Pairing: Angel centric more or less
Author:Anne
Rating:G
Disclaimer: All together now: Joss owns every teeny tiny thing!
Tempus Fugit
"Well, personally, I kind of want to slay the dragon."
He'd been able to slay the first one, but wasn't as lucky when a second one made appearance in the middle of the foray. It soared higher above him, gleaming effervescently in the moonlight and humming to itself as it swooped down once again. Gliding less than five feet away, detonating fire and slicing up things with sharp nails like knives.
Angel slid back out from beneath the askew slumber of wood, burning his back on a tailpipe and struggled to his feet. He looked north above the turnpike, eyes wide and disbelieving. A vast rummage sale was falling out of the sky: stereos and rugs and a motorcycle bicycle with the engine still in gear and an aquarium with the fish still swimming in it.
He saw an old man with a lot of theatrical gray hair running up the breakdown lane and then a flight of steps fell on him, tearing off his left arm and sending him to his knees. There were paintings and desks and coffee tables and a plummeting elevator with its cable uncoiling into the air like a greasy severed umbilicus. A heavy fur coat fell on a running woman, trapping her, and then a sofa landed on her, crushing her. The air filled with a storm of light as large panes of building glass fixtures just fell out of the blue.
Everywhere were dented cars with mashed windows; Angel saw a Lexus with the unnaturally plastic legs of a department store mannequin sticking up from the sunroof. The air shook with whines and whistles.
Another shadow fell on him and even as he ducked and raised his sword he knew he was too late, if it was just an uncanny fallen object then it would more than likely fracture his skull. If it was the dragon then he'd be nothing but a grease-spot in the alley.
The falling object struck his hand without hurting in the slightest, swished, and landed at his feet. He looked down at it first with apprehension, then with dawning surprise.
Angel bent over and picked up the tattered remains of the duster which had fallen from the sky, recognizing at once even from its poor state; the deep scratch down one of the arms and the comically tangled knots of the inside wearing were as good as fingerprints. He looked on the side, where he's seen Spike print his name. It was still there, but the letters looked fresher than they should have, and the leather there looked faded and frayed and whipsawed, as if other names had been inked in the same spot and then erased.
Closer to his face, the smell of the duster was both intoxicating and irresistible. Angel slipped it onto his arm, and when he did something crackled atop the surface a piece of paper shoved in a tiny gaping hole. He paid no attention. Instead he put the duster over his face, closed his eyes, and inhaled. Potent leather and cigaret and whiskey. All the years that were. This year, for instance, when he had first handedly seen everything slowly change-- Gunn sullen, Fred bubbly and effusive(at least for awhile), and the cool rogue demon hunter he'd known-- Wes-- gone. Everything had changed...but it was still the same year, he was still a champion, and everything had still seemed...
"Eternal," he murmured into the duster, and inhaled deeply of its aroma again as, nearby, a glass case filled with jewelry shuttered on the roof of a Coca Cola van and a stop-sign pole, quivering, into the breakdown street like a thrown spear. Angel remembered Connor and sleepless nights trying to put him to bed and how he'd come so close to calling the Hyperion home, how things suddenly fell apart; he remembered his first meeting with Darla and the sweet blood that promised him forever more and how his soul had never made him feel more alive than at the moment when he'd discovered he had a destiny to sign away and how much it had hurt to seal away his fate to Spike who'd already stolen so much more from him.
He remembered being blissfully soulless and meeting Spike for the first time in his gentlemen's fancy attire, now he saw him in nothing but leather and peroxide.
(wonder what it'd like to be to share the slaughter of innocents with another man..)
"Hey, hero." Only he says it more sardonically as if he still doesn't believe the status to reasonably suit him. Angel knows what he's going to see once he raises his face from the duster. It was Spike in nothing but faded jeans and tee standing in the middle of chaos, which seemed to encircle him in a different tiny universe where the sun still couldn't shine brighter than his peroxide hair. Spike looking oddly out of place for his surroundings lit up like a bar-sign from hell.
"Hey, hero, you get over here, I'll protect ya."And he held out his arms.
Angel walked toward him through the noisy hail of plunging furniture and bodies and bag loads of money and a car meter that hit and vomited a jackpot of cents. He walked toward him with a feeling of relief, that feeling you get only when you are coming home.
"I'll protect ya," he said, and Angel was facing the dragon again. Everything had stopped all around him, everything. A blurry voice was singing "Swing Low" and Angel couldn't breathe. Nothing appeared to have fallen out of the sky, except for the mass of demons about. Things seemed to be in order, but how could that be? When he had Spike's duster in his arms?
"I'll protect ya," Spike was saying. "Poor hero, poor lost hero, I'll keep ya safe."
Angel couldn't breathe, didn't need to, but couldn't breathe. He wanted to smile at him. He wanted to tell him he was sorry, that some of them had at least meant well, but he had no strength and he was very tired. He closed his eyes and tried to raise Spike's duster one final time, get one shallow whiff of that sweet, oil-and-leather aroma, but it was too heavy.
He dropped it as he fell. He heard nothing after that, except for the soulful singing of a lady still murmuring "Swing Low."
A/N: Tempus Fugit mean "Time is Precious" and is sadly one of the only things I remember from Latin.