Title: A Dash of Colour
Fandom: Angel
Pairing: Illyria x Drusilla
Rating: PG/PG-13
Word Count: 1000
Summary: She comes for Spike, but finds Illyria instead. Post season 5, but only just.
Notes: Written for
un-love-you. Prompt:
21. You’ll do. There are no angels left in their city - even Angelus is no longer himself - and she wonders where they’ve disappeared to. Floated away, flittered back to the sky now that the demons have come out to play. The craven little things.
And she had so wanted to break their tiny silver wings.
No matter - that’s not what she’s here for. She’s here for him instead, now following him around as he had once followed her. The world had fit together so much more nicely back then, before he had gotten his head so full of prettier things. Gleaming, unbroken things, and shards of metal, a whisper of breath, that reshaped everything she had built for him. But she’ll find him, pull him out of the coldness that she can feel surrounding him, and then-
Drusilla hasn’t thought that far ahead. For now, she simply follows the patterns, the threads of thought and being and prophecy that she knows will lead her to him. He shines like a beacon, so prettily, even more now than when she had last seen him, and Drusilla knows it won’t be long before she finds him again. And so she walks through this darkened city. The warring factions roll away in front of her, and she presses fingers to her lips and giggles.
Blasphemy, that the sun should ever rise in a benighted city such as this. All wrong. Someone should complain, get it set right. As soon as possible.
She can feel him just ahead, calling out to her as he ever has, and there’s something slightly wrong (and yet right in a way that nothing has ever been before) about him, around him, and Drusilla pushes forward until she can see what it is-
Until she cannot see anything at all.
A thousand, thousand colors swirl together, spin up to the sky and then back down again, sing and dance themselves out in front of her until she is blinded by their glory. They coalesce, shift against each other into a million shades of blue, and even without sight she can yet see them. A woman who is not a woman, a demon more demonic than any upon which Drusilla has ever before laid eyes, a contradiction of flesh and soul and essence and this-
This is-
(He is gone from her mind as surely as if he had never lived there at all. She is filled, and no room remains for anything but Illyria.)
A dozen possible futures - a thousand pasts that never were - converge, and Drusilla cowers against the wall of a broken building, unmindful of anything but the being before her. “All wrong. All wrong,” she whimpers, her eyes wide and not quite tearing.
She knows the demon she is looking at as surely as she knows herself, knows that nothing so beautiful - so terrible - should be contained in human flesh, and mourns the world that would commit such as sin. Such grievous wrong.
“Another vampire,” the God-King states, the words like fire as her glinting eyes rake across Drusilla’s form. “I grow tired of your kind.”
Drusilla shudders under that gaze. “Like the sun…” she murmurs, waving her hand in front of her face as if surprised it still exists. “Shining like glitter… but my hand is still my hand. It should become dust under such a light. Implacable…”
Illyria blinks sapphire eyes, and looking into them, Drusilla can see everything. All that ever was in a thousand different dimensions, everything that is, everything that ever shall be. The vision is maddening, but she cannot look away. “This one is not sane,” the Old One pronounces, turning her head to glimpse aside. Another voice sounds out, but Drusilla doesn’t hear. Can’t hear - not when Illyria is present, her essence bleeding out around her like the life force of a universe.
“She is broken,” Illyria says. “Broken, like so many things in this world. It is fallen, no longer a fraction of what it once was, and yet unfailingly your kind still breaks against it.” She makes it sound as if she takes it as a crime against herself.
“Not fallen,” Drusilla whispers, shaking her head. “Never that. The horrors have fallen into the cracks, but still they exist. Still they hide there, spinning their terrible webs. Staring at us. Blinking at us. Waiting…”
“Perhaps.”
“Waiting for one such as you,” Drusilla breathes, and she pushes herself away from the wall, moving closer to Illyria, each step bringing her nearer to inevitable doom. She doesn’t care - can’t care - not when a being such as this again walks the earth. Perfection immaculate. “You are not as you once were,” she singsongs. Something in Illyria’s stance tells her this: something in her being, in the paradoxical essence that every second threatens to burn Drusilla out entirely. Giddily, she murmurs, “But you can be again.”
And we can be with you. We as well can be as we once were. The fog could clear, and Drusilla could remember, could know…
Nothing but insignificant space separates them now, and Drusilla reaches out, runs her fingers against skin that is neither demon nor truly human, and if there is still blood rushing beneath, she cannot sense it. But she would drink more than mere blood if she could, if she dared, so that hardly matters at all. Vampiric instinct surges inside of her, and she would take this woman who is not a woman inside of her, become one…
Become whole.
“This is worship,” Illyria says, her voice pleased beyond measure, ancient beyond words, and Drusilla can feel the resonance vibrate almost painfully against her being. The God-King falls silent beside her, and Drusilla cannot hear even an echo of her thoughts. “Is it not?”
“It is,” she agrees, the words half a prayer - never before has there been a being to which a vampire would pray - when Illyria doesn’t pull away.
“Good,” Illyria decides, and Drusilla shivers as the world stands still. “This will suffice.”
Finis