Happy Nearly Birthday to geyer
It's that time of year again. A couple of years ago it was The Moonlight Gamblers. Last year it was A Better Reality. This year my offering for the occasion of my beta's birthday is a lot less on the fluffy side. In fact, it may well be the darkest fic I've written so far, but I'm hoping she'll like it anyway. Happy Birthday -3 to geyer! Chapter 2 to follow tomorrow with Chapter 3 on Saturday and (if I get it finished on time) Chapter 4 on Sunday. (Oh! And anyone whose fics I've been following who's posted and not got a comment in the last few days, see the end of the previous sentence. Normal reading will resume once I finish this fic. Okay, back to the transcripts...)
A slightly different take on how things might have gone in the AtS episode 'Orpheus' if Faith hadn't been the only person to consume the drug. I always found it a bit unbelievable that Faith would cry as if she was saying goodbye to everything she ever loved because she found out Angel bit someone who was already dead... Huh? That makes the sense that's not. So, in my version, Wes, Faith and Angelus take a walk through all of their worst memories...
This fic includes non-explicit nonconsensual sexual content in one of the later chapters.
Note: This is my way of saying thanks to my beta t_geyer on the occasion of her birthday for her unending patience, perseverance and support. This fic was kindly beta-ed by Josephine Martin with Slaymesoftly stepping in to correct any unwitting Briticisms.
Chapter 1
As he crashed through level after level of scaffolding, Wes didn't know whether he should be thanking Maury for having the renovators in or cursing him for having premises of pretentiously museum-like dimensions. Five feet above the marble floor of the entrance hall, the last layer of boarding finally held.
From the floor above, Wes could hear Angelus antagonising Faith and then the echoing blast of his own shotgun. The vampire had ripped it from Wes's hands earlier in the fight and he now turned it on the slayer. As the sound faded he heard the slap, slap, slap of flesh on marble. Intentional or not, Faith's tumbling roll down the huge staircase was bringing the fight back to him. He had to be quick.
Reaching into his inside pocket, he flicked the plastic protective cover from the end of the syringe that he had kept there for just such an occasion.
For the briefest of instants his eyes met Faith's where she was trying to raise herself onto her elbows on the lobby floor. He slammed the needle through his shirt and into his chest, depressing the plunger as far as it would go before he pulled the needle out and dropped it over the back of the scaffolding into the pile of debris his fall had caused.
He only had seconds in which to draw Angelus away from Faith and force him to attack before the drug would begin to take effect. He reached for the holster under his left arm, pulling out the automatic pistol that he now wore out of habit. Rolling onto his stomach, he took aim at the corner where Angelus would emerge. He hoped he was aiming for chest height. The cadence of Angelus's footsteps changed as he stepped onto the flat and Wes fired off shot after shot at what was, so far as he could tell, a big black blur.
Pain bloomed in his arm and he forced himself to keep shooting as Angelus dragged him from the structure, as much to make sure there was no ammunition left as to try to hurt the vampire.
Faith rolled into the darkest shadows at the edge of the room, but Wes could feel her eyes on him as Angelus twisted his arm until he was forced to drop the pistol.
"Here, slayer, slayer..." Angelus taunted. "We know you wouldn't want me to kill the watcher. You proved that earlier."
Wes felt his head being tilted to the side and forced out a few final words as the vampire's teeth sank into his neck. "Actually, I pointed out to her that that was a tactical error..."
Sooner than he expected, Wes felt himself thrown to the floor. It was impossible to tell whether it had been seconds or minutes. His eyes wouldn't focus properly but the muted crashes told him that not only was he close to passing out but that Faith had picked up the battle. He prayed that between them they could do enough. Fumbling blindly, he knew he had to manage one last task or their sacrifice would be meaningless. He reached into his pocket and felt for his phone, taking all his concentration to find the right speed dial key and hold it down.
The quiet in the lobby of The Hyperion was only surface deep. Fred perched on a stool at the front desk, an array of books on magic in front of her. She was trying to find something that might help with their Angelus problem. Despite what Gunn had said, she still felt as if she were to blame for Angelus making off with all the information that they had once had on The Beast's master and she wanted to find a way to make up for that, but it wasn't as if she could really concentrate when Angelus might come back and continue his game of 'Ten Little Indians' any time he felt like it.
The front door slammed open and Gunn backed his way through, dragging something behind him. It was only after he pulled his burden free of the closing door that Fred managed to make out the bound body. "Oh, my god! Angelus!"
Gunn laid the body flat on the floor, calling out instructions as he did. "Pick up your tranq gun and watch him. I don't know how much time we have." Turning toward the staircase he raised his voice and shouted upward. "Connor!" he bellowed as Fred grabbed the pistol from under one of her books and hurried around the counter to take up position ready to shoot the vampire if he so much as moved.
"What happened?" the Texan asked.
"Wes called. I went." He pulled the gun from Fred's hands and cocked it, aiming it at Angelus.
"Where is he? Where's Faith?" Fred tried again, but Gunn didn't get a chance to answer.
"Well, what is all the-." Lorne's voice carried from the bottom flight of stairs, but then stopped dead as he actually got far enough to view the scene for himself. "Oh! Angelus! He's in the hotel!"
Gunn turned to Fred again, deciding explanations might as well wait until Angelus was more firmly secured and preferably everyone was there, and really there wasn't much he could add to what had already been said. "Get me the steel shackles!"
Fred ran over to the weapons cabinet and pulled out the drawer beneath the glass doors, rummaging through its contents while Lorne moved over next to Angelus, taking in his apparent sedation and state of bondage with some amazement.
"...Oh, but maybe we're already aware of that," the demon added.
"All I had was rope in the truck," Gunn explained, his tone seeming to imply that the sooner Angelus was more firmly secured the happier he would be.
Connor finally appeared on the upper balcony, looking down on the scene below. "What's going on?"
"Get down here, now!" Gunn shouted back, wishing the kid would just do what he was told when he was told for once.
Fred pulled a set of manacles from the drawer and, looking at them, Gunn reconsidered.
"The leg irons, too," he added, as Connor dashed downstairs, not as a result of Gunn's order but because he'd finally seen who was down there.
"She found him." The teen's voice was tinged with a hint of awe.
"Yeah," Gunn agreed. "Her and Wes both..." He took the tangle of restraints that Fred passed to him, passing the tranquiliser pistol back to her and began fastening them onto Angelus's wrists and ankles.
"Wesley and Faith… where are they?" Lorne asked.
"In the truck," Gunn answered without looking away from the task in hand. "Connor, go bring them in."
"But..." Lorne protested.
"Don't figure they'd thank me if Angelus got loose while we were kissing their boo-boos," Gunn answered unequivocally but Lorne was already heading for the door.
Connor watched for several seconds as Gunn secured Angelus before he looked back at the now almost closed door and then back to the vampire again. Finally, he seemed to decide that the sedated vampire wasn't going anywhere and followed Lorne out.
When the teen reached the street Lorne was staring down into the bed of the truck, a grimace of distaste on his face. He had already dropped the tailgate on the vehicle and pulled Faith's inert form close enough to lever her into a sitting position.
"What is it?" Connor asked.
Lorne seated himself on the tailgate, next to Faith so that it was easier to hold her up with the arm around her back and used his free hand to lift one of her eyelids so that Connor could see how dilated her pupil appeared and then he nodded toward the bloody gauze and cotton wool pads that were taped to both Wes' and Faith's necks.
"He fed from them!" the teenager nearly spat out.
"Yeah," the anagogic demon replied, his own censure and disappointment aimed more at himself for letting things get so bad that he hadn't picked up on just how suicidally reckless Wes and the slayer had become, than at the vampire. "...And, if I'm reading this right, that's exactly what they wanted him to do. Shot themselves full of junk and hoped they would take Angelus down with them... Way they're all three out cold, I'm guessing they supersized the dosage to make sure they got the job done."
"Heroin?" the teen asked, remembering his first ever friend in this world and how she had died with a needle in her arm.
"Heroin wouldn't work on Angelus long enough for them to be sure he'd stay out of it while we did the clean up," Lorne argued. "My guess is orpheus, part-opiate, part-mystical and dangerous as all hell."
"So what do we do now?" Connor asked.
"We watch over them until it's done..." Lorne said, "...or until they are."
The first thing Faith marked was Angelus's presence, but, nearly as soon, she took in the scents on the air and the uneven cobbles underfoot that reminded her of the streets around Beacon Hill in her home town. Only this was no hill, rather they seemed to be on a none-too-savoury dockside and, judging by the not-completely-green version of The Statue of Liberty that she could see in the background, she was going to go with Ellis Island, late nineteenth, early twentieth century.
Angelus seemed to move with a purpose and she watched him with interest, especially when his path took him toward a shambling, unkempt and filthy version of himself, dressed to match the period. He moved to bar the other's path but Rank Angel walked right on through him as if one or both of them were a ghost.
Spinning on his heel to watch the retreating form, the vampire shouted out in irritation. "Hey! What is that about?"
Faith couldn't help her smirk and didn't try. "You tell me. It’s your flashback."
Angelus turned again, as if he'd been too preoccupied to notice the slayer until now. As soon as he fixed on his target he attacked, throwing himself right at her, with no more success than his efforts to impede his alter ego.
Faith looked down at her body and then laughed. "You know what the definition of insanity is, baby? Performing the same task over and over and expecting different results. Learned that in murder rehab."
"All right, Miss Blow-it-All," Angelus snapped. "This is my flashback. Why are you in it?"
Faith didn't bother to hide her amusement at his irritation. "Don’t know. Must be the magic side effects of our incredibly simple ruse."
"All right. So what is this, huh?" the vampire tried again. "Puff the Magic Dragon City? Fairyland?"
"Well," interrupted Wes's cultured tone, and the watcher stepped out from the maze of packing cases that littered the dockside and came to stand by Faith's side. "The drug is orpheus, so I'm guessing that puts us in The Underworld... Angelus's own personal interpretation by the look of it."
"You think?" Faith retorted, glad to see the watcher's face. She had begun to worry that she hadn't pulled Angelus away in time but she wasn't going to let the vampire know that. "Because… Lack-of-Hygiene world? It sure ain’t mine." She looked over at Rank Angel walking among the crowd. "Seriously, man, did you miss the invention of the bath?"
If anything, Angelus's own revulsion was even greater. "The whole way over here he crouched in the filth of the animals just to avoid human temptation. This isn't my life. It's his!"
"Angel's?" Faith asked and Wes gave a nod.
"It annoyed the crap out of me the first time around," Angelus snapped. "This sucks. And why do you two get to play Marley’s ghost?"
Wes gave a wry smile. "Our fates are linked with yours."
Angelus raised his eyes heavenward. "You don't say. That much I guessed when I saw you here."
"How about because we're dying, dumb-ass?" Faith retorted.
Angelus chuckled at the idea. "Not soon enough."
Neither Faith nor Wes seemed fazed by his amusement. "Way I figure," said the slayer, "we've got one last job. Baby-sit the psycho until they shove a soul up your-."
"Not gonna happen."
"Oh, I believe it will," Wes insisted. "You've been around long enough to realise that Fred, Gunn and Cordy generally achieve pretty much anything that they set out to do."
"Won't help either of you two," Angelus reminded them.
"Then we're- whatever," Faith replied nonchalantly. "Dust in the wind. Candle in the wind. There’ll be a general wind theme."
Angelus gave a snort of amusement. "Still trying to atone for taking the brat, Wes? Does it feel better to play the martyr than to watch the Texas Twig trying not to toss her cookies at the thought of you with Lilah? And, Faithie, Faithie..." He shook his head like a disappointed parent. "I thought those suicidal tendencies got squashed in the big enlightenment."
Faith shrugged. "I rolled the dice. It paid even odds."
"The rewards justified the risk," Wes added. "As you'll find out when they squash you back down under Angel's soul."
The world seemed to spin around them and then they were pitched into darkness.
"Geez!" Faith exclaimed. "Where the hell is this? It smells even worse than the last place."
Angelus switched to his demon visage and gave a snort of laughter at finding all three of their bodies overlapping both each other and that of the young boy concertina-ed into a sitting position on the floor. "This one isn't mine, princess," he said, turning until he could distinguish the outline of a door and then stepping through its varnished wooden surface.
He emerged into a large, plushly decorated study. Sunlight crept around the edges of heavy dark green velvet drapes and the demon instinctively understood why. It looked as if Wes's parents had been at least as versed in the psychological aspects of torture as most of the demons he knew. "Come out, come out, wherever you are..." he called.
Slayer and watcher both stumbled through the wall into the dimly lit room.
Angelus grinned at the stony expression on the watcher's face. That good old English stiff upper lip. "Guess someone used to be a naughty little boy?" the vampire taunted.
A spark of hatred flashed in Wes's eyes before he hid it under the facade of unconcern. "Not particularly, I just failed occasionally to meet Father's standards."
"Huh?" Faith signalled her incomprehension. "Wes? If that was you, then what was the smell in there? I mean you must have had indoor plumbing by your day."
Seconds passed and in the gloom Faith could make out the way Wes's head faced her way as if searching her face for any sign of amusement or ridicule, but she really didn't get it.
"That was my bucket," the Englishman replied in a tone far too expressionless to be genuine.
"How long did they leave you in there?" Faith asked. She knew he probably didn't want to answer her questions but this was a side of the watcher she would never have suspected and, like a healing scab, she just couldn't leave it alone.
Wesley shrugged. "Sometimes an hour..."
Angelus gave a snort. "And sometimes days... That's why the curtains are drawn, so there's no light getting in for him to tell day from night, so he doesn't know how long he's been there and can't guess how long might still be to go... but speaking as someone who grew up in an era of chamber pots I can vouch for the fact that the piss in that bucket was way past fresh."
"Come on!" the slayer demanded, nodding to Wesley, and turned straight for the outer wall of the house. Whatever terror this room or this house held for the watcher, she was willing to bet that it would look a whole lot better if they got out of the dark.
She stepped through into a garden with neatly trimmed herbaceous borders and flowers that didn't dare do anything but grow straight and upright. Wes followed on her heels and she caught the look of relief on his face as he stepped into the sunlight.
A disembodied vampire hand slid through the red-brick wall, started to smoke, and then disappeared again.
Faith lifted her eyes to Wesley's face and might even have taken his hands in hers if she could have and if she had thought that might make him look at her rather than his feet.
"I'm sorry-," the Englishman began.
"I'm sorry," Faith interrupted. "I thought when you showed up in Sunnydale that you were some spoiled little rich boy-."
Before she could elaborate further there was another disorientating blur as if the world spun around them. Then, the blur gradually changed to a pastel pink and slowed to a rose-patterned wallpaper stop. Even though the last scene had left her more than half expecting it, Faith felt long buried emotions spill out as she stared at the tiny open plan apartment that had faded in her memories until it had become nothing but the backdrop to a Polaroid that had itself been lost longer ago than she cared to remember.
The TV was old-fashioned, with a wood-effect case and a bunch of knobs and dials on the front, but it wasn't even turned on. It sat alone, no VCR or DVD to keep it company back in those days or at least not for families who were just about getting by. Instead, a radio played quietly as her mom stirred at a pan of Bolognese sauce on the top of the stove. Judging by the darkness outside the window, Faith knew it was late. She would have been sent off to bed hours earlier, while her mom cooked dinner ready for her dad coming home from late shift, just like every night, but this wasn't every night. It was the last night.
Before the heavy knock even sounded on the door she knew. She didn't watch the policemen or her mother. She watched the door to her room and the child who pulled it ajar. It was hard to believe that she'd ever been that soft. Footie pyjamas and a teddy bear half as big as she was.
Her mom was screaming. The policeman was holding her upper arms as she tried to beat at him with her fists and Little Faith didn't understand.
She couldn't understand... yet. Daddies didn't just go. She wandered into the main room and tugged at the tail of the oversized men's shirt her mother wore with a five inch wide belt. Almost absently her mom pushed her away hard enough to make her stumble. It would take her weeks to understand just what dead meant and just a little longer to understand that 'alcoholic' meant her mom wasn't coming back either.
"Aw... Poor widdle girl lose her daddykins?" Angelus crowed, enjoying the slayer's discomfort.
Wes stepped between her and the vampire. "Coming from someone whose idea of hell appears to consist of a combination of the American continent and poor personal hygiene, I don't think you have any room to complain."
"So says Closet Boy," the demon griped.
"You wouldn't understand what it's like to lose someone you cared about," Wes argued.
"That's because I don't care."
Faith wasn't sure how long the numbness lasted, how long she let Wes carry her end of the fight before the world blurred around them again.
Disclaimer - All writing is on a non-profit basis, purely for entertainment purposes. Use of any non-original material within any stories in no way implies ownership, be it from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel the Series or any other film, television, musical or other source.