TITLE: Angel's Girl part four
AUTHOR: Claudine
EMAIL: claudine423@yahoo.com
PAIRING: W/G
RATING: R-ish for violence, sexual situations
FEEDBACK: Sure! :-)
NOTES: Spoilers galore. Probably a little from each season of Buffy and one or two of Angel.
Permission to use these characters relating to BtVS & AtS has not been given. Joss, Twentieth Century Fox, UPN, WB & Mutant Enemy own TM and copyrighted them. This is purely for fun, and no copyright infringement is intended. You know the drill...
She moved slowly around the room as she set the table, lit a few candles and poured two glasses of wine. It was late and she knew Giles would be home soon. She wanted to surprise him. Too much of her time had been spent in bed, and not in a good way. She needed to get up and move around and become a productive member of the world again. Her bruises were healed, mostly, but the tear in her neck would remain a permanent scar. Just another reminder of a life less ordinary.
It was thundering again, seven nights in a row, now. She half expected to look out the window and see an ark floating by with two of everything on board. Two Giles's appeared in her imagination and she smiled. She wasn't recovered enough for that yet.
The monotony was starting to wear on her. No magic - Giles had enforced strict rules for her recovery. She didn't mind, though. Much. He kept her grounded and protected her. There was no need for magic with him around. He had taken such good care of her.
She stopped asking about Angelus the day after she woke up. That had been four weeks ago. Giles never answered her anyway. A little resentment loomed within her, but she knew the vampire would be taken care of. When she regained her strength, she would feel him if he was still alive. He had drunk from her when her blood was tainted and full of rage, it would call to her like a beacon when she searched for it. He couldn't hide forever.
She was lost in her thoughts as she sat at the window seat looking out into the night.
It was a massacre. And it played over and over in her mind as if it had been burned into the undersides of her eyelids. She wished she could turn it off, but she couldn't. The visions of Buffy hanging there, her body bloody and cut open like she'd been autopsied, those were the ones that haunted her the most. The others, the thirty or so victims that Angelus had left for Willow to find, they didn’t matter. They mattered to someone, somewhere, she was sure of it. But they were nameless, faceless bodies and their deaths, while tragic, were incidental in the grand scheme of things. Buffy's was the prize and Angelus displayed it proudly.
It was cold that night in Sunnydale. Long after the First had done its damage and destroyed most of the town, Buffy had reclaimed the land as her own. And Sunnydale, the streets that remained, thrived as it never had before. The hellmouth was sealed, locked forever beneath the remains of the high school, shrouded in a glamour that Giles and Willow and the covens from England had created. The evil was gone, and Buffy's life was good. Until Angelus returned.
Buffy never knew why it had happened, how Angel lost his soul. She was sure it was magical and that some beastie thing ripped the humanity from the vampire. Probably someone or something from that law firm in L.A. he dealt with so often. There really wasn't much time for her to ask about it, what with the dying and all.
He showed up one night in Sunnydale and went on a rampage. He was strong and drew his power from a source other than his own body. Buffy couldn't fight him. He seemed invincible. She wished he would just kill her and be done with it, but Angelus didn't operate that way. He lived to torture, and torturing Buffy would be his greatest accomplishment yet.
She fought him when he showed up at her door that night. He looked like Angel, so she invited him in. But when he crossed the threshold he showed her who he really was, and she ran, damning herself for letting down her guard. She should have known. The Slayer should have sensed it.
He chased her through the house, enduring blows from everything she could manage to throw at him or hit him with. It was all fuel for him, and each ounce of her resistance just made him stronger.
When he finally caught her, he pinned her to the ground with his knee on her chest, blocking her air. He grabbed her by the hair and rammed her head into the floor until she bled and passed out. Buffy woke up two days later, flat on her back on the floor of an abandoned church. She wasn't even sure she was still in Sunnydale until Angelus started his reign of terror.
He blindfolded her and hoisted her onto a platform barely larger than the width of her feet. Her arms were tied to a long, horizontal post as she stood in limbo, blindfolded, exposed, and helpless in his presence. It took only a minute for her to realize what was happening.
By the time he had pounded the last nail into her wrist, her face was covered with blood from the crown of thorns Angelus had placed on her head. "Right up there with the big J.C., you righteous bitch," he said with that last stroke of his hammer, "Just like you always wanted." He turned her face to him, the thorns cutting deeper wounds as she moved, and said, "Tell Angel I said hello." And then he licked the blood off of her cheek, "If that's where you end up, that is."
He untied her blindfold, but her head fell forward as if disconnected from her body.
"No, no - no rest for the weary," he said and rigged a contraption that would keep her head up and looking out onto the congregation hall where he had a few victims already bound and gagged and waiting for their bloody end.
Each of them tried to flee or fight, but failed. Some were stronger than others, but they were all merely human. An army of peasants fighting a king. They all succumbed to Angelus and, in the end, when it was all over and Angel announced the she was next, Buffy wept for those that had gone before her. By that time she had left her body, lost in the transcendental meditation techniques Giles had taught her. She searched for help, for Willow, out in the ether and managed to connect with her.
When Willow finally found the lair, the tomb, she froze at the door. The air, thick with the stench of rotting flesh, was unbreathable. Her eyes scanned the room for Buffy's corpse among the bodies, she never thought to look up. But when she did, when she saw Buffy hanging from the cross, drained of every ounce of blood and cut open from her neck to her pelvis, Willow vowed she would make Angelus pay.
Willow thought about it again and again. Why didn't he turn Buffy? Angel loved her so much and Angelus took such pleasure in tormenting her. Why did he leave her like that?
It didn't make any sense.
"You won't figure it out." He whispered and kissed the top of her head. "Don't torture yourself trying," he said. Giles knew her so well.
"Been standing there long?" she asked. These days, when she drifted off, it could be for two minutes or two hours. She never could tell anymore.
"Long enough." Giles took her hand in his and lifted her arm so that she would stand.
Her delicate frame pressed against his when she wrapped her arms around him and he knew that her strength had returned.
He felt her energy coursing through him, probing, searching, stealing his heat. It wasn't intentional, it wasn't evil. It was just Willow returning to herself again.
They ate in silence and when they were finished, he led her to the couch and put a book in her hand and ordered her to stay put. "More wine?" She asked and held up her glass just before he made it out of the room.
He stopped in the frame of the door and smiled to himself. He whispered something that she couldn't make out, but her glass filled itself before her eyes. "No fair," she said. "If I don't get to play you shouldn't either!"
"You're right, I'll stop," he said from the kitchen. She joked, but she knew he was feeling it. The power was overwhelming him and she knew how quickly it would overtake him.
An hour later they were in bed, moving as one beneath the light of the moon.
ALTERNATE CH. 4 ENDING (NC-17)
*(You can skip this part if you are under age, or dislike NC-17, w/o missing any plot elements)*