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Beneath Contempt
Summary: Andrew gives Buffy a piece of his mind. Implied Warren/Andrew. Not at all 'shippy, though. Rated PG. What if? AU. Set in the middle of "Never Leave Me." Spoilers from "Earshot" through "Never Leave Me."
"... we had to tie him up again, mostly to keep him from scratching his bandages."
He could hear them in the living room, their voices wafting out from behind the boards on the windows as he climbed down the trellis, moving as slowly as he could.
"They can't hear you, don't worry." Warren floated beside him as he slid carefully down the wall. "You're doing great."
Andrew hit the ground off-center and stumbled, but years of experience in falling down had taught him how to do so unobtrusively.
"I'll be waiting for you in the basement. You can get in through the windows. I'll go get Spike to unlock them. They're eastward-facing -- convenient, huh?"
Andrew didn't answer. He crouched at the back of the house and waited, watching the setting sun. He knew Warren would fix everything. He was back, that was what mattered.
"He's back," Andrew thought, "and he needs me. I can't let him down. Once I do this... he'll never leave me."
The latch on the window clicked. It was open. This was it.
"I'm fulfilling my destiny. No more games or gadgets... tonight, I become a real supervillain. My Graduation Night. And I'm not afraid."
He was terrified.
***
The tiny Ryntkyk demon had retied the knots around his wrists and ankles, and he had lain on the bed for a couple of hours before he heard what could only be described as a ruckus, somewhere downstairs. Heavy feet pounded on the steps, and the Bringers burst in. The first one through the door raised its blade, and Andrew screamed and rolled off the bed. "That's that, then," he thought.
***
He was sitting on the floor when she came back to check on him, leaning against the bed, his hands and ankles still tied.
"Are you hurt?"
"I kinda twisted my shoulder when you threw me at those Bringers -- nice move, by the way. But, you know, it's no big. Did you fight them off?"
She turned to leave.
"Don't you want to interrogate me some more?"
Her hand was on the doorknob, and she didn't stop moving. "Not particularly."
"Don't you want to hear what happened to Jonathan?"
"Deal with it in the morning," she said, and the door closed behind her.
***
"I think we should deal with it now."
He hadn't knocked before walking into her bedroom. She was lying on the bed with her legs hanging off the end, as if she had sat down and then collapsed backwards in exhaustion. She still hadn't taken off her shoes.
She sat up when he spoke, her expression confused but not alarmed. "How did you get untied?"
"Xander was in a hurry and didn't tie the ropes very tight," Andrew answered vaguely. There were more important things to talk about.
"Andrew, go away."
"He's dead."
"Who?"
At that, he paused. Was she joking? Could she joke about this? Was she just stupid, or tired, or starting to loose her mind?
Or did she really just not care?
"Jonathan. My last living friend. He's dead. His blood was sacrificed on the Seal of Danthalzar. It didn't work, though I'm still not sure why."
"What didn't work, what was it supposed to do, what's the Seal of Danzalthar, who killed him --" She was completely alert now, and he had her full attention, except that she seemed disinclined to shut up long enough for him to answer.
"Shut up." Hey, that worked. Her eyes widened, and she stood up. She was about an inch taller than Jonathan had been, and a good three or four inches shorter than Andrew. He'd never actually noticed how short she was before. Contempt and incredulity fought over her expression.
"First, the blood sacrifice to the Seal didn't work. Second, I don't know what it supposed to do, just that it was supposed to do something. Third, the Seal is a stone seal with a goat's head on it, and a five-pointed star, a little more than five feet around, because his body fit on it without any room to spare. Fourth -- and I appreciate your priorities, by the way -- I killed him."
"You?" Disbelief. Not denial, not at all -- she just doesn't believe that he's capable of that. "You're saying you murdered Jonathan?" She studied his face for the first time. She'd never really looked at him before, but he was pleasantly suprised to find that her gaze didn't intimidate him in the slightest.
"I sank a knife into his gut. It was harder than I thought it would be, even though I believed I was doing him a favor. Warren -- something that looked like Warren, anyway -- told me that the three of us would be made all-powerful, that we'd be together again and rule the world as gods."
Her expression was disgust, now. It made her face surprisingly ugly. She believed him. "And you believed him?"
"It was Warren. I had to believe him." His eyes drifted for a moment. Was this sadness he felt, or regret, or disappointment?
"Besides, what difference does it make to you?" The harshness of his voice surprised him. Now he knew what he felt. It was rage. "Willow murdered Warren, and you didn't give a damn. So I murdered Jonathan. So what."
"It's different. Warren was a murderer. Jonathan was innocent."
"Right. And Katrina just fell and hit her head in the park."
For the second time, he wondered if Buffy had ever really cared at all, as her face registered incomprehension for a second. She's trying to remember what I'm talking about, Andrew realized. It was only a second, granted. But it was long enough for the truth to sink in for him. The Trio really had been a sad excuse for a force of evil, and Buffy had been so apathetic to their activities that she had to concentrate to remember their one actual serious crime. Of course, if they were pathetic at being evil, Buffy wasn't exactly impressing him as a force of good and protector of the innocent. Innocent. Ha. He could see now what a myth innocence was, not to mention what a flimsy excuse for self-preservation the Slayer's so-called morality was. He didn't just feel rage, he felt outrage. He wanted to show her exactly what he had finally seen.
"Warren did it. That's true. He hit her, she died. But if it hadn't been for me and Jonathan, she wouldn't have been down in the Lair to start with. And even if he'd killed her anyway, if it hadn't been for us, he would have gotten caught. We all did it. Jonathan was no innocent."
"What was she doing in your basement, anyway?" A reasonable enough question, he mused, but one which might have more productively been answered, oh, maybe a *year* ago.
When he began to answer, though, he found that even now, he couldn't admit to that ugly truth, a truth he'd been trying not to think about ever since. "The three of us built a neural inhibitor. A mind-control device. We tried to make her a... we were going to..."
Buffy's expression of disgust took on an extra shade of horror. "Oh, my god."
"We didn't realize until she woke up -- I mean, we didn't do anything. The effects wore off too quick. And then she tried to get away, and she was going to tell on us, and Warren went after her. And after... I didn't want to go to jail. And neither did Jonathan."
The guilt would go away now, though, and the self-loathing and the shame, and he'd never again have to hear those horrible words echo in his nightmares. He'd forget about it soon. He was certain.
"Why are you telling me this?"
This was the good part. This was the part he was going to enjoy, getting to turn that mirror around. Getting to show Buffy what she really was.
"I want you to remember what Willow did. What your best friend did, and what you let her off the hook for. She murdered someone that I cared about. Someone that..." The words came easier, now that he understood that Warren was really gone. "Someone that I loved."
"I..." Buffy stopped, looked at Andrew, understood him. The conflict of emotions on her face intensified. She struck back with a justification. "He was a murderer."
"And Willow's what, an avenging angel? You act like you're so righteous all the time. Like, ooh, I'm the Slayer, queen of morality and stuff. But why is what I did any worse than what Willow did? She killed a murderer. So did I. So she did it for revenge, for Tara. Well, I did it for loyalty, for Warren. And, anyway, don't act like you give a damn that Jonathan's dead." This was what he had realized that night, what had made it so important that he have this one last conversation with the Slayer.
She took it personally. "How can you say that?"
"You told us yourself, when Willow came after us, that if it was up to you, you'd let us fry."
"I never said that." There was doubt in her voice.
"You said that you weren't trying to stop her for our sake, but for hers." This was undeniable. Buffy didn't try to deny it. "Do you know how often he tried to stand up for you? You should've heard the way he used to talk about you. He ... he liked you. He always did." He was getting to her. For the first time, Andrew saw regret well up behind the hardness of her eyes.
"Jonathan told me once, about the clock tower. You saved his life, and made him feel like you cared. Long enough to get the gun away from him, anyway. It wasn't until after that that he realized, you didn't come up there to save him. You thought he was going to open fire on the school. Still, you sat down and talked to him for a while after that. Jonathan told me how that one conversation meant more to him than anything anyone had ever done for him. His parents were useless, his peers were worse, and until he hooked up with us, that one conversation had been the first time that anyone really seemed to care about what he felt. For a while, he thought it meant something. After graduation, though, when you all started at UCS, it was just like high school again. That's why he did the coolness spell, because he wanted to feel that again, more than anything. All he ever really wanted was your friendship, Buffy. All he ever dreamed of was earning your respect."
It was working. She crossed her arms and looked down at the floor. He could see the pain and the regret as her eyes focused beyond him, on the past, and that pain satisfied some need that Andrew hadn't even known that he had. And the best thing about the story was, that it was all true.
"He told me that he almost asked you to senior prom. He gave you an award at that prom, remember?"
"Yeah. Class protector. The clock tower thing had happened only a few weeks before that. He made a speech. It was..." Her voiced choked off. The memory played itself across her face. Andrew found himself wishing he'd been at that prom, and screw his brother's devil dogs. It would make the moment perfect, to be able to quote from that speech, maybe some particular line about how much she'd meant to all of them... She looked like she was starting to recover. Oh, well. He had a few more choice things to say. She focused on his face again, and her anger at being provoked hardened her voice.
"It was a long time ago. And it didn't make much of a difference when the three of you were trying to kill me, did it?"
For once, Andrew was glad that Jonathan had been such a goody-goody. It made this so much easier. "Right, he turned Warren and me over to you thinking you'd just let him go out of gratitude, and for old times' sake. It never occurred to him that you'd send him to jail too. That was sarcasm, by the way."
"So if he was such a swell guy, why'd you kill him?
He'd exhausted that source of recrimination, he could see. Time to get back to the subject at hand. "Because Warren told me to, or I thought he did. He told me it would all be okay, that we'd all be together, that I was doing Jonathan a favor. Did Willow think that when she tortured Warren? When she ripped off his skin and let him die in agony?" This was something else Buffy didn't want to think about. Andrew didn't really want to think about it either, but that didn't stop it from lurking constantly at the back of his consciousness, slithering out into the open every time he let his guard down. Even though he hadn't been there when he died -- and thank all the powers that be for small favors -- Warren's screams would never leave him. He only wished he could be certain that the witch could hear them, too. "At least... at least Jonathan went quick."
Buffy jumped on this. "I can't believe you're rationalizing --"
"*I'm* rationalizing?" She was incredible, really. He wondered what exactly it was about this morally bankrupt woman that made Evil think it had anything to worry about. "You know, I've learned a thing or two about you, Buffy. I know about Angel, and now Spike... I know, right, souls. They have souls. And so that makes them good people? That means they aren't accountable for the things they've done? And what about Anya? Has she even expressed any regret for the countless multitudes of people she murdered without a thought?"
She was floundering again. "But Anya was a demon --"
"Don't try to tell me about demons, Slayer. I'm the summoner of demons, remember? Vengeance demons start out as humans. It's not a destiny, it's a lifestyle choice. And Willow didn't even have Anya's excuse."
She tried to start over. "You... are a human being. Who murdered another human being."
"So. Did. Willow."
She turned away, almost yelling in her frustration. "You're twisting everything to get yourself off the hook."
"No." Time to end this. He had places to be, and the thrill of facing down the Slayer was starting to wear off. "I don't want to be let off the hook anymore. I don't want your forgiveness, or your pity, or your friendship. I'm over it. But I'm not going to be your hostage anymore, either." He stepped forward and walked past her, to the window, his back to her. Might as well get a little menacing in before he left. "You knew that I was just playing along, didn't you? That I could've gotten away any time I wanted?"
He unlocked the window and opened it, putting a foot on the window frame, his body language making clear his intention to leave.
"Are you going to try to stop me?"
"Come on, Andrew." She was trying to recover her easy superiority. "What else do you have? Without us to annoy, what are you going to do?"
"As I understand it," he began --
***
-- and Buffy knew even before he turned around that his eyes would be shadowed under inhuman ridges, "pretty much anything I want."
She went into a crouch, but she should have known that Andrew wouldn't fight fair. The Fyarl demon, unable to contain his glee at having something soft and little to smash, roared as he rushed her from behind. By the time she was done with it, Andrew had vanished into the night.
Beneath Contempt
Summary: Andrew gives Buffy a piece of his mind. Implied Warren/Andrew. Not at all 'shippy, though. Rated PG. What if? AU. Set in the middle of "Never Leave Me." Spoilers from "Earshot" through "Never Leave Me."
"... we had to tie him up again, mostly to keep him from scratching his bandages."
He could hear them in the living room, their voices wafting out from behind the boards on the windows as he climbed down the trellis, moving as slowly as he could.
"They can't hear you, don't worry." Warren floated beside him as he slid carefully down the wall. "You're doing great."
Andrew hit the ground off-center and stumbled, but years of experience in falling down had taught him how to do so unobtrusively.
"I'll be waiting for you in the basement. You can get in through the windows. I'll go get Spike to unlock them. They're eastward-facing -- convenient, huh?"
Andrew didn't answer. He crouched at the back of the house and waited, watching the setting sun. He knew Warren would fix everything. He was back, that was what mattered.
"He's back," Andrew thought, "and he needs me. I can't let him down. Once I do this... he'll never leave me."
The latch on the window clicked. It was open. This was it.
"I'm fulfilling my destiny. No more games or gadgets... tonight, I become a real supervillain. My Graduation Night. And I'm not afraid."
He was terrified.
***
The tiny Ryntkyk demon had retied the knots around his wrists and ankles, and he had lain on the bed for a couple of hours before he heard what could only be described as a ruckus, somewhere downstairs. Heavy feet pounded on the steps, and the Bringers burst in. The first one through the door raised its blade, and Andrew screamed and rolled off the bed. "That's that, then," he thought.
***
He was sitting on the floor when she came back to check on him, leaning against the bed, his hands and ankles still tied.
"Are you hurt?"
"I kinda twisted my shoulder when you threw me at those Bringers -- nice move, by the way. But, you know, it's no big. Did you fight them off?"
She turned to leave.
"Don't you want to interrogate me some more?"
Her hand was on the doorknob, and she didn't stop moving. "Not particularly."
"Don't you want to hear what happened to Jonathan?"
"Deal with it in the morning," she said, and the door closed behind her.
***
"I think we should deal with it now."
He hadn't knocked before walking into her bedroom. She was lying on the bed with her legs hanging off the end, as if she had sat down and then collapsed backwards in exhaustion. She still hadn't taken off her shoes.
She sat up when he spoke, her expression confused but not alarmed. "How did you get untied?"
"Xander was in a hurry and didn't tie the ropes very tight," Andrew answered vaguely. There were more important things to talk about.
"Andrew, go away."
"He's dead."
"Who?"
At that, he paused. Was she joking? Could she joke about this? Was she just stupid, or tired, or starting to loose her mind?
Or did she really just not care?
"Jonathan. My last living friend. He's dead. His blood was sacrificed on the Seal of Danthalzar. It didn't work, though I'm still not sure why."
"What didn't work, what was it supposed to do, what's the Seal of Danzalthar, who killed him --" She was completely alert now, and he had her full attention, except that she seemed disinclined to shut up long enough for him to answer.
"Shut up." Hey, that worked. Her eyes widened, and she stood up. She was about an inch taller than Jonathan had been, and a good three or four inches shorter than Andrew. He'd never actually noticed how short she was before. Contempt and incredulity fought over her expression.
"First, the blood sacrifice to the Seal didn't work. Second, I don't know what it supposed to do, just that it was supposed to do something. Third, the Seal is a stone seal with a goat's head on it, and a five-pointed star, a little more than five feet around, because his body fit on it without any room to spare. Fourth -- and I appreciate your priorities, by the way -- I killed him."
"You?" Disbelief. Not denial, not at all -- she just doesn't believe that he's capable of that. "You're saying you murdered Jonathan?" She studied his face for the first time. She'd never really looked at him before, but he was pleasantly suprised to find that her gaze didn't intimidate him in the slightest.
"I sank a knife into his gut. It was harder than I thought it would be, even though I believed I was doing him a favor. Warren -- something that looked like Warren, anyway -- told me that the three of us would be made all-powerful, that we'd be together again and rule the world as gods."
Her expression was disgust, now. It made her face surprisingly ugly. She believed him. "And you believed him?"
"It was Warren. I had to believe him." His eyes drifted for a moment. Was this sadness he felt, or regret, or disappointment?
"Besides, what difference does it make to you?" The harshness of his voice surprised him. Now he knew what he felt. It was rage. "Willow murdered Warren, and you didn't give a damn. So I murdered Jonathan. So what."
"It's different. Warren was a murderer. Jonathan was innocent."
"Right. And Katrina just fell and hit her head in the park."
For the second time, he wondered if Buffy had ever really cared at all, as her face registered incomprehension for a second. She's trying to remember what I'm talking about, Andrew realized. It was only a second, granted. But it was long enough for the truth to sink in for him. The Trio really had been a sad excuse for a force of evil, and Buffy had been so apathetic to their activities that she had to concentrate to remember their one actual serious crime. Of course, if they were pathetic at being evil, Buffy wasn't exactly impressing him as a force of good and protector of the innocent. Innocent. Ha. He could see now what a myth innocence was, not to mention what a flimsy excuse for self-preservation the Slayer's so-called morality was. He didn't just feel rage, he felt outrage. He wanted to show her exactly what he had finally seen.
"Warren did it. That's true. He hit her, she died. But if it hadn't been for me and Jonathan, she wouldn't have been down in the Lair to start with. And even if he'd killed her anyway, if it hadn't been for us, he would have gotten caught. We all did it. Jonathan was no innocent."
"What was she doing in your basement, anyway?" A reasonable enough question, he mused, but one which might have more productively been answered, oh, maybe a *year* ago.
When he began to answer, though, he found that even now, he couldn't admit to that ugly truth, a truth he'd been trying not to think about ever since. "The three of us built a neural inhibitor. A mind-control device. We tried to make her a... we were going to..."
Buffy's expression of disgust took on an extra shade of horror. "Oh, my god."
"We didn't realize until she woke up -- I mean, we didn't do anything. The effects wore off too quick. And then she tried to get away, and she was going to tell on us, and Warren went after her. And after... I didn't want to go to jail. And neither did Jonathan."
The guilt would go away now, though, and the self-loathing and the shame, and he'd never again have to hear those horrible words echo in his nightmares. He'd forget about it soon. He was certain.
"Why are you telling me this?"
This was the good part. This was the part he was going to enjoy, getting to turn that mirror around. Getting to show Buffy what she really was.
"I want you to remember what Willow did. What your best friend did, and what you let her off the hook for. She murdered someone that I cared about. Someone that..." The words came easier, now that he understood that Warren was really gone. "Someone that I loved."
"I..." Buffy stopped, looked at Andrew, understood him. The conflict of emotions on her face intensified. She struck back with a justification. "He was a murderer."
"And Willow's what, an avenging angel? You act like you're so righteous all the time. Like, ooh, I'm the Slayer, queen of morality and stuff. But why is what I did any worse than what Willow did? She killed a murderer. So did I. So she did it for revenge, for Tara. Well, I did it for loyalty, for Warren. And, anyway, don't act like you give a damn that Jonathan's dead." This was what he had realized that night, what had made it so important that he have this one last conversation with the Slayer.
She took it personally. "How can you say that?"
"You told us yourself, when Willow came after us, that if it was up to you, you'd let us fry."
"I never said that." There was doubt in her voice.
"You said that you weren't trying to stop her for our sake, but for hers." This was undeniable. Buffy didn't try to deny it. "Do you know how often he tried to stand up for you? You should've heard the way he used to talk about you. He ... he liked you. He always did." He was getting to her. For the first time, Andrew saw regret well up behind the hardness of her eyes.
"Jonathan told me once, about the clock tower. You saved his life, and made him feel like you cared. Long enough to get the gun away from him, anyway. It wasn't until after that that he realized, you didn't come up there to save him. You thought he was going to open fire on the school. Still, you sat down and talked to him for a while after that. Jonathan told me how that one conversation meant more to him than anything anyone had ever done for him. His parents were useless, his peers were worse, and until he hooked up with us, that one conversation had been the first time that anyone really seemed to care about what he felt. For a while, he thought it meant something. After graduation, though, when you all started at UCS, it was just like high school again. That's why he did the coolness spell, because he wanted to feel that again, more than anything. All he ever really wanted was your friendship, Buffy. All he ever dreamed of was earning your respect."
It was working. She crossed her arms and looked down at the floor. He could see the pain and the regret as her eyes focused beyond him, on the past, and that pain satisfied some need that Andrew hadn't even known that he had. And the best thing about the story was, that it was all true.
"He told me that he almost asked you to senior prom. He gave you an award at that prom, remember?"
"Yeah. Class protector. The clock tower thing had happened only a few weeks before that. He made a speech. It was..." Her voiced choked off. The memory played itself across her face. Andrew found himself wishing he'd been at that prom, and screw his brother's devil dogs. It would make the moment perfect, to be able to quote from that speech, maybe some particular line about how much she'd meant to all of them... She looked like she was starting to recover. Oh, well. He had a few more choice things to say. She focused on his face again, and her anger at being provoked hardened her voice.
"It was a long time ago. And it didn't make much of a difference when the three of you were trying to kill me, did it?"
For once, Andrew was glad that Jonathan had been such a goody-goody. It made this so much easier. "Right, he turned Warren and me over to you thinking you'd just let him go out of gratitude, and for old times' sake. It never occurred to him that you'd send him to jail too. That was sarcasm, by the way."
"So if he was such a swell guy, why'd you kill him?
He'd exhausted that source of recrimination, he could see. Time to get back to the subject at hand. "Because Warren told me to, or I thought he did. He told me it would all be okay, that we'd all be together, that I was doing Jonathan a favor. Did Willow think that when she tortured Warren? When she ripped off his skin and let him die in agony?" This was something else Buffy didn't want to think about. Andrew didn't really want to think about it either, but that didn't stop it from lurking constantly at the back of his consciousness, slithering out into the open every time he let his guard down. Even though he hadn't been there when he died -- and thank all the powers that be for small favors -- Warren's screams would never leave him. He only wished he could be certain that the witch could hear them, too. "At least... at least Jonathan went quick."
Buffy jumped on this. "I can't believe you're rationalizing --"
"*I'm* rationalizing?" She was incredible, really. He wondered what exactly it was about this morally bankrupt woman that made Evil think it had anything to worry about. "You know, I've learned a thing or two about you, Buffy. I know about Angel, and now Spike... I know, right, souls. They have souls. And so that makes them good people? That means they aren't accountable for the things they've done? And what about Anya? Has she even expressed any regret for the countless multitudes of people she murdered without a thought?"
She was floundering again. "But Anya was a demon --"
"Don't try to tell me about demons, Slayer. I'm the summoner of demons, remember? Vengeance demons start out as humans. It's not a destiny, it's a lifestyle choice. And Willow didn't even have Anya's excuse."
She tried to start over. "You... are a human being. Who murdered another human being."
"So. Did. Willow."
She turned away, almost yelling in her frustration. "You're twisting everything to get yourself off the hook."
"No." Time to end this. He had places to be, and the thrill of facing down the Slayer was starting to wear off. "I don't want to be let off the hook anymore. I don't want your forgiveness, or your pity, or your friendship. I'm over it. But I'm not going to be your hostage anymore, either." He stepped forward and walked past her, to the window, his back to her. Might as well get a little menacing in before he left. "You knew that I was just playing along, didn't you? That I could've gotten away any time I wanted?"
He unlocked the window and opened it, putting a foot on the window frame, his body language making clear his intention to leave.
"Are you going to try to stop me?"
"Come on, Andrew." She was trying to recover her easy superiority. "What else do you have? Without us to annoy, what are you going to do?"
"As I understand it," he began --
***
-- and Buffy knew even before he turned around that his eyes would be shadowed under inhuman ridges, "pretty much anything I want."
She went into a crouch, but she should have known that Andrew wouldn't fight fair. The Fyarl demon, unable to contain his glee at having something soft and little to smash, roared as he rushed her from behind. By the time she was done with it, Andrew had vanished into the night.