Email: marenfic@yahoo.com
Live Journal:
Summary: This fic takes off after Buffy
is brought back to life in Bargaining (Season 6). Events of Season 6 BtVS won't happen, but AtS
Season 3 will occur as they did until Connor is kidnapped. From there, events diverge a little, although
I'll be retaining some elements. Most
importantly, baby Connor never comes back as angry teen Connor—he is lost to
Angel for good.
Disclaimer: I don't own any of these characters.
Pairings: B/?; references to A/C, will eventually be B/A but you'll have to
work for it.
Rating: R for language and sexual situations; Read at if you want to read the NC-17 version.
Warning: This fic is pretty dark and there will be character death. Read at your own risk.
Feedback: Please!!!
A/N: Italics generally indicate direct thoughts of characters unless they indicate emphasis—it should be easy to tell which is which.
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~~~Two Years Later~~~
The woman stood at the bar, her eyes on the mirror that spanned the wall in front of her, the reflection of dozens of colorful bottles of liquor neatly lined up in front of it giving the impression that the bar could never possibly run out of stock. She watched as the masses of new-age L.A. debutantes, with their daddy's money and their mommy's bottle-blonde hair, gyrated to the hip-hop noise that was coming out of the huge black speakers in pounding waves of nearly tangible sound. Each one was staging a show for the boys who cast appraising, hungry eyes at them, and the woman knew what they wanted. Some were here in a misguided attempt to meet the man of their dreams-- the father of their future children-- their provider when daddy died from screwing his mistress. She felt nothing but contempt for them. Others were here to move until they were sweating and breathing hard, here to rub up against willing, firm bodies until they felt the twinge and flood of arousal, here to tease themselves and those around them with inaccessible sexuality. For these, the woman felt something not unlike sympathy. She remembered a time when she had been one of them.
Silly little short schoolgirl skirts. Think that five times fast.
She looked down at the shot glass in front of her and considered the amber liquid inside. It would be so easy to teach them all a lesson about what these boys who were masquerading as men really wanted. They didn't want wives, and they didn't want teases. They wanted a woman who would fuck and then leave without wanting anything else, and she knew that from experience. They wanted a woman like her, and it would take her less than 60-seconds to prove it.
Her thoughts were momentarily distracted when she felt a large, strong hand caress her black leather clad ass. She tensed slightly in reaction—men who touched her without her permission always ended up regretting it. A quick glance back up to the mirror assuaged her irritation, and she relaxed again. This man had privileges that others didn't.
"Contemplating body shots again, Diana?" he asked, his English accent tinged with the droll sarcasm that he had honed to near perfection, one eyebrow raised in mock censure.
The woman rolled her eyes at the mirror and then slammed back the tequila before turning sideways to face him.
"Why Wes, you know you're the last guy to have had that pleasure," she answered, leaning against the bar and running one hand seductively across the part of her hip that her low-waisted pants left partially exposed before dragging the tip of her finger over her stomach and up her chest until it rested between the cleavage visible out of the top of the black lace shirt. She gestured to the empty shot glass with her head while her finger traced a light, almost absent-minded path between her breasts. "I can order another one if you want to do it again."
His blue-gray eyes sparkled with interest, but he ignored her offer. "How many have you had already?" he asked.
She dropped her hand from her chest and shrugged, her boredom supremely evident even in the barely noticeable movement. "Four, maybe five."
He casually leaned toward her until his lips were brushing the sensitive skin of her ear. "Have you eliminated the target yet?" he asked, his voice a soft, seductive whisper.
Stepping into him and turning so that her back faced his front, she maneuvered them until he had his back against the bar and they were both fully facing the interior of the club. Wesley wrapped one arm around her waist and leaned down to lightly kiss the delicate skin of her neck. She turned her head towards him and he obligingly dipped his head so she could whisper in his ear.
"See those twins sitting in that guy's lap in the corner?" When Wes nodded, she continued, "Yeah, well, so does the target. He's up in the balcony and he's had his eyes on them all night. I'm guessing when they leave, so will he—I think he's planning on a double-mint dinner. Once he's in the open I'll take him out."
"What do you need me to do?" he asked.
She ran one of her deceptively small hands lightly over the strong arm he had wrapped around her waist and wiggled against him until she could feel him pressing into the small of her back. At the sound of his sharp intake of breath, she allowed herself a small smile.
"This will be an easy target. I want you nice and healthy for later, so why don't you handle the getaway?" she said.
It sounded like a suggestion, but Wesley knew it wasn't. When the Slayer laid out a plan, it wasn't open for negotiation. He'd learned that the hard way a long time ago when he'd defied her order to leave her alone with a target. When he'd shown up, ready to help, she'd taken one look at him, shook her head impatiently, and knocked him out cold with a hard right hook to the temple. When he woke up the target was long dead and she had icily informed him that if he ever pulled a stunt like that again he'd have a freshly opened neck wound. He didn't believe she'd actually do it, at least not mostly, but he toed the line with her nonetheless. His acquiescence didn't prevent him from feeling supremely irritated at being left out of the action, however.
At that moment the man from across the room stood and, with one twin on each arm, made his way toward the front door.
Slayer stood up straight, her body tensing in anticipation. "Bring the car to the alley across the street. Give me 10." Then she pulled away from his embrace and subtlety followed the target out the back door of the club.
The alley that ran behind the club was dark, with fetid air and sticky pavement, just like every other alley in L.A. that Slayer had become intimately familiar with over the past year and a half. Oddly enough, despite their repulsive qualities, she felt at home in the alleys. It was where demons, vampires, and sometimes, evil humans came to die at the hands of the Slayer. It was where Death stalked and then annihilated her prey.
Slayer had come to think of herself as Death. Oh, not in an egoistic, Grim Reaper kind of way, but it was her job. More than that, it was her destiny. Her gift was death after all. Buffy had stupidly thought that it was her own death that would be a gift to the world, but Slayer knew that it was the death that she could dole out to others that was the real offering to mankind. What did it really matter that she did it on the orders of a government agency, or that she got paid extremely well for it? It was still her gift and she was a generous benefactor.
Skills to pay the bills, sayeth the Beastie Boys.
She stood quietly in the alley, giving her eyes a second to adjust in the dark. She could see the target slinking down the wall towards the front of the club. It had shed the glamour that made it appear human and shifted back to its natural demon form. Slayer could make out the large, muscular trunks that made up its legs as well as its broad, razored back. She followed in quick pursuit, her movements fluid and silent. It was startled when she tapped it on its scaly shoulder, and it spun toward her with a loud roar of fury at being interrupted in its dinner hunt. It stopped short at the sight of the petite blonde woman in black leather and lace standing in a loose fighting stance before it.
"Slayer," he growled, as he flexed his back like a hissing cat, the razors spreading into a deadly arc.
She smiled grimly. "Is there some flyer with my picture on it that gets handed out at Demons 'R Us? Cause I think I would have remembered meeting a sharp-dressed guy like you," she said.
He simply smiled back at her, and she couldn't help but notice that his teeth matched the razors arching out of his back. Damn. He hadn't looked too bad in the dossier she'd been given, but obviously they'd left out a few details. Of course any other asset would have taken him out with a gun from a distance, but that wasn't the way the Slayer worked. Usually she wanted-- no. . . . needed-- the sweat and pain and adrenaline of hand-to-hand combat. There were only two things that made her feel alive and killing was one of them. She had only used a gun once, on a human target. That time she hadn't wanted to touch her prey—had only wanted to complete her assignment as quickly as possible.
Slayer advanced on her prey and let her supernatural senses take over. She wasn't afraid, was never afraid—it would seem she couldn't stay dead anyway. Tuning out the faint noise that was emanating from the club and the sound of laughing drunk humans stumbling over themselves just ahead on the lighted street, Slayer pivoted on one foot and struck the target in the face with the steel re-enforced heel of her boot. The roundhouse kick was seamless, flowing, and nearly too fast for the naked eye to detect and the demon staggered back into the wall, the razors on his back making a blunt screeching noise as they connected with the brick of the club's outer wall. Before it could move forward in counter-attack, she began to hit it with a series of right and left jabs, using its dense face as a punching bag. With a roar of rage, the demon opened its mouth full of razor teeth and snapped at her hand. Slayer was just able to redirect her blow to hit its chest instead of its snapping face, but the change in motion provided just enough weakness in her attack for the target to retaliate. It's large, meaty fist hit her squarely in the chest, and she could feel her breastbone crack. She landed heavily on the pavement, but had flipped herself back onto her feet before the demon had time to take advantage of her position.
As the fight continued, she began to hum inside. It was times like these that she . . . felt. The crunch of fist on bone, the spray of blood, the pungent smell of demon and human exertion combined with the endorphin rush of the pain and the adrenaline rush of the fight and she reveled in it. It seemed that she had repressed this . . . euphoria? . . . for most of her time as Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Now, as Slayer, she didn't reject it any more. It was what it meant to be living—for her anyway-- and she embraced it with a fervor that she had felt for nothing else since being thrown out of Heaven.
In less than 5 minutes the target was lying dead at her feet, its thick neck sliced nearly all the way through its dense musculature. Slayer, breathing heavily from the fight, bent over and pushed up the leg of her leather pants so that she could re-sheath the dagger she'd used to kill the target. She watched as her bright red blood flowed freely onto the pavement under her before looking at the gaping slice on her forearm with surprise. She hadn't even felt it happen.
She felt it now.
Hurrying toward the alley where she knew Wes was waiting, she stepped out into the brightly illuminated street in front of the club. She kept her wounded arm pressed against her side and ignored the catcalls coming from the crowd of people still waiting to be admitted. Her strong strides slowed as Wesley pulled up beside her in her silver McLaren SLR, and opening the passenger door, she slid into the soft black leather interior.
"Give me your shirt," she demanded as he sped away.
He raised on eyebrow at her in questioning disbelief. "You likely wouldn't have been cut had you accepted my offer of help, and now you want to ruin my shirt?"
She simply glared at him and stuck out one blood-covered hand. "I'll buy you a new one. Shirt. Off. This is a serious violation of the 'no bleeding in my car' rule."
Wesley maneuvered the car into a nearly empty parking lot and put it in park. Stretching one hand over his shoulder, he grabbed the back of the neck and pulled the black long-sleeved shirt over his head in one swift motion. Slayer couldn't help but appreciate the view of his exposed chest. Over the last year as her sparring and training partner, his physique had . . . improved. A lot.
She grabbed the proffered shirt and wrapped it around her shredded arm, tying it tightly over the wound with the sleeves. Sitting back in the seat, she stared out the window as Wes put the car back in gear and sped off toward her loft. Anyone looking at her might assume that she was deep in thought, but they'd be wrong.
Wes settled into driving and waited for her to come out of her post-killing trance. For the past year they had been fighting together nightly, mostly doing routine sweeps of vamp and demon hot-spots in the city. Less often, he had accompanied her on her agency assignments. He had quickly noticed that after taking out the target she was quiet and withdrawn. For some reason, those killings affected her in a way that normal slaying did not, but it wasn't a topic that she cared to discuss, so he pretended not to notice. Both of them were very good at pretending not to notice things that the other didn't want to talk about. She pretended that she hadn't noticed he had kept a woman locked in his closet for a while several months ago, or that he got a haunted look in his eyes every time they were out early enough to see a father laughing and playing with his son. He, in turn, pretended not to notice that she got just a little jumpy when she was in enclosed spaces or that despite her refusal to talk about anything Sunnydale related, she sent a generous check to her sister each month—anonymously of course.
As they neared her loft, Slayer blinked several times in rapid succession and looked at the illuminated clock on the dash. The agency would be eagerly awaiting news on her most recent assignment.
Time to call Harris—the prick.
Picking up the cell phone that was cradled in its car port, she quickly dialed the number that Harris had given her after her agency graduation, just before he'd had her tranqued up and dumped in a random abandoned building on the outskirts of the city. She'd woken up with a cell phone, a headache, and nothing else. Luckily he hadn't lied about the off-shore bank account and if she'd still been the girl she had once been, if she'd still been Buffy, she would have squealed in excitement when she called to check the balance. Now, the fact that she had more money to her name than she could ever hope to use did little more than give her a vague sense of security. She bought what she wanted, when she wanted it, but the possessions gave her little joy.
Joy? I can't even remember what that feels like.
No, Slayer didn't feel joy anymore, or any really extreme positive emotions outside of those she felt in the middle of a fight. The trade-off was that she also didn't really feel the more negative emotions either. She wasn't ever sad, she wasn't depressed, she didn't get anxious or worried—she just existed.
The phone rang three times before Harris answered. "Yes?"
"The target's toast. No comps," Slayer answered. She smiled a tiny smile when she heard his sigh of annoyance. She liked to irritate Harris by refusing to follow DPE communication guidelines.
"I assume you meant to say that there were no complications?" he asked.
"Bingo," she replied.
"I need your code name for verification purposes," he persisted, ignoring her continued attempts to get under his skin.
This time it was Slayer who was irritated. She hated this code name shit—she was The Slayer and that should be enough.
"Artemis," she gritted out, and then snapped the phone closed without waiting for him to answer.
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Slayer winced as Wesley finished stitching up the cut on her arm. After unwrapping her arm and assessing the damage, they could see that the demon had sliced it almost completely to the bone. Even still, it would be completely healed in a matter of days.
Wes looked up when he felt her wince and gave her a slow, sexy smile. He nudged her knees apart with his body so that he was standing between her legs as she sat on the stainless steel surface of her dining table. Extending one hand up to her neck, he lightly trailed his fingers across the skin until they were touching the nape. The little downy hairs there were standing up from the contact, and he reveled in the feel of her soft skin on one side of his hand and her silky blonde hair on the other. He began tracing the pattern of black ink that he knew stained the skin under his finger. A small Celtic cross—protection for a warrior.
"Diana? Experiencing pain? I thought you liked the feel of the needle piercing your skin," he murmured. His exploring hand dipped down to her waist and he caressed her exposed stomach until he reached her navel and the metal bar that ran through it. Tweaking it gently, he leaned in until his lips were nearly touching hers, his eyes staring languidly into her hazel green depths. "In fact, if memory serves, you like pain . . . very . . . much." He punctuated the last two words with increasing pressure on her piercing, twisting the metal bar until it pulled her skin tight. Her eyes darkened with a tinge of lust, and Wesley quickly dropped to his knees in front of her, let go of the metal, and laved the reddened skin of her navel with his tongue, his hands wrapped around her leather-clad hips. He was rewarded with the sound of her sharp intake of breath, her hands wrapping in his hair to pull him closer. He used his teeth to pull out on the piercing and then continued the soothing ministrations with his lips and tongue.
She felt the stirrings of arousal as he teased her with his mouth, and she surrendered to the sensations. Fighting made her feel like she might actually be alive . . . fucking made her believe it, if only for a few precious moments.
Slayer felt one of his hands move to undo her pants and she leaned back and lifted her hips to help him slide them down and off. They made a black puddle on the concrete floor. His mouth returned to her stomach and he teased the tight expanse of skin that spanned the distance between her belly button and the top of her panties, but he was careful to avoid the other inked design that adorned the alabaster skin of her pelvis. Wes never touched that one—even if she hadn't forbidden it, he had no desire.
Then they were all skin and hands and mouths and heat.
"Diana," Wes moaned, and held her tightly as he found his release, the pleasure undeniably intense.
Somewhere deep inside, Slayer twinged at the name, but she no longer let him see her annoyance. He always cried out the name that he insisted on calling her when he was in the throes of his orgasm. She, in turn, never made a sound. There were other things that were always the same—he always carefully avoided her lips, her scar, and the tattoo that marked her pelvis with his mouth, and seconds after they were finished the feelings of emptiness and detachment returned.
Still, she was glad to have Wes in her life, as her partner . . . of sorts. It was better with him than it had been with the others and she was able to forget and feel for a few precious minutes. The ones that had come before Wes had either been too afraid to hurt her to be able to deliver the right amount of stimulation or they had been too into trying to humiliate her before she made it painfully clear to them that she wasn't into that. Wes, on the other hand, wasn't fooled by the delicate façade of her petite body, and he wasn't interested in her humiliation. With him she could feel almost human again.
When he fucks me, I know that I'm real.
Wes felt her unwrap her legs from where they rested around his waist. He watched, his breath still irregular, his heart still pounding, as she pulled herself up and slid off the table. Halfway across the room, she slipped off her bra and left it carelessly on the floor as she made her way to the bathroom that was situated near the middle of the large loft-space that she called home. It divided the space nearly in half. The side with the toilet and sinks faced the kitchen and dining area and was enclosed with solid walls, but the large free-standing shower and the tub were encased on one side with clear glass blocks. She had once told him that the first thing she'd done when she moved in was to have those walls torn out and replaced with glass. She hadn't had to tell him that it was because she felt the walls closing in on her everytime she took a shower. Wesley heard her turn on the faucets, and he knew that if he walked over to the opposite side of the loft, the side that held her bed and living area, that he would be able to see the outline of her naked body under the cascading water. It was tempting, but he knew that she expected for him to be gone when she reemerged, and he had business to attend to anyway. He pulled himself together and, grabbing his bloodied and ruined shirt, quietly left, locking the deadbolt on the steal door behind him with his key.
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