Disclaimer: Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel the Series, characters, names and related indicia are trademarks of Warner Bros and Mutant Enemy. They are used here for entertainment purposes only.
Warnings: Violence. Slashy thoughts. Angst. Completely unfounded and probably wrong Angelus past.
Spoilers: Late Season 1 of AtS
Vampire With Soul
He tries to remember, occasionally, that evil is something that's chained up in the back of his head. He keeps in mind that any minute, for any number of reasons, he'll lose whatever it is that keeps the evil in check and keeps his monster foaming at the bit.
They call it a soul.
They say it like it changes something in him. Like it means he's not himself when he kills people and hurts people and uses them and tosses them aside like nothing. Like it means that it's not him that remembers those days long ago where girls giggled at his face, and then screamed when it changed. They say, "Angel's a vampire. But, it's okay, because he's got a soul."
They think the vampire is just some demon that lives in a human body, that it has nothing to do with humanity, or human nature, or human emotion. But it's not true.
They call it a demon.
He's read, in those books in the back of Wes' office, that when a human is killed and turned the soul flees and a demon takes its place. The demon walks around with human skin and kills and drinks and turns others. It's so easy to believe.
He wonders who came up with the theory, 'cause that's all it is and he's not about to set anyone straight on it. But it's beautiful in its construction. Simple. Unverifiable. It's not as if a vampire's going to sit and be questioned about it. It's not even like most vampires care one way or the other about human definitions. It's not like they even take a moment to think about the intrinsic differences between their human selves and their 'demon' selves.
Angel spends a lot of time thinking.
He thinks about how sorry he is for that woman in Barcelona, 1853, and her two kids. He thinks about how she never got a chance to watch those kids grow up and get married and have kids of their own. He thinks about the husband she was sure to have had, and what that man must have thought when his wife and kids never came home, and the authorities brought him the news a few days later when they finally figured out where those bodies belonged. He thinks about how beautiful she looked strung from that tree, hands spasming in death, blood trickling from her many bite marks, naked as the day she was born. He thinks about how stunning those two children looked, bleeding out on the ground beneath her, sort of kneeling, like a sacrifice to a dying goddess.
He thinks and thinks and still, even with the soul, he'd like to see it again. Just for a moment. He tells himself that he'd let her down and not kill her kids, if he'd had the soul. He thinks he might have even walked her home and told her to be careful with her children so late at night. He'd have done all that, but he'd still have taken a look at the curve of her back and imagined it scratched and bloody and dripping on the earth.
He's dead. He died a long time ago, and in a perfect world, he'd have stayed down when Darla ripped his throat out. He'd have been buried in the family plot, and his sister would have cried and eventually gotten over it. She would have gotten married and had a son and named it after him, and that's how he'd have lived on in a perfect world.
He thinks about his soul, when it's dark and no one's come in to interrupt his 'brooding', which is important, he assures them. He thinks about what's different now that wasn't different before. He wonders if there's even such a thing as a curse, and that maybe he'd just had an epiphany that day with the Gypsy girl, had seen her sprawled and dying on the ground from the neck wounded and part of him had thought, "maybe it was wrong to do that."
But there must be a curse, there must be something, because he's felt the difference between Angelus and Angel. There's a difference, there is, he'd swear to it. Angelus liked to torture the people he loved before finally killing them or turning them. Angelus liked to grab any old body off the street for a snack, even when there wasn't any poetry in it.
Angel doesn't torture people or eat them. He thinks about all the bad things he's done and is sorry for them like a good little boy.
But he looks at Cordelia sometimes, at the smooth stretch of her neck, and tells himself he'd like to kiss her there, run his tongue along her pulse and let her heart beat for him to make him feel alive again. Even when there are pictures in his head of him pressing his nose even tighter into her nape, opening his jaw wide and just breathing out onto her skin. Stirring up the sweat and perfume that would have to be stuck there, and slowly, slowly sinking fang and tooth and body and soul into her.
And sometimes he looks at Wes, a little higher up than on his neck, at the base of his chin, really, and wonders whether Wes had cut himself shaving that day. Wonders how Wes would react if, just one morning, when he walked in off the street Angel would sidle up to him and right in the middle of a joke about Cordy's coffee, lean over and lick him. Right there. In that space below his chin and above his neck that's probably been nicked open and bled a thousand times. Wonders if he could pass it off as a come on if he followed it up with a rough, taking kiss.
He's not sure if he kills vampires who happen to be on the edge of a hot meal because killing humans is wrong, damn it, or because he's jealous. He tries not to be jealous, but his teeth itch. His borrowed pigs blood screams at him to rip that vamp-o-the-minute away and just attatch himself to the already formed wounds at the base of Jane or John Doe's neck and have at it. Hey, he didn't bite the girl, he would explain when Wes called him on it, he just licked up what the last guy left behind.
Waste not, want not.
He could spend forever thinking about all these things, but then Cordelia would slam his office door open and pester him to stop brooding and he would put those thoughts into the back of his mind, slip them back through the bars to keep his 'demon' company, turn the lock, and finally remember that he's not evil.
Evil's something that's chained up in the back of his head.
Fin