This chapter is rather... different. Just read it, and I will explain at the end. Promise.
Will awoke that evening to the familiar bellow of, "William!" from the floor below. Suddenly the memory of that morning came flooding back. Actually it hit him like a tidal wave and he immediately felt the urge to throw up. "BOY!" Oops. Angelus had repeated himself and that was never a good thing. Will hurriedly shoved on a large shirt which must've been Angelus' because it hung way down to just above his knees, and ran to Angelus' room. He knocked, then entered at the answering grunt.
"There you are," Darla remarked coolly from the bed, where she had pulled the sheets up to protect her modesty. Angelus lay beside her but on top of the sheets, dressed from the waist downwards. The room reeked of sex and Darla, a combination Will disliked intensely. Angelus frowned at him disapprovingly.
"You've just woken up," he stated. Will didn't answer but shifted his weight onto the other foot, staring at the carpet because he was reluctant to look at his Sire, particularly after last night. "Why?" Will picked at a spot with his toe. "I asked you a question boy," Angelus reminded him sternly, raising himself off the bed. "Answer me."
"I woke up 'cos you called me," Will replied, risking a look at his Sire whose face darkened considerably.
"You know perfectly well that is not what I meant. You should have been up hours ago."
William glanced at Angelus nervously and skipped nimbly to his right where he could keep the high-backed mahogany chair between him and his Sire.
"You have jobs to do boy, you have duties," continued Angelus, taking a few slow steps forwards. Then Darla spoke up.
"Perhaps you shouldn't be too hard on him Angelus. After all, he has been away for four months. It must be difficult for him to get back into routine after his holiday." Will scowled. He should've known she would never genuinely step in to help him out. Malevolent bitch.
"That's no excuse for shirking responsibilities," Angelus chided sternly. Will scowled even deeper and his frustration finally reached its peak.
"No! You're not being fair Angelus! I've just got back from four months of torture with that bat faced creature you call Master; I'm weak, and hungry, and tired, and you expect me to just get up the first night back and do my old jobs like before? Someone must've done them while I was in hell and why can't they do it for just one more day? It's not fair – I've got up early every night for the past two and a half years so I think I deserve a day off!"
There was a silence, and then a strange sound which took Will a couple of seconds to place. Angelus was laughing. He took a few more steps forwards and Will nervously checked he was behind the chair, but Angelus simply pushed it aside and tousled Will's hair lightly.
"Why didn't you just say that to begin with? I only asked why you weren't up!"
Will, relieved, began to relax, but then he remembered what had happened that morning and stiffened as Angelus' strong arms enveloped him. Angelus must have sensed it, but chose to ignore it. Instead he dragged Will onto the bed along with Darla, who sniffed disapprovingly as the boy wriggled in next to her.
"I'm getting dressed. Make sure he doesn't watch," she said to Angelus, injecting the last word with enough venom that Will immediately turned his face and buried it in the pillow. He felt Darla lift her weight from the bed, and then surprisingly, Angelus' hand in his hair. He didn't like it – the event of that morning proving to him that Angelus' affections could instantly become violent. When he heard the door shutting with Darla's exit, he quickly rolled over to her side of the bed, away from Angelus' hand which dropped to the pillow.
"Come here Will," he said, but the younger vampire pretended not to have heard. "William, come here," he repeated more firmly.
"I'm fine here thanks," Will replied stiffly, but a slight snarl made him change his mind and he moved a little closer. Angelus' arm reached out and pulled him up close. Will stiffened again.
Angelus sighed. "What's got into you today boy?" Will physically jerked when Angelus threw his leg over Will's, and his Sire sighed exasperatedly again. "William, stop it," he commanded. "You're just being silly now, aren't you." Will swallowed and tried to relax. "Aren't you?"
"Yes." Angelus gave a slight cough. "Yes Sire. Sorry."
He smiled and kissed Will's hairline. "That's better. Now, we're going out tonight. Our territory has changed and Darla wants me to make sure you know where the boundaries are. Alright? Now go and get dressed."
Will gladly escaped the clutches of his Sire and stopped in at Dru's room on the way up. She woke gracefully at the soft sound of the door shutting and turned, propping herself up on her elbows.
"Spike?"
He smiled and crossed the room. "Yeah. It's me pet." He kissed her nose, and then she lifted her head and they kissed properly. It seemed that she was as happy to see him as he was to see her, and Will was delighted that she hadn't forgotten him. When they finally broke apart, she seemed to glow.
"The stars told me so much… But Daddy said they were lying. Were they lying Will?"
"If Angelus said so then they must have been," Will replied shortly, wanting to change the subject. "What have you been up to?" He settled down on the bed with one knee up in front of him and the other hanging off the edge.
"There was a big fight… other vampires, my Angel destroyed them and we had a party in their blood. Red rivers of blood carrying their bodies away…" she swayed slightly and smiled to herself.
"Dru, you said they were vampires. How could they have bodies?"
Drusilla stopped swaying immediately as if she had snapped back to reality, and glared at Will. "Of course they had bodies. Everyone has bodies," she scoffed, as if talking to a very stupid person. Will sighed, and changed the subject again.
"Have you any new dresses?" He enquired politely, and she growled a little.
"Yes."
"Can I see them?"
"No."
"Why not?"
"No!" she repeated, frustrated, and Will hastily tried to think of something else to talk about.
"WILLIAM!"
Oh. Angelus had called him. Will suddenly remembered he was supposed to be dressed and ready to go out, so he raced out of Drusilla's room and into his own, hurriedly trying to find something suitable.
"WILL!" Angelus bellowed again, and Will checked himself over and then raced back down the two flights of stairs until he got to the bottom where Angelus was waiting. Angelus checked him over, sighed, shook his head and opened the door. On the way out, he roughly flattened Will's hair, pulling on a tangle as he did so.
"Ow!"
Angelus sighed again and shut the door behind him. He led Will towards the river, but instead of heading for Southwark Bridge, as they usually did, they headed in the opposite direction, through the slums of Bermondsey. It was a fairly long journey; one that would have taken a human the best part of forty minutes. Angelus and Will made it in fifteen. They reached the river around the deserted warehouses and wharfs between London Bridge and Tower of London. Angelus walked out onto one of the wharfs and stared out across the river at the Tower, a malevolent dark figure that seemed to leak malice into the night around.
Will felt uneasy. This part of London was notorious for its high crime rate. No one lived around here – it was full only of factories and warehouses, owned by the people to the east, staffed by the people to the west. He assumed, from Angelus leading him here, that Bermondsey was their new territory, but he still felt uneasy. Southwark wasn't much safer, but a human William had known Southwark and Waterloo like he knew his own home. The thought suddenly occurred to him that it would be incredibly difficult to defend this territory - especially for Angelus, being an Irishman - and that from their house it may be even more difficult. They lived in Newington Causeway, one of the only respectable areas left in Borough, which also happened to be very close to Trinity church, where he had found Drusilla.
Angelus turned back round and pointed at the Tower. "Do you know what that is?"
"Of course," Will answered.
"Have you ever been there?"
"No."
"I have." Angelus' voice was strange – more layered than usual, Will thought, although he wasn't really sure what he meant by layered.
"Is it part of our new territory?"
Angelus shook his head. "No. We own the stretch of river between Southwark Bridge and Tower, and south of the river down to New Kent road." Will tried to picture it in his head but not knowing Borough and Bermondsey that well, he couldn't. He did know, however, that the Bermondsey housing area – slums – stretched a lot further east than the Tower.
"How much of Bermondsey?"
"Only as far as St Mary Magdalene," Angelus told him, turning back around again towards the inky water. "Any more questions?"
Will hesitated, wondering whether to voice his fears that Bermondsey would be a difficult place to defend as a territory, but stopped. Instead he shook his head. "No Sire."
"Good. I will take you round the slums tonight and show you exactly which bit is ours and which is not. I negotiated this area because it is far, far easier to pick strangers from the deteriorated areas than those people from Newington." There was a trace of bitterness in his voice there, and somehow Will knew without knowing that something had happened in their old territory when he'd been away and they'd been forced to shift a little. Will personally didn't care about hunting in the slums and he knew Darla, despite how she may appear, didn't care either. Angelus and Drusilla, however, were dreamers, and the thought of feeding from scummy lowlife disgusted them both.
For a while, Angelus and his Childe stood and watched the water - Will a little anxious because of his irrational fear of water - and then they left, and Angelus butchered a woman and daughter as he led Will home along the territory boundary.
Ok, so Iwas going to have a big dramatic scene involving the river Thames in there somewhere and that's what the whole chapter was about to lead up to, but then when I got there I couldn't do it. It took a long time to write this, because I did a hell of a lot of homework on this my friends! I don't actually live in London, I used to live just outside it, so I don't know it very well, let alone what it was like in 1882. I have looked at SO many old maps and compared them to the knew ones and MY GOD was it difficult! Not only did I work out that Tower Bridge didn't actually exist until 1896 and although it was planned in 1882 it wasn't under construction until 1886 (So I had to go back and change all references to the bridge to the tower itself), but I realised that variousplaces have different names etc...New Kent Road is bythe area now known as Elephant and Castle, for anyone interested, and so their new territory stretches up from Elephant and Castle to the area of the Thames between Southwark Bridge (near Shakespeare's globe) and Tower Bridge. phew. Also, I was planning on bringing this toa close here, but it doesn't want to stop yet so I'm going to let the fic run away with me until it feels like stopping.
Oh yeah, and I have no idea whether Drusilla went to Trinity church - I most sincerely doubt it - but I have taken liberties there considering it was just Too Convenient to have a church more or less in Angelus' back yard. (I told you I did my homework on this! All these places do/did exist and I know exactly where they are/were!)