FIC: Five Ways NFA Probably Didn’t End (Conclusion)
Title: Five Ways NFA Probably Didn’t End
Rating: NC-17, I think.
Warnings: Sex, violence, sex and violence, weirdly kinky in a place or two. Er, and some parts may be sad.
Length: 5 parts, at 2,000+ words each? But you can read it in one sitting, honestly.
Disclaimer: Warren Zevon, I don’t know how it happened. "Dollfull" is a word coined by Thomas Pynchon.
Summary: Ensemble, with focus on Angel, Connor, Spike, Buffy, and Dawn.
A/N: This is another one of those nutty fics from me. So, even though I'm all nervous and stuff, entirely open to constructive criticism. Not sure some of the things works in here.
On that note, thanks to a2zmom for giving it a couple reads through and the firm nod of "yes." I love you for that. Oh, and for putting up with my indecisiveness. And...other things ;o)
Parts 1-3 are HERE
iv.
One morning, Buffy wakes up to her throat feeling like an exhaust pipe, coughing foul air into her mouth and burning away saliva, her cunt soggy with the fuel of left-over dreams. Her hand’s heel digs deep against her hipbone in deference to a feeling of aversion and perhaps nausea; then she ruthlessly thrusts the heel down the crease between torso and thigh and finds herself, curling her fingers to scrape away the slime there. After several moments of her nails scrambling over damp flesh, thinking dispassionately and for reasons unknown of and man’s hard heels clacking over black and white tile then slipping and tumbling headlong into only black, her fingers are pistoning into herself.
She can’t get there. Her knuckles are raw-rubbing against the sheet’s crosshairs as she trenches against the target of her fingers, over and over again; the flesh she’s scraping is gummy. It’s all very much like killing, sinking her knuckles into the occipital of a skull and after the bone smashes, the quivering mess of blood and what used to be a visual perception system. The matter feels like meat, solid, tight-packed, or pulpy maybe like fruit: rooting in herself for pomegranate seeds, as if she could dredge just that much deeper she’d make it to Hell.
The cool touch brings the little death that gets her there. Oh yeah, she recalls. Hell isn’t hot. It’s the cool, dry place that she’s mossed up and made damp with her womb. It’s a breezy breath in her mouth, a thing-like presence against hers. It’s comfort and death. “Spike.”
The cool touch from the broad hand disappears instantly. “No. Angel.”
“No,” she repeats, as he pushes up and puts his legs over. “Angel.” He stops but doesn’t look at her. His shoulders are hunched over. “I wanted you.”
“Did you love him?”
“Very much. I very much wanted to.”
He lifts his head and stares at the opposite wall. “I wanted to love Cordelia very much.”
Not quite the same thing. She hesitates, begins to play with the hairs on his neck. “Just so we’re clear, I think I did.”
His head tilts back until she’s cupping his skull. His eyes are closed. “I know I did. In a way.”
It will later occur to her that he’s not talking about Cordelia on that one, but not now. Now she uses both her hands to lift one of his, and leans in over one of his shoulders, her hair brushing the bone-blade, to delicately sniff his life-line--it was the hand that had thrust two fingers inside of her. It smells salty and alive. She kneels behind him on the bed, rising up above him, and brings his hand to her breast. “You can’t lose your soul if it’s not for us,” she says.
He tugs down his hand and turns, pressing open mouthed and firm-lipped in that spot between her breasts. So much blood behind that spot, so much life, so much lost and still to be lived. “Yes,” he tells her, and his mouth follows the pointing arrow of her sternum to the dip of her belly, then to part the heavy curtains of her red flesh.
Buffy lies back and lets him. He licks her, laves her labia, carefully searching her. She wonders what he thinks they're looking for. She does not sink her hands into his hair. She stares up at the ceiling of the hotel they had found, where Angel said he'd lived before with his friends. She had looked at him warily at the time. Angel had never said he'd lived before. Is that what they are searching for, she wonders now, life?
She is a tomb; only a dead thing risen from the grave would look for life in her. But no, it was wrong to think of Angel that way; he believed . . . She was a cave, dripping wet in the depths of her, but also mother earth and somehow dark. His gentle, very warm-now tongue finds her clit. She was the womanly night, thrust through by hard male stars. Dawnie used to stare at them through her telescope, looking for life.
Was that how it was?-her baby sister, because she was curious, seeking life? Even seeking the life within herself? It was the thievery of her innocence, but the beginning of her adulthood. Dawn spread her portal and thrust herself into it. It was self-exploration, discovery, experimentation, womanhood. Amazing that Angel's tongue can find that out.
Buffy looks at her hands, spread on the sheets beside her hips, clenching and unclenching. Blood oozes in laggardly thuds down her arms, until there are threads sinuous and sullen dripping down her fingers. Her eyes squench shut, with their tears tangled in lashes leaking out of the corners. She is blossoming under Angel's touch, like a rose; his fingers are firm on her hips to steady her bucking, and Dawn, Dawn fuck; she just misses her sister.
He whispers into her, breath hot and wet with her. “Let go.”
"I can’t."
"You can. Just let go. For me.”
Buffy remembers how tightly wound he was, that first, that only night they made love. That look on his face as he gave himself up to her had been the shock of her absolution; she had given him his forgiveness. “Let me give you my gift,” Dawn had said. Buffy cries out and lets go.
"Knew you could do it,” he says minutes later, and smirks, hands linked over her abdomen, chin resting on the folded wrists.
"Come here,” she says, and lugs him up. She licks his lips, then gets impatient, and thrusts her tongue inside. She loves the taste of herself on him. She wants to swallow it, get down into it-in his throat or inside him. Is this how a man feels, she wonders, wanting to be surrounded, possessing all of it?
"Buffy-?” he asks, when she bites his tongue and he’s pulled away. He hasn’t found that Buffy yet; he hasn’t found the parts of her that like the pain.
Her answer to his question isn’t sex. Instead she flips her hair in that bouncy to-tease-Spike way she’d acquired, and guides his mouth to her bared neck. He lurches away. In his eyes is a betrayed look, an accusation of how could you? With a scowl and a furrowed brow she tugs once on his shirt, thrusting her throat against his mouth. This is how it feels, she confirms; it's wanting to get this pulsing, vulnerable part of yourself encased and swallowed by that dark wet welcoming cavern. This is how a cock gets inside a cunt and a man fucks out his soul.
A struggle ensues. It ends when she feels the mash of his teeth against his lips beneath her knuckles. He licks the trickle of blood trailing down his chin unconsciously. He is hurt and angry and almost indignant, as if he had that right. “If you want to be that way about it, tie me down.”
She blinks. “Angel . . .” Some part of her wants to explain. Some other part of her wants to hit him again.
He is seeing her for the first time. His eyes are growing darker in a strange simulacrum of her own pulse, each moment blacker and closer to death. She knows his cock is throbbing. “Buffy," he breaths, wondering now and excited about it, just thought of it, like a boy. "Do it.” Her mouth opens. “Do it right now.”
She does not tie him down. Instead she brings her manacles, and his eyes are where did you get those? She ignores him and lifts his arms so his hands lock behind the bed post, biting her tongue in concentration as she studies the cuff then snaps it closed. Her whip-tongue fingers lick down the awkward arabesque of his white arms, then coil into fists to rip his shirt open. She tugs off his pants and mounts his narrow hips, her knees on either side a vise. “What do you want?”
Despite her husky voice, she is with that question Buffy his virgin girl, with her loopy, scrawling “Buffy n’ Angel 4ever” handwriting and chubby cheeks. In an awful moment of allusion he thinks of Connor and slowly and deliberately turns his face away from hers.
She understands. Her finger-pads dig deep, like age-wrinkles in his skin, when Buffy turns his head to her. Through little, white clenched teeth, she tells him, “Look at me when I am talking to you.”
He swallows. Her other hand, restive on his throat, suddenly tightens, her thumb working as counterbalance to his jutting Adam’s apple. She presses downward, thumb-printing his throat, until he gags and wonders if this is what cock feels like, if this is what Spike felt like. “Does it hurt?” she ask.
“Yes,” he gasps, around the vomit-feeling. Her hand jerks away in a catching-a-moth motion, hovering over the hollow above his collar bones, claw-like, encasing something-about-to-die. “Yes. God-more.”
She takes her hands away and slips off of him, annulling the cross her body erect on his had made, the way they fit together. She leaves the room and it feels so flat, the weak, watery light through the horizontal blinds, his sloping, planar body on her straight and narrow bed, the only perpendicular his red and jutting cock.
It had all been so straightforward, combing and parting and plaiting the streets for survivors, before he had entered the hotel this morning. And then he'd heard her in her room above him, grunting as if digging through stones, bricks, bones, her fingers scraped and tattered, as if she could just dig far enough-if she could just thrust hard enough-she would find them-Dawn, Giles, Willow, Xander . . . Spike, fallen in the rubble-lost in the desolation of her sex. He had come to her with pity, lay down beside her with a thought to creature comfort. Her hot cunt and sweaty small hand had burned him, branded him, reminded him that they were so much more than pity and comfort, and destroyed it all with a name on her lips that hadn't been his.
She comes back hours later, still naked and holding a knife, just cutlery, like a weapon. She does not stop to admire the eager, teenager way his cock jumps to parallel her, but with simple economy of movement struts forward. Folding herself neatly into an athletic "L" shape standing beside him, she plants the knife straight up and down and draws it down his chest, one two three. One at a time the narrow cuts begin to ream out pretty ribbons of blood. Her nipples, sharp as bird's beaks on her gently swaying breasts, cut up the ribbons and drag upward, to his mouth. They hold there for him until his lips at last obediently drop open and his own blood thips eagerly inside.
The pain of it, her beloved body as the instrument of his torture, is almost enough to let him bear it. The sight of her small, abused breasts are pinpricks to his consciousness; he’s awake, awake, with Buffy, not dreaming, this is not a dream . . . She’s so solemn, so sterile with him and austere that it feels real. She straddles him and tells him, so soft like sweet nothings in his ears, the knife point on his chest, “Maybe you want the other end.” She turns the knife over, fingering the handle. “Maybe you want me to fuck you from behind.”
His eyes contract with lust.
“You should have a scar here,” she goes on, exactly as if she doesn't care. Now she is fingering his unmarred chest. He knows now what she’s finding-not his life but his death, all those things that have been stolen from him-Connor, twice now, first by a friend who should’ve known better, second by a dragon that should’ve been his. And herself-all those chances they never had: Buffy, who is no longer the girl he knew.
“Close your eyes,” she demands, and he does. Then she plunges the knife down.
“Angel,” she whispers, pressing her fingers down against the wound. There are tears in her eyes. “Angel, it was too far; I’m so-”
“Need,” he pants, cutting through her, baring his teeth and looking away. His hips buck up. “Need you.”
“Oh. Well,” she brightens, “could have said so.” And she very carefully, with finality, puts the knife beside them on the table.
In a haze of pain and blood and her thrusting, forceful hips he sees her, pink all over and pretty, head thrown back and taking him, in over and over. “Give it to me,” she’s saying. She’s cut away his Buffy, the girl he remembered. Why, he wants to know, why?
She's taking him so deep; her muscles are clenching so tightly; it's all so unbelievably good. I’m taking this from you because I love you, Connor had said. “Give-give it to me-”
“I love you,” Angel replies, and gives.
Something is aging this City of Angels, exhausting its streets in a tired, run-down way with dust and dandruff, the clean-up crews sweeping through like adolescents finally maturing into mustaches, too old now to be fresh-faced. The children are all growing up, and it isn’t theft after all but merely life, learning the true face of beauty is always like waking from Jasmine’s spell, it’s life; falling out of Eden is knowledge at last, it’s life. Angel and Buffy is not the spell it was; it’s fallen and weak, ugly with truths to raw to bear, a theft of what came before. It’s life, and they will live with it.
Later, cleaned up and unburdened, in his sheets which are cleaner than hers, he tells her about Connor. Inconsequential things, how he smelled, how he fit in Angel’s arms, how he looked when he fought. “His hair was perfect,” Angel concludes. Then they make love.
v.
One morning, LA bursts in tendrils of rosy fingered dawn, and a flash of smoke, and is never quite the same again. As the dawn deepens and the differences settle in LA that first day, choppers slice the air and kick dust up in clouds, swirling it with crumbled asphalt and a lost walkie-talkie somewhere, the same walkie-talkie that hours ago, rolled antennae-over-speaker for a block at least, turned a right, took the feeder to the highway and came to rest at Connor’s feet.
“The hell?” he said, and picked it up. “Um, roger?”
“Xander, we’re trapped. Bloody-pull out. We’re down. Pull out now; get-” Giles crackled into screams and dying sounds on the speakers. Connor shrugged, threw away the talkie, went straight for the doomsday in the sky for a block at least, and caught his breath at the-well shit, all the dead girls, Kennedy and her three dozen. Then he saw the dragon. “Like hell you get all the fun,” he said, and started fighting. Because hey, it was a dragon.
Faith was fighting, too. Connor caught her, pulled her out of the way of the dragon’s fiery breath and took it, the dragon Angel had called for himself, with a mortal blow.
“Fucker killed Angel,” Faith grunted. “Who’re you?”
“Killed Angel?” Connor asked, and the force of his shock left him open to the attack on the right. His abdomen splattered, red his insides, black his glare, not words, that said: where the fuck did that . . .?
“Well if you’d’ve been looking,” Faith said, and went on fighting.
The military is come to clean up Angel’s mess and the ashes the dragon left of him, the clean-up crews to sweep through like adolescents finally maturing into mustaches. Angel was too old now to be so fresh-faced; he should have known better, Riley thinks later. His hand is just touching Sam’s knee, and there is a trace of a smile. They are not the honeymoon they were before; their love is fallen and weak, ugly with truths to raw to bear, a theft of what came before. It’s life, and they will live with it.
In one of the make-shift shelters, Anne is making beds, careful to crease the corners, even though some of them will never be clean again. She heaps the worst bedding in a pile. On a pillow case, she finds a blood stain. Gunn had somehow survived the battle. He had used a cloth to staunch the blood on the stump of his elbow, unaware that his abdomen had finally given in and entrails were beginning to wind their way out of his stomach. Anne scrubs for a long time. She won’t ever get the stain out, but she will wash it, nevertheless. She will dry it. She will fold it. Then she will go make another bed with it, careful to crease the corners, even though some of them will never be clean.
Clem clears his throat, sees Sergeant Finn’s kitten, and raises three. He wonders whatever happened to Spike, just as Angel had when he realized it had been hours since he’d seen him, and that Spike’d been sitting in the driver’s seat racing down those cobbled streets, and that fucking pissed him off. Not that he’d’ve let Spike get behind him, either.
As for that vampire, he had heard his name, spoken once, “Spike,” and felt his heart beat.
“Fuck,” Spike replied, sinking to his knees. “Angel. It was supposed to be Angel.”
“Angel,” the voice said. “Together you were powerful. Alone you are dead.”
Mortal now, Spike whipped around to find the voice, took a blow to the head, and never got up again. This is Angel’s fault. This is Angel’s fault. Angel’s fault. Angel’s fault fault fault. For Justine, every day, the thought is the same: This is Angel’s fault. “Why wasn’t I there?” she wants to know. Strangely, these are Buffy’s thoughts; "why wasn’t I there," she wants to know, "when Dawn decided to spread her portal?"
After a day and a half of little sleep and less rest, Justine’s sight’s gone blurry and she hits Harmony’s hip with the crossbow, not her heart. Harmony, who has returned to feed on the dead and dying-easy prey, and Angel never let her have human-plucks out the dart and advances. Justine, with a force borne of exhaustion, slams Harmony against the wall, jerks open the vampire’s pink floral print skirt, and fucks her hard with her fingers, until there is blood-perhaps because Harmony is nothing like her dead twin sister, nothing like at all.
Blood from Harmony’s hip and cunt oozes in laggardly thuds down Justine’s arms, until there are threads sinuous and sullen dripping down her fingers. At the last moment, Buffy had tried to save Dawn, and got sucked into the portal too. She just could not let go.
She is blossoming with Harmony under her, like a rose; her fingers are firm on her hips to steady her bucking, and Julia, Julia, (Dawn, Dawn) , fuck; they just miss their sisters.
"Mulholland Drive, much?” Harmony asks, when Justine bites her tongue and pulls away. Justine's answer to the question isn’t sex. Instead she flips her hair in a bouncy way she’d never acquired, and guides Harmony to her bared neck with red fingers. Harmony shrugs, thinks, “Take that, Angel. This is for saying I didn’t know what a memo was,” and bites down.
Oz is fucking a monster. Nina came to him a week ago in England, saying Angel sent her. “Werewolves of London.” he’d said. “See, it was werewolf, but now it’s werewolves. Can’t have that. Next we’ll be drinking piña coladas.” So they’d both gone back to LA.
His monster has black hair, blue veins that stand out from her face, and pupils the size of quarters; her eyes are holes like her tugging, tenacious sex and he is falling in-loved a girl once. Loved her innocent greenness, her, the way she always smelled like herbs. There was a seed of darkness in her he never penetrated far enough to touch, but a woman did, a woman did. He never saw the seed, and he never saw the blossom either, never saw the skin of the seed fold out, inside out, fall away so that the thing inside could rise up old and ancient, weeping willow, mother goddess. He tries to fuck that monster and that spirit-the woman she became, the woman he never knew and shouldn’t mourn so much-but there is no white hair black, only blonde. And when he closes his eyes, he sees only red.
Eve is still looking for Lindsey and that Sahrvin lair. He had told her they were like a fairytale, and fairytales ended happily ever after. Even when they didn’t, they didn’t end like this. He couldn’t have been killed by some random demon or a-a falling building or something like that; he was supposed to have last words. It should’ve been epic. Angel was epic. Lindsey should’ve been, too.
“Whoa, epic,” Andrew had said, after Xander had exploded the giant. “Like Ghostbusters, only you can’t eat the guts. Or I don’t think so. Xander, do you think you could eat the-”
Xander was on the ground in a pool of blood. “You should-” he gasped, feeling blood in his throat-how had it gotten in his throat?-“You should tell Willow-”
“Nuh-uh. Have you seen how she looks at the way my skin fits?”
“Shut the fuck up, Andrew. I’m trying to say my last words here and you’re . . .” Xander coughed. “Just tell Buffy and Dawn I love them. And tell Willow . . . I love her crayon-breaky self.”
“Okay, yeah. But on a scale of one to ten, I’m giving that a four. Hal Jordan’s last words were better. Xander!” Andrew shook his shoulders. “Don’t die! You can’t just . . .”
Dazedly, Xander put his hand to his mouth. There was blood coming out of his mouth-how had blood gotten up to his mouth? “Andrew. I am not saying the Green Lantern Oath.”
“But you had to admit it was epic. Come on, Xander. Do you feel cold? They always say they feel the cold. You can’t die like this!”
Andrew was panicking, Xander realized sluggishly. “How’d I end up dying with you?” Xander wanted to know.
“Hey! Snap out of it! Don’t die; please, please, don’t die.”
Andrew was crying now, that idiot, Xander thought. They were in the middle of a battlefield, and Andrew would die crying and alone, somehow wanting to be a hero. Xander rolled his eyes and started the Green Lantern Oath. “In the brightest day, in the darkest night, no evil . . .”
In an LA suburb, Kate Lockley is mourning her newly dead husband and helping refugees from deeper in the city take the buses out. She is using a fire-arm for some measure of solace and control, but she hasn’t fired since she last shot at Angel, years ago. People are turning to her with frightened eyes because they know this eight-grade teacher used to be a cop, and she is letting them. She is crying, but she has a daughter now. Humans are children, too, and Kate has finally gotten over her father’s death.
At the barrier erected on the LA perimeter, the Burkles are trying to get in to find their daughter’s body. They won’t ever have to know their daughter’s body wasn’t their daughter’s. Nor will they know it’d slammed into a brick wall and went through, catapulting back a block at least, leaving blue pieces of Fred all along the way.
Something is changing this world. People are watching the news with horror filled eyes. Others are reading the paper. Others are making donations. Others are calling loved ones and spilling over into tears with relief and that one futile cry: how could this happen? The president is making apologies. Politicians are tumbling off soap box pedestals; a mayor is seeking a reelection out of this. An animal rights activist is saying, What about the kittens? And Sean Penn is flying to San Francisco, where Jesse Jackson will be talking to a church full of refugees. Matt Lauer is hugging a pregnant sixteen-year-old who survived this year’s holocaust (Is apocalypse a better word?) Oprah is preparing a special. Elton John is going to write a song.
Someone has already beat him to it. On radios across the world, an eerie melody is filling the speakers, the home, the city, the satellite, the earth, and the world is mourning. “And I’m giving you this because I love you," the singer says. "I loved this world.” The voice sings in inhumanly multiphonic, the second and third harmonics not buzzes and hums in the throat but crystal clear, and yet indisputably of one origin. It is a song fitting for this tragedy, for the inhumanity of it. Today the eyes of man were opened, and they see that they are naked-against the dark that haunts their thoughts, against the lies they’ve told themselves. Naked and banished into this cursed world of painful toil against the darkness, all of the days of their lives, their land thorned with demons, thistled with rancor. They might fight it . . . endlessly, but nothing they do matters.
“All that matters is what we do,” a green skinned demon thinks as he walks out of the recording studio in Nashville. He has been in the south to visit the family of the man he murdered. “What have I done?” he thinks, and because a bullet to the butt hardly seems dignified, he swallows enough pills to bury him six feet deep in this earth, this paradise, this land of music, not death.
On the Isle of White, Parker Abrams is taking a well earned vacation after his graduation from college, and he is still using that tried and true “my dad just died” docket. He thinks of an LA girl he made love to at U.C. Sunnydale-a tall redhead name Layla, dead now. He wonders if more women will fuck him because of Layla, dead now, or whether he should just say his dad was the one in the City of Angels. He grunts his release into the neck of the woman he is on top of, and wishes she were a little prettier.
In Shanghai, Drusilla smiles, and walks into the sunlight.
In Quor-Toth, the Groosalug is bringing light and peace and justice. It is more beautiful than anything anyone has ever seen-even though no one there has forgotten the face of The Destroyer. Who was much prettier, the story goes. His hair was perfect.
In Hell, Drusilla’s long-forgotten soul awakens and forgives her Makers. Both of them.
In Heaven, many souls do not.
Rating: NC-17, I think.
Warnings: Sex, violence, sex and violence, weirdly kinky in a place or two. Er, and some parts may be sad.
Length: 5 parts, at 2,000+ words each? But you can read it in one sitting, honestly.
Disclaimer: Warren Zevon, I don’t know how it happened. "Dollfull" is a word coined by Thomas Pynchon.
Summary: Ensemble, with focus on Angel, Connor, Spike, Buffy, and Dawn.
A/N: This is another one of those nutty fics from me. So, even though I'm all nervous and stuff, entirely open to constructive criticism. Not sure some of the things works in here.
On that note, thanks to a2zmom for giving it a couple reads through and the firm nod of "yes." I love you for that. Oh, and for putting up with my indecisiveness. And...other things ;o)
Parts 1-3 are HERE
iv.
One morning, Buffy wakes up to her throat feeling like an exhaust pipe, coughing foul air into her mouth and burning away saliva, her cunt soggy with the fuel of left-over dreams. Her hand’s heel digs deep against her hipbone in deference to a feeling of aversion and perhaps nausea; then she ruthlessly thrusts the heel down the crease between torso and thigh and finds herself, curling her fingers to scrape away the slime there. After several moments of her nails scrambling over damp flesh, thinking dispassionately and for reasons unknown of and man’s hard heels clacking over black and white tile then slipping and tumbling headlong into only black, her fingers are pistoning into herself.
She can’t get there. Her knuckles are raw-rubbing against the sheet’s crosshairs as she trenches against the target of her fingers, over and over again; the flesh she’s scraping is gummy. It’s all very much like killing, sinking her knuckles into the occipital of a skull and after the bone smashes, the quivering mess of blood and what used to be a visual perception system. The matter feels like meat, solid, tight-packed, or pulpy maybe like fruit: rooting in herself for pomegranate seeds, as if she could dredge just that much deeper she’d make it to Hell.
The cool touch brings the little death that gets her there. Oh yeah, she recalls. Hell isn’t hot. It’s the cool, dry place that she’s mossed up and made damp with her womb. It’s a breezy breath in her mouth, a thing-like presence against hers. It’s comfort and death. “Spike.”
The cool touch from the broad hand disappears instantly. “No. Angel.”
“No,” she repeats, as he pushes up and puts his legs over. “Angel.” He stops but doesn’t look at her. His shoulders are hunched over. “I wanted you.”
“Did you love him?”
“Very much. I very much wanted to.”
He lifts his head and stares at the opposite wall. “I wanted to love Cordelia very much.”
Not quite the same thing. She hesitates, begins to play with the hairs on his neck. “Just so we’re clear, I think I did.”
His head tilts back until she’s cupping his skull. His eyes are closed. “I know I did. In a way.”
It will later occur to her that he’s not talking about Cordelia on that one, but not now. Now she uses both her hands to lift one of his, and leans in over one of his shoulders, her hair brushing the bone-blade, to delicately sniff his life-line--it was the hand that had thrust two fingers inside of her. It smells salty and alive. She kneels behind him on the bed, rising up above him, and brings his hand to her breast. “You can’t lose your soul if it’s not for us,” she says.
He tugs down his hand and turns, pressing open mouthed and firm-lipped in that spot between her breasts. So much blood behind that spot, so much life, so much lost and still to be lived. “Yes,” he tells her, and his mouth follows the pointing arrow of her sternum to the dip of her belly, then to part the heavy curtains of her red flesh.
Buffy lies back and lets him. He licks her, laves her labia, carefully searching her. She wonders what he thinks they're looking for. She does not sink her hands into his hair. She stares up at the ceiling of the hotel they had found, where Angel said he'd lived before with his friends. She had looked at him warily at the time. Angel had never said he'd lived before. Is that what they are searching for, she wonders now, life?
She is a tomb; only a dead thing risen from the grave would look for life in her. But no, it was wrong to think of Angel that way; he believed . . . She was a cave, dripping wet in the depths of her, but also mother earth and somehow dark. His gentle, very warm-now tongue finds her clit. She was the womanly night, thrust through by hard male stars. Dawnie used to stare at them through her telescope, looking for life.
Was that how it was?-her baby sister, because she was curious, seeking life? Even seeking the life within herself? It was the thievery of her innocence, but the beginning of her adulthood. Dawn spread her portal and thrust herself into it. It was self-exploration, discovery, experimentation, womanhood. Amazing that Angel's tongue can find that out.
Buffy looks at her hands, spread on the sheets beside her hips, clenching and unclenching. Blood oozes in laggardly thuds down her arms, until there are threads sinuous and sullen dripping down her fingers. Her eyes squench shut, with their tears tangled in lashes leaking out of the corners. She is blossoming under Angel's touch, like a rose; his fingers are firm on her hips to steady her bucking, and Dawn, Dawn fuck; she just misses her sister.
He whispers into her, breath hot and wet with her. “Let go.”
"I can’t."
"You can. Just let go. For me.”
Buffy remembers how tightly wound he was, that first, that only night they made love. That look on his face as he gave himself up to her had been the shock of her absolution; she had given him his forgiveness. “Let me give you my gift,” Dawn had said. Buffy cries out and lets go.
"Knew you could do it,” he says minutes later, and smirks, hands linked over her abdomen, chin resting on the folded wrists.
"Come here,” she says, and lugs him up. She licks his lips, then gets impatient, and thrusts her tongue inside. She loves the taste of herself on him. She wants to swallow it, get down into it-in his throat or inside him. Is this how a man feels, she wonders, wanting to be surrounded, possessing all of it?
"Buffy-?” he asks, when she bites his tongue and he’s pulled away. He hasn’t found that Buffy yet; he hasn’t found the parts of her that like the pain.
Her answer to his question isn’t sex. Instead she flips her hair in that bouncy to-tease-Spike way she’d acquired, and guides his mouth to her bared neck. He lurches away. In his eyes is a betrayed look, an accusation of how could you? With a scowl and a furrowed brow she tugs once on his shirt, thrusting her throat against his mouth. This is how it feels, she confirms; it's wanting to get this pulsing, vulnerable part of yourself encased and swallowed by that dark wet welcoming cavern. This is how a cock gets inside a cunt and a man fucks out his soul.
A struggle ensues. It ends when she feels the mash of his teeth against his lips beneath her knuckles. He licks the trickle of blood trailing down his chin unconsciously. He is hurt and angry and almost indignant, as if he had that right. “If you want to be that way about it, tie me down.”
She blinks. “Angel . . .” Some part of her wants to explain. Some other part of her wants to hit him again.
He is seeing her for the first time. His eyes are growing darker in a strange simulacrum of her own pulse, each moment blacker and closer to death. She knows his cock is throbbing. “Buffy," he breaths, wondering now and excited about it, just thought of it, like a boy. "Do it.” Her mouth opens. “Do it right now.”
She does not tie him down. Instead she brings her manacles, and his eyes are where did you get those? She ignores him and lifts his arms so his hands lock behind the bed post, biting her tongue in concentration as she studies the cuff then snaps it closed. Her whip-tongue fingers lick down the awkward arabesque of his white arms, then coil into fists to rip his shirt open. She tugs off his pants and mounts his narrow hips, her knees on either side a vise. “What do you want?”
Despite her husky voice, she is with that question Buffy his virgin girl, with her loopy, scrawling “Buffy n’ Angel 4ever” handwriting and chubby cheeks. In an awful moment of allusion he thinks of Connor and slowly and deliberately turns his face away from hers.
She understands. Her finger-pads dig deep, like age-wrinkles in his skin, when Buffy turns his head to her. Through little, white clenched teeth, she tells him, “Look at me when I am talking to you.”
He swallows. Her other hand, restive on his throat, suddenly tightens, her thumb working as counterbalance to his jutting Adam’s apple. She presses downward, thumb-printing his throat, until he gags and wonders if this is what cock feels like, if this is what Spike felt like. “Does it hurt?” she ask.
“Yes,” he gasps, around the vomit-feeling. Her hand jerks away in a catching-a-moth motion, hovering over the hollow above his collar bones, claw-like, encasing something-about-to-die. “Yes. God-more.”
She takes her hands away and slips off of him, annulling the cross her body erect on his had made, the way they fit together. She leaves the room and it feels so flat, the weak, watery light through the horizontal blinds, his sloping, planar body on her straight and narrow bed, the only perpendicular his red and jutting cock.
It had all been so straightforward, combing and parting and plaiting the streets for survivors, before he had entered the hotel this morning. And then he'd heard her in her room above him, grunting as if digging through stones, bricks, bones, her fingers scraped and tattered, as if she could just dig far enough-if she could just thrust hard enough-she would find them-Dawn, Giles, Willow, Xander . . . Spike, fallen in the rubble-lost in the desolation of her sex. He had come to her with pity, lay down beside her with a thought to creature comfort. Her hot cunt and sweaty small hand had burned him, branded him, reminded him that they were so much more than pity and comfort, and destroyed it all with a name on her lips that hadn't been his.
She comes back hours later, still naked and holding a knife, just cutlery, like a weapon. She does not stop to admire the eager, teenager way his cock jumps to parallel her, but with simple economy of movement struts forward. Folding herself neatly into an athletic "L" shape standing beside him, she plants the knife straight up and down and draws it down his chest, one two three. One at a time the narrow cuts begin to ream out pretty ribbons of blood. Her nipples, sharp as bird's beaks on her gently swaying breasts, cut up the ribbons and drag upward, to his mouth. They hold there for him until his lips at last obediently drop open and his own blood thips eagerly inside.
The pain of it, her beloved body as the instrument of his torture, is almost enough to let him bear it. The sight of her small, abused breasts are pinpricks to his consciousness; he’s awake, awake, with Buffy, not dreaming, this is not a dream . . . She’s so solemn, so sterile with him and austere that it feels real. She straddles him and tells him, so soft like sweet nothings in his ears, the knife point on his chest, “Maybe you want the other end.” She turns the knife over, fingering the handle. “Maybe you want me to fuck you from behind.”
His eyes contract with lust.
“You should have a scar here,” she goes on, exactly as if she doesn't care. Now she is fingering his unmarred chest. He knows now what she’s finding-not his life but his death, all those things that have been stolen from him-Connor, twice now, first by a friend who should’ve known better, second by a dragon that should’ve been his. And herself-all those chances they never had: Buffy, who is no longer the girl he knew.
“Close your eyes,” she demands, and he does. Then she plunges the knife down.
“Angel,” she whispers, pressing her fingers down against the wound. There are tears in her eyes. “Angel, it was too far; I’m so-”
“Need,” he pants, cutting through her, baring his teeth and looking away. His hips buck up. “Need you.”
“Oh. Well,” she brightens, “could have said so.” And she very carefully, with finality, puts the knife beside them on the table.
In a haze of pain and blood and her thrusting, forceful hips he sees her, pink all over and pretty, head thrown back and taking him, in over and over. “Give it to me,” she’s saying. She’s cut away his Buffy, the girl he remembered. Why, he wants to know, why?
She's taking him so deep; her muscles are clenching so tightly; it's all so unbelievably good. I’m taking this from you because I love you, Connor had said. “Give-give it to me-”
“I love you,” Angel replies, and gives.
Something is aging this City of Angels, exhausting its streets in a tired, run-down way with dust and dandruff, the clean-up crews sweeping through like adolescents finally maturing into mustaches, too old now to be fresh-faced. The children are all growing up, and it isn’t theft after all but merely life, learning the true face of beauty is always like waking from Jasmine’s spell, it’s life; falling out of Eden is knowledge at last, it’s life. Angel and Buffy is not the spell it was; it’s fallen and weak, ugly with truths to raw to bear, a theft of what came before. It’s life, and they will live with it.
Later, cleaned up and unburdened, in his sheets which are cleaner than hers, he tells her about Connor. Inconsequential things, how he smelled, how he fit in Angel’s arms, how he looked when he fought. “His hair was perfect,” Angel concludes. Then they make love.
v.
One morning, LA bursts in tendrils of rosy fingered dawn, and a flash of smoke, and is never quite the same again. As the dawn deepens and the differences settle in LA that first day, choppers slice the air and kick dust up in clouds, swirling it with crumbled asphalt and a lost walkie-talkie somewhere, the same walkie-talkie that hours ago, rolled antennae-over-speaker for a block at least, turned a right, took the feeder to the highway and came to rest at Connor’s feet.
“The hell?” he said, and picked it up. “Um, roger?”
“Xander, we’re trapped. Bloody-pull out. We’re down. Pull out now; get-” Giles crackled into screams and dying sounds on the speakers. Connor shrugged, threw away the talkie, went straight for the doomsday in the sky for a block at least, and caught his breath at the-well shit, all the dead girls, Kennedy and her three dozen. Then he saw the dragon. “Like hell you get all the fun,” he said, and started fighting. Because hey, it was a dragon.
Faith was fighting, too. Connor caught her, pulled her out of the way of the dragon’s fiery breath and took it, the dragon Angel had called for himself, with a mortal blow.
“Fucker killed Angel,” Faith grunted. “Who’re you?”
“Killed Angel?” Connor asked, and the force of his shock left him open to the attack on the right. His abdomen splattered, red his insides, black his glare, not words, that said: where the fuck did that . . .?
“Well if you’d’ve been looking,” Faith said, and went on fighting.
The military is come to clean up Angel’s mess and the ashes the dragon left of him, the clean-up crews to sweep through like adolescents finally maturing into mustaches. Angel was too old now to be so fresh-faced; he should have known better, Riley thinks later. His hand is just touching Sam’s knee, and there is a trace of a smile. They are not the honeymoon they were before; their love is fallen and weak, ugly with truths to raw to bear, a theft of what came before. It’s life, and they will live with it.
In one of the make-shift shelters, Anne is making beds, careful to crease the corners, even though some of them will never be clean again. She heaps the worst bedding in a pile. On a pillow case, she finds a blood stain. Gunn had somehow survived the battle. He had used a cloth to staunch the blood on the stump of his elbow, unaware that his abdomen had finally given in and entrails were beginning to wind their way out of his stomach. Anne scrubs for a long time. She won’t ever get the stain out, but she will wash it, nevertheless. She will dry it. She will fold it. Then she will go make another bed with it, careful to crease the corners, even though some of them will never be clean.
Clem clears his throat, sees Sergeant Finn’s kitten, and raises three. He wonders whatever happened to Spike, just as Angel had when he realized it had been hours since he’d seen him, and that Spike’d been sitting in the driver’s seat racing down those cobbled streets, and that fucking pissed him off. Not that he’d’ve let Spike get behind him, either.
As for that vampire, he had heard his name, spoken once, “Spike,” and felt his heart beat.
“Fuck,” Spike replied, sinking to his knees. “Angel. It was supposed to be Angel.”
“Angel,” the voice said. “Together you were powerful. Alone you are dead.”
Mortal now, Spike whipped around to find the voice, took a blow to the head, and never got up again. This is Angel’s fault. This is Angel’s fault. Angel’s fault. Angel’s fault fault fault. For Justine, every day, the thought is the same: This is Angel’s fault. “Why wasn’t I there?” she wants to know. Strangely, these are Buffy’s thoughts; "why wasn’t I there," she wants to know, "when Dawn decided to spread her portal?"
After a day and a half of little sleep and less rest, Justine’s sight’s gone blurry and she hits Harmony’s hip with the crossbow, not her heart. Harmony, who has returned to feed on the dead and dying-easy prey, and Angel never let her have human-plucks out the dart and advances. Justine, with a force borne of exhaustion, slams Harmony against the wall, jerks open the vampire’s pink floral print skirt, and fucks her hard with her fingers, until there is blood-perhaps because Harmony is nothing like her dead twin sister, nothing like at all.
Blood from Harmony’s hip and cunt oozes in laggardly thuds down Justine’s arms, until there are threads sinuous and sullen dripping down her fingers. At the last moment, Buffy had tried to save Dawn, and got sucked into the portal too. She just could not let go.
She is blossoming with Harmony under her, like a rose; her fingers are firm on her hips to steady her bucking, and Julia, Julia, (Dawn, Dawn) , fuck; they just miss their sisters.
"Mulholland Drive, much?” Harmony asks, when Justine bites her tongue and pulls away. Justine's answer to the question isn’t sex. Instead she flips her hair in a bouncy way she’d never acquired, and guides Harmony to her bared neck with red fingers. Harmony shrugs, thinks, “Take that, Angel. This is for saying I didn’t know what a memo was,” and bites down.
Oz is fucking a monster. Nina came to him a week ago in England, saying Angel sent her. “Werewolves of London.” he’d said. “See, it was werewolf, but now it’s werewolves. Can’t have that. Next we’ll be drinking piña coladas.” So they’d both gone back to LA.
His monster has black hair, blue veins that stand out from her face, and pupils the size of quarters; her eyes are holes like her tugging, tenacious sex and he is falling in-loved a girl once. Loved her innocent greenness, her, the way she always smelled like herbs. There was a seed of darkness in her he never penetrated far enough to touch, but a woman did, a woman did. He never saw the seed, and he never saw the blossom either, never saw the skin of the seed fold out, inside out, fall away so that the thing inside could rise up old and ancient, weeping willow, mother goddess. He tries to fuck that monster and that spirit-the woman she became, the woman he never knew and shouldn’t mourn so much-but there is no white hair black, only blonde. And when he closes his eyes, he sees only red.
Eve is still looking for Lindsey and that Sahrvin lair. He had told her they were like a fairytale, and fairytales ended happily ever after. Even when they didn’t, they didn’t end like this. He couldn’t have been killed by some random demon or a-a falling building or something like that; he was supposed to have last words. It should’ve been epic. Angel was epic. Lindsey should’ve been, too.
“Whoa, epic,” Andrew had said, after Xander had exploded the giant. “Like Ghostbusters, only you can’t eat the guts. Or I don’t think so. Xander, do you think you could eat the-”
Xander was on the ground in a pool of blood. “You should-” he gasped, feeling blood in his throat-how had it gotten in his throat?-“You should tell Willow-”
“Nuh-uh. Have you seen how she looks at the way my skin fits?”
“Shut the fuck up, Andrew. I’m trying to say my last words here and you’re . . .” Xander coughed. “Just tell Buffy and Dawn I love them. And tell Willow . . . I love her crayon-breaky self.”
“Okay, yeah. But on a scale of one to ten, I’m giving that a four. Hal Jordan’s last words were better. Xander!” Andrew shook his shoulders. “Don’t die! You can’t just . . .”
Dazedly, Xander put his hand to his mouth. There was blood coming out of his mouth-how had blood gotten up to his mouth? “Andrew. I am not saying the Green Lantern Oath.”
“But you had to admit it was epic. Come on, Xander. Do you feel cold? They always say they feel the cold. You can’t die like this!”
Andrew was panicking, Xander realized sluggishly. “How’d I end up dying with you?” Xander wanted to know.
“Hey! Snap out of it! Don’t die; please, please, don’t die.”
Andrew was crying now, that idiot, Xander thought. They were in the middle of a battlefield, and Andrew would die crying and alone, somehow wanting to be a hero. Xander rolled his eyes and started the Green Lantern Oath. “In the brightest day, in the darkest night, no evil . . .”
In an LA suburb, Kate Lockley is mourning her newly dead husband and helping refugees from deeper in the city take the buses out. She is using a fire-arm for some measure of solace and control, but she hasn’t fired since she last shot at Angel, years ago. People are turning to her with frightened eyes because they know this eight-grade teacher used to be a cop, and she is letting them. She is crying, but she has a daughter now. Humans are children, too, and Kate has finally gotten over her father’s death.
At the barrier erected on the LA perimeter, the Burkles are trying to get in to find their daughter’s body. They won’t ever have to know their daughter’s body wasn’t their daughter’s. Nor will they know it’d slammed into a brick wall and went through, catapulting back a block at least, leaving blue pieces of Fred all along the way.
Something is changing this world. People are watching the news with horror filled eyes. Others are reading the paper. Others are making donations. Others are calling loved ones and spilling over into tears with relief and that one futile cry: how could this happen? The president is making apologies. Politicians are tumbling off soap box pedestals; a mayor is seeking a reelection out of this. An animal rights activist is saying, What about the kittens? And Sean Penn is flying to San Francisco, where Jesse Jackson will be talking to a church full of refugees. Matt Lauer is hugging a pregnant sixteen-year-old who survived this year’s holocaust (Is apocalypse a better word?) Oprah is preparing a special. Elton John is going to write a song.
Someone has already beat him to it. On radios across the world, an eerie melody is filling the speakers, the home, the city, the satellite, the earth, and the world is mourning. “And I’m giving you this because I love you," the singer says. "I loved this world.” The voice sings in inhumanly multiphonic, the second and third harmonics not buzzes and hums in the throat but crystal clear, and yet indisputably of one origin. It is a song fitting for this tragedy, for the inhumanity of it. Today the eyes of man were opened, and they see that they are naked-against the dark that haunts their thoughts, against the lies they’ve told themselves. Naked and banished into this cursed world of painful toil against the darkness, all of the days of their lives, their land thorned with demons, thistled with rancor. They might fight it . . . endlessly, but nothing they do matters.
“All that matters is what we do,” a green skinned demon thinks as he walks out of the recording studio in Nashville. He has been in the south to visit the family of the man he murdered. “What have I done?” he thinks, and because a bullet to the butt hardly seems dignified, he swallows enough pills to bury him six feet deep in this earth, this paradise, this land of music, not death.
On the Isle of White, Parker Abrams is taking a well earned vacation after his graduation from college, and he is still using that tried and true “my dad just died” docket. He thinks of an LA girl he made love to at U.C. Sunnydale-a tall redhead name Layla, dead now. He wonders if more women will fuck him because of Layla, dead now, or whether he should just say his dad was the one in the City of Angels. He grunts his release into the neck of the woman he is on top of, and wishes she were a little prettier.
In Shanghai, Drusilla smiles, and walks into the sunlight.
In Quor-Toth, the Groosalug is bringing light and peace and justice. It is more beautiful than anything anyone has ever seen-even though no one there has forgotten the face of The Destroyer. Who was much prettier, the story goes. His hair was perfect.
In Hell, Drusilla’s long-forgotten soul awakens and forgives her Makers. Both of them.
In Heaven, many souls do not.