampires in town would bring back the light. Perhaps then he could move on.
Probably not, but at least he was going to try. Goodnight, sweet sodding Prince.
He stood and turned towards the door.
I plan to cross-post this at
spike_fics and in my own LJ - possibly elsewhere later.