TITLE: Ever After
AUTHOR: Indri
SUMMARY: Angel, Riley, Spike and Parker some years later.
SPOILERS: "The Body". Otherwise, I'm extrapolating from
Season 5 without having seen Season 6.
RATING: R, to be on the safe side.
PART: 3 of 4. Series is complete.
DISCLAIMER: The characters do not belong to me.
FEEDBACK: archaeoindri@yahoo.com
EVER AFTER
PART THREE
SPIKE: WHAT'S MY LINE?
Spike has the woman pinned against the brick, one of his hands against
a shoulder, the other holding down an arm. She's screaming just as
hard as she can, her head thrown back, her makeup running, and her
throat is beginning to tear from the abuse. Won't make any
difference---the repair shop's closed and the _thud thud thud_ of the
band next door drowns her out. She's so frightened that she doesn't
even think to kick him (he'd only break her legs) and he begins to
smell the scent of urine over the gasoline-and-motor-oil stench of the
air. She doesn't plead---she's well beyond speech---but just emits
these panicked, gasping shrieks like some sort of car alarm, the kind
that he'd kick in the doors of a Mercedes to disable. She's really a
great screamer, so Spike holds her there to listen until she grows
hoarse. And all the while he marvels at how this just doesn't seem to
do it for him anymore.
It's conditioning, he knows, like those animal experiments, and he's
pissed to think that he's not so much love's bitch anymore as Pavlov's
dog. But you can break conditioning, if you're smart and you're
willing to make the effort. So he will.
Later, he sits in the mall, slurping down strawberry milkshakes and
eating fat wontons out of a cardboard box. The food court is thronged
with humans on a Friday night: shitty parents slapping their bouncing
ADD kids, bored teens bitching about one another as part of their
storm-in-a-teacup home dramas. Tired, puffy mallworkers clearing
vacant tables of coleslaw and baby spit.
He thinks about how he'd do it. Start with the ADD kids first, just
hoist them out of the way when their parents' backs were turned. Quick
snap of the neck to shut them up, drain them and dump them. They're
small enough to fit in the ThankYou! bins without any trouble. Then
the parents---''Kid, 'bout so high? Headed down there.'' Grab them in
the corridor leading to the loos. You can stack four or five corpses
in one cubicle, if you know what you're doing. The teens? Too
easy. They'll go to the carpark later, for some stolen hooch or a bit
of a grope. The number he's done in the back of a car---all
unappealing, goose-bumped teenflesh, though. And the mallworkers,
coming out all alone at the 3am exit outdoors, they don't even
struggle.
Yeah, he could still do it. Take them all out in one go.
Not tonight.
He finds a liquor store that's shut early, row upon row of coloured
bottles visible through the glass. He thrusts a boot through the
window, steps in, braces himself for the alarm. The noise is
shattering, but he won't stay long. He grabs a single bottle and
stashes it in the pocket of his coat before settling in for some
serious property damage. He just walks along the aisles, his arms
outstretched, toppling every last bottle off the shelf so that the
floor is covered with shards of broken glass and the fumes are making
him drunk.
Dru found him one time, because she's bloody psychic. She'd turned up
late one evening at his motel room door, just as this game show was
ending. He'd blocked the doorway with his body and asked her what she
was after. "My Spike,'' she said, cooing and purring, leaning over to
kiss him just above his belt. She'd licked her way up over the fabric
from his nipple to his neck, digging her fingers into his sides in a
kind of embrace. And he'd thought, why the hell not?, and had started
kissing her mouth.
She'd known that he'd finally left Buffy for good. "She was bad for
you,'' she scolded as Spike closed the door and started stripping
her. But she was feeling a bit playful and wouldn't let him take her
frock off straight away. Instead she'd sat back on a chair and pushed
his head down under her long skirts, wrapping her legs around
him. "You shouldn't have gone away,'' she'd admonished as if it were
all his fault that she had left.
Then for a while, when he was fucking her on the floor, everything had
seemed almost alright. She'd felt cool and familiar and if he closed
his eyes he could pretend they were in that little room in New York,
the only space they'd had out of the view of the minions. It had been
just a five-foot concrete cell, and they'd had to do it standing up or
lying diagonally. Good times and occasional concussion.
After they'd finished (all too quick) Dru had hauled him up onto the
bed. She'd held him there with his arms outstretched and started
biting him: pleasant, shallow cuts on his belly and inner thigh. Then
she gave his cheek an affectionate peck with her demon-face and
started to tell him what it was that she wanted him to arrange. He was
too out of it to take it in---something about New Zealand---and he got
to thinking about those giant birds they used to have there, all eight
foot tall and killer beak, like evil Big Birds, and he wondered how
you'd go about killing one of those. They were probably too tall for a
good kick to the neck, but maybe if you took out a kneecap first you
could wrench off its head. The thought interested him so much that he
almost said to her, "Yes, we'll go to New Zealand.'' But those birds
had been extinct for a few hundred years---amazing the crap he
knew---so it just wasn't going to be worth it.
He turned to look at her as she prattled on: her pale skin, her dark
hair, the curiously old-fashioned contours of her face and her long
body. He tried to remember why he'd loved her. Because he'd thought
that she needed him, because she'd picked him out when no-one had ever
picked him out before. Because he'd been pathetic. Still, he couldn't
really hold that against her. She had loved him just as much as she
could---only it had turned out that that hadn't been very much at all.
Eventually she had stopped talking and sat up a little to rub her hand
down his chest. He'd smiled then with his eyes closed, breathing in
her scent, as if she smelt of old and happy holidays, like brandy and
plum pudding. But then she had hopped out of the bed to rummage in her
little bag and sure enough, when she came back it was with her box of
knives. She laid three out, in ceremonial fashion, in a row across
Spike's chest. Then she settled back against the bedhead, with her
hands in her lap and with an expectant air. And Spike could only hate
this, because this part was always really about Angelus, and it wasn't
something he'd ever actually enjoyed for its own sake, even when he'd
been really really angry with her about the chaos demon and he was
trying to win her back.
So he lay there (like someone dead, hah hah) until he heard her snort
with frustration, and then he turned away from her, tipping the
scalpels carefully onto the bed and then onto the floor, because Dru
wasn't above stabbing him with them when she got pissed, which was
going to be about---now. She started pounding his back with her fists
as he leant over to pull on his trousers. Because they really were
through. Because after a hundred years together they'd found out that
Dru preferred Angelus and Spike preferred dog-racing.
By 2am Spike is in the graveyard, killing his own kind. It's the only
bad habit he still has, now that he's stopped sending postcards to
Dawn. Demons fight back, and that, for Spike, is the point. He feels
a need to reach limits, test skills, risk himself. Humans are too
feeble, piss-weak, no challenge there. He figures that's why, hours
earlier, when he slapped that woman about, he didn't enjoy it at
all. No glory, no thrill. But that's the conditioning again, just
something he's got to work at until it breaks.
He'd felt nauseous when he'd finally left Sunnydale. For three days
he'd knelt in front of a motel toilet, wanting to vomit but not sure
if he could. He'd wanted to upchuck Buffy, puke her and her friends
all the way out of him, round the U-bend, away to those sewers. He'd
violently wished that he'd never met any of them.
And he wished that he couldn't remember what she'd felt like, her
slick skin, her warmth, how her breasts had been just the right size
to hold onto when he'd taken her from behind. Muscle against muscle,
push against shove, and no fucking around with little knives and petty
rituals. Just violence and desire.
He can't imagine how he could ever get there again, so he's not going
to try. He's on his own now. No more laughingstock attempts at
relationships, no more humiliating himself for no reason. It isn't
worth it. You just never get out as much as you put in.
It's late, late at night now and the city streets are dark and
empty. The only sounds are of his boots on the pavement and apartment
airconditioners. This used to be his favourite time, when he would
know, with a fair amount of certainty, that there was nothing faster,
or stronger, or more skilled in the whole bloody town. He could go
anywhere, break in anywhere, take what he wanted. The place was his.
The place _is_ his.
He's in an older part of the city now, narrow apartment blocks with
not enough parking space. The streets are lined end-to-end with cars
and SUVs. He leaps up onto the boot of one of them, feels his foot
sink just a little into the metal, steps up onto the top then back
down onto the hood. He walks from car to car, just because he can,
because the damage feels good beneath the soles of his feet.
If only he'd worked out before what his problem was, why his unlife
had been so fucked-up for so long. But it had always been a bit of a
blind spot for Spike---bit of a blind spot even for his human
actually---no matter how many times people had tried to beat it into
him.
It was all about knowing your place.
And Spike, well, he'd never much cared for rules and strictures, never
really bothered with what he was supposed to do, only with what looked
fun at the time, even if he knew (and he almost always knew) that what
he wanted was not what was good for him. So he hadn't paid attention
and it had all gone wrong.
Somewhere, Spike believes, the Powers That Be have a filing cabinet,
probably (because he remembers what offices are like) somewhere in
hell. And inside there is a list with his name on it which specifies
his place in the universe. And it says "Evil.''
Which is fair enough, because he's a vampire, yeah?, and he's not
sodding-sainted-he-always-gets-to-be-the-exception-bloody-Angel, is
he? But it's meant that every time he's stepped out of line, even a
little bit---WHAM---he gets hit. And what had he been doing? Hanging
out with humans, getting to know them. He'd taken to beating up
demons, even helped to save the world a couple of times. So no wonder
he'd been crippled, dumped, sneered at, experimented on, tortured and
abused ever since. He hadn't been doing what he was supposed to do.
And Spike hates that, he hates that he can't just do as he likes. But
never let it be said (by anyone except Angelus) that Spike can't learn
something when it's beaten into him, repeatedly, with a large
stick. He's got the message now, thank you very much, he gets
it. No-one wants a vampire that thinks for itself, that doesn't so
much reject the script as doesn't bother to read it. Demons don't want
it. The Powers don't want it. And Buffy and her crew sure as hell
don't.
So he'll make it simple for them, then, if that's how it is, even if
the coat doesn't feel as if it fits anymore.
'Cause it's not a bad gig, all in all. He knows he'll never make it to
the realm of Mr Really-World-Destroying Evil, but if that means he's
neither Angelus Mark II nor the God of Bad Home Dye-jobs, then that's
fine. He'll stick with what he's good at, what he knows.
He'll be the everyday death of the unwary, the one who kills you for
those little mistakes that don't seem much of a risk: the alley
short-cut, the ride you accept when the last bus has gone, the man who
picks a fight with you in the bar. He'll be at the funfairs and the
truckstops and the late night stores, waiting for people to slip
up. And then he'll punish their tiny misdemeanors even harder than his
have been.
So he walks smoothly from car to car, looking out for someone to
practice on, because he's knows he's not back at full strength yet,
(but please know that he's _trying_ and that they can stop kicking him
in the teeth). Wondering why this doesn't feel fun any more.
Spike wants his unlife back.
AUTHOR: Indri
SUMMARY: Angel, Riley, Spike and Parker some years later.
SPOILERS: "The Body". Otherwise, I'm extrapolating from
Season 5 without having seen Season 6.
RATING: R, to be on the safe side.
PART: 3 of 4. Series is complete.
DISCLAIMER: The characters do not belong to me.
FEEDBACK: archaeoindri@yahoo.com
EVER AFTER
PART THREE
SPIKE: WHAT'S MY LINE?
Spike has the woman pinned against the brick, one of his hands against
a shoulder, the other holding down an arm. She's screaming just as
hard as she can, her head thrown back, her makeup running, and her
throat is beginning to tear from the abuse. Won't make any
difference---the repair shop's closed and the _thud thud thud_ of the
band next door drowns her out. She's so frightened that she doesn't
even think to kick him (he'd only break her legs) and he begins to
smell the scent of urine over the gasoline-and-motor-oil stench of the
air. She doesn't plead---she's well beyond speech---but just emits
these panicked, gasping shrieks like some sort of car alarm, the kind
that he'd kick in the doors of a Mercedes to disable. She's really a
great screamer, so Spike holds her there to listen until she grows
hoarse. And all the while he marvels at how this just doesn't seem to
do it for him anymore.
It's conditioning, he knows, like those animal experiments, and he's
pissed to think that he's not so much love's bitch anymore as Pavlov's
dog. But you can break conditioning, if you're smart and you're
willing to make the effort. So he will.
Later, he sits in the mall, slurping down strawberry milkshakes and
eating fat wontons out of a cardboard box. The food court is thronged
with humans on a Friday night: shitty parents slapping their bouncing
ADD kids, bored teens bitching about one another as part of their
storm-in-a-teacup home dramas. Tired, puffy mallworkers clearing
vacant tables of coleslaw and baby spit.
He thinks about how he'd do it. Start with the ADD kids first, just
hoist them out of the way when their parents' backs were turned. Quick
snap of the neck to shut them up, drain them and dump them. They're
small enough to fit in the ThankYou! bins without any trouble. Then
the parents---''Kid, 'bout so high? Headed down there.'' Grab them in
the corridor leading to the loos. You can stack four or five corpses
in one cubicle, if you know what you're doing. The teens? Too
easy. They'll go to the carpark later, for some stolen hooch or a bit
of a grope. The number he's done in the back of a car---all
unappealing, goose-bumped teenflesh, though. And the mallworkers,
coming out all alone at the 3am exit outdoors, they don't even
struggle.
Yeah, he could still do it. Take them all out in one go.
Not tonight.
He finds a liquor store that's shut early, row upon row of coloured
bottles visible through the glass. He thrusts a boot through the
window, steps in, braces himself for the alarm. The noise is
shattering, but he won't stay long. He grabs a single bottle and
stashes it in the pocket of his coat before settling in for some
serious property damage. He just walks along the aisles, his arms
outstretched, toppling every last bottle off the shelf so that the
floor is covered with shards of broken glass and the fumes are making
him drunk.
Dru found him one time, because she's bloody psychic. She'd turned up
late one evening at his motel room door, just as this game show was
ending. He'd blocked the doorway with his body and asked her what she
was after. "My Spike,'' she said, cooing and purring, leaning over to
kiss him just above his belt. She'd licked her way up over the fabric
from his nipple to his neck, digging her fingers into his sides in a
kind of embrace. And he'd thought, why the hell not?, and had started
kissing her mouth.
She'd known that he'd finally left Buffy for good. "She was bad for
you,'' she scolded as Spike closed the door and started stripping
her. But she was feeling a bit playful and wouldn't let him take her
frock off straight away. Instead she'd sat back on a chair and pushed
his head down under her long skirts, wrapping her legs around
him. "You shouldn't have gone away,'' she'd admonished as if it were
all his fault that she had left.
Then for a while, when he was fucking her on the floor, everything had
seemed almost alright. She'd felt cool and familiar and if he closed
his eyes he could pretend they were in that little room in New York,
the only space they'd had out of the view of the minions. It had been
just a five-foot concrete cell, and they'd had to do it standing up or
lying diagonally. Good times and occasional concussion.
After they'd finished (all too quick) Dru had hauled him up onto the
bed. She'd held him there with his arms outstretched and started
biting him: pleasant, shallow cuts on his belly and inner thigh. Then
she gave his cheek an affectionate peck with her demon-face and
started to tell him what it was that she wanted him to arrange. He was
too out of it to take it in---something about New Zealand---and he got
to thinking about those giant birds they used to have there, all eight
foot tall and killer beak, like evil Big Birds, and he wondered how
you'd go about killing one of those. They were probably too tall for a
good kick to the neck, but maybe if you took out a kneecap first you
could wrench off its head. The thought interested him so much that he
almost said to her, "Yes, we'll go to New Zealand.'' But those birds
had been extinct for a few hundred years---amazing the crap he
knew---so it just wasn't going to be worth it.
He turned to look at her as she prattled on: her pale skin, her dark
hair, the curiously old-fashioned contours of her face and her long
body. He tried to remember why he'd loved her. Because he'd thought
that she needed him, because she'd picked him out when no-one had ever
picked him out before. Because he'd been pathetic. Still, he couldn't
really hold that against her. She had loved him just as much as she
could---only it had turned out that that hadn't been very much at all.
Eventually she had stopped talking and sat up a little to rub her hand
down his chest. He'd smiled then with his eyes closed, breathing in
her scent, as if she smelt of old and happy holidays, like brandy and
plum pudding. But then she had hopped out of the bed to rummage in her
little bag and sure enough, when she came back it was with her box of
knives. She laid three out, in ceremonial fashion, in a row across
Spike's chest. Then she settled back against the bedhead, with her
hands in her lap and with an expectant air. And Spike could only hate
this, because this part was always really about Angelus, and it wasn't
something he'd ever actually enjoyed for its own sake, even when he'd
been really really angry with her about the chaos demon and he was
trying to win her back.
So he lay there (like someone dead, hah hah) until he heard her snort
with frustration, and then he turned away from her, tipping the
scalpels carefully onto the bed and then onto the floor, because Dru
wasn't above stabbing him with them when she got pissed, which was
going to be about---now. She started pounding his back with her fists
as he leant over to pull on his trousers. Because they really were
through. Because after a hundred years together they'd found out that
Dru preferred Angelus and Spike preferred dog-racing.
By 2am Spike is in the graveyard, killing his own kind. It's the only
bad habit he still has, now that he's stopped sending postcards to
Dawn. Demons fight back, and that, for Spike, is the point. He feels
a need to reach limits, test skills, risk himself. Humans are too
feeble, piss-weak, no challenge there. He figures that's why, hours
earlier, when he slapped that woman about, he didn't enjoy it at
all. No glory, no thrill. But that's the conditioning again, just
something he's got to work at until it breaks.
He'd felt nauseous when he'd finally left Sunnydale. For three days
he'd knelt in front of a motel toilet, wanting to vomit but not sure
if he could. He'd wanted to upchuck Buffy, puke her and her friends
all the way out of him, round the U-bend, away to those sewers. He'd
violently wished that he'd never met any of them.
And he wished that he couldn't remember what she'd felt like, her
slick skin, her warmth, how her breasts had been just the right size
to hold onto when he'd taken her from behind. Muscle against muscle,
push against shove, and no fucking around with little knives and petty
rituals. Just violence and desire.
He can't imagine how he could ever get there again, so he's not going
to try. He's on his own now. No more laughingstock attempts at
relationships, no more humiliating himself for no reason. It isn't
worth it. You just never get out as much as you put in.
It's late, late at night now and the city streets are dark and
empty. The only sounds are of his boots on the pavement and apartment
airconditioners. This used to be his favourite time, when he would
know, with a fair amount of certainty, that there was nothing faster,
or stronger, or more skilled in the whole bloody town. He could go
anywhere, break in anywhere, take what he wanted. The place was his.
The place _is_ his.
He's in an older part of the city now, narrow apartment blocks with
not enough parking space. The streets are lined end-to-end with cars
and SUVs. He leaps up onto the boot of one of them, feels his foot
sink just a little into the metal, steps up onto the top then back
down onto the hood. He walks from car to car, just because he can,
because the damage feels good beneath the soles of his feet.
If only he'd worked out before what his problem was, why his unlife
had been so fucked-up for so long. But it had always been a bit of a
blind spot for Spike---bit of a blind spot even for his human
actually---no matter how many times people had tried to beat it into
him.
It was all about knowing your place.
And Spike, well, he'd never much cared for rules and strictures, never
really bothered with what he was supposed to do, only with what looked
fun at the time, even if he knew (and he almost always knew) that what
he wanted was not what was good for him. So he hadn't paid attention
and it had all gone wrong.
Somewhere, Spike believes, the Powers That Be have a filing cabinet,
probably (because he remembers what offices are like) somewhere in
hell. And inside there is a list with his name on it which specifies
his place in the universe. And it says "Evil.''
Which is fair enough, because he's a vampire, yeah?, and he's not
sodding-sainted-he-always-gets-to-be-the-exception-bloody-Angel, is
he? But it's meant that every time he's stepped out of line, even a
little bit---WHAM---he gets hit. And what had he been doing? Hanging
out with humans, getting to know them. He'd taken to beating up
demons, even helped to save the world a couple of times. So no wonder
he'd been crippled, dumped, sneered at, experimented on, tortured and
abused ever since. He hadn't been doing what he was supposed to do.
And Spike hates that, he hates that he can't just do as he likes. But
never let it be said (by anyone except Angelus) that Spike can't learn
something when it's beaten into him, repeatedly, with a large
stick. He's got the message now, thank you very much, he gets
it. No-one wants a vampire that thinks for itself, that doesn't so
much reject the script as doesn't bother to read it. Demons don't want
it. The Powers don't want it. And Buffy and her crew sure as hell
don't.
So he'll make it simple for them, then, if that's how it is, even if
the coat doesn't feel as if it fits anymore.
'Cause it's not a bad gig, all in all. He knows he'll never make it to
the realm of Mr Really-World-Destroying Evil, but if that means he's
neither Angelus Mark II nor the God of Bad Home Dye-jobs, then that's
fine. He'll stick with what he's good at, what he knows.
He'll be the everyday death of the unwary, the one who kills you for
those little mistakes that don't seem much of a risk: the alley
short-cut, the ride you accept when the last bus has gone, the man who
picks a fight with you in the bar. He'll be at the funfairs and the
truckstops and the late night stores, waiting for people to slip
up. And then he'll punish their tiny misdemeanors even harder than his
have been.
So he walks smoothly from car to car, looking out for someone to
practice on, because he's knows he's not back at full strength yet,
(but please know that he's _trying_ and that they can stop kicking him
in the teeth). Wondering why this doesn't feel fun any more.
Spike wants his unlife back.