Victimized | Chapter One
A Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Angel the Series Fanfiction by Majokai Yukiko
Pairing: Angel/Spike, Angelus/William
Warning: Slash. Blood play.
Spoilers: All the way up to Angel Season 5: Damage.
This is an amateur effort and does not intend to infringe on the rights of Joss Whedon, WB, and their associates.
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"She was an innocent victim."
"So were we, once upon a time."
It was a joke. It must be one. Almost a century ago, Angel thought he never would feel something other than anger, guilt, and disgust towards his youngest childe. But time had proven him wrong. First was Pavayne. His demon snarled when it saw the man who cheated hell time and again, threatening his childe right in his face. Inside him, Angelus roared, rattling at his cage. This was my childe, the demon yelled. How dare you harm him! Threatening to do so in front of me, no less!
It felt good, when he shut the gate on the man's face, the gate of eternal hell, knowing that his childe was safe from the claws of torture he himself had suffered under for five hundred years.
Then came the day when the mysterious box came in the mail for Spike. Angel had no idea what he wanted to do most. To beat his childe black and blue for wanting to leave for Europe, for Buffy, the minute he became corporeal. Or to hug him close to himself and never let go.
Angel thought he had gone through all the emotions he could ever go through, when he woke up from his nefarious nightmare and saw William pull the demon off him, a slight smile on his handsome face. Until he realized finally, what he really felt for his childe, and still felt.
Love.
How strange, that it took him a psychotic slayer, a pair of lost hands and a quiet, civil chat in a hospital room late at night to realize that.
Just as Angelus had loved and hated William in his own demonic way, Angel loves and hates Spike the way he never could before.
What had Spike mean when he said they were innocent victims once upon a time? Or more exactly, why did Angel feel like staking himself when he heard that?
***
A Small English village, 1865
"What are you looking for, Will?" The little boy turned away from the window, and smiled at the old woman who had entered the room. He loved his grandmother more than he loved himself. He loved the countryside he lived in. But most of all, he loved looking at the clear blue sky where there was not a single cloud in the sky. The endless blue made him think of heaven somehow. Although his grandmother always said his eyes reminded her of the sky, he never really believed her. How could anyone be compared to heaven and its beautiful angels?
William gave his grandmother a hug when she sat on his bed next to him, closing his eyes when he felt her kiss the top of his head, longish blond hair falling over his eyes.
"Angels! Grandmamma, do you think they exist?" The kindly old lady stroked her grandson's hair tenderly, smiling benignly at the boy's innocence.
"Of course they do. They are messengers of God." The child grinned, a dreamy expression filling his baby blue eyes. Though he paid attention at the village's Sunday school, he never really thought about the Almighty. It seemed rather ridiculous, somehow, that a being should hold absolute power over all men. Although that left his faith in angels on rather shaky ground, he did not care.
"Is Daddy with them?" The six-year old asked the elderly woman. He had never seen his father before. The villagers said he was dead. The village priest told him his father had found eternal peace with the angels. How lucky he was! William thought. He wanted to see angels too!
She was right. Just when he had stopped believing in angels, six years after his grandmother died, and the mother he had never heard from appeared and hitched him to London, he finally found one. That angel was not like the way his elders had described these beings to be. He did not have blond hair, blue eyes, wings, halo, or even wear white. His Angel was no messenger of God.
He was God.
His father was not with the angels either.
His Angel was his father, his sire, and his God.
His everything.
***
Spike sat at the edge of the rooftop of an old abandoned building, taking in a deep breath of nicotine from his cigarette. It hurt… nobody told him it would hurt this much, or perhaps they did, and it was just that he had never listened.
The blond vampire had half contemplated staying out there in the open until morning came; letting the LA sun reduce him into the dust he should have been long ago, if not for the demon that reanimated his corpse.
Empty: that was how he was feeling. Was that how Dana felt too? Like her, he had nobody to turn to, nobody who wanted him, nobody who understood what he was going through and nobody to tell him what else he have to go through. They were more alike than they thought, it seemed. Perhaps he should just end it all.
"Keep cutting until you see dust."
It seemed familiar, this resignation, and this willingness to give in to his immortal death. Spike thought there was something he ought to remember. He frowned and tried his best to recall.
Apparently not.
Spike shrugged, reaching into his pockets to take out a plastic vial with many small white pills in it, a souvenir from his recent visit to the hospital.
"Piece by piece yellow makes you weak. Brown makes you sleepy."
"Let's see what blue does, shall we?"
Ten of these would knock a human out for forty-eight hours straight. The vampire smiled. He did not even need that long. With one gulp, he swallowed all the pills dry, not bothering to count how many there were.
Spreading his arms out in a parody of Christ on the cross, he lay back against the cold floor and watched the stars slowly drift out of sight. Out of mind.
Blue…like the skies…like heaven.
"Daddy's gone. He can't hear you."
"That's where you are wrong, hammer sack. He never heard me." Spike smiled sardonically to himself and closed his eyes, shutting out the eternal blue.
***
London, 1882
Angelus stared across the room at the unconscious vampire in his bed. William never looked more human than when he was asleep, long fringe falling over closed eyes, lips slightly parted as the fledgling breathed in and out, yet to be able to kick the nasty human habit.
The burns were beginning to heal, albeit at a rather slow speed for a vampire. Angelus sighed and leant back further into his chair.
William felt his heart slow as the demon blood was being fed into him. Drop by drop as he drank, he saw bits of his soul being chipped away. Instinctively, he knew what was happening to him, but he could not stop it. He did not want to stop it. The Englishman took a deep breath with his dying heart and looked up, smiling sweetly at the angelic visage that was holding him in his arms. He saw his murderer in a whole new light. And in that moment, as he exhaled and his heart beat its last, he chained a shred of humanity to his newborn demon out of desperation. He had found it and he was not letting it go.
He had fallen in love.
Angelus sat there quietly in the barn, the dead and limp body of his newly made childe sprawled over his lap. Unlike his other victims, the Irish vampire could not understand what had sparked off his obsession for the English poet. Sure, the boy was beautiful, but his beauty was only skin deep. He was timid, painfully romantic, and terribly naïve at the same time. Angelus wondered what attractions he had found in William J Bradford. Truth be told, he, the Scourge of Europe, was a little afraid by what had just occurred.
He could have killed William for just a taste of that sweet betrayal on the boy's face at his final death, and he might have sired him only to see how a sniveling man like him would survive as a demon. That was familiar. That was explainable. What was not was the look of complete love and adoration William had given him with his last mortal breath and the flutter in Angelus' non-beating heart when he saw it.
Angelus shook his head. An unfamiliar emotion akin to guilt invaded his mind. Gently, he pushed the cold body onto the hay and left before daybreak, taking one last look at the sweet poet whom he had marked for eternity.
Things could get even more complicated from now on.
***
Déjà vu
Angel spent the past two days sitting in his chair, across the room from his bed, watching his childe sleep, just like the way he had done that fateful day back in 1882.
Spike was never a quiet sleeper. He would kick, he would growl and sometimes, and when the nightmares got particularly bad, he would scream. But this was new. And it was scary. Angel had never seen the blonde vampire whimper fearfully or cry. Spike was doing all of that now. His no longer painted fingers clutched tightly at the sheets, trembling, while the tears flowed endlessly from eyes he knew to be of a gorgeous blue. Finally, not being able to take it anymore, he pushed himself off the chair and moved to sit down on the bed, beside Spike instead. He reached out his hand, wanting to wipe the tears away when eyelids slowly fluttered open.
The blonde vampire frowned and edged away suspiciously. Angel felt his bones run hollow when he realized what was missing from Spike's eyes.
Recognition.
"Who are you?" Spike asked. No, Angel mentally corrected. This was not Spike that had just asked him who he was with an uneasy tremor in his voice.
"I'm Angel, your sire."
"No, you are not," the younger vampire scurried off the bed and pressed himself as close as possible to the opposite wall.
"My Sire is Angelus, Scourge of Europe, you dork!"
This was Spike…
"Now where the bloody hell am I—?"
When he was still William…
"—and my sister Dru?!"
Before Angelus made the mistake of letting Drusilla 'sire' him.
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End of Chapter One
Continue to Chapter Two