You want her.
You want her in the worst sort of way.
And she's perched on the counter like a butterfly in a brightly colored dress while you wash dishes, smiling at you.
She's petite, blonde, blue-eyed and ambitious.
She's nineteen and still in school.
And she's perched on the counter like a butterfly in a brightly colored dress while you wash dishes, smiling at you.
You're wearing a tomato sauce stained apron and up to your elbows in greasy water scraping the burnt lasagna out of the pan it was cooked in as you grow hard.
She comes from a good family.
She's in...she's in, what was it, pre-law?
She reminds you of someone you once loved a long time ago.
She even dresses similarly to that someone you once loved a long time ago.
Her name is Ava. She's perched on the counter like a butterfly in a brightly colored dress while you wash dishes, smiling at you.
Your heart's beating so loud that you can't even hear what Ava's saying to you as she swings her long legs with their slender ankles, heels drumming a light tattoo against the stainless steel cupboard door.
While you scrape burnt on lasagna from the pan that it was baked in as you grow hard.
You want Ava so bad but you have nothing to give her back in return because you just aren't what you used to be when you loved that someone else.
Except if you listen to your meds and the doctors that prescribed them after you wrapped your car around a bridge abutment three years ago, that someone else never existed. Vampires don't exist. Hellmouths? What's that? You're plain old Bill, the guy with the shuffling limp who mops the floor over at the Mall after hours, swabbing out toilets in the silence once the customers have gone home, lost in his own thoughts.
Trying to sort out what is real.
Today you think you've got a pretty good grasp of what's real; though for the last week or so things have been sliding around in your head like they do when you haven't been taking your meds. It's making you nervous because the last time you felt like this, you had a major flake-out and had to go back into the booby hatch for a month and you don't want to go through that again.
So you find yourself constantly telling yourself that Hellmouths aren't real. Paychecks are.
Vampires aren't real. Getting fired for sleeping on the job is.
The Slayer isn't. AA and NarcAnon meetings are.
That's what the meds and the doctors that prescribe them say, so it must be true.
So, right now at six o'clock sharp in the evening on a Friday night sometime in the middle of March, exact date unclear, you're plain ol' Billy, 26, recovering alcoholic and former heroin addict, slightly delusional, somewhat schizophrenic, medicated to the gills, high school dropout, severe diabetic, and incredibly, incredibly lonely, Billy.
Billy Tully. Crazy.
Billy Tully. With a limp.
Billy Tully. With a hard-on for something he can't have.
You know you're Billy Tully because that's what it says on your California driver's license. It expired three years ago while you were involuntarily committed for babbling a lot of crap that you thought was true. About Hellmouths. About Vampires. About Slayers. You never bothered to renew the license with it's image of you, peroxided hair, eyes closed, sharp chinned you.
Hell, not that they would have granted you one anyway. Your condition makes you unfit to drive.
So you take the bus.
And walk.
Everywhere.
Ava's perched on the counter like a butterfly in a brightly colored dress, smiling at you with that million dollar smile of hers, at the State run men's group home that you live in, watching you and your hard-on slowly clean up the communal kitchen because it's your turn to do so tonight and you've got sod else to do because it's your night off.
And you have nothing that you can give her in return.
Try telling that to your body. Bodies are animals. Animals are optimists even when there's no chance in Hell. So you're hard. Which makes you an animal with nothing you can give her in return.
She's an alcoholic. Or so her therapist tells her. Two weeks ago she started attending the same late night AA meetings as you. You couldn't help but notice her. She's small, petite, blue eyed, blonde and ambitious.
Last night, she chose you to be her Sponsor.
You think it was only because you were the youngest person there - the rest of the group is made up of burned out middle aged white men; dock workers, clerks, and retired factory people. You know, the ones that fall through the cracks, the ones that aren't interesting or ethnic enough for some liberal bleeding heart to start a crusade on behalf of.
Anyway, with the permission of Linda your therapist, you're supposed to be starting to guide Ava through the 12 Steps. You've been clean yourself for three years now, it's only right.
Ava's perfume when she sat down next to you the first night overwhelmed you with the memories it carried within it. You nearly broke down right there and cried over losing something that was never yours to begin with; that never existed because the meds and the doctors that prescribe them say so. Instead, you settled for nervously smiling at her when she introduced herself and telling her your name without stuttering. "Billy, Billy Tully."
Because that's your name. Right? Billy Tully.
So, what's Ava doing here?
You didn't tell her where you lived. You only gave her your phone number when she asked you how she could get hold of you outside of the AA meetings; laboriously writing it down on a paper napkin before handing it to her, "C-c-c-c-call me aaaa-anytime, I-I'll m-meet y-you at th-the c-c-c-coffee shop on Third... ssss-ssss-street."
She immediately programmed it into her cell phone while you stood there feeling like an idiot, face flushed, ears burning. When she asked you for your number, she caught you without a rehearsed reply - you'd managed to control yourself around her for the last two weeks: sticking to monosyllable replies, nodding, smiling, letting her do all the talking. With one simple request from her, you'd blown any chance you might have had by sounding like a CD with a bad skip in it. So you steeled yourself for the inevitable, "Forget it!"
"Don't worry," Ava twinkled up at you against all expectations to the contrary, "I will!"
You never told her where you lived because you were ashamed. Someone your age should have his own apartment, a house maybe, with a wife and kids, and not live in some group home with a bunch of fellow derelicts, looking forward to a menial job every night and watching television in the lounge all day when you can't sleep.
You're plain old Billy Tully and you have nothing you can offer her and yet here she is. She just showed up at the front door (locked) after parking her jaunty little red Miata across the street. Knocked on the door. Told Bob the guy who works the front desk that she's your cousin. Can she see you? He called Linda. It was o.k.
So, Bob called you in from the kitchen, coated up to the elbows with burnt lasagna (not your fault) and wearing your work clothes. Your other clothes are dirty because you forgot to do your laundry this week (your fault) because you've been too busy sorting the real from the unreal to notice things like an overflowing laundry bag behind the door to your room. She gave you an enthusiastic hug and kissed you on the cheek, "Billy, can we talk?"
The sudden blood rush to your crotch made it harder than usual to walk, making you grateful for the big greasy apron you were wearing. "Yeah." you managed to say, feeling the aftershock of her kiss on your face, "If you d-don't mind d-doing it in the kkkk-kitchen."
That's another odd thing, the last week or so? You've been wanting sex again. Those wank-off magazines that you keep wrapped up in the remains of a blood stained black leather duster in the bottom of your footlocker? Well, just looking at the pictures and daydreaming aren't enough any more...
Even though it was a lie, you signed her in without a quibble from stupid Bob who runs the front desk. She took your hand, tomato sauce and all, and let you lead her to the kitchen. Nobody makes an issue of it because lately you've been good. Besides, the kitchen's an open one - if something starts, the counselors, who are really orderlies in street clothes, can step in and stop it anytime they choose with restraints and a well-aimed hypo.
Ava's pissed off at her folks again. She couldn't wait to talk to you in person so she got out the reverse dialing directory that her dad keeps around the house and looked up your address. She was really that pissed off, she laughs, to go into his home office and look up your address because they've been hassling her about everything and when her folks hassle her, she wants to drink.
Fair enough. You remember you old man beating the shit out of you at the slightest provocation, and learning that if you poured enough of his Jack Daniels down your throat, the belt didn't hurt so much whenever he decided that you needed to learn a lesson. The more he beat you, the more you drank. The more you drank, the less you felt.
That was when you were seven.
Hey, mate, how can we be so sure of that?
Oh great, he's back. That other you who likes to mess with your head. You start to go limp.
He's been growing louder these last two weeks.
He puts a mental hand on your shoulder, leans into your ear, and whispers: Personally, William me old son, I remember running starkers in and out of the surf at Brighton with me cousins when I was seven while my favorite cousin Beatrice minded us with one eye on a copy of Dante's Inferno. I had a little tin bucket and shovel and one of my other favorite cousin's old sailor hats to play with. Our mum sat way off on the boardwalk in a Bath chair because she had what they call these days "a nervous breakdown" and watched us play.
There's a nasty grin on his face. His teeth are filed to sharp cannibal points, so you say: Go away, you aren't real.
You put up the last of the pans, drain the sink, scour it out, and dry your hands.
You know we're being watched?
Go away, you aren't real.
The other men have left their rooms and cruise by, looking her over. Some make faces, gestures behind her back, gestures of approval, of... encouragement?
Most of them have girlfriends. You don't.
Ava's not our bird. Why would she want us? Bet we could have big fun with her anyway, pin her down, make her scream, rip out her throat, drink her blood as it spills out all over the bed?
Go away, you aren't real.
It feels good to see the looks of envy and approval on their faces as you help her down off of the counter with your left hand, the one missing most of the finger tips. Your right hand you stuff down in your trouser's pocket next to your returning hard-on. It's missing entire fingers; Ava shouldn't have to see or touch such a nasty thing.
The two of you move out into the lounge, but the television is on so loud that you can hardly hear each other.
So.
You invite.
Ava.
To your.
Room.
You've been good, so nobody stops you.
As long as we leave the door open, that is.
That's the problem with the other you, he follows you everywhere. Doors and privacy don't mean anything to this asshole.
Go away, you aren't real.
There's a television, a small one that you don't turn on very often because the one in the lounge is better, a hard, narrow bed with a footlocker at the end of it, a mirror that you spend hours in front of looking at what's left of you because the other you tells you that you weren't always able to see yourself in it, never mind what the meds and the doctors that prescribe them tell you, and two posters.
One is of Bela Lugosi in Dracula drag, posturing.
The other is Big Ben at sundown.
You bought them with your first paycheck a month after your doctors let you move out of the booby hatch and start getting reacquainted with the world. They caught your eye in the window of a used bookstore that you always pass on your way to work. Come payday, you bought them. You walked out of the shop with them under your arm feeling odd. Maybe it was because you were born in London before they shipped you to your old man in backwoods Mississippi and maybe you once saw Big Ben when you were very small. Maybe it was because Bela and you had something in common. You were both druggies, and you thought you had once been a vampire while he once played one in a black and white movie that your other self tells you saw the night it was first released in 1931, your best girl sitting next to you after you fed off of the people in the seats around you. It was the funniest movie that either one of you had ever seen because you knew...
...the real Dracula. That bastard still owes us money and isn't half as cool as Bela was that night, all big black cape and fangs. But the meds and the doctors that prescribe them tell us that the last part is a lie, riiiiiiiiight W-w-willie?
Go away, you aren't real. And it's Billy, by the way.
Ava looks at both posters as you usher her into your room with its sparse personal items and giggles.
"The parantal figures sent me to London last Christmas. The shopping was fantastic! Ever been to England, Willy?"
"B-Billy. I was b-born there, so they t-tell me. Don't remember it m-much. My old man was from Missi-sssss-ssss...d-down South. When my mother d-died of an overd-dose, they sh-shshshipped me to him." is all you manage to get out as you offer her the single hard chair that came with the room, sitting on the bed in front of her. "W-what's England like these d-days?"
So Ava goes on, telling you about the wonders of Harrod's, Bond Street, and the hundreds of little dress shops that she raided. You let her voice wash over you; it makes the room seem less grey while the fake memories trickle unasked for back into your head - you and Dru window shopping on the Portabello Road in 1965, smashing windows, killing shopkeepers, taking whatever caught your fancy, and even earlier, being measured for your first grown up suit with long pants in Saville Row when you were sixteen back in 189- The meds and the doctors who prescribe them tell you that you left London when you were seven and that your earliest memories are of a filthy little flat with rat droppings and broken hypodermics and spoons all over the floor where your mother lies dead and smiling in a corner with an elastic band still around one arm.
And Dru was your beloved little half-sister that your father molested in front of you no matter how hard you tried to protect her.
Oh for God's... mum didn't die of heroin, we killed her with a sharp stick! When we were 22, remember? and dead as a doornail ourselves. Should have done it sooner, but we didn't have the wrinklies back then.
Go away, you aren't real.
Dru isn't our sister any more than this bint flutterin' 'round our cage's our cousin! We have no family. The closest thing we have left to family obviously hates us so much that they've abandoned us, just like our sister, who isn't our sister, who stood there and watched us kill our mo...
Shut up!
This brings you up short. You shake your head violently at the confusion of overlapping images. "You okay?" Ava asks.
"Long d-day. Sorry, d-d-didn't mean to drop off on-on y-you." You stammer. "G-go on, I'm l-listening."
"Like really? I'm not boring you?"
"No, not at all." you carefully reply.
She goes on to tell you about her day trip to Paris on Christmas Eve while visiting London; of the Chunnel, of the things she bought within sight of the Eiffel Tower with her Daddy's money, and how pretty the lights were. You on the other hand spent last Christmas Eve sprawled out on your bed in a pair of ratty boxers, nursing a tepid diet Cherry Coke that you wished was bourbon with your booted feet up on the nightstand while reading a dogeared copy of The Collected Works of Emily Dickenson while waiting for the dryer buzzer to go off across the hall in the communal laundry room. That was when that other you, the sarcastic one who's bugging you now, convinced you to refuse your meds because he said you didn't need them, had never needed them, and that they were poisoning you so that you had to go back into the booby hatch by New Year's because you were babbling and delusional all over again.
At least they got the seizures under control. Can't have us writhing around on the floor like a chopped in two snake, can we? Just not dignified!
Go away, you aren't real.
"Ooooh, pictures. I love pictures!" Ava gets up and leans past you to get a look at the battered photos, a small handful of them that you used to keep in your wallet that are now taped to your wall beside your pillow so that you can lie there and look at them when you can't sleep - which is most of the time, "Is this your family? Is that your mom? Are those your sisters? No, they can't be, they don't look like you. Is that one your girlfriend?" she adds coyly, looking at you from the corner of her eye.
You lean over to look, catching a sweet glimpse of vanilla cleavage. Ava's found the picture of a blonde woman, middle aged but in good shape and a slender redhead with humorous green eyes who has her arm around the waist of a curvy strawberry blonde who looks embarrassed to be in a bikini. In front of them, sharing a dribbly ice cream cone is a little brunette who's making a face at another blonde who looks like she could be her sister. Behind them is the endless blue Pacific. "N-no, just some p-people I once knew."
The meds and the doctors who prescribe them tell you that the woman's name is Joyce. She was your social worker back when you attended high school in some podunk California town before you dropped out/got expelled at sixteen. The redhead is her daughter's best friend despite the fact that she was one of the geekiest people in your class. Joyce's daughter's the other blonde; the brunette's her bratty but nice little sister who occasionally let you sit next to her on the school bus - you had a hopeless crush on the eldest one long before you realized that Joyce was her mother. When you saw the picture peeking out at you from an envelope on Joyce's desk, you pocketed it when she left her office to get something...
No, the other you insists, you know, the one that won't leave you alone? Joyce was that blonde's mother all right. She was incredibly kind to us one summer before her bitch of a daughter broke our heart. You stole the picture from their house one night after Joyce died of a brain tumor because you didn't want to forget her.
"Shut up." You say. Ava looks at you, startled, "Just thinking ab-about m-my boss."
"Right," she says, "Like me with my mom and dad!" She loses her balance, falling against you. You steady her, feeling like your fly is going to burst open. Your bad hip betrays you, painfully spasming so that you both wind up on the hard grey linoleum floor with her on top.
The two of you pause for what feels like forever.
Then Ava kisses you.
The room with its putty colored cinder block walls disappears.
From a distance you feel your hands gliding up and down Ava's back as her tongue entwines with yours while her soft body presses...
Someone clears his throat loudly.
"B-bloody Hell!" the two of you sit up guiltily.
It's Fat Dan the meds man. Fuck.
You hate Fat Dan with a dull, flat loathing.
You hate what he brings with him every so many hours even more.
He's one of the visible bars in your invisible cage.
He's what keeps you and the rest of the men who live here sane.
Right now, you aren't so sure that in your case it's working.
Fat Dan's cheerful. Not a real cheerful, but a grating, saccharine kind of cheerful. He loves his job. He bustles around with his meds cart as you stand up, humiliated by the rapidly diminishing bulge in your crotch and the small paper cup full of pills he hands you along with a larger one of water. You pause, looking at them before you toss them back, washing them down with what's in the other cup. "William, it's been two hours, you need to test yourself. I have the lancet and the meter all ready to go. Don't mind me young lady, just doin' the Lord's work." He taps you on the chin. Obediently you open your mouth to prove that you actually swallowed them because you've been known not to. He sticks one rubber gloved finger into your mouth and runs it around the insides of your cheeks. You'd like to bite him, but you know better now.
Fat Dan finds nothing and makes a note on his clip board, "You should be grateful that the Lord has seen to it that your friend is being so well cared for here. But if I were you, young lady, I'd pray for His forgiveness tonight because it's a sin to lie, right William?"
Great, Fat Dan's also Born Again and won't leave you alone about it either.
If his God's so merciful and kind, why the hell didn't He let us die the night we drove our car into that bridge abutment?
Go away, you aren't real.
You take the lancet and meter from Fat Dan, turn your back on your guest, and roll up your sleeve, embarrassed to let Ava see you take a reading because she'll see the railroad tracks on the inside of your arms and know that you're also a recovering junkie.
The spring loaded lancet stings the back of your right arm. You catch the tiny bead of blood up on the end of the test strip, wait for the countdown: 10. 9. 8...
230. Damn. Next thing you'll know they'll be cutting off your feet. You go completely flaccid, breaking out in a cold sweat.
Sizzling in your own sugar, you close your eyes briefly before you hand the meter back to Dan who makes a notation on a clipboard with your name on it before handing you a disposable syringe and a gauze pad soaked in alcohol.
You walk out into the hall, Dan on your heels to make sure that you actually do it. You lift your grey work shirt; the one that the janitorial service you work for has provided you as part of the bennies, pinch the pale skin of your belly between the fingers of one hand, and swipe at it with the pad before inserting the needle with the other. You look up. Ava's standing there in front of you, leaning over all big eyed and fascinated.
"Does that hurt?" she asks.
You blush, "N-no. You...you get used to it after a while." Heroin was that way too only it made you feel better. Getting caught shooting up in the employee lounge got you fired so you took your last paycheck from that shitty job and got so drunk that you...
...woke up on the operating table convinced that the Initiative had gotten its hooks back in us so that in our terror we flipped off of the surface, and tried to run away only our hip was so badly crushed that all we could do was lie there and scream in a pool of our own blood at the feet of the doctors and nurses in their masks and scrubs.
Who's the Initiative?
Nobody you'd want to know, mate!
Go away, you aren't real.
You work the plunger, feeling the frigid heat of the insulin spreading out beneath your skin, wishing it was heroin.
You then put the gauze pad over where needle meets flesh, before withdrawing it and dropping your shirt. Dan holds out a container marked "Biohazard" and you place the pad and the empty syringe after bending the needle in half against the wall. Fat Dan makes another note on his clipboard. As he puts the clipboard away, he tells you "Curfew in one hour - don't forget to pray!" as he bustles off to the next room, fat ass wobbling with every jaunty step.
You really, really hate Fat Dan. You'd like to kill him, to feel his fat neck snap between what's left of your hands, to feel his cheerfulness drain out of his blobby body like so much stale piss, to hear his carcass hit the floor like a sack of wet shit, but it's just too much trouble.
Ava takes your hand and leads you back into your room, closing the door behind you. This is a major no-no, but right now you don't care.
"S-sorry you had to s-s-s-see that." You manage to get out, rubbing at the scar on your temple, a souvenir of where you went head first through a windshield three years ago and look away.
To your surprise Ava removes your glasses before she unbuttons your shirt, one slow movement at a time. All you can do is lean against the door in blurry surprise. She kisses where you just shot up, "Better now?"
"Mmm." you say noncommittally, pleasantly distracted by the violent return of your erection. Ava smiles as she leads you to the bed.
She pulls you down before you can protest, not that you want to. "W-wait." you manage to get out, and you spit out the one pill you managed to chipmunk. The others you need, but you don't like going to sleep so hard you can't defend yourself, so you try not to take these every chance you get.
"What's that?" Ava takes the pill from you. It's already starting to dissolve.
"Sleeping pill."
She giggles, handing it back to you, "Way to go!" You secrete it along with the other ten you've managed to horde behind the plastic baseboard. One of these days, you'll take them all, and never wake up. Won't that be nice?
You nod before you kiss her, one hand slipping beneath her skirt while the other turns out the little bedside light imbedded in the wall so you can't hang yourself with the cord.
Ava doesn't protest.
Instead she helps you out of your trousers, your shirt, your boots, everything even as you unwrap her like a gift, silk dress, bra, panties, garters... where they all become one big out of focus puddle on the floor...
Her hands rest briefly on your hip, manicured nails lightly tracing the harsh keloid scars where the steering column crushed it, "C-car c-crash."
"So that's why you limp." You nod against Ava's neck, breathing in the perfume of her hair, tasting the delicate layer of sweat on her soft skin. "Looks like you got lucky and missed the best part." Her hand lingers on your cock, tugging gently at your foreskin all pulled back like a turtleneck - you gasp, arching your back as she kisses you, "I've never done one like this before, what's it do?"
You catch your breath before whispering in her ear, "L-let me show you." as your hands greedily explore Ava's trim backside and belly, lingering in the crisp curls of her pubic hair. It's been months. You've tried prostitutes, but it doesn't feel the same. And there's disease. You want to die, but not from AIDS.
Funny, your other self smirks, that didn't used to be an issue when we were dead.
Go away, you aren't real.
You ease down on top of Ava, using your good hip to push in between her thighs. Trembling, you just rest there for a long time, enjoying the feel of your skin against hers, trying to ignore the growing ache in what's left of the bad one. Her pelvis rises, you slide in as she twines her legs around yours. It feels so good you come right there like some green kid. It's so intense that your eyes roll back in your head and you can't breathe for a second.
"S-sorry." You slide off and sit down on the chair, shoulders hunched with humiliation. You're 26 for God's sake, this isn't supposed to happen! "S-sorry."
No, that other one smirks again, you're over a century old and this isn't supposed to happen. I thought Dru taught you better, but I guess not.
Shut up! you scream silently. Dru's my sister, and I never did my sister. Dad did, but I didn't! That's what the meds and the doctors who prescribe them tell me!
Dru isn't our sister. Ask the pills who she is the next time you see them. You'll find out I'm right, your other self sneers. Soddin' pathetic is what you are. Serve you right if she gets pissed and abandons us just like Buffy did because you weren't man enough for her.
Shut up! Shutup Shutup ShutupShutupShutupShut up!
Ava doesn't. Instead she gets up and straddles you where you sit, caressing your bad hip, wrapping her long legs around your waist while reaching down between your thighs and teasing you back up so that you lose yourself within her.
Afterwards, the two of you lie there on your hard, narrow bed beneath the thin blanket that the home supplies you with, gently kissing her shoulders and neck as you listen to her breathe.
No, you're back in a basement somewhere and a little voice inside you is telling you that you're going to die. The person you hold against your still dead heart is going to kill you and you'll thank her for the privilege even though she never loved you half as much as you did her.
The pills tell me this is a lie.
Wrong, pouf. The other you corrects, the pills are a lie, and that basement is the truth. We once died for someone who didn't love us as much as we loved her. Billy Tully is a lie. Bill Tully is a lie. William Tully is maybe a lie. We died the first time in 1880, rising from our grave like a homicidal crocus a few nights later. Dru was there and she fed us, she fed us the same Whitechapel whore you'd gone to a few days before and failed to get off with. Then she deflowered you on the still cooling body.
You're insane!
That's what they tell us, the other you sneers, what do you think? Me? Well, mate, a man doesn't forget his first time...
...you'd somehow convinced Buffy the snotty cheerleader, Joyce's daughter, to do it with you at the Homecoming Bonfire. She was tipsy on a beer and a half, and you weren't - by the time you were seventeen, you could down a bottle of Jack without anybody being the wiser. You convinced her to come with you to an abandoned house on the bad side of town. You did it on a dirty mattress in what was left of the kitchen, nervous because she was your ideal, nervous because for all your experience with the loser girls that you drew like a magnet into your orbit she made you feel like it was your first time and you nearly came all over yourself just thinking about it. She passed out half way through; you lay there just like you are now, smelling the perfume in her hair, pretending that she was yours, but knowing that she belonged to someone else... that was about the time the house decided to collapse and the two of you nearly didn't make it out alive...
The what, the house collapsed? I don't remember that!
You're pathetic, Willy. Yeah, the house collapsed, but she was too old to be a cheerleader - she was out of high school. And it wasn't you that took her, she took you! Gobbled us up and spat us out, is what she did! And we liked it too, only you're too crazy and broken to interest her now should she ever decide to come and rescue us - which is all your fault because you're such a loser!
Huh? Don't remember that, don't remember that at all! Shut up!
Not surprised with the amount of bone they had to pull out of our nut - yeah, brilliant move there Spike!
Who's Spike?
That's us, you idiot! Brilliant move, Spike, because that's us, go out- go out, get smashed and forget that we aren't what we used be, and crash head long into a bridge, leavin' us a soddin' pathetic half-vegetable loony. Sometimes I don't know why we even bother! Now you've got us locked up in some warehouse for half-men where we can't escape and have nowhere to go even if we did because the second we stop taking our meds, we're toast! We're flopping 'round on the floor foamin' at the mouth toast! Thanks to you, even Buffy wouldn't want us the way we are!
Who's Buffy?
What the bloody...have you been listening to me at all? That other you snarls and mentally smacks you on the back of the head. The same damned drugs that keep us going are turning our brains into oatmeal. What have you done to us? You aren't Billy Tully, loser extraordinaire, you were born in 1858 and you died when you were twenty two in an alleyway after that cunt Cecily ripped our heart out with her tongue! Vampires are real! You should know; we were one for over a century until that bitch Buffy saw to it that we lost everything and became her unwanted lap dog!
I'm 26. I was born in London. My mother was a heroin addict. My father abused me. A foster father molested me, I have a half-sister...
Shut the fuck up, that's just the pills talking!
Shut up! Shut up! Shut up Shut up ShutupShutupShutupShutup!
Buffy forced us to go out and get our soul back - some prize that was. We went out and got our soul back and she still didn't love us. She loved Angel - he had a soul. Why couldn't she forget him and love us? And after she killed us down in the Hellmouth, you didn't have the wrinklies to go and claim her after that bastard Lindsey resurrected us - coward!
Shut up! Shut upShut upShut upShut upShut upShut up! Shut up! Shut upShut upShut upShut upShut upShut up!
Failure! Nancy boy! Poofter! You can't make anybody happy! You couldn't satisfy Dru, you couldn't satisfy Buffy. What makes you think that you can make this little bit of veal all cuddled up to your heart happy?
Shut up! Shut upShut upShut upShut upShut upShut up!Shut up! Shut upShut upShut upShut upShut upShut up!Shut up! Shut upShut upShut upShut upShut upShut up!Shut up! Shut upShut upShut upShut upShut upShut up!
Oh God! Did you just shriek that out loud? You feel your body begin to convulse, your eyes roll back into your head, but it's not an orgasm. She screams with a tinny echo that smears across your senses, but you can still hear that other you and he's laughing.
He's laughing at you...
Cell phone conversation overheard in the dressing room of an undisclosed Abercrombie & Fitch:
"...yeah? It's him all right...uh-huh...if you hadn't shown me his picture before the accident, I wouldn't have bothered... Why do your bosses want to know about him anyway? He's a fuckin' vegetable! I mean, like, he can move around... there's nothing left! Even after you bribed his doctors and therapist to...placebos... over the last few weeks before I interviewed him...I don't think there's any use for him. Get this, he doesn't even recognize pictures of his old girlfriend, he really thinks he's Billy Tully! Uh, try him out? What? Oh yeah, eewwwww...came all over me -thank God he shut up. It would have been like screwing Porky Pig. Yes, I was careful! What do you think I am? I'm tired of pretending to be an alcoholic. All those ishy old men staring at me...all right, I'll go to a couple more AA meetings... Don't let anybody know about this? There might be a use for him one of these days? He's still pretty, like a Ken doll somebody smashed with a hammer... if he wasn't so creepy with those eyes...it's like someone else is looking out of them at me. No, he's crazy...good in the sack, once you get him to chill out, though... you were right...stamina!
...uh-huh.
...uh-huh.
...uh-huh.
...oh! Evie, be a good big sis' for me and tell daddy that I dented the Miata again? Kiss-kiss and C-ya!"