A.N.: This is my first—quite possibly my only—Angel fic. I'm a major Fred/Wes fan, and I sorta lost interest when nothing happened between them. It figures that I'd only get into the show now that it's getting cancelled! Anyhoo, I apologize if I left anything out, and I'd appreciate recommendations for other good Fred/Wes fics.
Thanks for reading!
**************************************************************************************************************************
"Smurf"
He'd been drinking again, this human man she'd found herself so inexplicably tied to. He was always drinking, it seemed, though the memories she'd unwillingly taken from the vessel's mind told her it had not always been so. The vessel remembered a man stronger than this, a man who, though he had always been a little too serious and a little too withdrawn, made the human before her seem like nothing more than an echo of his true self. The vessel would barely have recognized this Wesley, had she been alive enough to see him as he was now.
Illyria cocked her head to one side, studying the sleeping, motionless human sitting only a few feet from her. He was facing the nearest window, as he so often did, but she knew he hadn't been looking through it even before he'd fallen asleep. He'd simply chosen the position because this way he could keep his eyes on something—anything—besides the demon-goddess he'd taken under his care. Wesley never looked at her, if he could help it, and she didn't think that would change no matter how much time they spent together. She knew, even if he'd never actually come out and said as much, that he would do everything he could to avoid looking at her and seeing what she'd done to his love's body, to avoid seeing the inhuman chill in eyes that had once held only tenderness and compassion. In his mind, staring out the window was probably as good excuse as any to avoid meeting her gaze.
She felt no such aversion to looking at him, however, though if she'd actually stopped to think about it she would have realized how odd that was in itself. Once she would have felt sick simply from being in the same room with a human, and now she found herself doing nothing but watching one for hours, days at a time. She watched him, listened to the oxygen sweeping in and out of his human lungs, listened to the harsh, grating sounds coming from his nose. Her cold blue eyes drifted often to the clear, amber filled glass he held in his hands, not quite able to stop thinking about the man the vessel's memories insisted he should have been. Where was the composure this human had supposedly once had? To the vessel, this man had been intelligent, strong and determined at all times. Even Illyria could see that he was still a little more clever than most humans, a little more reserved, but she failed to see that inner steel of the vessel's memories.
She found herself wondering if he was looking for solace in the contents of his glass, using this poison—whiskey, he'd called it—to lose the grief still so obviously overwhelming him. She frowned, knowing it wasn't working, this thing he was doing to himself. She'd heard him calling the vessel's name every time he closed his eyes in the rare, fitful sleeps that were all his grief and the whiskey allowed him. She'd seen the hollow despair in his gaze whenever sense returned to his erratic mind. This poison of his wasn't helping to ease his guilt or his misery, and it galled her that he would even keep trying. How dare he do this, actively strive to forget who and what she was just so he could bury himself in the worthless, pointless memories of a woman who had barely lived at all?
His actions made little sense to her, not only because she couldn't understand why he was trying to drink his grief away, but also because she couldn't understand why he felt grief at all. He was just a human, and she would not have thought one of his kind would even be capable of emotions this strong. Humans weren't supposed to feel this deeply, and yet Wesley obviously did. True, the vessel's soul had only been destroyed a few days previously, but Wesley's grief was not abating as it should have. His despair was only deepening, if anything, swallowing up what little sanity he might have had before.
Illyria continued to listen to his breathing, smelling the whiskey on his breath even from here. He was drinking himself to death, she mused rather disinterestedly, and she didn't understand that, either. Even if these worthless humans did, in fact, have some sort of afterlife where they would all be together after they died, the vessel's soul would not be there waiting for him. It had been destroyed with Illyria's arrival, and there was quite literally nothing left but the body Illyria now wore, the memories she'd retained of the vessel's life. If Wesley was so eager to cling to his love, Illyria reasoned, he should want to stay with the demon-possessed remnants of her, not abuse his body until he, too, expired.
He certainly was odd, this human guardian/teacher of hers. Not once, in the brief time she had known him, had he behaved as he should. He should have been terrified of her, afraid of what she could do to him and his, but he wasn't. He should have been throwing himself at her feet, awed by her greatness…but he wasn't. He treated her with more contempt than even one of her own kind would have dared to show, insulting her, berating her. Hating her. He would, she mused, be perfectly content—if such a word could even fit someone so tangibly miserable—if she decided to simply walk out of his life and never come back. He might not even notice, if she did.
She was not pleased by his treatment of her. He answered the questions she asked of him, but the minute she fell silent again, so did he. He never volunteered anything at all, never bothered to explain anything she didn't ask him to. He continued to withdraw further into himself with every day that dragged by, shutting out as much of the world, including the demoness herself, as he could. And when he couldn't forget, he simply drank himself back into that brief, unsuccessful oblivion the whiskey provided, forcing her to wait until he regained himself before she could continue her assimilation of his human world.
This arrangement failed to satisfy her, but she had yet to tell him that. Part of her insisted that she shouldn't have to, that he should have been paying enough attention to notice her displeasure, but even she could realize how little she would be helping herself by crossing this man even more than she already had. She needed him, after all, needed him for the knowledge he could give her, for the jaded insights he alone was even a little willing to provide. And yes, she even needed him for his apathy towards her. She didn't have to worry that fear would make him incoherent and useless, as it had with most other beings and all the humans that she'd ever encountered. He wouldn't try to soften or hide the unpleasant truths of this world, either, since he didn't care enough about her to gentle his answers. She needed that, because otherwise she wouldn't truly have a strong enough grasp on this world to survive it.
This didn't, of course, mean that his apathy didn't have the power to irritate her, or at least it would have if she'd actually been capable of so petty an emotion. He answered most of her questions, even if she had to filter out the hurt and cynicism before she could gain anything useful from his words, but he absolutely refused to talk about the one thing that had come to interest her most. He wouldn't talk about the vessel—Fred, she reminded herself. Wesley insisted that he call the vessel by name, though Illyria failed to understand why this was so important to him, failed to understand why Fred was so important to him. What was it about the vessel that her loss could keep Wesley in despair so great that Illyria could feel it, taste it? Fred had been just another human, no more important than others of her kind and certainly nothing at all to Illyria herself. Why, then, was it that neither Wesley nor Illyria could forget her? Even as she dismissed the vessel, a small part of the Old One continued to wonder about her, to wonder how one tiny human female could inspire such devotion as this.
Illyria's face hardened, if only a little. There should have been nothing left of the human female but the shell the demoness had made her own, and yet Fred's presence on this world was almost more real and tangible than Illyria's own, and Illyria resented it more than she would ever have thought she could or should. Hardly anyone even knew that Illyria had been revived or existed at all, and most of those who did were still more focused on who the vessel had been than on the being now possessing her flesh.
It was pathetic, she knew, that she had come so low as to even be capable of feeling anything towards a human. The vessel certainly hadn't been worth more than a second thought, and yet here she was, resenting Fred with every fibre of her being. That resentment only grew every time this human guardian of hers drank himself to sleep, every time he called out Fred's name with such misery and longing in his voice. Even now, when he should have been sleeping, her name was still on his lips. He shifted in his chair, his expression darkening even though his eyes were closed. She suspected he was dreaming about her again.
And then his head jerked up, and she knew he was awake again. He didn't say anything, didn't try to speak through the thickness the whiskey always put in his mouth. He simply turned back to the window, gazing out with eyes that did not see.
She wasn't going to let him force her out again. "You've been sitting for a long time," she observed from the shadows, forcing him to remember her, the cold, emotionless voice cutting through his self-imposed isolation.
He grimaced, just as she had known he would, but he didn't turn to look at her. "Yeah," he muttered, voice weary. "Dozed off."
She looked at him, wondering why he thought she wouldn't have realized that for herself. "You drank a great deal of that poison," she accused. "You called me a lot of names meant to hurt feelings I no longer have…and then you sat there for hours, making noise through your nose."
Wesley rubbed one hand over his eyes and forehead, slender fingers trying to massage the tension from his body. He didn't seem concerned with the scorn that had seeped into her words, though his disgust with her was in his own voice as he finally chose to speak. "I was dreaming, you twit," he snapped, having already taken his hand away, once again not seeming to care that insulting her probably wasn't the wisest thing he'd ever done.
Her voice only softened in response. "You said her name," she murmured, the scorn gone as if it had never been. She was seeking only for understanding, now. "Fred."
There hadn't been any openness in Wesley's face, but his eyes hardened even more. She couldn't tell, when next he spoke, if he was addressing her or speaking only to himself. Perhaps he was speaking to the woman that no longer existed except in a handful of memories imbedded in both their minds? "It was a nightmare," he said. He raised his glass to his lips again, not seeing that her eyes had widened slightly with his words. "I don't suppose you have nightmares…or sleep, or any of that human crap."
Something had changed in her own voice, as she answered, and he turned his head slightly, as if to hear her better. "In my time," she said, voice and face even more intense than they usually were, "nightmares walked among us. Walked and danced, skewering victims in plain sight, laying their fears and worst desires out for everyone to see. This," she added, voice thick with longing, a tiny smile curling the corners of her lips "to make us laugh."
He didn't seem impressed. "I'll bet you were jolly as frat boys," he sarcastically muttered, turning back to the window.
His voice hadn't truly registered. "And now," she continued softly, horror tingeing her words, not missing the ironic similarity of her own situation and that of the creatures who had once strived to amuse her kind, "nightmares are trapped in the heads of humans, pitiful echoes of themselves. I wonder whom they angered so to merit such a fate."
Silence followed her words, but she didn't notice that Wesley's face had softened with something akin to understanding or pity. She would not have expected to see any, in his face. "This world must be a terrible disappointment to you," he murmured almost gently.
She felt cold inside, even more than she would have anyway. "Grievous," she answered almost forlornly, looking away, a universe of meaning in her words that she knew he couldn't comprehend.
A flash of emotion danced over his features, faded away again. "I'm not too impressed with it myself," he said, the apathy and cynicism back in his voice as he lifted the glass to his lips once again.
She took a few abrupt steps towards him, then stopped. Her eyes were still wide. "Why don't you leave?" she demanded coldly. He didn't answer, but she saw how his body had frozen. Why, she wondered as the silence stretched out, didn't he leave? What was there about this world that kept him here? He believed he had no reason to stay, now that his love was gone. Or did he remain only because he realized his death would also sever his last link to the vessel? Was he staying for the same reason he was helping her, because she looked a little like his damned human mate?
**************************************************************************************************************************
The human had surprised her, in those first few days after their meeting. He'd surprised her with the depth of his emotions, with the strength of his love and later with the strength of his despair. She'd spent so many hours trying to find in him the man the vessel had been coming to love, trying to see what it was the vessel had found so appealing. She'd been trying to understand what it was that made this human different from all the others, but as he'd sunk further and further into himself, she'd almost decided she never would.
And now he'd surprised her again, surprised her as few beings ever had. He'd shifted once more, become someone different than the Wesley she knew or even the Wesley the vessel had known. Something she had said to him had lit a fire in his eyes, a fire that was still too desperate to belong to the vessel's Wesley but gave his eyes more life than Illyria's. He had leapt from his chair, moving with a speed she would not have thought him capable of having. He'd come close to her, no fear at all in his eyes, the revulsion he'd felt to looking at her seemingly buried by this sudden, inexplicable excitement. "You could go anywhere," he earnestly told her, "you could leave."
He paced a circle around her, not quite coming within her reach but obviously not afraid to. She only watched him in return, a little amused and curious in spite of herself. "That's not possible."
He wasn't willing to accept that. "Of course it's possible," he insisted. "Are you telling me that great Illyria, idol of millions, was limited to one small dimension?"
"I traveled all of them as I pleased," she retorted immediately, irked by both his casual use of her name and his questioning of her power. "I walked worlds of smoke and half-truths, intangible." She turned slowly to face the mirror behind her, looking at the reflection she had not yet accustomed herself to seeing. "Worlds of torment and unnamable beauty," the ancient demoness recalled wistfully, voice softer than a whisper as she slipped into memories that, for the first time in days, were hers alone and had nothing whatsoever to do with the vessel she had taken. "Opaline towers as high as small moons, glaciers that rippled with insensate lust." She paused, the slight smile that had been on her lips fading. "And one world with nothing but shrimp." She cocked her head. "I tired of that one quickly," she admitted, not understanding why she was telling him any of this. Why was she sharing of herself with someone like him? What was it about Wesley that made telling him her thoughts so easy and natural?
Wesley was staring at her through the mirror, coming still closer. "Then why stay in this world?" he persisted. "Surely there's a world more appealing—maybe not the shrimp one—but one where you will be welcome like you never will be here. Why don't you go?" He was still coming towards her, either unaware or unconcerned with the flare of anger now in her icy-blue eyes. "You can go. Why don't you go?"
He'd come too close, and she was out of patience. Illyria lashed out, grabbing him by the throat and lifting him off his feet, intending to simply end his life regardless of how much she needed his help. Her fingers tightened on his windpipe, crushing the air from him…and then she made the mistake of looking up at him, of meeting his eyes and letting herself see the resigned hope in his dark eyes. He wanted her to kill him, she realized, wanted Illyria to end his misery so he wouldn't have to do it to himself. He wanted to die, to leave behind the world he'd so briefly shared with the woman the vessel had been before Illyria had liquefied her organs and stolen her body.
Perhaps the eagerness for death that she could still see in his eyes stilled her hand, or perhaps the part of herself that had once been a human woman wouldn't let her kill without greater provocation than he'd given her, but whatever the reason, Illyria didn't take Wesley's life. The anger was still alive within her, but so were the vessel's memories of the love he'd had for her, and she couldn't follow through with her initial intentions. Something indefinable gripped her body, a myriad of emotions she should never have felt washing over her, and she flung Wesley aside in an attempt to rid herself of it. She was breathing heavily now, her eyes wild as she moved as far from Wesley as she could.
All the emotions she'd repeatedly claimed not to have were forming a knot of panic in her stomach. She knew that Wesley and the vessel's love for him was the cause of it, but she wasn't willing to accept the implications of that. She transferred her panic away from the man and onto the place where they now lived, her eyes growing even wilder as she paced as great a distance from him as she could. "It's too small!" she cried, frustration providing fuel for the anxiety she was feeling. "It's too small! I can't breathe! I can't live with these walls!" She was darting across the room, unable to hold still as the panic continued to roil within her. She could sense Wesley's eyes on her, but the sudden desire to be free of this place and to be free of him swamped over her awareness of him. "I can't breathe! There's no room for anything real…"
Wesley was still watching her, apparently unconcerned by the fact that she might easily have killed him. "It's all right," he told her, trying to calm her though she could hear the slight anger in his voice. He didn't make a move towards her, perhaps wiser than he'd been when his enthusiasm had prompted him to come so stupidly close to her.
She glared at him, the look in her eyes almost enough to slay him where he stood. It wasn't all right, she thought furiously, far from it. Didn't he understand how hard this was for her, staying in the same place with a disgusting human that interested her more than she could ever have wanted, trapped in another human's body and no hope of escape from either in sight? How dare he think he had the right to try and soothe her? She shoved her face towards his, the ice of her eyes glinting with the potency of her inhuman fury. "I should gut you where you stand," she hissed.
He jerked back, obviously wondering if she would carry out her threat, but she didn't take the time to guess if the vessel's memories would even let her hurt him. "You challenged me," she snarled, hating him for whatever it was he'd meant to the vessel, hating him because she hadn't been able to kill him. "There's not enough space to open my jaws. My face is not my face. I don't know what it will say…"
His calm, accented voice cut through her terror. "Illyria," he interrupted, his voice still hard and not holding even a fraction of the fear he should have felt for her in return. She looked at him, the part of her that had been the vessel already feeling soothed by him, that same part keeping her from feeling outrage that he'd used her name again. Her eyes met his, some of the panic draining from her as she waited to see what he would do.
"Come with me," he said.
**************************************************************************************************************************
He took her to the roof, holding the door open and indicating that she should move past him into the free air. He remained behind her as she came uncertainly but still eagerly forward, stepping into the open space. The demon-goddess stared up into the night sky with wonder in her ice-blue eyes, with an odd relief in her heart. There were fewer stars than she was used to, blocked as they were by the layer of pollution always over this city, but she would not have been more pleased if she'd been moving among them in person rather than simply staring up at them. They brought peace to her, reminded her that there was more in the universe than this world on which she'd been trapped.
But then Wesley came closer, and some of her peace shattered as she remembered what she now was, who she was now with. Wesley reminded her of the limitations she'd gained along with her new body, of the greatness she'd once had but had lost when she'd been betrayed and murdered by one of her own millions of years before. He reminded her of the fact that she was trapped here, lost in a human body that tormented her with memories she didn't want and couldn't quite absorb.
Wesley was watching her, following her movements as she lifted her blue-tinted face to the stars. "Are you all right?" He didn't sound like he cared if she actually was or not, but then he didn't quite sound like he didn't care, either, and she didn't know how to take that.
"I breathe easier," she said simply. And she did.
He was coming closer, once again not caring how dangerous she was. He had his hands shoved in the pockets of his pants, his hair ruffling a little in the same breeze that had eased her tension. "The walls don't press in as hard when you can't see them," he confided softly, and once again she marveled that his human perception could be so limited. Didn't he understand anything at all?
"They're still here," she returned, her voice too cold to make the words the retort they might have been. Coming from her, it was an observance, nothing more.
"Yes."
He fell silent again, moving to stand next to her, and she didn't know whether she should be amazed by his fearless audacity or disgusted with the hesitation that had her allowing this at all. Was she so weak that, even after she'd nearly killed him only moments before, she still failed to inspire fear in him? How had she come to this?
Her earlier elation at this small freedom died. "All I am is what I am," she murmured suddenly, not realizing that some of her renewed despair had crept into her voice. "I lived seven lives at once. I was power and the ecstasy of death. I was god to a god." She looked away, out onto this human world and away from the human keeper she no longer wanted to kill. "Now…I-I'm trapped," she said, moving slowly from him as he turned his head to stare at her. Her voice became harsh again, accusing as she spun to glare at him. "On a roof. Just one roof, in this time, in this place, with an unstable human who drinks too much whiskey and called me a smurf."
He laughed a little, at that, though she hadn't been trying to amuse him. A part of her—the part of her that had once been the vessel—felt a small pang of joy that he was finally able to laugh at all, that he was finally coming out of the despair he'd been in ever since the vessel's soul had been destroyed, but it was a tired joy, just as his laughter was tired. There was no true gladness in either of them.
"You don't worship me at all, do you?" This was not news to her, had not been since those first moments after she'd taken this body. If Wesley worshipped anything or anybody, it had been the vessel. He had loved her, she knew, adored her as few beings could adore anything or anybody. Her death had killed a large part of his soul, had taken from him his vitality, his reason for living. Now that she was gone, he would never respect or love anyone the same way again…certainly not the demon who had killed her in the first place.
He didn't bother to address that, probably knowing she wouldn't like what he said. He only moved closer to the edge of the roof, his own features and voice hardening all over again. "And you really can't leave," he said, his voice careful enough that she couldn't decide if he was taunting her or simply making an observation.
"I…don't know," she confessed uneasily, no longer trying to hide the truth from him, taking a strange comfort in sharing her burden. "I fear in any other dimension, in this form, I'd be but prey to those I knew." She paused, staring down at the human hands that should never have been hers. "I reek of humanity."
"Don't flatter yourself," he said, once again surprising her with his ability to insult her and survive. Why was it that she hadn't killed him yet? She had destroyed greater beings for less than what he'd done to her, but she could no longer muster even the smallest desire to end his pitiful life. Why couldn't she kill him? He didn't even realize the gift she'd given him, in confessing her fears when she probably wouldn't have revealed them even to one of her own kind. Instead of being impressed by the boon she'd given him, he sounded almost…amused.
She strode angrily over to him, determined to put an end to that amusement, but then stopped as she came near enough to the edge to look down. Her anger left her, immediately replaced by still more surprise. She didn't notice the uncertain glance Wesley sent her way, didn't notice that she'd startled him by coming so close. He could have reached out and touched her, if he'd wanted to, though she looked too much like his mate for him ever to want to.
The leather-clad demoness leaned against the edge of the roof, pressing human hands against the tiling. "Your world is so small," she observed, not stopping to wondering why she was so at ease with him, not stopping to wonder why she had accepted his companionship.
Her words might have had a double meaning, though neither of them realized it. She might just as easily have been referring to the frail human woman who had taken his worthless soul for her own and made herself his world without even knowing what she had done to all three of them. She might have been referring to the fact that, having lost his human lover, Wesley's world had become even smaller, shrinking until he had nothing left but his memories and his grief. Illyria didn't let that truth occur to her, truly not liking to think about the woman whose body she had stolen any more than she had to, and Wesley was already too aware of how much his lover had meant to him to bring up something he'd known from the beginning. It would have been pointless even to think it, so neither of them did.
Illyria continued to stare at his world, not liking or understanding what she saw. "And yet, you box yourselves in rooms even smaller. You shut yourselves inside…in rooms, in routines," she said, waiting to see if he would give her the explanation she'd been asking for.
"There are things worse than walls." He was talking about her again, she knew, about her death. Was the vessel—Fred—ever absent from his thoughts? Wesley was being haunted by the human woman he'd loved, but he didn't seem to care. It was, Illyria thought, as though Wesley thought it preferable to be eaten away by memories of the vessel than to forget her. Had she truly been so special, so precious that Wesley would rather lose his own soul than to let go of his love?
Wesley was still speaking, his voice deepening with his unnaturally intense emotions. "Terrible," he continued, "and beautiful. If we look at them for too long, they will burn right through us." He stared at her in return, finally seeing her, finally able to meet her eyes without wincing. "Truths we couldn't bear, not every day."
Perhaps his understanding wasn't so limited, after all. "We are so weak," she whispered, no longer hating him but hating herself for being as she was. Would she never regain her earlier greatness? Or was she to spend the rest of eternity, trapped in the body of a woman she both envied and hated? She looked over at the human man beside her, and the ice in her eyes suddenly softened. Perhaps, she thought, her imprisonment might not be so terrible as she'd originally imagined.
"Yes," Wesley agreed, his earlier animosity temporarily buried beneath their shared misery, unaware that her attitude had taken on a new slant, however brief and slight that change might be. "Yes, we are."