Darla

Part One

Down in the lobby of the Hyperion, the four living members of team Angel were quietly discussing what to do about their undead boss. He had been upstairs, shut away in his room, for a couple of days now, and his friends knew that this could not bode well. 'We were supposed to be keeping him busy,' Cordelia hissed, 'what happened to that? Now we're just letting him sit upstairs, stewing in his own broodiness, obsessing over Darla?'

'Cases have been a little thin on the ground,' Wesley pointed out. 'It would have helped if we had had something to distract him with.'

'Well I gave him all those art supplies - that should help,' Cordelia answered, then she turned to face her Irish coworker. 'You know, if someone would just do his job properly - and have a vision - we wouldn't be in this mess!'

'Hey! I can't perform on demand, you know.'

'Well, why aren't the PTB helping? He's their champion! And he's off the rails, shouldn't they be trying to re rail him, or something?' She pushed her hair back in frustration. 'What are we gonna do?'

Gunn looked up from where he was polishing his homemade axe. 'Y'know I'm getting kinda jumpy sitting round here, not getting my violence on. I'm thinking I might go and patrol - maybe Echo Park kinda way. I could always use the help of the big guy.'

'That's great!' Cordelia enthused. 'He loves violence! Go up there and tell him.'

'Nuhuh. I'm doin' my part, offering the distraction. Aint no way I'm walking into his den of crazy, though - someone else tell him.' Three sets of eyes; two dark brown, one blue and hidden behind spectacles, all turned and settled on the hapless half demon who sat on the round sofa, shuffling his cards. He looked up and saw the direction of their gaze. 'Me? Why me?' They all just continued to look at him. He sighed. 'Fine, I'll go talk to him.'

...

He made his way up the stairs and along the hall towards Angel's room. The door was open and he stood on the threshold looking inside. Paper was scattered all over the floor, some were crumpled and some lay open, revealing the subject of Angel's artistic attempts. The vampire sat in the middle of the room - sketching - and if the previous drawings were anything to go by, he was only sketching one thing: Darla. So much for Cordy's art supplies distracting him!

'What do you want Doyle?' Angel asked, without looking up.

'Not much, bud. Are you OK?'

'I'm fine.'

'Uhuh - and there isn't anything on your mind, anything you want to share?'

Angel looked up, then, and glanced down at the discarded images of his sire. 'No.'

'..Right,' Doyle took a deep breath, calling on all his reserves of patience. 'Well, Gunn is thinking of going patrolling - wants to get a few vamps dusted whilst the night's still young. He'd appreciate the help, if you're available.'

'I'm not.'

The half demon gave up on his attempts at patience. He stepped into the room, walked over to Angel, and snatched the sketchpad from out of the vampire's hands. 'Hey!' Angel looked up, annoyed.

'I think we need to go over, again, all the ground we covered down in Mexico. 1) Wolfram and Hart want you to turn evil, and are using Darla to make that happen. 2) You want to give up on the monumental guilt trip and just give in to the darkness. 3) We're never gonna let that happen, so 4) You agreed you'd keep busy so you wouldn't have time to brood over Darla. How exactly does drawing her face 327 times over two days help you accomplish 4? Out. Now.'

'I'm your boss, Doyle, you can't tell me what to do.'

'I'm your mentor - and yes I can. C'mon man: killin', violence, staking vamps - it'll be great!'

'No.'

'Well if you don't - I'm just gonna do this-' he began jabbing Angel in the shoulder, hard, with his index finger, 'until you move.'

The vampire just sat there for a moment, the jabbing became more intense until the force of it was actually shoving him, causing him to move against his will with every prod. 'Ow ow. Stop it!' He slapped Doyle's hand away. 'Fine, I'll go. Jeez are you twelve?' he got out of his chair, found his coat and, for the first time in 48 hours, left his room. Behind him, Doyle smiled a smug smile of satisfaction and triumph.

Lilah opened the door to the rooms where the firm had been keeping Darla. There had been reports of a disturbance and Holland Manners had dispatched her to check it out. She found the former vampire sitting slumped in a chair, moaning softly to herself. The floor was covered in smashed shards of glass, the only remains of the mirrors that had hung on the walls. Darla seemed mostly unhurt, but her wrists and hands were cut and bleeding. 'Darla? What happened?' Lilah asked.

The blonde woman stopped her gentle whimpering and looked up at the lawyer. 'Everything,' she breathed. 'So many things have happened - more than you can imagine. And I remember them all. Which one did you want to know about?' Lilah was disconcerted. This woman had always made her uneasy, with her flirtations and confidence and experience. But this version of Darla: a broken shell, a mockery of her former self, was even harder to deal with - all that experience turned sour and leaving her hollow and traumatised.

'I mean what happened here? The neighbours said there was a disturbance - did someone break in, was someone here?'

'No, it was just me. It's always just me. Even after a hundred years, you're still alone at the end of it -nothing to show for it but regrets.'

'You broke the mirrors?'

'I guess I did.'

'You're bleeding.'

'I guess I am.'

Lilah entered the room, reluctantly. 'Maybe we should get you out of here? Perhaps you'd be better off back at Wolfram and Hart?'

'You don't think I can be trusted to be left alone?'

'The work you do is of great importance to the Senior Partners. You are a vital asset to our dealing with the Angel problem - we cannot afford to have anything ...amiss ...happen to you.'

'Angelus,' Darla moaned, his name being all she had heard of Lilah's words. 'My boy, you should have seen us together - Europe trembled in our wake - such brutality, so perfectly matched. And now look what we have become.'

'Enemies.'

'Oh no,' she sat up and leaned forwards, fixing Lilah with a stare, refusing to drop eye contact. 'It's much worse than that. We've become soul mates.' And then she began to laugh; a bitter, hysterical, mirthless laugh.

Constance lay on her deathbed and gazed weakly at the winter sun that shone in through the shutters. It offered light but no warmth. Death had stalked the colonists of Virginia and now it was her turn. She had only arrived in The New World the previous year, one of the very first women to come -along with Margaret, the wife of a settler, and her little servant Ann. She had known life would be tough, but the adventure on offer was far too great to turn down, and she had left her old life in England without so much as a backward glance.

But a drought during the summer had led to a poor harvest - and the people of Jamestown were now starving. Not that this had proved a problem for Constance. There were so few women, especially unattached ones, in the colony - and men had such particular weaknesses. A woman willing to do anything to survive need never go hungry. But even that had led to death.

Her fair, porcelain skin, which had always been the envy of her sisters - of all women, was now ravaged with the marks of disease. A pox sore pustulated on her lip. But this was only the outward signs of damage. Her heart was weakening, failing. Her breathing was laboured. She had fallen foul of the infections that were a constant threat to women of her profession. And now it was her very determination to survive that was killing her.

Weak and cold as it was, the sun was hurting her eyes. 'Someone close the shutters. It seems wrong that I should die when the sun is still so bright.'

One of the women that tended her bedside acquiesced, and the room was plunged into darkness. A hooded priest entered the room. 'You'll not see it again,' he warned her. 'Before it sets, you will have left this life.'

'I didn't call for a priest,' Constance told him, she turned her head slightly to look at the women, 'who invited him here?'

'You did,' the priest told her, 'last night. You cried out for me in your delirium.'

'I don't remember.'

'You should have called for a priest long ago, child. You're life might have been the better for it.'

She rolled her head on the pillow so she could see him. 'And you should have paid me a visit before today, Father. Your life might have been more interesting for it.'

'Are you now prepared to renounce Satan and beg God for his forgiveness?'

She shook her head, still not lifting it from the pillow. 'God never did anything for me.'

The priest spoke the two women: 'leave us.' They did, and then the priest spoke to the doctor. 'You can't save her life, perhaps I can still save her soul.' The doctor stood up, and left, following the women out of the room. Constance was still unconvinced. 'My soul is well past saving. Let the devil take me if he'll have me. Either way, I die.'

'No'. The priest lifted his hand and removed his hood. His face was not that of a normal man. He was completely bald, and his skin was white - true white - except for around his mouth which was stained red, as if he had drunk Christmas punch too quickly. His nose and brow were wrinkled, and his teeth were sharp, like fangs. He looked more like a gargoyle that adorned the exterior of churches back in The Old World, than like a man that would minister from inside of one. As hideous as he was, Constance was not afraid. There was something familiar about this creature, something that felt right.

'I know you,' she breathed.

The Master leant down and took one of her hands in his own. 'I came to you last night. I sang to you from that window.'

'I remember now. Are you death?'

'No.'

'What then?'

'I am your saviour. God never did anything for you, but I will…' and as he opened his mouth and bit down hard into her neck, Constance realised that she had found another way to survive - and that she had discovered the dawn of a new adventure.

Angel and Gunn cruised the streets. It wasn't bad actually - being out at night, looking for action. It was good. Better than staying cooped up, brooding over his sire. Action. Adventure. His friends had been right. He made a mental note to thank Doyle for insisting he leave the hotel.

They got lucky, and found a group of vampires attacking a young couple near the Dodgers' stadium. Gunn swung his hubcap axe at the nearest vamp, and beheaded him in one clean stroke. The demon crumbled to dust. Angel led with his fists, preferring to have more contact with his kills. As he thumped and kicked and threw his vampire against the wall, he realised how much he was enjoying himself. It wasn't getting his heart racing or his blood pumping, of course, but it was blowing away the cobwebs.

As two of the vampires rushed him at once, from different sides, he flicked out the stakes from his wrist holsters and dusted them both, simultaneously. Then, he leapt backwards into a somersault, his long coat flying out like a cape, and he landed on his feet on the hood of a parked car. He immediately kicked the final vampire in the face before jumping on top of him, and finishing him off.

The young couple were breathless and frightened. 'Wh what - what was that?' the young woman asked.

'They just exploded into dust!' her boyfriend said, staring at the ground, where the remains of the demons lay, in disbelief.

'Ah -I think it's best if you folks just get on home now,' Gunn told them. 'Forget all this ever happened, y'know what I'm sayin'?' But the couple were a long way from their home, and were not eager to head on out into the night after the experience they had just suffered.

'Well - if you want a ride -' Angel told them, now he was out and his head was clear, he was anxious to avoid returning back to the dank gloom of his hotel, and spiralling into his obsession with Darla once more. 'I mean, we could drop you off - right, Gunn?'

'You're the boss.'

The couple lived all the way up in Sun Valley, and Angel happily ushered them into the back of his convertible and took the interstate north. If he drove slowly, and saw this couple back to their front door, he could maybe avoid returning to the hotel for a whole hour.

Meanwhile, Wesley was back in the Hyperion, flicking through some of the books in Angel's office. 'What're you doing?' Cordelia asked, coming into the room.

'Researching Darla.'

'Still? I thought we agreed not to mention the D word?'

'Interestingly enough, the 'D' word may not be accurate. This book indicates that 'Darla' as a name, only became popular in the early 18th century - over a hundred years after she was born.'

'You mean it isn't even her real name?'

'Quite - whoever that woman was when she was first alive, she wasn't the person Angel thought she was. Someone else has named her after she was sired -much like Angel was originally 'Liam'.'

'What a wussy name!' Cordelia snorted. 'But what does any of this matter?'

Wesley rested his book down on the desk before speaking. 'I think it's best, under the circumstances, that we know as much as possible about her. If we're to assume that she is what Angel is spending the days brooding over -'

'Oh assume away, bud!' Doyle came up behind Cordelia, and held out the sketch pad that he had snatched from his boss. Wesley took it with a frown. 'It's very good,' he said.

'That's hardly the point. And this isn't the only one, there's hundreds of 'em up in his room.'

Cordelia snatched the pad from the watcher and looked at it. 'What the heck is this? This is what he's using my art supplies for? Oh, boy - this is worse than we thought. We need to confiscate all drawing materials - paper, pencils, charcoal, the works.'

'That would be rather like sticking a band aid over a gaping wound wouldn't it?' Wesley said. 'These drawings speak to a disturbed psyche, a clearly deep rooted obsession. Simply removing the tools of his outlet won't heal his mind.'

'Isn't that why we sent him out with Gunn, though?' Cordelia asked, 'distract him, make him too busy to brood. Isn't that what's gonna heal him?' She looked between the two men, seeking clarification.

'With any luck, it'll help,' Doyle told her, 'just as long as nothing happens that reminds him of Darla - and their lifetimes long love affair.'

She had brought her boy back to her master. Not that they had hurried. They had come the long way round, the very long way. Galway to London was such a short journey, and they had had the whole of Europe to claim for their own. They had cut a bloody swathe through South Wales and up into the North of England, before her magnificent creature had decided to see how people tasted over on the mainland. Seven years, and a continent laid to waste before them, and now she had decided to show off her prize. There had never been a vampire like this one, her master would welcome him with open arms.

The Master sat back in his ornate chair and surveyed the fine specimen that Darla had brought before him. 'Angelus?' he chuckled 'The latinate for Angel. It's marvellous.' The blonde vampire woman, stood beside her master, decided to add some detail to further pique his interest. 'Angelus' name would already be a thing of legend in his home village - if he had left anyone alive. He was magnificent.'

'So, Darla tells me you're some sort of 'Master'?' Angelus asked, insolence dripping from his voice. She stepped forward to try and smooth over her boy's rashness. 'He is the master of our order, he commands us.'

'The order of Aurelius,' the Master said. 'We are the select - the elite.' Angelus folded his arms and glanced around their surroundings, taking it all in, disdain evident on his face. 'And you live in the sewers do you?' Darla looked worried at Angelus' refusal to behave. The Master patted her on the hand and then stood up, so that he was eye to eye with the new boy. 'We live below. Giving tribute to the old ones. Awaiting the promised day when we will arise -Arise! And lay waste to the world above.'

'Now why would you want to do a thing like that?' Angelus asked. 'Have you been up there, recently, it's quite nice. Now me. I could never live in a rat infested stink hole - like this, if you'll pardon me saying. I need me a proper bed or I'm a terror. Isn't that right Darla?'

'He's young,' Darla tried to explain to her master. 'We fed recently, the blood is still hot in his veins.'

'Oh you noticed did you?' Her boy whispered in her ear, slipping his arms around her waist. The Master watched him with growing irritation. 'We stalk the surface to feed and grow our ranks. We do not live amongst the human pestilence.'

'I'll be honest. You couldn't really, with a face like that, could you?'

Darla turned, and slapped him in reproach. 'Angelus!' But the young vampire just laughed out loud and dropped himself down into the Masters throne. He lolled in the chair, his left leg dangling over the arm, and reached out to take a pinch of snuff. 'It's not stuck that way now is it?'

'The Master has grown past the curse of human features,' Darla told him, hotly.

'So, am I gonna end up with a bat nose like that?'

'Few vampires are cunning enough to live as long as I have,' the Master told him. 'As you are about to ably demonstrate.' He reached out and yanked Angelus off the chair and threw him against the wall. The young vampire crumpled down to the ground, laughing. He got back to his feet and began to talk to Darla, as if there were no one there but the two of them. 'Naples. You and me Darla. What do you say?'

'Angelus…'

The Master hit him, throwing him against the wall again. 'You should show the proper respect.' But Angelus just pushed himself back up and continued to address his sire. 'This is no place for you - bound to the likes of him.' Another blow from the Master, and Angelus was down on all fours. But he kept talking to Darla only, as if there were no one else in the world but them. 'You belong by my side - out in the world - feeding as we like, taking what we need. I'll give you all that you crave - Darla - I'll give you everything.'

The Master kicked him and he landed on his back, but still he laughed. He pushed himself upwards and faced his sire. 'Tell the truth - whose face would you rather look at for eternity - His? Or mine?'

'Idiot,' hissed The Master, 'I made her'. But Darla was smiling down at her boy, and the boy was smiling back up at her. The ancient vampire looked between the two lovers. 'You're leaving with the stallion, aren't you?' She didn't even bother to answer him, she just swept past and helped Angelus to his feet. They wrapped their arms around each other as they left the hall of the Master. One of his minions tried to block their way, but the Master called him off, without even looking. 'Leave them. It'll never last. I give it a century - tops.'

Lilah ushered the blonde woman into her office. She was irritated, she had no wish to babysit a traumatised ex vampire, to stop her from hurting herself. But Darla was important to the senior partners, which meant her survival was crucial to Lilah's own. The attorney had no choice but to see her through this.

Holland Manners entered the office and raised an eyebrow when he saw Darla there. 'Darla'

'Holland.'

'How are you?'

'I'm fine - it's nice to see you, Holland.'

'Always a pleasure - Lilah, a word?' he beckoned Lilah to follow him, and the young attorney stepped out of her office and shut the door.

Once the door was closed, Holland began to speak. 'I thought it was agreed that since she made contact it was not - ah - prudent to have her on the premises?'

'I know, sir, but there's something wrong with her. The disturbance her neighbours reported? That was her. She's smashed the mirrors and cut herself.'

'She's cracking up,' Holland surmised.

'My thoughts exactly, sir, I didn't think she could be trusted to be left alone.'

'She's way ahead of schedule.'

'Excuse me?'

Holland blinked himself out of his reverie and smiled at Lilah. 'We'll have to accelerate matters.' He clapped her on the shoulder. 'You did the right thing Lilah. Good work. Don't let her leave the building.' He started to walk away, but then turned back. 'Oh, and any sharp objects; letter openers, staple guns - even ballpoint pens - maybe keep them out of reach?'

'I'm way ahead of you, sir.'