The Web
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The Web
William sits, staring at the spider patiently spinning its web to stretch between the mantlepiece and the hearth.
He has been in his new life (unlife?)--his new existance-- for some time now. Somehow the days seem longer. Maybe because he's no longer obligated to do anything. It seems somehow unfair that he can't go out in the day, and the nights are so short. At least London has enough days of rain or overcast that it prevents him from feeling utterly confined. How do vampires in Antarctica cope, he wonders, during the endless days. Maybe there are no vampires in Antarctica. Maybe they live underground. He'll ask Angelus.
Not right now, though. Angelus is not in a teaching mood. He has been around long enough to begin using his newfound senses to pick up the threads of unspoken thoughts and moods that eminate from the others like strands of spiderweb. They're invisible, but if he pays close enough attention he fancies he can see them, glistening like dewy spiderwebs on a misty morning. He wonders if he's going mad.
No, no it's just a metaphor. He's always loved language, wanted to craft it, to weave it, to bend it to his will. Angelus' fine, strong hands bend simple charcoal and ink and fine textured paper to his will, making pictures from nothingness. William the Bloody Awful Poet is dead and buried but William the Vampire's mind can't stop weaving words. His new world has so many things that cry out to be discovered and described, for it is in the describing they become real. Angelus told him he ought to start keeping a journal. He writes in it sometimes, during the interminable hours of daylight, although now that he's a vampire he's too busy actually experiencing his new world to have the time to write about it much.
Ironic that he was never so alive, til he was dead, William thinks. It makes him smile and he tucks it away to tell Dru sometime. He has learned, although still not completely accepted, that the gossamer strands that weave Dru to Angelus are tangled, thick and sticky. Try as William might he can't break them, although he does manage to stretch them a bit. He still holds to the thought that in time he'll stretch them farther and farther, little by little, until without either of them noticing, he can wrap himself tightly to her, binding them together for eternity in a single cocoon of love and passion, of eternal devotion. He would be her willing slave.
He is slightly uneasy that Angelus is aware of this plan. More disturbingly, he senses that his own gossamer threads bind him as tightly to the brute as Drusilla. And Angelus in turn, is bound to Darla. All of them, bound together by a tangled web, each motion one makes setting the web reverberating and alerting the others in turn.
As William watches the busy arachnid at work, he feels his Sire's hand on the nape of his neck. He turns swiftly and looks up, all the way up to his Sire's face. Angelus smiles down at him and crouches beside his boy, to see what has captured the fledgling's interest.
Angelus rests his chin on the boy's shoulder, casually draping a strong arm over William's shoulder and across his chest.
The two of them watch the spider in her work, silently. William feels Angelus purr.