Camera Obscura for the lynnevitational
Title: Camera Obscura
Author: Lostakasha
Pairing: Angel/Oz
Rating: R
Word Count: 4600
Warnings: This is not a happy story.
Disclaimer: Property of Mutant Enemy and all that jazz.
Credits: Joss Whedon, David Greenwalt, Jeanne Renshaw for snippets of dialogue from City Of, In The Dark, and I Will Remember You.
Beta-read by: chrisleeoctaves, glossing, and sweptawaybayou. Thanks also to setje for the French translations, and especially to germaine_pet for holding this marvelous event.
Feedback is craved and cherished -- thank you.
This is a follow up to Pentimento. You don’t need to read that first, but it might be fun. For the lynnevitational
For Snow, who asked.
With love.
Camera Obscura
Nothing of his life remains: not the city he guarded nor the people he loved or befriended. Trapped in his cage of living flesh and bone he can offer nothing of substance to the good fight. Cast away, he is simply human now; bereft of commonality with destiny’s foot soldiers, and with anyone he truly loved dead or corrupted or reigning over a luminous army of slayers that doesn’t need his kind.
Angel, fallen.
Alive and living to die.
~~ from Pentimento
Prologue
Anguilla, British West Indies
The black-clad poseur who runs a group of outlandish galleries in Rendezvous Bay gets the paintings. He fawns and preens over Angel’s presence in his foolish little shop, drools indiscreetly over the landscapes and the few portraits left in the group: Buffy in shadow, a bronze Madonna sending her lover to hell; Doyle, eyes lifted as if in supplication; and Cordelia, pale and gravid, trapped in a dream. Shades of deKooning! So sumptuously violent… we must create an installation … I know a collector in Monaco… in Copenhagen…
He leaves the canvases and a scrawled note with a rarely used but still viable address, and heads back to Signal Hill to dig a grave.
When it is finished the rectangular edges of the sod blend seamlessly into the surrounding grass. No hump of fresh earth betrays the gravesite, no temporary riot of cut blooms are left to wither and die the next day. It is as if the old nun never lived at all, nor did he; he’s thought for years now that it would have been best, but her presence in his life made it easier to live in pallid cowardice and let life simply go on rather than make the effort to end it.
“Regardez le monde comme si vous êtiez serein, Niall, mais vous fuyez toujours.”
“You look to the world as though you’re standing still, Niall, but you’re forever running.”
He was new to being human and to the island and the convent and his landscaping then, and simply smiled and watched the frail old woman walk away. She waits until the life is almost completely drained from her body to press the point. “N'est il pas l'heure de faire face à vos demons?” she asks him two years later.
For last words they were pretty damn funny.
Isn’t it time to face your demons?
I
Los Angeles
From the top of Sunset Plaza Drive the L.A. basin sparkles bright, a riot of tattered sequins on a fallen starlet’s handbag. Angel is careful not to look south toward the empty hole where the financial district used to be. There’s not much to see on that end of Wilshire, even now. In this light the chasm could be an oncologist’s dream, a precise excision of a lethal mass with nice, clean margins. Five years post and relatively cancer-free.
For now, at least.
He idly imagines Dru, dizzy and rancid, looping her way over the canyon curves. She will forever be his legacy; more than Connor or any of the others, more than whatever fights have been lost and won. She is the last one of his kind, but it isn’t in him to be sorry. He’s paid for his deeds in the incessant desire that always curdles into hate. Sorrow is for poets and drunkards.
For Spike. For Doyle.
Angel keeps the hate for himself.
Anguilla is a no more than a half-forgotten fever dream to him now, drowned in a teal sea of memory that lingers like the sunwashed days he spent tending the convent’s gardens. Sister Jeanne D’Arc wanted him to stop and face himself and he’s granted her that innocent death wish over and over since returning to the shattered remains of the city of angels.
He returns nightly to that moment of rebirth, to the first days of reanimation in warm, foreign skin. The mundane aspects of humanity were the ones he thought would bring him joy: feeling his own heartbeat, changes in body temperature, knowing that the blood in his veins is his own, digestion. The disjunction of hope and reality was savagely quick, but hardly so neatly excised.
Of course he told himself what not to expect, having spent a significant portion of his days insisting that to become a man would be different than being what he was. Despite every argument he had with himself, Angel believed that the Shanshu would confer upon him some kind of glorious humanity, something nearer to divinity than his ancient rotting heart could touch. Simplicity would be the prophecy’s gift, he’d told himself, an exquisite sense of normalcy, a state of grace his soul craved and his demon despised.
On the first or second night - he doesn’t remember anymore - bound by the phantom need to drink and to savor one more taste of dying flesh, he took a steak from a burned-out grocery store and tore into it with blunt teeth, devouring gristle and fat and meat. The experience was unremarkable once the retching stopped.
He learned quickly that without his own monstrosity he could do nothing to stop any real or imagined demon; a thing that once would have died with an effortless twist of his wrist lifted him up over its spiny head and threw him against the side of a building.
N'est il pas l'heure de faire face à vos demons?
Downtown L.A. is five years gone and he is a five-year-old real boy whose questions have all been asked and left largely unanswered. Angel now understands the following:
1. Simplicity is for morons.
2. The meaning of the phrase “to shit a brick.”
Angelenos drive through the night in rivers of white and red, circling the dark, bottomless wound as if whistling while passing that demonic graveyard will grant them some beatific immunity from it. Angel watches the pointless hegira as if he were still a monster, still a champion, still necessary. As if he matters.
Still Angel.
When the mark of Aurelius fled his skin, so too did the scourge of memory: that endless parade of agonized faces and pleas for mercy that orchestrated his soulful existence for so long. He remembers too well the rat-feasts and near-starvation, the fear of dreaming, the song of the demon threading sweet and low in its cage of skin and bone, and the holy terror of love.
He remembers the Deeper Well.
Compared to that, downtown L.A. is just another fucking hole in the ground.
At daybreak he returns to the flat-roofed house above Laurel Canyon Boulevard and works in the gardens until the agony of his ruined back blurs his vision and forces him to retreat into the blessed nothingness of a hit of black tar. When it rains there’s wine and Chopin and a lungful or two of delicate ganja smoke just before he nods off with Buffy’s name and the taste of his own come on his lips. When he rises from his stupor, he paints what strokes he can manage until shadows steal the light and drive him back to the rim of Sunset Plaza Drive to hover over the legions of the fallen; alive, and living to die.
II
Sensuality Exhumed: The Portraiture of Niall Gallimh
Forum Gallery, West Hollywood
It’s been months since Oz first saw Buffy’s face staring back at him from a half-page newspaper ad for a chic art gallery. He chalked it up to coincidence, at first; the sword in her hand could have been a trippy metaphor, or the artist might have been on the business end of a bad break-up. Oz made the trip to the gallery not really expecting to see Buffy in the actual portrait. Nor was he expecting to see Francis Allen Doyle in the one that hung beside it, or Cordy’s death-still face in the frame across the room.
~~~
The flat stilt house sits etched into the hillside, hidden from the road by cypress and spruce trees, by thick green hedges and moss covered rock. Oz knows this is the place, having driven the undulant street repeatedly, stopping every few feet to bounce up stairs and pathways, checking well-concealed house numbers and peering through locked gates.
It’s taken months to track Niall down. It takes months to track down anyone in L.A. these days, when the city’s freeways stop bluntly at the lip of a crevasse that the world’s brightest construction and architecture firms can’t seem to fill. The hole still seethes, resisting concrete, rebar, and asphalt, defiant.
Oz buzzes the gate. When no answer comes he scales a nearby ledge and jumps the fence. He lands, light-footed, in a bed of vivid orange day lilies that reach nearly to his waist and in the moment it takes him to orient himself he becomes part of a stoner’s blossoming dream, engulfed by color and scent and texture. Lilacs, heady and somnolent, reach brush-stroke wide through the spectrum of magenta and blue to lavender and violet; blood-bright amaryllis strain to the sky, offset by climbing manzanitas, dusky and pale.
He steps through the clusters of color and keeps his eyes to the ground, seeking a path to get him closer to the house, resisting the urge to crouch and track, his ability to scent dulled, for the moment, by overstimulation. The light above him shifts and he stills instinctively, holding his breath.
“Okay, this is fucked up,” he says, and Angel -- whose shadow darkens the flowerbeds and is actually larger than Oz remembers -- doesn’t contradict him.
When Angel simply turns his back, Oz follows.
He doesn’t notice how badly maintained the low glass and beam structure is until he steps up on the uneven concrete slab that once served at a patio; the steel porch supports are sharp with peeling rust and the floor to ceiling widows are pitted, opaque. It becomes clear with every step Oz takes that whatever fondness Angel may have had for objets d’art or for the peculiar brand of sterile beauty he once favored is gone, or forgotten.
Battered wooden doors swing wide and Oz’s scent trumps his sight: paint, turpentine, beeswax, pot smoke, tart vinegar, and dust mingle and blend. Half-finished canvases lean upon one another everywhere he looks; a canvas scroll covers one entire wall, wide, black outlines revealing a cityscape Oz can’t quite place - it could be Vienna or any number of European cities.
Angel folds himself down on a battered wood-framed couch, and with no choice but to mirror him, Oz does the same.
“Are you still a vampire?” he asks.
“No.”
Carbon black eyes connect and hold, lifting Oz out of his skin. There always seemed to be too much in Angel’s eyes; not the wisdom of centuries but the pain of them. What he sees now is a different kind of agony -- the hollow ruins of disappointment.
“How did you find me?” Angel asks.
Oz pulls a scrap of paper from his jeans pocket and presents it to him. Angel turns the newspaper clipping over and over in his hands, folds it, then examines it again.
“Who knows about this?”
“Just me, Scooby-wise.” Delayed reactions collide and crowd his consciousness, and Oz has no idea what to do with the realization that Angel is a living, breathing, warm-blooded person. He reaches over to Angel’s arm, touches fingertips to wrist. There it is, there’s the proof. Now he’s got more questions than he can find words for. He waits for something meaningful and direct to coalesce, but only one word comes.
“Buffy.”
Angel’s eyes flicker but don’t leave the newspaper ad. There was a time he could see each dot in the newsprint; could see the slightest shift in registration, the slightest blur, but now all he can see is what any L.A. Weekly reader sees: an invitation to view “the tortured, sumptuously erotic neo-impressionist visions of new artist Niall Galimnh” and three blurry portraits - Buffy, Doyle, and Cordy.
“I’m not a new artist,” Angel says. Oz’s voice reaches him, at last, and he looks up. “How is she?”
Oz shrugs. “I haven’t seen her since I left Sunnydale. Since before there wasn’t a Sunnydale. So you…?”
“No.” Angel pockets the clipping and regards Oz for a long moment, as if seeing him for the first time. “How are you?”
“Good,” he says, smiling. “When I saw you in the garden I thought you were wearing the Gem of Amarra. The pulse was a shocker.”
Angel extends his right hand, flexes his fist and stares at the ghost of a long-forgotten ring.
“They’re dead. Doyle. Cordy. Spike.” The stone shatters beneath the brick, emerald shards spin into the sunset and dissolve. “All mine died. Wes. Gunn. Fred. Hers didn’t. Not Xander or Giles, or Willow… or you.” Angel stands and motions into the next room. “Why do you think that is, Oz? You guys on the better side of the fight, or what?”
The good fight, yeah…
“I didn’t know, Angel,” Oz says, following close behind.
“Angel,” he says. His words fall measured and slow. “There is no Angel. Angel is dead.”
Oz steps forward. “He was a friend of mine,” he says, and reaches for Angel’s wrist. The pulse beats hard on his fingers. “Angel is dead. Long live Angel.”
III
Laurel Canyon
They lounge in the kitchen. There is iced tea and homegrown ganja laced with potent honey oil and talk of Tibet; of journeys taken years apart; of Romania and curses bestowed and broken; of living in the light of the sun and the shadows of the moon.
“I lost my taste for people,” Oz tells Niall, knowing he’ll understand in a way only another flesh-eater can. “Didn’t have much to offer the stake and silver bullet set once I came back from Romania.”
“Can’t believe they didn’t offer you a recruitment package.” Niall groans, breathing a satisfying draught of sweet smoke.
Oz chortles and takes the joint from Niall’s fingers, remembering how enormous he thought they seemed when wrapped around a wooden picket or a teacher’s neck.
“They tried,” he admits. “The chowing down and howling thing isn’t for me, so I traveled instead. Tried to help. Interesting thing about most monsters, man…”
“They don’t much care to be separated from their monstrosity.”
“It’s a radical specialness,” and the word sticks on the roof of his mouth, tacky and huge. The room expands and contracts, and he can’t control the impulse to lean close when he hands the joint back, doesn’t want to suppress the impulse to brush his mouth against his host’s, so he doesn’t. He passes a stream of smoke between Niall’s parted lips, suffocating whatever agreement he was prepared to utter, and pulls the shared breath into a kiss.
Niall inhales and pulls away.
“So why you?” He blows the remains of the toke up to the ceiling and sits back. “What makes you so radically special? Not like most … monsters?” He draws the defining word out like a caress on skin flayed raw and waits for Oz to open his pale eyes.
Oz shakes the query away and the room swims into soft focus. “Not remembering,” he says. “That’s the one part of it they can’t fix. Can’t hook me into the wolf so I feel anything more than the aftermath. Makes the ‘thrill of the hunt’ vastly overrated.”
“You’re missing out on the best part,” and he’s lived with it for so long that it will never be untrue, “all that guilt and repentance. Every throat ripped out’s a reason to live one more day just to say you’re so fucking sorry.”
“What happened to you? How did you get this way?”
“I saved the world.”
That sucks, Oz thinks, but the words never make it to his lips because Niall’s mouth is over them, prying them wide with a fierce, insistent tongue, erasing everything that can be spoken.
When Oz grabs hold of his shoulders and lets himself be lifted, a scene plays out in Niall’s mind; something he watched in a movie once, or lived in a collection of hours that he stored in his heart for days when nothing but the hope of death and that memory could sustain him. When he kicks his chair over there’s no metal to meet glued-down linoleum; the refrigerator he lifts Oz against is stainless steel and as hollow as the sound his chest makes when his bulk slams him into it.
His paintings paid for a sturdy grapevine table with a tempered glass top that would hold a pair of two-hundred pound men as they fucked or fought; no matter how hard he shoves Oz down beneath him there’s nothing to buckle or break; and it’s not a teapot or a bowl of fruit that crashes to the floor this time, just a couple of empty glasses and a brass ashtray full of smutty, wet roaches.
This is not the insatiable hunger of champions together at last; there’s nothing romantic or poetic when Niall wrenches the zipper on Oz’s jeans and frees his cock, drops to his knees and sucks it to the root, shivering with each clench of fingers dug in his scalp and the heat of small, sharp hips pistoning into his face. Oz will have blood under his nails when he’s through, Niall thinks. Might help him remember what he’s lost…
…what I bargained away for this, to be just another asshole in a world filled to the brim with them. Monkeyshit flung on a canvas and they think it’s art and wouldn’t Spike just love this, love me like this? “This isn’t over until one of us is a pile of dust, mate,” and Spike was so goddamn sure of it at the time, always convinced it would be him against him and not beside him; convinced in that empty warehouse with Doyle and Cordy and hot pokers and the good fight, yeah...
“Wanna fuck you,” Oz moans, pulling his face away, hard. “Angel…”
~~~
The bedroom reminds Oz of a night long ago and a case of mistaken identity. Angel favored rich reds and burgundies then, bedclothes the color of blood and the texture of supple skin. Flecks of gold woven through tapestries matched the monstrous gleam in his eyes as he writhed in the throes of death and reached for Oz’s hand. Angel’s mouth was moist and oddly hot against his fingers even though the litany he whispered wasn’t carried on breath.
“Don’t save me,” he whispered. “Not worth saving. Please, don’t…”
Oz had wiped the cold sweat from Angel’s face with his palm and bent to taste it afterward when Willow couldn’t see.
Niall’s sweat is just that: sweat, not tinged with ichor or poison or a hint of animal blood; salty and tart, a little sweet, indistinguishable from his own. When Oz rolls away, spent, panting, and wet, the dampness chills him. He’s too stoned and fucked out to leave, so he takes a handful of the luxurious Egyptian cotton sheet on which he lies, covers himself with it, and lets the darkness fall without asking permission to stay.
~~~
Niall tightens the tourniquet around his upper thigh and turns to watch Oz twitch and mutter in sleep. The mundane aspects of humanity were the ones he thought would bring him joy: a pulse to measure, heartbeats to count, hunger to satisfy. Now the heartbeat terrifies him when it throbs hard in his throat, choking his breath, slamming the blood he makes in veins too narrow and insubstantial to hold it in. What he hungers for will never be satisfied by a lover’s kiss or the well-meant lie of eternal remembrance. It will never be fed by drink or smoke or a cock up his ass or the sly invitation of a perfumed cunt at his chin or be satisfied with pigments and chiaroscuro and crosshatch earnestly applied to canvas.
Niall sinks the needle home, breathes through the pull-back and waits through interminable seconds for the weight of his bones to lift and fall into blankness; to descend into precious peace.
It’s been happening more and more lately that he’s met at the brink of relief, pulled into a familiar embrace and tempted to tumble beyond the innocent lightness of the high, to push the boundaries of that pure joy and see what’s next.
“I’ll go if you come with me,” Niall whispers. “You know what’s there.”
Doyle tilts his head, latches a finger beneath the crimson belt at Niall’s groin and releases the knot. Covers Niall’s ruddy thumb with his own as he pushes the plunger.
“Not allowed. I'm just a lowly messenger, you're a warrior.”
“Come with me,” and the plea beats hard in his chest, pulses in his temples, rises to a scream, wild and feral. Doyle smiles and presses a perfectly white fingertip over the glistening bead of blood that wells at the curve of Niall’s groin.
“I’m just the guy who gives directions.” Niall feels the whiskey-burned breath against his cheek and reaches to keep him there, fights to touch flesh and muscle and feel some kind of resistance. “You already know where you want to go.”
Doyle is close enough to kiss as the bed and the room and the world float out from beneath Niall’s body and he spins gently into the void, not caring to cling, not needing to hold on.
~~~
The western light caramelizes the colors on the bed and there’s one side of the wolf that Oz hasn’t lost - time told by the reach of the sun. When the brightness wakes him it’s five, or near it; he’s been in Niall’s bed for as many hours. Niall sleeps placidly beside him, gaunt and strangely beautiful. Oz rises and collects his clothes, nearly stepping on Niall’s works as he passes by the side of the bed.
Rabbit still and waiting, Oz collects another moment, another irresistible comparison of past to present and forms a new set of questions about Angel’s new life -- as if having fucked him out of breath in his own bed wasn’t something extraordinary in itself. Angelus would have slit Oz’s throat and ejaculated into the blood-drained hole. Angel would have laughed and broken him with silence, poetry, and exquisite hands, evaporating Oz’s lofty notion of dominance with a sly smile, a soft kiss. But Niall…
Niall merely laughed, deep and low and filthily, and led Oz to the bedroom, where he knelt on all fours and spread his legs.
“What happened to you? How did you get this way?”
“I saved the world.”
The dusty floor beneath Oz’s bare feet creaks when he steps back to avoid landing on the syringe; warm hands wrap around his slender, muscular thigh and pull him hard into the side of the bed.
Niall’s eyes are night-sky endless; his smile alone is tender enough to freeze Oz there, enough to steal his reaction and leave him bereft of response or the willingness to make a choice.
“Let me paint you,” he rasps, and he sounds like dusk falling.
IV
Sunset Plaza Drive
Oz loved that Angel was the perfect second-story man; willing and able to trespass, to sneak into forbidden spaces, and he loves that this is one aspect of his former self that Niall retains. Past midnight and without sufficient light to paint, he’s led him here, to the paved backyard of a derelict showbiz icon whose immense swimming pool is built out over the cliffside.
He clambers up on the retaining wall at the pool’s deep end and sits at the corner, watching the city lights shimmer into a pointillist’s fever dream. He closes his eyes and breathes, lets the illusion of those precious stones fade and re-form in his mind. When he opens his eyes he keeps them trained away from the southern fringe of the city. To look there still makes him feel ill-at-ease and voyeuristic; never one to rubberneck at accident scenes, he peers instead at the rooftops staggered directly below.
The clink of coin on concrete and tile is followed by a whisper of cloth falling and a splash. Niall’s dark head breaks the water and in this light, with his hair plastered back from his wide, lean face, he could have gone to Sunnydale, sat next to Oz in the computer lab or on the bench with Xander at swim practice. Oz sees the youth Angel missed and doesn’t need an invitation to pull his shirt over his head and shuck his shoes and jeans.
They pull each other under the black glassine surface and tug and wrestle and pull like the beautiful boys they never were and pop up from the water, lungs on fire, gasping, mouths open and curved, ready to kiss. Niall tastes like chili peppers and bergamot tea, sweet and acidic and so human; Oz chases the kiss, and another, until Niall kicks out from beneath him and floats on his back. The line where his gardener’s tan ends and the moon-white of his hips and legs begins fascinates Oz, and not just because he’s still a little stoned.
“That tan needs its own zip code,” he says. “You must dig the beach now.”
Niall flips and dives to the bottom of the pool without answering. Oz swims to the center and treads water, staring up at the crescent moon. He remembers a line from a book he read in junior high, something about a ‘little silver slipper of a moon’ and he thought so, then, before that mysterious rock meant madness and loss and solitude. The Glass Menagerie, he thinks, wondering if whoever wrote it imagined the stars overhead as slivers of glass shattered by that wicked scythe.
“Dude, you ever read that story…”
Oz turns to see Niall standing atop the retaining wall, shoulders glistening, arms spread like Christ of the Andes, water coursing in rivulets down his chest.
“There’s a million stories in the naked city, Oz,” he laughs. “They’re all pretty much the same. Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, girl sends boy to hell. Boy comes back from hell, slits his son’s throat, saves the world and becomes a real boy. Think that’s a good one?”
“I was around for the first act. Everything after that’s kinda murky,” Oz says.
The air shifts and stills and the scent of night blooming jasmine lingers in the air, cloying and sickly sweet. Niall remembers planting flowers on the convent grounds at White Rock Cay: roses, oleander, camellias and frangipani, but never, ever jasmine. He breathes past it, past the chemical tang of contained water, past lungfuls of tempera and grave dust, past the scent of honey and whiskey and whatever memories he has left.
Doyle leans against Niall’s shoulder, stretches his arm across his chest and turns him to face the riot of neon jewels spreading out before them.
“It’s what you’ve been waiting for,” he says. “The good sister was right. Time to face your demons.”
Oz’s voice is a hum in the distance, dull and insistent, nothing to pay any particular attention to.
“Bright lights, big city. All yours, boyo.”
Niall turns just enough to see Doyle’s face, to see the silver shadows in his eyes. They look toward the south and stare together into the dark chasm that bought his humanity; into that desolate birth canal, dark and silent amid the pulsing ocean of color and light and life.
“You see it at night and it shines,” he says.
“That it does,” Doyle agrees, holding Niall’s hand as he dives into the city of fallen angels, arms open to receive the breaking wave.
~~end~~
Author: Lostakasha
Pairing: Angel/Oz
Rating: R
Word Count: 4600
Warnings: This is not a happy story.
Disclaimer: Property of Mutant Enemy and all that jazz.
Credits: Joss Whedon, David Greenwalt, Jeanne Renshaw for snippets of dialogue from City Of, In The Dark, and I Will Remember You.
Beta-read by: chrisleeoctaves, glossing, and sweptawaybayou. Thanks also to setje for the French translations, and especially to germaine_pet for holding this marvelous event.
Feedback is craved and cherished -- thank you.
This is a follow up to Pentimento. You don’t need to read that first, but it might be fun. For the lynnevitational
For Snow, who asked.
With love.
Camera Obscura
Nothing of his life remains: not the city he guarded nor the people he loved or befriended. Trapped in his cage of living flesh and bone he can offer nothing of substance to the good fight. Cast away, he is simply human now; bereft of commonality with destiny’s foot soldiers, and with anyone he truly loved dead or corrupted or reigning over a luminous army of slayers that doesn’t need his kind.
Angel, fallen.
Alive and living to die.
~~ from Pentimento
Prologue
Anguilla, British West Indies
The black-clad poseur who runs a group of outlandish galleries in Rendezvous Bay gets the paintings. He fawns and preens over Angel’s presence in his foolish little shop, drools indiscreetly over the landscapes and the few portraits left in the group: Buffy in shadow, a bronze Madonna sending her lover to hell; Doyle, eyes lifted as if in supplication; and Cordelia, pale and gravid, trapped in a dream. Shades of deKooning! So sumptuously violent… we must create an installation … I know a collector in Monaco… in Copenhagen…
He leaves the canvases and a scrawled note with a rarely used but still viable address, and heads back to Signal Hill to dig a grave.
When it is finished the rectangular edges of the sod blend seamlessly into the surrounding grass. No hump of fresh earth betrays the gravesite, no temporary riot of cut blooms are left to wither and die the next day. It is as if the old nun never lived at all, nor did he; he’s thought for years now that it would have been best, but her presence in his life made it easier to live in pallid cowardice and let life simply go on rather than make the effort to end it.
“Regardez le monde comme si vous êtiez serein, Niall, mais vous fuyez toujours.”
“You look to the world as though you’re standing still, Niall, but you’re forever running.”
He was new to being human and to the island and the convent and his landscaping then, and simply smiled and watched the frail old woman walk away. She waits until the life is almost completely drained from her body to press the point. “N'est il pas l'heure de faire face à vos demons?” she asks him two years later.
For last words they were pretty damn funny.
Isn’t it time to face your demons?
I
Los Angeles
From the top of Sunset Plaza Drive the L.A. basin sparkles bright, a riot of tattered sequins on a fallen starlet’s handbag. Angel is careful not to look south toward the empty hole where the financial district used to be. There’s not much to see on that end of Wilshire, even now. In this light the chasm could be an oncologist’s dream, a precise excision of a lethal mass with nice, clean margins. Five years post and relatively cancer-free.
For now, at least.
He idly imagines Dru, dizzy and rancid, looping her way over the canyon curves. She will forever be his legacy; more than Connor or any of the others, more than whatever fights have been lost and won. She is the last one of his kind, but it isn’t in him to be sorry. He’s paid for his deeds in the incessant desire that always curdles into hate. Sorrow is for poets and drunkards.
For Spike. For Doyle.
Angel keeps the hate for himself.
Anguilla is a no more than a half-forgotten fever dream to him now, drowned in a teal sea of memory that lingers like the sunwashed days he spent tending the convent’s gardens. Sister Jeanne D’Arc wanted him to stop and face himself and he’s granted her that innocent death wish over and over since returning to the shattered remains of the city of angels.
He returns nightly to that moment of rebirth, to the first days of reanimation in warm, foreign skin. The mundane aspects of humanity were the ones he thought would bring him joy: feeling his own heartbeat, changes in body temperature, knowing that the blood in his veins is his own, digestion. The disjunction of hope and reality was savagely quick, but hardly so neatly excised.
Of course he told himself what not to expect, having spent a significant portion of his days insisting that to become a man would be different than being what he was. Despite every argument he had with himself, Angel believed that the Shanshu would confer upon him some kind of glorious humanity, something nearer to divinity than his ancient rotting heart could touch. Simplicity would be the prophecy’s gift, he’d told himself, an exquisite sense of normalcy, a state of grace his soul craved and his demon despised.
On the first or second night - he doesn’t remember anymore - bound by the phantom need to drink and to savor one more taste of dying flesh, he took a steak from a burned-out grocery store and tore into it with blunt teeth, devouring gristle and fat and meat. The experience was unremarkable once the retching stopped.
He learned quickly that without his own monstrosity he could do nothing to stop any real or imagined demon; a thing that once would have died with an effortless twist of his wrist lifted him up over its spiny head and threw him against the side of a building.
N'est il pas l'heure de faire face à vos demons?
Downtown L.A. is five years gone and he is a five-year-old real boy whose questions have all been asked and left largely unanswered. Angel now understands the following:
1. Simplicity is for morons.
2. The meaning of the phrase “to shit a brick.”
Angelenos drive through the night in rivers of white and red, circling the dark, bottomless wound as if whistling while passing that demonic graveyard will grant them some beatific immunity from it. Angel watches the pointless hegira as if he were still a monster, still a champion, still necessary. As if he matters.
Still Angel.
When the mark of Aurelius fled his skin, so too did the scourge of memory: that endless parade of agonized faces and pleas for mercy that orchestrated his soulful existence for so long. He remembers too well the rat-feasts and near-starvation, the fear of dreaming, the song of the demon threading sweet and low in its cage of skin and bone, and the holy terror of love.
He remembers the Deeper Well.
Compared to that, downtown L.A. is just another fucking hole in the ground.
At daybreak he returns to the flat-roofed house above Laurel Canyon Boulevard and works in the gardens until the agony of his ruined back blurs his vision and forces him to retreat into the blessed nothingness of a hit of black tar. When it rains there’s wine and Chopin and a lungful or two of delicate ganja smoke just before he nods off with Buffy’s name and the taste of his own come on his lips. When he rises from his stupor, he paints what strokes he can manage until shadows steal the light and drive him back to the rim of Sunset Plaza Drive to hover over the legions of the fallen; alive, and living to die.
II
Sensuality Exhumed: The Portraiture of Niall Gallimh
Forum Gallery, West Hollywood
It’s been months since Oz first saw Buffy’s face staring back at him from a half-page newspaper ad for a chic art gallery. He chalked it up to coincidence, at first; the sword in her hand could have been a trippy metaphor, or the artist might have been on the business end of a bad break-up. Oz made the trip to the gallery not really expecting to see Buffy in the actual portrait. Nor was he expecting to see Francis Allen Doyle in the one that hung beside it, or Cordy’s death-still face in the frame across the room.
~~~
The flat stilt house sits etched into the hillside, hidden from the road by cypress and spruce trees, by thick green hedges and moss covered rock. Oz knows this is the place, having driven the undulant street repeatedly, stopping every few feet to bounce up stairs and pathways, checking well-concealed house numbers and peering through locked gates.
It’s taken months to track Niall down. It takes months to track down anyone in L.A. these days, when the city’s freeways stop bluntly at the lip of a crevasse that the world’s brightest construction and architecture firms can’t seem to fill. The hole still seethes, resisting concrete, rebar, and asphalt, defiant.
Oz buzzes the gate. When no answer comes he scales a nearby ledge and jumps the fence. He lands, light-footed, in a bed of vivid orange day lilies that reach nearly to his waist and in the moment it takes him to orient himself he becomes part of a stoner’s blossoming dream, engulfed by color and scent and texture. Lilacs, heady and somnolent, reach brush-stroke wide through the spectrum of magenta and blue to lavender and violet; blood-bright amaryllis strain to the sky, offset by climbing manzanitas, dusky and pale.
He steps through the clusters of color and keeps his eyes to the ground, seeking a path to get him closer to the house, resisting the urge to crouch and track, his ability to scent dulled, for the moment, by overstimulation. The light above him shifts and he stills instinctively, holding his breath.
“Okay, this is fucked up,” he says, and Angel -- whose shadow darkens the flowerbeds and is actually larger than Oz remembers -- doesn’t contradict him.
When Angel simply turns his back, Oz follows.
He doesn’t notice how badly maintained the low glass and beam structure is until he steps up on the uneven concrete slab that once served at a patio; the steel porch supports are sharp with peeling rust and the floor to ceiling widows are pitted, opaque. It becomes clear with every step Oz takes that whatever fondness Angel may have had for objets d’art or for the peculiar brand of sterile beauty he once favored is gone, or forgotten.
Battered wooden doors swing wide and Oz’s scent trumps his sight: paint, turpentine, beeswax, pot smoke, tart vinegar, and dust mingle and blend. Half-finished canvases lean upon one another everywhere he looks; a canvas scroll covers one entire wall, wide, black outlines revealing a cityscape Oz can’t quite place - it could be Vienna or any number of European cities.
Angel folds himself down on a battered wood-framed couch, and with no choice but to mirror him, Oz does the same.
“Are you still a vampire?” he asks.
“No.”
Carbon black eyes connect and hold, lifting Oz out of his skin. There always seemed to be too much in Angel’s eyes; not the wisdom of centuries but the pain of them. What he sees now is a different kind of agony -- the hollow ruins of disappointment.
“How did you find me?” Angel asks.
Oz pulls a scrap of paper from his jeans pocket and presents it to him. Angel turns the newspaper clipping over and over in his hands, folds it, then examines it again.
“Who knows about this?”
“Just me, Scooby-wise.” Delayed reactions collide and crowd his consciousness, and Oz has no idea what to do with the realization that Angel is a living, breathing, warm-blooded person. He reaches over to Angel’s arm, touches fingertips to wrist. There it is, there’s the proof. Now he’s got more questions than he can find words for. He waits for something meaningful and direct to coalesce, but only one word comes.
“Buffy.”
Angel’s eyes flicker but don’t leave the newspaper ad. There was a time he could see each dot in the newsprint; could see the slightest shift in registration, the slightest blur, but now all he can see is what any L.A. Weekly reader sees: an invitation to view “the tortured, sumptuously erotic neo-impressionist visions of new artist Niall Galimnh” and three blurry portraits - Buffy, Doyle, and Cordy.
“I’m not a new artist,” Angel says. Oz’s voice reaches him, at last, and he looks up. “How is she?”
Oz shrugs. “I haven’t seen her since I left Sunnydale. Since before there wasn’t a Sunnydale. So you…?”
“No.” Angel pockets the clipping and regards Oz for a long moment, as if seeing him for the first time. “How are you?”
“Good,” he says, smiling. “When I saw you in the garden I thought you were wearing the Gem of Amarra. The pulse was a shocker.”
Angel extends his right hand, flexes his fist and stares at the ghost of a long-forgotten ring.
“They’re dead. Doyle. Cordy. Spike.” The stone shatters beneath the brick, emerald shards spin into the sunset and dissolve. “All mine died. Wes. Gunn. Fred. Hers didn’t. Not Xander or Giles, or Willow… or you.” Angel stands and motions into the next room. “Why do you think that is, Oz? You guys on the better side of the fight, or what?”
The good fight, yeah…
“I didn’t know, Angel,” Oz says, following close behind.
“Angel,” he says. His words fall measured and slow. “There is no Angel. Angel is dead.”
Oz steps forward. “He was a friend of mine,” he says, and reaches for Angel’s wrist. The pulse beats hard on his fingers. “Angel is dead. Long live Angel.”
III
Laurel Canyon
They lounge in the kitchen. There is iced tea and homegrown ganja laced with potent honey oil and talk of Tibet; of journeys taken years apart; of Romania and curses bestowed and broken; of living in the light of the sun and the shadows of the moon.
“I lost my taste for people,” Oz tells Niall, knowing he’ll understand in a way only another flesh-eater can. “Didn’t have much to offer the stake and silver bullet set once I came back from Romania.”
“Can’t believe they didn’t offer you a recruitment package.” Niall groans, breathing a satisfying draught of sweet smoke.
Oz chortles and takes the joint from Niall’s fingers, remembering how enormous he thought they seemed when wrapped around a wooden picket or a teacher’s neck.
“They tried,” he admits. “The chowing down and howling thing isn’t for me, so I traveled instead. Tried to help. Interesting thing about most monsters, man…”
“They don’t much care to be separated from their monstrosity.”
“It’s a radical specialness,” and the word sticks on the roof of his mouth, tacky and huge. The room expands and contracts, and he can’t control the impulse to lean close when he hands the joint back, doesn’t want to suppress the impulse to brush his mouth against his host’s, so he doesn’t. He passes a stream of smoke between Niall’s parted lips, suffocating whatever agreement he was prepared to utter, and pulls the shared breath into a kiss.
Niall inhales and pulls away.
“So why you?” He blows the remains of the toke up to the ceiling and sits back. “What makes you so radically special? Not like most … monsters?” He draws the defining word out like a caress on skin flayed raw and waits for Oz to open his pale eyes.
Oz shakes the query away and the room swims into soft focus. “Not remembering,” he says. “That’s the one part of it they can’t fix. Can’t hook me into the wolf so I feel anything more than the aftermath. Makes the ‘thrill of the hunt’ vastly overrated.”
“You’re missing out on the best part,” and he’s lived with it for so long that it will never be untrue, “all that guilt and repentance. Every throat ripped out’s a reason to live one more day just to say you’re so fucking sorry.”
“What happened to you? How did you get this way?”
“I saved the world.”
That sucks, Oz thinks, but the words never make it to his lips because Niall’s mouth is over them, prying them wide with a fierce, insistent tongue, erasing everything that can be spoken.
When Oz grabs hold of his shoulders and lets himself be lifted, a scene plays out in Niall’s mind; something he watched in a movie once, or lived in a collection of hours that he stored in his heart for days when nothing but the hope of death and that memory could sustain him. When he kicks his chair over there’s no metal to meet glued-down linoleum; the refrigerator he lifts Oz against is stainless steel and as hollow as the sound his chest makes when his bulk slams him into it.
His paintings paid for a sturdy grapevine table with a tempered glass top that would hold a pair of two-hundred pound men as they fucked or fought; no matter how hard he shoves Oz down beneath him there’s nothing to buckle or break; and it’s not a teapot or a bowl of fruit that crashes to the floor this time, just a couple of empty glasses and a brass ashtray full of smutty, wet roaches.
This is not the insatiable hunger of champions together at last; there’s nothing romantic or poetic when Niall wrenches the zipper on Oz’s jeans and frees his cock, drops to his knees and sucks it to the root, shivering with each clench of fingers dug in his scalp and the heat of small, sharp hips pistoning into his face. Oz will have blood under his nails when he’s through, Niall thinks. Might help him remember what he’s lost…
…what I bargained away for this, to be just another asshole in a world filled to the brim with them. Monkeyshit flung on a canvas and they think it’s art and wouldn’t Spike just love this, love me like this? “This isn’t over until one of us is a pile of dust, mate,” and Spike was so goddamn sure of it at the time, always convinced it would be him against him and not beside him; convinced in that empty warehouse with Doyle and Cordy and hot pokers and the good fight, yeah...
“Wanna fuck you,” Oz moans, pulling his face away, hard. “Angel…”
~~~
The bedroom reminds Oz of a night long ago and a case of mistaken identity. Angel favored rich reds and burgundies then, bedclothes the color of blood and the texture of supple skin. Flecks of gold woven through tapestries matched the monstrous gleam in his eyes as he writhed in the throes of death and reached for Oz’s hand. Angel’s mouth was moist and oddly hot against his fingers even though the litany he whispered wasn’t carried on breath.
“Don’t save me,” he whispered. “Not worth saving. Please, don’t…”
Oz had wiped the cold sweat from Angel’s face with his palm and bent to taste it afterward when Willow couldn’t see.
Niall’s sweat is just that: sweat, not tinged with ichor or poison or a hint of animal blood; salty and tart, a little sweet, indistinguishable from his own. When Oz rolls away, spent, panting, and wet, the dampness chills him. He’s too stoned and fucked out to leave, so he takes a handful of the luxurious Egyptian cotton sheet on which he lies, covers himself with it, and lets the darkness fall without asking permission to stay.
~~~
Niall tightens the tourniquet around his upper thigh and turns to watch Oz twitch and mutter in sleep. The mundane aspects of humanity were the ones he thought would bring him joy: a pulse to measure, heartbeats to count, hunger to satisfy. Now the heartbeat terrifies him when it throbs hard in his throat, choking his breath, slamming the blood he makes in veins too narrow and insubstantial to hold it in. What he hungers for will never be satisfied by a lover’s kiss or the well-meant lie of eternal remembrance. It will never be fed by drink or smoke or a cock up his ass or the sly invitation of a perfumed cunt at his chin or be satisfied with pigments and chiaroscuro and crosshatch earnestly applied to canvas.
Niall sinks the needle home, breathes through the pull-back and waits through interminable seconds for the weight of his bones to lift and fall into blankness; to descend into precious peace.
It’s been happening more and more lately that he’s met at the brink of relief, pulled into a familiar embrace and tempted to tumble beyond the innocent lightness of the high, to push the boundaries of that pure joy and see what’s next.
“I’ll go if you come with me,” Niall whispers. “You know what’s there.”
Doyle tilts his head, latches a finger beneath the crimson belt at Niall’s groin and releases the knot. Covers Niall’s ruddy thumb with his own as he pushes the plunger.
“Not allowed. I'm just a lowly messenger, you're a warrior.”
“Come with me,” and the plea beats hard in his chest, pulses in his temples, rises to a scream, wild and feral. Doyle smiles and presses a perfectly white fingertip over the glistening bead of blood that wells at the curve of Niall’s groin.
“I’m just the guy who gives directions.” Niall feels the whiskey-burned breath against his cheek and reaches to keep him there, fights to touch flesh and muscle and feel some kind of resistance. “You already know where you want to go.”
Doyle is close enough to kiss as the bed and the room and the world float out from beneath Niall’s body and he spins gently into the void, not caring to cling, not needing to hold on.
~~~
The western light caramelizes the colors on the bed and there’s one side of the wolf that Oz hasn’t lost - time told by the reach of the sun. When the brightness wakes him it’s five, or near it; he’s been in Niall’s bed for as many hours. Niall sleeps placidly beside him, gaunt and strangely beautiful. Oz rises and collects his clothes, nearly stepping on Niall’s works as he passes by the side of the bed.
Rabbit still and waiting, Oz collects another moment, another irresistible comparison of past to present and forms a new set of questions about Angel’s new life -- as if having fucked him out of breath in his own bed wasn’t something extraordinary in itself. Angelus would have slit Oz’s throat and ejaculated into the blood-drained hole. Angel would have laughed and broken him with silence, poetry, and exquisite hands, evaporating Oz’s lofty notion of dominance with a sly smile, a soft kiss. But Niall…
Niall merely laughed, deep and low and filthily, and led Oz to the bedroom, where he knelt on all fours and spread his legs.
“What happened to you? How did you get this way?”
“I saved the world.”
The dusty floor beneath Oz’s bare feet creaks when he steps back to avoid landing on the syringe; warm hands wrap around his slender, muscular thigh and pull him hard into the side of the bed.
Niall’s eyes are night-sky endless; his smile alone is tender enough to freeze Oz there, enough to steal his reaction and leave him bereft of response or the willingness to make a choice.
“Let me paint you,” he rasps, and he sounds like dusk falling.
IV
Sunset Plaza Drive
Oz loved that Angel was the perfect second-story man; willing and able to trespass, to sneak into forbidden spaces, and he loves that this is one aspect of his former self that Niall retains. Past midnight and without sufficient light to paint, he’s led him here, to the paved backyard of a derelict showbiz icon whose immense swimming pool is built out over the cliffside.
He clambers up on the retaining wall at the pool’s deep end and sits at the corner, watching the city lights shimmer into a pointillist’s fever dream. He closes his eyes and breathes, lets the illusion of those precious stones fade and re-form in his mind. When he opens his eyes he keeps them trained away from the southern fringe of the city. To look there still makes him feel ill-at-ease and voyeuristic; never one to rubberneck at accident scenes, he peers instead at the rooftops staggered directly below.
The clink of coin on concrete and tile is followed by a whisper of cloth falling and a splash. Niall’s dark head breaks the water and in this light, with his hair plastered back from his wide, lean face, he could have gone to Sunnydale, sat next to Oz in the computer lab or on the bench with Xander at swim practice. Oz sees the youth Angel missed and doesn’t need an invitation to pull his shirt over his head and shuck his shoes and jeans.
They pull each other under the black glassine surface and tug and wrestle and pull like the beautiful boys they never were and pop up from the water, lungs on fire, gasping, mouths open and curved, ready to kiss. Niall tastes like chili peppers and bergamot tea, sweet and acidic and so human; Oz chases the kiss, and another, until Niall kicks out from beneath him and floats on his back. The line where his gardener’s tan ends and the moon-white of his hips and legs begins fascinates Oz, and not just because he’s still a little stoned.
“That tan needs its own zip code,” he says. “You must dig the beach now.”
Niall flips and dives to the bottom of the pool without answering. Oz swims to the center and treads water, staring up at the crescent moon. He remembers a line from a book he read in junior high, something about a ‘little silver slipper of a moon’ and he thought so, then, before that mysterious rock meant madness and loss and solitude. The Glass Menagerie, he thinks, wondering if whoever wrote it imagined the stars overhead as slivers of glass shattered by that wicked scythe.
“Dude, you ever read that story…”
Oz turns to see Niall standing atop the retaining wall, shoulders glistening, arms spread like Christ of the Andes, water coursing in rivulets down his chest.
“There’s a million stories in the naked city, Oz,” he laughs. “They’re all pretty much the same. Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, girl sends boy to hell. Boy comes back from hell, slits his son’s throat, saves the world and becomes a real boy. Think that’s a good one?”
“I was around for the first act. Everything after that’s kinda murky,” Oz says.
The air shifts and stills and the scent of night blooming jasmine lingers in the air, cloying and sickly sweet. Niall remembers planting flowers on the convent grounds at White Rock Cay: roses, oleander, camellias and frangipani, but never, ever jasmine. He breathes past it, past the chemical tang of contained water, past lungfuls of tempera and grave dust, past the scent of honey and whiskey and whatever memories he has left.
Doyle leans against Niall’s shoulder, stretches his arm across his chest and turns him to face the riot of neon jewels spreading out before them.
“It’s what you’ve been waiting for,” he says. “The good sister was right. Time to face your demons.”
Oz’s voice is a hum in the distance, dull and insistent, nothing to pay any particular attention to.
“Bright lights, big city. All yours, boyo.”
Niall turns just enough to see Doyle’s face, to see the silver shadows in his eyes. They look toward the south and stare together into the dark chasm that bought his humanity; into that desolate birth canal, dark and silent amid the pulsing ocean of color and light and life.
“You see it at night and it shines,” he says.
“That it does,” Doyle agrees, holding Niall’s hand as he dives into the city of fallen angels, arms open to receive the breaking wave.
~~end~~