Crazy Madcap Redemption - 13
Sorry to keep you all waiting so long!!
Previous Parts in Memories
Chapter 13: Doctor my eyes
Dried blood clung to the creases around her fingernails, a dull contrast to the bright handcuffs that still managed to look like jewelry on her delicate wrists. Her dress - cream muslin today - was also splattered with lacy sprays of red-brown. She was looking at him with complete composure, and for that reason alone she looked more insane than Angel had ever seen Drusilla.
He crossed the room. There was an awkward moment as he tried to draw the chair on his side of the table out only to find that the two chairs and table were all secured to the floor. Probably a good policy in a Wolfram and Hart interrogation room.
“I don’t wish to speak to you,” Drusilla said. “Go away.” She turned her face away as Angel sat down. The chains rustled against her dress. They’d bound her feet too.
Angel looked down at his own hands clasped on the brushed metal table. “I don’t know what to say to you. Don’t know what I can say. I… I’m sorry.”
She turned back to face him, eyebrows raised and lips pursed.
Angel grimaced. “Inadequate words of the year award?”
“Your guilt doesn’t interest me unless it means you’ll take these chains off.” She tilted her head and added, with an evil glint in her eyes, “Daddy.”
Angel felt his stomach knot up and then crawl lower in his abdomen for safety. Now he looked away, unable to face that clear expression, those oh-so-knowing eyes. “Why did you do it, baby? Why did you tear him up like that? You know he loves you.”
“Yes,” Drusilla said, dismissively. “I know that for certain now.”
Angel couldn’t raise his eyes from his own knuckles. “I’ve talked to Fred. She… they won’t continue the treatments, without your consent. Now that you’re, you know…”
“Sane.”
Angel shrugged. “If it helps you make a decision, Drusilla,” her name hung for a moment, as though he couldn’t follow it with another word after it fell off his tongue. He forced himself to meet her steady gaze. “I want you well. I want you reformed. It… it would mean so much to me.”
Her smile was mocking. “I always suspected I was more sane than my wicked boys.”
Angel looked pained. “I know you can’t agree to this, and you won’t…”
“I will.”
He swallowed a mouthful of air. “Will?”
“Foolish Daddy,” she said, with gentle mockery that should have been alien to her voice. Heaving a sigh, she looked past him. “He loves me. I know that now.”
***
Fred entered a silent room - a still room, the absence of those incidental sounds of breath just piled on the creepy factor. “I’ll come back,” she said.
“No,” Angel said, rousing as if from sleep. “I was just on my way out.”
The two vampires didn’t look at each other. Drusilla acted like Angel wasn’t there at all, glancing with bored expectation at Fred and her tray of pills and hypodermics.
Angel stopped and made a few awkward motions like he was going to say something, or maybe hug her or pat her on the arm. She’d have patted HIM on the arm - he looked like he sorely needed it - but she needed both her hands on the tray to keep it steady.
“How’re you doing?” Fred tried for cheery, but it came out suspicious.
Drusilla’s smile was bright and false. “How is my handsome prince?”
Creepy factor ten. Fred placed the tray carefully on the table and answered as though the question were genuine, “He’s doing much better. You know, vampires! The restructuring of the metatarsal was amazing to watch. It was just like… tendons reaching out and grabbing bits of bone like little hands. All those little connections! I almost didn’t want them to stitch the skin back.”
The door shut behind her. Fred grimaced. “Right. Bedside manner, Doctor Burkle.” She busied herself arranging the items on her tray. “Anyway, I brought you some new drugs, but these are only if you agree to them. Let me just explain each one and its probable effects, this first one…”
“I’ll take it,” Drusilla said, extending her chained arms out in front of her.
“I haven’t told you all the pros and cons. You don’t want to just take a psychotropic drug without detailed knowledge and informed consent.”
Drusilla tilted her head back. “You don’t trust me.” Her delicate grin was somewhat proud. “Go on. Give me the shots that will make my prince trust me again.”
Fred slipped into the seat Angel had vacated. “Do you see that? I mean, do you know already which treatment will work?”
Drusilla pursed her lips and shook her head. “If I could direct what I saw, I’d see it. But the visions haven’t been coming. They don’t like the drugs. I wonder if you have to be a little mad to see the future, if I was always mad, then.”
“Drusilla, I don’t feel very good about this, about any of this.”
“Are you going to ask the same questions Angelus asked?”
Fred set the hypodermic down with a tiny click. “We don’t call him ‘Angelus’, you know that.”
“And very silly of you it is.”
“I’m trying to be your friend. If I can, if it’s even possible. I just… you’re evil, aren’t you? Spike is my friend too and it wasn’t easy, seeing him like that. I get all excited about science and biology and magic and things, but you know I still see him, not as a patient but a friend, in pain.”
“I didn’t do anything that wouldn’t heal,” she said, as though this was the most reasonable thing ever spoken.
“But you hurt him!”
Drusilla’s large, dark eyes blinked slowly. “Love hurts,” she said, as though educating a very young person.
***
Fred entered the recovery room with the same quiet reverence everyone had. It made Spike feel like a corpse at a wake. He pushed violently to get himself up and she dropped her box of cookies to run and help him. “Stop! You can’t just go moving around like that. Even vampires have to heal, you know.”
“Can’t take this sitting still,” he said.
“How do you feel?” She picked up the cookies once he settled back on the raised pillows. They’d tumbled out of their little plastic rows and she was grateful for the distraction of putting them back and licking frosting off her fingers. She didn’t want to look at Spike - his joints were hard and purple with swelling.
“As expected,” he said, smiling tiredly at her. “What’s that?” He held out his hand toward the box of cookies.
“Frosted sugar,” she said, avoiding his reach and setting the box on his lap.
“I think I can bear the ponderous weight of a box of cookies,” he chided, and pried open the lid. “How’s Dru?”
“God! I can’t believe you can ask that!”
He raised an eyebrow at her. “It’s only two words.”
“You should be angry!” Spike folded his hands over the cookies and smirked. “I’m serious! No amount of love is worth abuse. Don’t make me make you watch Oprah!”
“Oh, love, if I’d met you twenty years ago.”
Fred dropped onto the side of the bed and slapped at his arm. “You don’t get to be flippant about this, mister. I’ve been studying up on neuroscience, reading medical reports that are worse than Gunn’s legal briefs. Angel’s all quiet all the time and, and… damn it I want to talk to you!”
He rested his head back on the pillow and his eyes closed briefly, looking paper-thin. “What do you want me to say? The cosmic joke is on me once again. The only part of Dru that loved me was the crazy part. Not to be the most self-involved prat in the building, but it does make a bloke think.”
“That’s not true.”
“Is it? We were together over a hundred years. I thought I knew her - all the little bits of her, her lucid moments and her tantrums. I thought knowing Dru was something I had cold.”
Fred shifted closer and placed her hand on his arm. “Now you listen. A person on psychotropic drugs is going to not be themselves. I’ve read all about it now and what you’re saying is common - well, without the near dismemberment part. Families find that their loved one isn’t recognizable until the proper balance is achieved. It can take weeks, months, even years to figure out the right dosages.”
“Fred? Love?” He put his hand over hers. “She’s evil.”
Fred bit her lip. “That does complicate things a little.”
“A little? Soddin’ right.” He shook his head. “Never thought… never really felt it in her, you know? I mean, sure, she’d rip a person apart like a toddler with a doll, but there was innocence there.”
“Now that she’s lucid, well, the evil thing is a choice. I mean, she couldn’t really make an informed choice before.”
He closed his eyes again. “And she made her choice.”
“Well, yeah,” Fred said, an edge to her voice taking the place of the smack she wanted to give him. “She’s going forth with treatment. And she says she loves you, you big idiot. Though that doesn’t mean you should run right back…”
He sprung up eagerly. “She said that?”
“… to a person who would beat you up!”
“But she said she still loves me?”
“I’m going to have to talk to Oprah about you,” Fred said, slipping off the bed. “Are you going to eat your cookies?”
***
It was an irritating day and night, imprisoned by the nurse-maids of the medical wing - and sod it, he was fine already! They kept pushing him back in the bed and poking him with needles and twice he was sure they knocked him out.
But at last he was free, and able to go see Dru. She was taking some new cocktail of medical magic, according to Fred, something to make her less aggressive - it sounded like bollocks to him but he had to see for himself. Better or worse, he had to know.
Drusilla lay against the wall of the holding cell like a wilted flower in a dry glass.
They were restraining her, he saw, silvery cuffs chafed her thin wrists. “Petal?” He stood at the door, waiting for her to look up at him.
Her head rose only a little. “Oh,” she said. “My prince has come at last.”
Spike swallowed a dry lump. “How do you feel, pet?”
“Fuzzy,” she said.
With numb legs he crossed the room and crouched beside her. “I know you were just doing what you had to, to try and get out of here.”
“It wasn’t just that,” she said. Her heavy lids blinked slowly at him. “Daddy came to visit me. Did you know? He came to apologize!”
And she smiled - just a tight stretch of the lips, but for a moment she was alive.
He brushed a lock of hair back and tucked it behind her ear. “I don’t know what to do with you, petal. What are we going to do?”
“I can learn to be good,” she turned into his hand. “Let them change me and we’ll be together. Or they’ll kill me.” She kissed his palm. “Is this what it was like? When you were all alone and helpless?”
A little too quickly, Spike pulled his hand back. “No,” he said.
She turned to rest her head against the wall again. “Winifred is very kindly destroying me. It’s all right; I asked her to. Ironic that this is sanity.”
He picked up her smooth, limp hand. “Who were you, Drusilla, before I met you?”
“I used to believe the fairy stories they told me, about saints and angels. I was a child all my life and death.”
“And now, love?”
She grimaced. “Growing up is terrible. No wonder I put it off so long.”
“I’ll be here with you, love. I won’t leave you again.”
Another tight smile. “Are they watching us? Ready to rush in should you need to be saved?”
Spike chuckled, peering up at the security cameras. “You know old Peaches. Can’t wait to come to my rescue.”
Her face turned toward the wall, her eyes shut firmly with tiny wrinkles. He stroked her hand and arm - back and forth above and below the restraining cuff. He felt afraid, and worried, and wondered if he shouldn’t have paid more attention the last time Fred was babbling medical terms at him.
Drusilla turned her head slightly, eyes slitting like a cat disturbed from its nap. “Bring me some music?”
He laughed. “Of course, love. Whatever you want. I’ll even listen to that awful Raffi bloke for you.” He kissed her forehead and rushed from the room.
She held her hand up, feeling his absence. “There’s never any music anymore,” she said.
Continued -->
Previous Parts in Memories
Chapter 13: Doctor my eyes
Dried blood clung to the creases around her fingernails, a dull contrast to the bright handcuffs that still managed to look like jewelry on her delicate wrists. Her dress - cream muslin today - was also splattered with lacy sprays of red-brown. She was looking at him with complete composure, and for that reason alone she looked more insane than Angel had ever seen Drusilla.
He crossed the room. There was an awkward moment as he tried to draw the chair on his side of the table out only to find that the two chairs and table were all secured to the floor. Probably a good policy in a Wolfram and Hart interrogation room.
“I don’t wish to speak to you,” Drusilla said. “Go away.” She turned her face away as Angel sat down. The chains rustled against her dress. They’d bound her feet too.
Angel looked down at his own hands clasped on the brushed metal table. “I don’t know what to say to you. Don’t know what I can say. I… I’m sorry.”
She turned back to face him, eyebrows raised and lips pursed.
Angel grimaced. “Inadequate words of the year award?”
“Your guilt doesn’t interest me unless it means you’ll take these chains off.” She tilted her head and added, with an evil glint in her eyes, “Daddy.”
Angel felt his stomach knot up and then crawl lower in his abdomen for safety. Now he looked away, unable to face that clear expression, those oh-so-knowing eyes. “Why did you do it, baby? Why did you tear him up like that? You know he loves you.”
“Yes,” Drusilla said, dismissively. “I know that for certain now.”
Angel couldn’t raise his eyes from his own knuckles. “I’ve talked to Fred. She… they won’t continue the treatments, without your consent. Now that you’re, you know…”
“Sane.”
Angel shrugged. “If it helps you make a decision, Drusilla,” her name hung for a moment, as though he couldn’t follow it with another word after it fell off his tongue. He forced himself to meet her steady gaze. “I want you well. I want you reformed. It… it would mean so much to me.”
Her smile was mocking. “I always suspected I was more sane than my wicked boys.”
Angel looked pained. “I know you can’t agree to this, and you won’t…”
“I will.”
He swallowed a mouthful of air. “Will?”
“Foolish Daddy,” she said, with gentle mockery that should have been alien to her voice. Heaving a sigh, she looked past him. “He loves me. I know that now.”
***
Fred entered a silent room - a still room, the absence of those incidental sounds of breath just piled on the creepy factor. “I’ll come back,” she said.
“No,” Angel said, rousing as if from sleep. “I was just on my way out.”
The two vampires didn’t look at each other. Drusilla acted like Angel wasn’t there at all, glancing with bored expectation at Fred and her tray of pills and hypodermics.
Angel stopped and made a few awkward motions like he was going to say something, or maybe hug her or pat her on the arm. She’d have patted HIM on the arm - he looked like he sorely needed it - but she needed both her hands on the tray to keep it steady.
“How’re you doing?” Fred tried for cheery, but it came out suspicious.
Drusilla’s smile was bright and false. “How is my handsome prince?”
Creepy factor ten. Fred placed the tray carefully on the table and answered as though the question were genuine, “He’s doing much better. You know, vampires! The restructuring of the metatarsal was amazing to watch. It was just like… tendons reaching out and grabbing bits of bone like little hands. All those little connections! I almost didn’t want them to stitch the skin back.”
The door shut behind her. Fred grimaced. “Right. Bedside manner, Doctor Burkle.” She busied herself arranging the items on her tray. “Anyway, I brought you some new drugs, but these are only if you agree to them. Let me just explain each one and its probable effects, this first one…”
“I’ll take it,” Drusilla said, extending her chained arms out in front of her.
“I haven’t told you all the pros and cons. You don’t want to just take a psychotropic drug without detailed knowledge and informed consent.”
Drusilla tilted her head back. “You don’t trust me.” Her delicate grin was somewhat proud. “Go on. Give me the shots that will make my prince trust me again.”
Fred slipped into the seat Angel had vacated. “Do you see that? I mean, do you know already which treatment will work?”
Drusilla pursed her lips and shook her head. “If I could direct what I saw, I’d see it. But the visions haven’t been coming. They don’t like the drugs. I wonder if you have to be a little mad to see the future, if I was always mad, then.”
“Drusilla, I don’t feel very good about this, about any of this.”
“Are you going to ask the same questions Angelus asked?”
Fred set the hypodermic down with a tiny click. “We don’t call him ‘Angelus’, you know that.”
“And very silly of you it is.”
“I’m trying to be your friend. If I can, if it’s even possible. I just… you’re evil, aren’t you? Spike is my friend too and it wasn’t easy, seeing him like that. I get all excited about science and biology and magic and things, but you know I still see him, not as a patient but a friend, in pain.”
“I didn’t do anything that wouldn’t heal,” she said, as though this was the most reasonable thing ever spoken.
“But you hurt him!”
Drusilla’s large, dark eyes blinked slowly. “Love hurts,” she said, as though educating a very young person.
***
Fred entered the recovery room with the same quiet reverence everyone had. It made Spike feel like a corpse at a wake. He pushed violently to get himself up and she dropped her box of cookies to run and help him. “Stop! You can’t just go moving around like that. Even vampires have to heal, you know.”
“Can’t take this sitting still,” he said.
“How do you feel?” She picked up the cookies once he settled back on the raised pillows. They’d tumbled out of their little plastic rows and she was grateful for the distraction of putting them back and licking frosting off her fingers. She didn’t want to look at Spike - his joints were hard and purple with swelling.
“As expected,” he said, smiling tiredly at her. “What’s that?” He held out his hand toward the box of cookies.
“Frosted sugar,” she said, avoiding his reach and setting the box on his lap.
“I think I can bear the ponderous weight of a box of cookies,” he chided, and pried open the lid. “How’s Dru?”
“God! I can’t believe you can ask that!”
He raised an eyebrow at her. “It’s only two words.”
“You should be angry!” Spike folded his hands over the cookies and smirked. “I’m serious! No amount of love is worth abuse. Don’t make me make you watch Oprah!”
“Oh, love, if I’d met you twenty years ago.”
Fred dropped onto the side of the bed and slapped at his arm. “You don’t get to be flippant about this, mister. I’ve been studying up on neuroscience, reading medical reports that are worse than Gunn’s legal briefs. Angel’s all quiet all the time and, and… damn it I want to talk to you!”
He rested his head back on the pillow and his eyes closed briefly, looking paper-thin. “What do you want me to say? The cosmic joke is on me once again. The only part of Dru that loved me was the crazy part. Not to be the most self-involved prat in the building, but it does make a bloke think.”
“That’s not true.”
“Is it? We were together over a hundred years. I thought I knew her - all the little bits of her, her lucid moments and her tantrums. I thought knowing Dru was something I had cold.”
Fred shifted closer and placed her hand on his arm. “Now you listen. A person on psychotropic drugs is going to not be themselves. I’ve read all about it now and what you’re saying is common - well, without the near dismemberment part. Families find that their loved one isn’t recognizable until the proper balance is achieved. It can take weeks, months, even years to figure out the right dosages.”
“Fred? Love?” He put his hand over hers. “She’s evil.”
Fred bit her lip. “That does complicate things a little.”
“A little? Soddin’ right.” He shook his head. “Never thought… never really felt it in her, you know? I mean, sure, she’d rip a person apart like a toddler with a doll, but there was innocence there.”
“Now that she’s lucid, well, the evil thing is a choice. I mean, she couldn’t really make an informed choice before.”
He closed his eyes again. “And she made her choice.”
“Well, yeah,” Fred said, an edge to her voice taking the place of the smack she wanted to give him. “She’s going forth with treatment. And she says she loves you, you big idiot. Though that doesn’t mean you should run right back…”
He sprung up eagerly. “She said that?”
“… to a person who would beat you up!”
“But she said she still loves me?”
“I’m going to have to talk to Oprah about you,” Fred said, slipping off the bed. “Are you going to eat your cookies?”
***
It was an irritating day and night, imprisoned by the nurse-maids of the medical wing - and sod it, he was fine already! They kept pushing him back in the bed and poking him with needles and twice he was sure they knocked him out.
But at last he was free, and able to go see Dru. She was taking some new cocktail of medical magic, according to Fred, something to make her less aggressive - it sounded like bollocks to him but he had to see for himself. Better or worse, he had to know.
Drusilla lay against the wall of the holding cell like a wilted flower in a dry glass.
They were restraining her, he saw, silvery cuffs chafed her thin wrists. “Petal?” He stood at the door, waiting for her to look up at him.
Her head rose only a little. “Oh,” she said. “My prince has come at last.”
Spike swallowed a dry lump. “How do you feel, pet?”
“Fuzzy,” she said.
With numb legs he crossed the room and crouched beside her. “I know you were just doing what you had to, to try and get out of here.”
“It wasn’t just that,” she said. Her heavy lids blinked slowly at him. “Daddy came to visit me. Did you know? He came to apologize!”
And she smiled - just a tight stretch of the lips, but for a moment she was alive.
He brushed a lock of hair back and tucked it behind her ear. “I don’t know what to do with you, petal. What are we going to do?”
“I can learn to be good,” she turned into his hand. “Let them change me and we’ll be together. Or they’ll kill me.” She kissed his palm. “Is this what it was like? When you were all alone and helpless?”
A little too quickly, Spike pulled his hand back. “No,” he said.
She turned to rest her head against the wall again. “Winifred is very kindly destroying me. It’s all right; I asked her to. Ironic that this is sanity.”
He picked up her smooth, limp hand. “Who were you, Drusilla, before I met you?”
“I used to believe the fairy stories they told me, about saints and angels. I was a child all my life and death.”
“And now, love?”
She grimaced. “Growing up is terrible. No wonder I put it off so long.”
“I’ll be here with you, love. I won’t leave you again.”
Another tight smile. “Are they watching us? Ready to rush in should you need to be saved?”
Spike chuckled, peering up at the security cameras. “You know old Peaches. Can’t wait to come to my rescue.”
Her face turned toward the wall, her eyes shut firmly with tiny wrinkles. He stroked her hand and arm - back and forth above and below the restraining cuff. He felt afraid, and worried, and wondered if he shouldn’t have paid more attention the last time Fred was babbling medical terms at him.
Drusilla turned her head slightly, eyes slitting like a cat disturbed from its nap. “Bring me some music?”
He laughed. “Of course, love. Whatever you want. I’ll even listen to that awful Raffi bloke for you.” He kissed her forehead and rushed from the room.
She held her hand up, feeling his absence. “There’s never any music anymore,” she said.
Continued -->