ethrosdemon ||| Buffy & Angel

Dissonance IV - Interlude: Darla
by ethrosdemon HRH

EMAIL: naturallycalm@yahoo.com
Distribution: You don’t want it
Disclaimer: Joss made it up, too bad he is an incompetent ninny. Mutant Enemy and others own the rights. No suing please.
Rating: R for spite and evilness
Pairing: A/X, A/D
Dedication: who else? Lar, for her continued support of all things in the ethrosdemonverse and for being herself.
Note: Um, k, this is like, 4th in a series or something. It follows “Interlude: The Call”. Previous parts at eterniata.com, read them or you will be in the dark (and since Angelus is known to lurk there, not a good place).
NoteII: Written for the Improv list, like almost everything I do now. ash -- feathers -- infinite – perception
Spoilers: Gen seasons 5/1

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“Xander, I…”

“Can it, Spawn of Satan. I’ve things to do besides dredge up all the reasons I should be in therapy.”

*click *

So, there are a few options open to me now, and maybe two or three don’t involve shredded flesh or clotted blood.

I can call right back and…act pissy.

I can stomp downstairs and take my frustrations out on whichever of the herd is there.

I can imagine Xander strapped to my bed in four-point restraints with clamps on his nipples and scrotum.

Or, I could put on my coat, slam the door behind me and tear towards the northbound freeway.

I need gas, but it’s still going to be number four.

He never fails to bring out the worst in me. Or the best, depending on which voice I’m going for, which perception I want to let slip, slide down over my inner eye. Here I was thinking that when I cracked it would be because of Darla. Not only me assuming on that score. Cordelia and Wesley will be sniping at one another right now over EXACTLY where I am, and why it isn’t with Gunn hatching new plots to get myself killed over my Golden Mistress.

Gunn will be there too, strutting in to look over the slate of evil up for dispatching tonight. Getting more embedded into our lives with every caustic insult and well-landed kill-strike. My handle on him is still tenuous; I wonder if it will be him to blurt out that * maybe* evil is afoot, and finding me poste haste would be intelligent.

At which point they will be on the full-Wolfram and Hart alert. Mobilising to seek out Lindsay or my Sire, not really my Sire anymore at all, to seek out Darla. To make damned sure that that “they” haven’t gotten to me.

How wrong they will be. What got to me isn’t a they. Him. He got to me. He, and his refusal to lie down and admit to defeat. Pride, the source of mankind’s greatest woes, and Xander’s worst wounds. Ash on my tongue and blood pervading my thoughts, and Xander’s voice sarcastic and condescending. Shredding that singular, last cord binding me to my maxim “Harming humans for pleasure is bad”.

If any of the triumvirate had even a ghost of the knowledge of how overwhelming the desires Darla sirened to the surface are, I would be on one of those kiddie harnesses. Made of iron. Magic locks JUST to be safe.

Her presence always in my mind like feathers tickling a thought out on a daily, then a weekly basis. Never gone altogether, because, everyone remembers their mother sometimes, even if she’s passed on. There was a debt there.

There is another now. The new debt has finer shadings falling in a more intricate pattern, arabesques instead of familiar squares or hexagons, but the import is about equal. Her raising and brazier-hot humanity awakened a realisation I let hide from me since the Ascension.

I serve no master on this earth now. The mistress I was yoked to, who kept me at heel and treated me as a pet to alternately kick and coddle, is no more. Her corporeality means nothing. She’s not the one who made me. Can’t ever be. That eternal folly she carried beneath her skin vaporized with the flesh of her form, and her physical bond to me went with it.

She’ll die twice by my hand, and I’ll shed fewer tears this time than the last. None. Second chances for vengeance come infrequently. One of the parties is usually dead.

She was never the unloved one in our unholy marriage. No matter how many human tears she sheds over my callous words and unreceptive manner, it wasn’t SHE who was unloved for 150 years. Mortality has altered her in the one way that NOTHING I did ever could. She needs me. She appears to, and even if it’s an act, I’ll pretend too. Appearances are all we have to know others by anyway, words echo and fade and sometimes miss the ear.

After all, love was always my failing. Who better to know that than the woman who bathed in my devotion for over a century and paid me back with trinkets and fucking. Even demons know the difference. Even when the trinkets are gypsy virgins. Even when the fucking left me ruined for women, so that I have to find my pleasure with men for the rest of my pathetic existence. Not that I disfavour those pleasures.

Twice a lie over that love.

‘I have never loved anyone but you’ to an apparent china doll of a girl out of nihilistic tendencies.

‘I never loved you’ to the Goddess at the center of my pantheon reduced to common humanity.

Just to burn her ONCE the way she burnt me on infinite occasions. When she found a new pet and relegated me to secondary status. When she slipped out while I slept and abandoned me for years at time. When she punished me for siring my own childer in the quest for love returned. When she sent me out into the night detested when I was cursed.

“Don’t snivel like the food, shining one. Love will kill you in the end.” Maybe she has a touch of the Sight herself, except love killed the loved not the lover.

Vestiges cling to me even now, and I know she has to die. I will murder the second aspect of my Goddess, the Lover instead of the Death-bringer, because killing her once was not enough. Some claims are fiercer than most. It might take the triple death to finally be rid of her. The Virgin next.

Ah, but I’ll let her off today. What better way to celebrate my newfound freedom and to obliterate the need for the shell of my Sire than with a visit to my almost-childe. Grown far too secure in his place in the world since I moved to L.A. So sure of my distance and my guilt. Safe in the embrace of his personal demon and with Buffy watching his back.

Complacency is dangerous when you run with the devil, my boy.

It means death when you’re the devil’s own.

Another who belongs to me and acts with disrespect. My mark is on him as surely as it’s still on that cur, William. Taught at the end of my sire’s whip, never let your possessions stray too far, and if they do, it’s all the more pleasurable to remind them of their standing.

Alexander is due a few reminders.

I should turn around and let sleep scour these thoughts from my conscious mind; let them filter down the drain back to the subconscious where there’s no danger of ruining my new shirt with blood splatters. My evil-deeds column is already spilling onto the next page. All the same, every addict has relapses, and one slip won’t release me from my bondage to the nether-nazis.

I’ll save a few extra people next week.



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