Endurance of the Silence
Angel wasn't entirely sure when he had fallen asleep, but when he opened his eyes it felt like it had been days since he'd closed them. The first thing that registered was the fact that he was alone on his bed, the weight of Desiree's body no longer resting on top of his. The second thing that came to his attention was the faint, almost inaudible, crying that was coming from the entrance area of his apartment. He was shocked at how tired his body was as he tried to pull himself off his bed, nearly losing his balance in the process. It wasn't hard to realize that offering himself to Desiree to feed on while she was unconscious and unable to control herself was a foolish decision, but he didn't entirely regret it.
"Desiree?" Angel called out in a soft voice, knowing that if a calm, gentle approach was best for a crying woman.
The crying toned down, sniffles and heavy breathing nearly silenced at his voice. Stepping along the cold flooring, Angel eyes sought out where Desiree was, listening intently for where she could be. Rounding the couch, he nearly missed her when he realized no one was sitting on the couch, but she was instead sitting on the floor in front of the furniture, curled in on her body.
"Desiree," Angel began gently, moving forward. She shied away from him, though, and tucked her head down against her thigh and prevented him from properly seeing her. "Desiree, what's wrong? Is it your neck? Wesley and Cordelia went out to try and find an antidote-" he cut himself off when he saw her shaking her head, her shoulders still trembling. "Does your arm hurt? I can change the bandage." Again, she shook her head softly. Reaching forward, Angel gently lifted her head by placing a finger beneath her delicate looking jaw, forcing her to look into his eyes.
The dullness that had overtaken the usually beautiful vibrant blue tore at Angel's dead heart, the cold sweat still lingering on her forehead with her hair stuck to her skin. She was trembling, her arms holding her knees close to herself. She still looked terribly sick, even after he had allowed her to feed from him so that she could heal.
"Please, tell me what's wrong."
Again she shook her head, almost as though she was denying his request, before she took his hand from beneath her chin and manoeuvred it to instead wrap loosely around her throat. She opened her mouth as though she was about to speak, but no sound passed her lips. She squeezed Angel's hand, forcing him to squeeze her throat and opened her mouth, still remaining silent.
"The demon took your voice," Angel breathed out, watching as new tears appeared in her dull blue eyes, her hand falling away from his and her head falling down once again. Moving forward, he wrapped an arm around her shoulders and drew her against his still bared chest. She was eerily silent as she cried, leaning against his chest as tears trailed down her cheeks in clear streaks. "We'll work this out, Desiree. Don't worry; I promise you, we'll get your voice back."
Desiree just kept shaking her head, as though he was lying to her over and over. There was nothing more that Angel could do to try and reassure her, so he simply kept a hold of her and tried his best to calm her down and comfort her.
It was an hour later when he was able to get her moving, leaving the place that she had curled up on the floor, to go and take a shower. Angel lent her the same clothes that she had worn the first time she stayed at his place, sitting on the couch with a book open to the image of the creature that had been found in the alley. He could hear her moving around inside, a sharp contrast to the silent movements that she had been able to move through the previous time she had used his shower.
It was also around that time that Cordelia and Wesley clamored down the stairs, appearing out of breath. Angel rose from where he was sitting, looking between them. They didn't appear to have the anti-toxin, but there was a light in Wesley's eyes that promised good news.
"He did not have the anti-toxin, but he gave me the way in which to make it," Wesley began immediately, not bothering to try and beat around the bush in any manner of speaking. "The only problem is that we need the poison as one of the components, so we'll need to get our hands on that. What is in Desiree's blood won't be clean enough to work."
"Where is she?" Cordelia asked as she leaned around the corner of the room, trying to locate the other woman who was no longer lying on Angel's bed.
"She's in the shower." Somehow, Angel was able to make even that sentence sound morbid and the two knew something had happened. "It turns out the demon was able to steal her voice somehow; she can't talk."
"Geez, she can't catch a break," Cordelia mumbled, just before the door to the washroom was opened and Desiree stepped out, Angel's large clothes once more hanging heavily on her smaller frame. She still looked as pale as a corpse and her hair was wet and hung around her face in un-brushed tendrils, but she was awake and that provided some positive reactions.
"How are you feeling?" Wesley asked in concern as soon as she had stopped just inside the living area of the small apartment, her eyes falling to the floor in something akin to shame or embarrassment. Her only answer was to shake her head in a negative response.
"Well," Cordelia interrupted, already beginning to hate the painful silence of Desiree having no voice, and held up a bag of what appeared to be groceries. "If you're going to be staying here, you'll need food and Angel seriously lacks that. So, I took it upon myself to get you something that isn't blood." It appeared as though Desiree wanted to smile, but her face couldn't quite bring itself to show the emotions. However, her tense and withdrawn posture relaxed just slightly.
"You just didn't want to go into the magik shop," Wesley threw in as he leaned casually against the wall.
Cordelia shot him a look that brought a tiny smile of amusement to Angel's lips. "There were dead things hanging on the walls. Dried dead things."
Before the argument could escalade, Desiree had stepped between them and gently nudged Cordelia's arm without touching any skin, turning her toward the kitchen and succeeding to end the conversation between the two opposites. Cordelia forgot all about Wesley and began to adamantly speak to Desiree, even though she knew that the other woman couldn't talk back in any way. Desiree nodded along to encourage her, though, and they soon disappeared into the other room.
"So where can we find this toxin?" Angel asked once they were gone, directing Wesley's attention back to him.
"That's the problem. I don't know yet."
Night grew later and soon it was time for Wesley and Cordelia to depart, no further knowledge on the Toxin having been found. Desiree seemed out of it for most of the night, staring off into space or reading through the page of the demon that had attacked her over and over again until she probably knew it word for word. Cordelia was able to convince her to eat some fruit, but aside from that the rest of the food went away in the fridge for another time. Angel figured that even if she had been capable of speaking, she wouldn't have had much to say. He noticed that she was more of an observer, preferring to stand to the side and watch in order to calculate the right move before acting.
Angel could tell she was discretely relieved when the others left, and finally removed herself from the corner she had placed herself in on his couch.
"You should take more, Desiree," Angel tried to encourage once Cordelia and her badgering nature had finally departed and left the two alone. The woman shook her head, though, and turned herself slightly away from him, angled so that she was staring off past him and into the bedroom instead of having to meet his gaze. "What if I don't mean the food Cordelia brought?"
Her head lifted and her dulled eyes looked at him with surprise before she shook her head again, this time more with a look of concern on her face. She was afraid she would hurt him and take too much of his energy. Even as a vampire, someone that didn't tire easily, he could still become weak and even die if she sucked too much of his undead strength from him.
"You need it, Desiree," Angel continued, moving to sit right in front of her. She tried to get to her feet and put distance between the again, but he caught her wrist and gently sat her back down. "Your body can fight against the poison and the infection longer if you feed, we both know that. I don't know how long it'll take to get the anti-toxin." Lifting a hand to her cheek, she attempted to speak but no sound left her lips. Her eyes were closed and she refused to look at him.
She felt much warmer than when he had first taken her from Anthony's car, but he missed the heat that she had carried with her when they were in the Demon Club.
"Let me help you, Desiree," he hushed as he leaned forward to ghost his lips along her temple, the skin contact making her shiver as she supressed the urges he was stirring inside of her. Instinct and thought warred inside her head.
When she was distracted with her own thoughts, Angel used the hand still resting on her cheek to turn her to face him, pressing his lips to hers as he had done in the club. She snapped back, breaking the contact, and drew in a shuddering breath. Angel took her arms and wrapped them around his neck as he pressed his lips to hers again, this time preventing her from pulling away. She didn't have the desire to break the contact a second time and instead slipped her hands into the back of his shirt to touch more of his skin.
"Let me save you," Angel whispered against her lips before he allowed her to separate them long enough to strip him of his shirt and bare his flesh again. Relief sparked inside of Angel when she opened her eyes to show the vibrant azure colour once more, the dullness having faded away at last. He knew it would return, but Angel still let his worry for the Siren lift as her lips sought his once more while her quickly warming fingers began to trace along his back, following the notches of his spine.
The bruises on her neck, already mostly healed from earlier that night, faded completely from her flesh with only the scratch marks left behind. She didn't show any signs of discomfort from the gashes on her arm so he could only assume that those had healed themselves beneath the bandages as well, the flesh no longer marred with imperfections.
Angel could feel the dizziness coming to him much faster than before, making him sway on the spot as his hands grasped desperately at the back of her shirt.
Noticing the change, she quickly pulled away from him to scoot back along the couch cushions, her shining eyes looked up to him through dark lashes as she took in deep gulps of air to try and calm her racing heart. Angel grasped the back of the couch for support as he no longer had her to take hold of. "I won't hurt you, Desiree."
'You' she mouthed back to him, looking concerned. Shaking her head, she felt along her throat with a faint smile, as though to tell him that there was no more that he could do. Her bruises had healed and the infection would not be fought off so easily. Knowing that he understood why she had backed off, Desiree rose from her place and leaned forward to press a ghost of a kiss on his lips, her hands framing his face with soothing warmth. Angel could hear the silent words. Thank you.
Moving passed him she took hold of his arm to guide him with her to the bedroom section of the apartment. Angel went with ease, allowing her to move him to lie on the bed before she slipped onto the other side, sliding under the covers while he remained on top of the thick duvet, watching her carefully as she closed her eyes and exhaled softly. Allowing her to feed from him in intervals so close together had depleted his strength and he couldn't keep his eyes open for long, soon slipping into sleep alongside Desiree.
Angel woke hours after the sun had raised, his eyes snapping open at the quiet sound of pages turning. Slipping from the comfort of his bed, he saw Desiree sitting on the couch with the books stacked beside her, her still bright eyes skimming through the pages quickly. Her fingers feathered over the paper with the lightest caress, showing how delicate she was with the old texts that Angel had stocked up. When she heard him moving about her eyes flicked over to him and there was a soft smile that touched her lips in replacement to a 'good morning'.
"How are you feeling?" he asked as he sat on her free side carefully so as not to knock over any of her open books. She was looking through the toxins that they had been searching through the night before, perhaps wishing for more luck than the others. She nodded her head in an affirmative response, glancing up from her book to look into his dark eyes. "I'm going to grab a shower," he said softly so as not to further disrupt her and moved to the washroom to the sound of flipping pages.
It seemed that her scent followed after him wherever he went in his apartment, even though it was all of his own possessions, just having her around left her scent on everything; his clothes smelt of her, the furniture and even the walls themselves. Her Siren heritage made her scent strong to other predators, but also to those that would have been considered her prey.
When he stepped out from his bedroom, dressed in fresh clothes, she was no longer in the living room but had moved to the kitchen. She had pulled her hair up into a messed bun, the rings of red still loose enough that some tumbled down her back as she sliced an apple that had been amongst Cordelia's groceries. She looked over her shoulder to him, the bright blue of her eyes illuminated in the darkness of his basement apartment.
"I have to go back up and help Cordelia and Wes, but you can come up if you want," he offered, noticing that her feeding had made her slightly restless. In silent response she looked down at her clothes, or rather Angel's, before she looked up to him curiously. "We don't really get many people in unless it's for a job, so I think you'll be okay."
After collecting her apples slices in a bowl she followed Angel to the elevator. The elevator wasn't small for two people, but Angel stood directly at her side as they ascended. The light from Angel's office illuminated the space of the elevator, but it was still quite dark considering the curtains had been drawn closed to prevent sunlight from getting inside. He pulled the protective gates away from the exit and allowed Desiree to slip out first, her bare feet padding softly on the floors.
"Hey!" Cordelia cried out excitedly at the sight of the Demon, causing Desiree to smile in amusement and move over to greet the other woman as best she could. Cordelia manoeuvred her over to the couch and sat her down as she began to go on a rant about having to get her other clothes again. Desiree didn't stop her and simply ate her apple slices as she watched Cordelia's antics with mirth dancing in her vibrant eyes.
"How is she?" Wesley asked Angel as they two women remained in the front part of the office, leaving the men to watch from the doorway to Angel's smaller space.
"The injuries that her body could heal are gone, but she still has the infection and her voice isn't back," Angel explained as he frowned, his eyes landing on the marks that remained on Desiree's neck. "Was there any luck on your end?"
Wesley heaved a sigh and turned away from the doorway to sit on the chair across from Angel's desk. "I haven't been able to find anything on the toxin, which will make it impossible to create an anti-toxin." Wesley watched as Angel circled around his desk to take his own seat before the window, his eyes lingering on the window between rooms that allowed him to see the two women, one chattering away while the other silently endured. "But, there has been activity near The Delgado that Anthony told me about over the phone that could lead us to whoever was employing that demon."
I'm slowly giving small doses of Angel/Desiree interactions, but I don't know whether it's a treat for you guys or torture ;)
Anyway, I hope that you all liked it and I'll do my best to get another out soon. Please review! It's always lovely to hear from you!
