What is your worst quality as a signifcant other?
Oh, please.
*very locked from just about everyone, especially Angel*
Of course, there is the stunningly obvious: I can't provide perfect happiness, and apparantly I never could. Frankly, I don't know what is more humiliating: the fact per se or that I still mind, several years after being told about it.
Seeing him again, awake, had been everything I hoped for back then. I was still angry about him killing me - and with myself for creating the situation that led to this instead of just doing the sensible thing, skip the gloating part and shoot the girl - and I was more than willing to play along with the lawyers for a while and mess with his mind in retaliation. But I always thought I knew how it would end, and for a while, it seemed I was right.
"You feel what this place was like before they excavated it? It's a convent. You remember how much I like convents," he said, all pretense to soulful gentility gone. He was furious. I loved it.
"It's been a long time since I said this to anyone, but you can scream all you want," he hissed, and I said "There's my boy," and kissed him. For a moment, we had the whirlwind back, just as we did in China. I should have remembered how China ended. Or perhaps not. He was still lost, then, wanting to belong, and I had the upper hand. He wasn't lost in Los Angeles. He knew who he was. We struck at each other with all the knowledge we had, and he was my equal more than he had ever been since the gypsies cursed him. Right until he said it. With a smile on his face, more Angelus than ever, and that was what sealed it to me, because I couldn't even blame it on the soul speaking.
"You took me places, showed me things. You blew the top off my head. But you never made me happy."
Of course, I hadn't sired him to make him happy. I did it because I felt like it. I didn't leave the Master for him to make him happy, either, it was because he had a point, life with him would make me happier. So why should I mind?
A hundred and fifty years. And with a few words, he managed to reduce them to what had come before, to a mere prequel to his grand drama with a teenage girl who didn't even know him but somehow had managed to make him completely, absolutely happy.
Here's another irony: I wouldn't change positions if I could. I don't want to be her. What came before, what came after that little exchange in a former convent isn't something I'd trade for anything. And yet. And yet. Sometimes, even these days, I look at him and I wonder what he found so lacking. I could eat him up then, in more than one sense.
Still, neither of us lied back then.
"See," I said, pressing that cross I knew was burning him against him as hard as I could. I wasn't a vampire anymore, but the smell of burning flesh was unmistakable. Talk about things providing happiness. "No matter how good a boy you are, God doesn't want you!"
He let me go then, and I said it.
"But I still do."
*very locked from just about everyone, especially Angel*
Of course, there is the stunningly obvious: I can't provide perfect happiness, and apparantly I never could. Frankly, I don't know what is more humiliating: the fact per se or that I still mind, several years after being told about it.
Seeing him again, awake, had been everything I hoped for back then. I was still angry about him killing me - and with myself for creating the situation that led to this instead of just doing the sensible thing, skip the gloating part and shoot the girl - and I was more than willing to play along with the lawyers for a while and mess with his mind in retaliation. But I always thought I knew how it would end, and for a while, it seemed I was right.
"You feel what this place was like before they excavated it? It's a convent. You remember how much I like convents," he said, all pretense to soulful gentility gone. He was furious. I loved it.
"It's been a long time since I said this to anyone, but you can scream all you want," he hissed, and I said "There's my boy," and kissed him. For a moment, we had the whirlwind back, just as we did in China. I should have remembered how China ended. Or perhaps not. He was still lost, then, wanting to belong, and I had the upper hand. He wasn't lost in Los Angeles. He knew who he was. We struck at each other with all the knowledge we had, and he was my equal more than he had ever been since the gypsies cursed him. Right until he said it. With a smile on his face, more Angelus than ever, and that was what sealed it to me, because I couldn't even blame it on the soul speaking.
"You took me places, showed me things. You blew the top off my head. But you never made me happy."
Of course, I hadn't sired him to make him happy. I did it because I felt like it. I didn't leave the Master for him to make him happy, either, it was because he had a point, life with him would make me happier. So why should I mind?
A hundred and fifty years. And with a few words, he managed to reduce them to what had come before, to a mere prequel to his grand drama with a teenage girl who didn't even know him but somehow had managed to make him completely, absolutely happy.
Here's another irony: I wouldn't change positions if I could. I don't want to be her. What came before, what came after that little exchange in a former convent isn't something I'd trade for anything. And yet. And yet. Sometimes, even these days, I look at him and I wonder what he found so lacking. I could eat him up then, in more than one sense.
Still, neither of us lied back then.
"See," I said, pressing that cross I knew was burning him against him as hard as I could. I wasn't a vampire anymore, but the smell of burning flesh was unmistakable. Talk about things providing happiness. "No matter how good a boy you are, God doesn't want you!"
He let me go then, and I said it.
"But I still do."