BtVS songfic: Light in the Darkness
Title: Light in the Darkness
Author: SCWLC
Disclaimer: Y’know, if I owned them I would have way more money than I do.
Distribution: Go ahead and take it if you want it. Tell me where it went though.
Summary: A sort of sequel to ‘Heart of Darkness’. It can stand alone, but it’s set in the same universe as that one. Songfic done to Loreena McKennitt’s ‘All Souls’ Night’
Notes: Thanks to Emily for offering me an intervention. Unfortunately, I like being addicted to writing songfics. Thanks to all those people who have sent me feedback, you’re the best!
Feedback: Goes to scwlc@yahoo.ca
**********************
Angel knew it was wrong. It didn’t stop him.
Once, he had hired a professional to stalk her. He knew Buffy could feel him when he came near, but since that fateful night when she came back from the dead, he couldn’t even stay away. So he stalked her.
Tonight was nothing special on the Celtic calender, but she was out with the group of madwomen she had joined. He had managed to find out through subtle questioning that Buffy hadn’t truly converted to the madcap almost-cult. She was just there for the fun. He watched her and her group of would be druids as they did a completely made up ceremony based on a confused fusion of Beltane celebration and Samhain ritual.
As always, the party culminated in a crazed dance done at midnight to the new age strains of some Celtic wave singer.
//Bonfires dot the rolling hillsides
Figures dance around and around//
Angel’s gaze swept over the gyrating figures who would have him arrested for stalking if they knew he was there. All save one. She moved through the night as though she was a part of it, and yet she was separate, her hair glowing like sunlight from the flickering of the fire.
//To drums that pulse out echoes of darkness
Moving to the pagan sound.//
She moved to sounds that none of the others could hear, and her eyes moved over his hiding place more than once as she searched for him. Angel did not move, wanting to see her dance. Pretending it was only him she danced for. Pretending he was not jealous of these girls who got to be so close to his soulmate, when he was relegated to stalking her.
Still, his body tightened as though expecting this to be mere foreplay before joining with her at the end of the night. Instead, this was the evening. He could not go to her after the dance ended. He would go home to LA and his cold and lonely bed.
//Somewhere in a hidden memory
Images float before my eyes//
He could remember a time long ago when he had stalked others in the night as he did her. Hunting for them, tracking them, playing with them. Even now, he knew that he was not as well hidden as he might be, for she kept catching sight of him. Then it would have been calculated to frighten the victim. Now, it was unconscious. The desire to have her acknowledge him as he did her.
Of course, this hunt was no different from the others in one respect. Though it was not of fear, but of desire, her pulse did quicken, her breath change to pants, and her whole body tensed with a need for action.
//Of fragrant nights of straw and of bonfires
And dancing till the next sunrise.//
Once, he might have found someone, willing or unwilling, to fulfil his needs. In a time further lost to him, he would have found a partner and made her willing. His errant mind recalled those nights so long ago with the wine and women, when he had greeted the dawn making his way across the fields to his father’s home.
On the other hand, neither of those time in his life would he have been so enamoured of the one girl that he would be, if not content, at least resigned to watch her from a distance. The former would have taken her and had done with, the latter, moved on to easier partners.
Then he had been human.
//I can see the lights in the distance
Trembling in the dark cloak of night
Candles and lanterns are dancing, dancing
A waltz on All Souls Night.//
Humanity was possessed of an inner light that few ever fully appreciated. Angel knew that he valued his all the more now that it was gone. These humans dancing in a field in the middle of the night had no notion of the light they bore within themselves. All save her.
Buffy’s awareness changed her inner light from a single candle to blazing fire, cheerful and warming to those who neared it. Dangerous to those who were careless with it. Had he not learned this lesson every time he hurt her? She lashed out, banked embers flaring, fanned by the heat of her pain.
Even now he could see the pain rising within her, and yet he could not leave, drawn to her, like one frozen so cold he will thrust his hands into the fire to regain the feeling, though he knows what damage it will cause.
//Figures of cornstalks bend in the shadows
Held up tall as the flames leap high//
It was her inner goodness that made the evil within him both more defined, and redeemed at the same time. For, without the demon within, he would not have had the chance to become what he was today. As Angel, he was so much more than he had been as Liam of Galway. That same darkness was what had made it possible for him to meet her and be inspired by her example. Her love made the demon within hi into a bearer of good as well as evil.
//The green knight holds the holly bush
To mark where the old year passes by.//
At moments like this one, her light complementing his dark, he could imagine for a moment that they could move past the sins of previous years. She had saved his life as he had saved hers, she had taken his life, and in return he had nearly taken hers, they were even. For a moment their eyes met, his from the shadows, hers bathed in flickering firelight, and the past fell away leaving only the moment.
//I can see the lights in the distance
Trembling in the dark cloak of night
Candles and lanterns are dancing, dancing
A waltz on All Souls Night.//
Hope, that feeble glow piercing the blackness, bloomed again in the gleaming of the fire, in the sunlight of her hair, mixed as it was with the darkness she walked in. Her body undulating in time with the balletic grace of the fire, even as the others lost themselves in the stereo sound from the boom box in the grass.
Then every move was not merely imagined to be for him. It was. He watched as each turn of the hips, each beckoning hand, moved for him alone. She knew he was there, and could no more keep herself from reaching for him than he could tear himself away.
//Bonfires dot the rolling hillsides
Figures dance around and around
To drums that pulse out echoes of darkness
Moving to the pagan sound.//
He was a vampire, condemned to darkness. Eternally trapped in a night he had unwittingly chosen. He and his brethren circled the brightness that comprised the lives of the humans he now watched and guarded. Moving to rhythms more ancient and needs more visceral than those who were of the light, he was as controlled by those instincts in some ways as any other monster.
She alone understood these rhythms, for she too had been created from them by the source, and not the dilution that existed in others. He watched her dance, made for him as he was made for her. Both trapped in this seeming of humanity behind which their instincts raged, hers to destroy the dark, his to destroy the light. Yet both were faced with a choice, his to turn traitor on his darkness, she to turn traitor for the hunter within.
//Standing on the bridge that crosses
The river that goes out to the sea//
Trapped between the madnesses that graced both sides of the spectrum, balanced on a knife’s edge between virtue and vice, they were matched. Each perfectly attuned to the other’s need. Angel moved closer still, and she slowed in her movement to watch him stalk closer.
Later they would both pretend the evening’s events had not occurred, but for now, there was only the moment when they could be this close together. For a moment, despite the time and space between them, they were united in the firelight and song, motion and darkness, her sunlight to his dark.
//The wind is full of a thousand voices
They pass by the bridge and me.//
Then the moment was broken by the memories of what could not be. Both stood on that line between beast and warrior, surrounded by the whispers of those who doubted. Friends, enemies, and strangers who knew nothing yet condemned.
Angel drew back into his shadows and Buffy turned back to her firelit dance, both feeling the words and fears, disbelief and suspicion swirl about them, drowning the two in mistrust of their own selves. The moment of union between the light and dark drew to a close.
//I can see the lights in the distance
Trembling in the dark cloak of night//
Angel went on his way back to LA, vowing he would not return. The words of so many rang in his ears, drowning out the voices of himself and his soulmate. He knew she too, would return to her friends and hide behind a gentle veneer. Both would try to live apart, swearing they would not draw together through sheer instinct alone.
//Candles and lanterns are dancing, dancing
A waltz on All Souls Night.//
He would return, or she would seek him out. Neither could truly avoid the other in an eternal dance of those equal and opposite, yet so similar as to create a paradoxical relationship of hunter and hunted, love and hate, hope and despair.
And both would hope, for always. Such was their lot. It would forever be the merest flicker in the far-away night, but that alone would keep the dance alive.
//I can see the lights in the distance
Trembling in the dark cloak of night
Candles and lanterns are dancing, dancing
A waltz on All Souls Night.//
Read the rest of the series:
Heart of Darkness
Through the Darkness
Darkness Revisited
Back to archive page