Fanfic: Birds In Cages.
Title: Birds in Cages.
Fandom: elements of both ‘Angel’ and ‘Buffy: the Vampire Slayer’, Spike/Angel. Lynnevitational ficathon entry for stakebait.
Rating: R, for swearing, violence, and sexual content.
Description: It was always about power. It was never about love. (It was always about lying to yourself.)
***
It was never about love, not about love in the slightest; love was something left behind with oxygen, with the taste of nervous sweat on your lip when you saw a certain silhouette in the parlor door, with the feeling of your own heart beating hard and angry against your ribs, like the ever-so-cliched bird beating its wings against a too-small cage. It would be a raven, these days, if it were there at all. An owl. A sparrow. Some predictable psychopomp, ready to offer a guide and gateway into death. If it were there at all.
But it isn’t.
This was never about love; not even for Drusilla, one of Persephone’s owls if ever one took human form and traded flight for footsteps. It was always about power, about control, about the knowledge that some tiny human rite or ritual had been turned inwards on itself, becoming parody and thus powerful in its powerlessness. Valentine’s Day went from sweet to sinister when truly broken hearts were substituted for the paper sort, and all the cute and charming rituals of courting became somehow...more...when addressed with the proper depravity. So it was never about love.
Darla kisses like the plague personified; cheap lipstick, spoiled port, and the distant, dying burn of thwarted end-stage syphilis, the disease cut off at the finish line and eternally preserved in her pretty, frozen flesh. He tastes her on Angel’s skin, hidden in the deep, dark parts of him, the sizzle and burn of frustrated viral bodies burning up and burning out. She’s like a fine, strange wine, and he loves the taste of her, even as he hates the reality of her, abhors it for everything it represents and every chain it throws across him. He’d bottle her if he could, open her every ten years, on Christmas Eve, then drink her down and go infect some unsuspecting congregation. Bottle her, and be done with everything but that impossibly preserved decay.
It’s late September, and the Carpathian Mountains are on fire with a thousand shades of orange, red and gold. Before they leave here, that fire will be a literal thing, that burning will be real, and pretty Pestilence may be, for a time, satisfied; her laughter will be sincere, and he’ll love her, a little bit, the mother in this horrible family of fools. But for now, the fire is the sort that only poets see, and he’s not a poet, not anymore. He’s gone to be a monster now, and that comforts him. That always comforts him.
Angel doesn’t taste of Darla now. Angel tastes of absinthe and ashes, laudanum and lunacy, and that means it’s Drusilla’s bower he’s been cradled in (pretty madness of the mourning moon), and that’s more than Spike can bear to think about -- because it’s always been about love, it’s about nothing but love -- and so he puts it aside, rejects it, and gives himself back to his own monstrosity, where it isn’t about love at all. Just power. Nothing but power, and power leaves no room for jealousy.
The chains are tight enough to grind bone against bone, and borrowed blood is running down his hands and ankles, leaving him wet and waiting for what happens next. He’s been crucified here in the moonlight for the better part of this windy autumn night, just waiting. Waiting for kisses that taste like the woman he tries to tell himself he doesn’t love; waiting for fangs penetrating skin, waiting for the heat of other forms of penetration. Blood lubricates everything. Sex, society, slaughter.
It’s not about love. It’s about power.
If he says that often enough, there’s a chance it may be true.
*
If Darla was Pestilence in corset and curls, Drusilla was Famine in painted petticoats -- she smiled and smiled and stole everything you’d ever loved or wanted away, took it and ground it into dust, and pouted prettily when you screamed. God, he loves her. Loves the sight of her, loves the taste of her, loves the feel of her stretched tight and trembling underneath his hands. Loves the way she understands him. Madness has left her open-eyed and smiling at the broken stars that only she can see, and she no longer sees the holes in him, only the wholeness; she’ll never be everything he needs, and since she doesn’t understand, she doesn’t care.
He sometimes wishes as he’s thrusting into her, fangs and cock both buried to the hilt in the dead-meat cold of her throat and cunt, that he’d seen her sane. She isn’t that much older than he is, and there’s something broken deep inside of him; something he suspects she broke, when she brought her madness to the making of him. Something that wonders, when he lets his guard down, whether he might have found her comely, when she had a pulse of her own to count the ticking seconds by. Whether he might have taken her hand, pretty little Irish lass that she was, defined convention, and taken her to his father’s table as a living, breathing, blushing bride.
But then she writhes beneath him, head tilting back, hips thrusting up, and breathes, “Oh, Angelus,” and it’s all that he can do not to pull his fangs out of her jugular and turn them to the sweeter task of ripping out her throat. Open up the birdcage, and let the pretty pigeons free. He loves her -- he can’t deny he loves her, broken doll that she is, broken soldier that she made him -- but he’s never been the sort of man who loves to share. Not her with her maker, and not, when honesty takes him, her maker with her. What’s his is his alone, not to be toyed with, not even by the other members of what passes for his family.
The only compensation for their abandonment is that he never tastes Darla on Drusilla anymore, and even that is cold repayment. He took his lover to a whorehouse three nights past, sipping sluts until they found the ones who burned with syphilis, rotting them secretly away from the inside. They plucked six of the sweetest, like tomatoes from the vine, split them open and rolled in the contagion, Drusilla a happy child allowed to make messes, and he...well, he what he’s always been, when family’s the issue.
Just a fool, after all. At the end of the slaughter...
Just a fool.
*
He’d thought they were lying, when he started hearing rumors of a curse. Angelus, caught? Angelus, wing-clipped and broken and tied down to the level of mere mortality, without even the option of escaping into the arms of another maker? Impossible. They were jealous, they were bitter, they were pleading through their lives by trying to sound more powerful than they’d ever be. Liars didn’t deserve to live, and so he drank them down like draughts of bitter wine, and went back to his starving angel, and told her nothing but the pretty lies she needed.
He’d thought they were lying, but the stories wouldn’t die. The stories continued, until they had almost more weight than all the wonderful, horrible things they’d done together, and part of him -- the part he liked the least, the broken part that Famine made, the part Pestilence infected, the part that starved for the sickness known as love -- began believing it. Began, but refused the final reality of it...until Sunnydale, when it became impossible to pretend any longer. It was betrayal beyond any saying, because it was so damn final. So final. There was no coming back from that.
Darla was dead, and that was almost enough to make it better; if he couldn’t have Angel, no one would have him. But that little bit of blonde idiocy had him, and had him, and had him until she broke the curse. Spike could have warned her that would happen, that it couldn’t last, that it couldn’t stay; nothing stays where Angelus is concerned.
Drusilla was Famine, things running out, hot blood turning cold, stagnant and unnurturing, and Darla was Pestilence, the pretty thing that rots you out and leaves you dead and empty...but Angel is Death himself, has always been, whatever face he comes or came to wear. Let him put a soul inside his empty spaces. It won’t change a damn thing, because his emptiness will always win, will drink away the good as it drinks the evil, and he’ll come back to what he is: an ending.
When Angel comes back to them, announcing his return with pain and with Drusilla’s gleeful screams of, “Daddy, oh, Daddy, I’ve been so good, I’ve been so dreadfully, terribly bad!” from the bed that was no longer Spike’s to claim as his alone, it feels like coming home, and coming home has always felt like hell, because now he’s sharing again. Now he’s back in the position of youngest son, unable to claim any of the best things at the table, and there’s not even Darla to distract either one of them.
He plots against his Angel not for power, but for love, and that’s the cruelest thing of all. He’s been poisoned and been starved, but not until he realized what a monster he could be in loving has he ever truly been a dead man. Sixteen pieces of silver, a sleeping madwoman and a world that keeps on going; that’s the price he pays to crucify the man who used to crucify him so sweetly in the mountains of Carpathia.
Dead men don’t dream.
Spike dreams of angels, and of wings, skeletal and bleeding out against the sky.
*
Connor looks just like his father, all wounded pouts and sharpened planes. Connor looks just like his mother, too, with her eyes that were infected from within by all the evils of a world she never asked to know. Connor walks like the impossibility that he is, the point where death meets disease, and he lives in the mortal world, and he breathes the air, and his blood is hot as a candle flame, and he’ll never know his sister, Spike’s mother, whom his father’s hands drove mad. Perhaps that is a mercy.
This is the last day. Live this day like it’s your last, and that’s what Spike is doing, because of all the places he’d like to be -- Famine’s arms, Death’s bed, or better still, held close against the Slayer that he’d done his best to steal, the one he’d wanted, not because his father had her, but because her War was just as endless as his own -- the only one that he deserves is here, the beginning and the ending both. He said it was about power, always said it was about power, but it was never about power. Not really.
It was about the taste of blood, the taste of lips sweet with syphilis, the taste of syphilis decaying on the skin of the man he called lover, maker, father, monster. It was about Drusilla’s hair, tangled and unkempt, like a child who wrapped her lips around his cock and murmured that the stars were singing every time he came. It was about the mountains of Carpathia, burning with the fires of fall, then simply burning as they turned and took their leave.
It was about psychopomps, spreading their wings and carrying you home.
It was always about love.
He takes the stage like he never took a woman to the altar (but he would have, if they’d let him; would have taken them, would have taken Angel, come to that), and he looks out on the life he threw away, and he knows, here, at the end, that he made the right decision.
It was about love.
So let the birds fly home.
Fandom: elements of both ‘Angel’ and ‘Buffy: the Vampire Slayer’, Spike/Angel. Lynnevitational ficathon entry for stakebait.
Rating: R, for swearing, violence, and sexual content.
Description: It was always about power. It was never about love. (It was always about lying to yourself.)
***
It was never about love, not about love in the slightest; love was something left behind with oxygen, with the taste of nervous sweat on your lip when you saw a certain silhouette in the parlor door, with the feeling of your own heart beating hard and angry against your ribs, like the ever-so-cliched bird beating its wings against a too-small cage. It would be a raven, these days, if it were there at all. An owl. A sparrow. Some predictable psychopomp, ready to offer a guide and gateway into death. If it were there at all.
But it isn’t.
This was never about love; not even for Drusilla, one of Persephone’s owls if ever one took human form and traded flight for footsteps. It was always about power, about control, about the knowledge that some tiny human rite or ritual had been turned inwards on itself, becoming parody and thus powerful in its powerlessness. Valentine’s Day went from sweet to sinister when truly broken hearts were substituted for the paper sort, and all the cute and charming rituals of courting became somehow...more...when addressed with the proper depravity. So it was never about love.
Darla kisses like the plague personified; cheap lipstick, spoiled port, and the distant, dying burn of thwarted end-stage syphilis, the disease cut off at the finish line and eternally preserved in her pretty, frozen flesh. He tastes her on Angel’s skin, hidden in the deep, dark parts of him, the sizzle and burn of frustrated viral bodies burning up and burning out. She’s like a fine, strange wine, and he loves the taste of her, even as he hates the reality of her, abhors it for everything it represents and every chain it throws across him. He’d bottle her if he could, open her every ten years, on Christmas Eve, then drink her down and go infect some unsuspecting congregation. Bottle her, and be done with everything but that impossibly preserved decay.
It’s late September, and the Carpathian Mountains are on fire with a thousand shades of orange, red and gold. Before they leave here, that fire will be a literal thing, that burning will be real, and pretty Pestilence may be, for a time, satisfied; her laughter will be sincere, and he’ll love her, a little bit, the mother in this horrible family of fools. But for now, the fire is the sort that only poets see, and he’s not a poet, not anymore. He’s gone to be a monster now, and that comforts him. That always comforts him.
Angel doesn’t taste of Darla now. Angel tastes of absinthe and ashes, laudanum and lunacy, and that means it’s Drusilla’s bower he’s been cradled in (pretty madness of the mourning moon), and that’s more than Spike can bear to think about -- because it’s always been about love, it’s about nothing but love -- and so he puts it aside, rejects it, and gives himself back to his own monstrosity, where it isn’t about love at all. Just power. Nothing but power, and power leaves no room for jealousy.
The chains are tight enough to grind bone against bone, and borrowed blood is running down his hands and ankles, leaving him wet and waiting for what happens next. He’s been crucified here in the moonlight for the better part of this windy autumn night, just waiting. Waiting for kisses that taste like the woman he tries to tell himself he doesn’t love; waiting for fangs penetrating skin, waiting for the heat of other forms of penetration. Blood lubricates everything. Sex, society, slaughter.
It’s not about love. It’s about power.
If he says that often enough, there’s a chance it may be true.
*
If Darla was Pestilence in corset and curls, Drusilla was Famine in painted petticoats -- she smiled and smiled and stole everything you’d ever loved or wanted away, took it and ground it into dust, and pouted prettily when you screamed. God, he loves her. Loves the sight of her, loves the taste of her, loves the feel of her stretched tight and trembling underneath his hands. Loves the way she understands him. Madness has left her open-eyed and smiling at the broken stars that only she can see, and she no longer sees the holes in him, only the wholeness; she’ll never be everything he needs, and since she doesn’t understand, she doesn’t care.
He sometimes wishes as he’s thrusting into her, fangs and cock both buried to the hilt in the dead-meat cold of her throat and cunt, that he’d seen her sane. She isn’t that much older than he is, and there’s something broken deep inside of him; something he suspects she broke, when she brought her madness to the making of him. Something that wonders, when he lets his guard down, whether he might have found her comely, when she had a pulse of her own to count the ticking seconds by. Whether he might have taken her hand, pretty little Irish lass that she was, defined convention, and taken her to his father’s table as a living, breathing, blushing bride.
But then she writhes beneath him, head tilting back, hips thrusting up, and breathes, “Oh, Angelus,” and it’s all that he can do not to pull his fangs out of her jugular and turn them to the sweeter task of ripping out her throat. Open up the birdcage, and let the pretty pigeons free. He loves her -- he can’t deny he loves her, broken doll that she is, broken soldier that she made him -- but he’s never been the sort of man who loves to share. Not her with her maker, and not, when honesty takes him, her maker with her. What’s his is his alone, not to be toyed with, not even by the other members of what passes for his family.
The only compensation for their abandonment is that he never tastes Darla on Drusilla anymore, and even that is cold repayment. He took his lover to a whorehouse three nights past, sipping sluts until they found the ones who burned with syphilis, rotting them secretly away from the inside. They plucked six of the sweetest, like tomatoes from the vine, split them open and rolled in the contagion, Drusilla a happy child allowed to make messes, and he...well, he what he’s always been, when family’s the issue.
Just a fool, after all. At the end of the slaughter...
Just a fool.
*
He’d thought they were lying, when he started hearing rumors of a curse. Angelus, caught? Angelus, wing-clipped and broken and tied down to the level of mere mortality, without even the option of escaping into the arms of another maker? Impossible. They were jealous, they were bitter, they were pleading through their lives by trying to sound more powerful than they’d ever be. Liars didn’t deserve to live, and so he drank them down like draughts of bitter wine, and went back to his starving angel, and told her nothing but the pretty lies she needed.
He’d thought they were lying, but the stories wouldn’t die. The stories continued, until they had almost more weight than all the wonderful, horrible things they’d done together, and part of him -- the part he liked the least, the broken part that Famine made, the part Pestilence infected, the part that starved for the sickness known as love -- began believing it. Began, but refused the final reality of it...until Sunnydale, when it became impossible to pretend any longer. It was betrayal beyond any saying, because it was so damn final. So final. There was no coming back from that.
Darla was dead, and that was almost enough to make it better; if he couldn’t have Angel, no one would have him. But that little bit of blonde idiocy had him, and had him, and had him until she broke the curse. Spike could have warned her that would happen, that it couldn’t last, that it couldn’t stay; nothing stays where Angelus is concerned.
Drusilla was Famine, things running out, hot blood turning cold, stagnant and unnurturing, and Darla was Pestilence, the pretty thing that rots you out and leaves you dead and empty...but Angel is Death himself, has always been, whatever face he comes or came to wear. Let him put a soul inside his empty spaces. It won’t change a damn thing, because his emptiness will always win, will drink away the good as it drinks the evil, and he’ll come back to what he is: an ending.
When Angel comes back to them, announcing his return with pain and with Drusilla’s gleeful screams of, “Daddy, oh, Daddy, I’ve been so good, I’ve been so dreadfully, terribly bad!” from the bed that was no longer Spike’s to claim as his alone, it feels like coming home, and coming home has always felt like hell, because now he’s sharing again. Now he’s back in the position of youngest son, unable to claim any of the best things at the table, and there’s not even Darla to distract either one of them.
He plots against his Angel not for power, but for love, and that’s the cruelest thing of all. He’s been poisoned and been starved, but not until he realized what a monster he could be in loving has he ever truly been a dead man. Sixteen pieces of silver, a sleeping madwoman and a world that keeps on going; that’s the price he pays to crucify the man who used to crucify him so sweetly in the mountains of Carpathia.
Dead men don’t dream.
Spike dreams of angels, and of wings, skeletal and bleeding out against the sky.
*
Connor looks just like his father, all wounded pouts and sharpened planes. Connor looks just like his mother, too, with her eyes that were infected from within by all the evils of a world she never asked to know. Connor walks like the impossibility that he is, the point where death meets disease, and he lives in the mortal world, and he breathes the air, and his blood is hot as a candle flame, and he’ll never know his sister, Spike’s mother, whom his father’s hands drove mad. Perhaps that is a mercy.
This is the last day. Live this day like it’s your last, and that’s what Spike is doing, because of all the places he’d like to be -- Famine’s arms, Death’s bed, or better still, held close against the Slayer that he’d done his best to steal, the one he’d wanted, not because his father had her, but because her War was just as endless as his own -- the only one that he deserves is here, the beginning and the ending both. He said it was about power, always said it was about power, but it was never about power. Not really.
It was about the taste of blood, the taste of lips sweet with syphilis, the taste of syphilis decaying on the skin of the man he called lover, maker, father, monster. It was about Drusilla’s hair, tangled and unkempt, like a child who wrapped her lips around his cock and murmured that the stars were singing every time he came. It was about the mountains of Carpathia, burning with the fires of fall, then simply burning as they turned and took their leave.
It was about psychopomps, spreading their wings and carrying you home.
It was always about love.
He takes the stage like he never took a woman to the altar (but he would have, if they’d let him; would have taken them, would have taken Angel, come to that), and he looks out on the life he threw away, and he knows, here, at the end, that he made the right decision.
It was about love.
So let the birds fly home.