ethrosdemon ||| Buffy & Angel

Stitch
by ethrosdemon

EMAIL: naturallycalm@yahoo.com
Distribution: You don't want this
Disclaimer: Joss made it up, too bad he is an incompetent ninny. Mutant Enemy and others own the rights. No suing please.
Rating: PG-13
Dedication: Lar, Criss and Katie who all read this when I foisted it on them.
Notes: Still trying to reclaim my inner-Angel. Not actually betaed. Prolly full of typos and angel/angle. "." is Fred talking.
Improv: darkness (although this is really dark-light for me)
Spoilers: Heartthrob

- - - - -

Angel is Fred-sitting. Listening to her newest treatise and trying to get her to eat. She's so thin, the bones in her arms showing, the interstices in her chest when her shirt gapes. It repulses him like any predator. He never fed from the sick, the idea of it makes him itchy. Too easy. Never was his style to do anything the simplest way. But she's so broken he's worried she might never be better. That this is the highest level of functioning Fred will ever attain. She'll move from room to room in the hotel marking up the walls and not eating until her internal organs start to break down, until she starves to death in front of them.

"...but if you take omega and divide it..."

There is always the other way. The one where he takes matters in his own hands and force feeds her, steals her pens and tells her it's tough love. Or he sends Wes to the hospital to procure I.V.s and saline to inject in her while she's tied to the bed in the four point restrains he found in the basement the other day. And then there's the solution that pops up in moments like this, when she's been going full tilt for two and half hours, and her words are running together in his mind. He could end it all for her. Give her the relief she needs. He knows she wouldn't resist. No screaming or hysterics, just a shy smile and a limp body. In a way he sees it as a favor. Maybe to the gang as much as to Fred. They have enough to worry about without an invalid to care for. A broken neck, he can't stomach the idea of feeding from her in this state.

But he sees slight improvement on some days. More recognition in her eyes. An indication that she understands where she is and who they all are. Yesterday she ate a quasadilla. Besides, he doesn't believe in Eternal Rest. He has no way to know where he'd be sending her. If she would move on at all or stick around to haunt him personally for the rest of his days. Wonders if she would get a shot at a privileged reincarnation. A chance to be a well-loved child of doting parents as far away from a Hellmouth or L.A. as possible. He doubts it. Probably land in Sudan or Siberia. Starving again to echo something from this life as a cosmic joke. That he believes in.

He thinks about transmigration of souls often. Having done the migration himself at least once as far as he knows. Maybe more. It's a theme he's toyed with for years. The same damned or half-damned souls occupying different bodies from Creation until Armageddon, and he's hell-bound for moving the process along faster than disease or accidental drowning? Life after life nothing but the same mistakes, the same petty hatred and lust and fear. The ride to the Home Office didn't need to illuminate this for him, it was always right there, on the back of his tongue where the tang of fresh blood never fades. Humanity is wasted on the humans.

"...and if you factor in the ratio of half pi..."

As she speaks, animated with the insight of the deranged, her mouth opens and closes with varying apertures, red, pink, white. He wonders what her last life was. If she deserved this one for some horrid actions in another body. Knows there's no balance, no reckoning, that she probably died in childbirth, of a tooth infection, beaten by a husband. And he stops at that, tries to picture Fred as a man, a reedy youth in knickers and round spectacles. Now sees the youth on a battlefield with glasses shattered and a bayonet through the chest. Shimmer to the youth committing suicide over an unrequited love, veins split wide and gushing essence of Fred all over pocked wooden floorboards.

He wonders if the Wheel of Life is real if slayers are part of it or if they are exempted as some saint or immanation of a demi-goddess. If they get to repeat along with everyone else. Born again to a life of desperate longing for a fulfilment they can never attain, always grasping at some missing piece they can't name. Imagines Buffy as someone else. Moving through a new life, with new hopes and experiences. The only way she could ever have her dream, and he's glad in a way that it came so soon. But wonders all the same if there's a special section of Hell for slayers. Murderers in their own right, paying for eternity for sins they thought were part of the Good Fight.

"...but Dr. Buckman always forgot that the hypotenuse..."

The nausea inducing scent of permanent marker fills the room again, and Angel watches the angles and lines form the words that Fred speaks. Her head tilts to the side forcing her artery into relief. His tongue rolls over his canines one after another in a pattern he's had for longer than he likes to think about. Longer than his ambulatory death, longer than his memory stretches back.

But that's an internal lie, not further back than some parts of his memories. The ones of other hands, of other torsos, legs, feet, never faces though. Not really even memories, just images one after another, like dreams molding and streaming together. The his but not his component to his remembrances. The flashes that only come when he lets go. Just exists and lets the thoughts scurry as they will. No recrimination, no pained longing, no guilt, no push for normalcy. Just thinking and watching. The slipping of Fred's glasses seen and matched with the thought of what her vision is without them.

In the stillness of non-striving, he sometimes finds clarity. The enabling of a sense of freedom in his thoughts, between his thoughts. It's his habit now. Recent habit unlike the teeth. A new mental framework constructed due to coping with a reborn Darla. Sometimes the unconstrained thoughts bring carnage, severed limbs and arterial spotting. Mostly he gets theology and philosophy. Ponderings on the way of the universe. And that is an old habit too. Difficult to discern when he came by it when he reaches for it, but he knows by instinct, just can't break himself from so many years of trying to deny it.

"...this is a tad technical, but I..."

His entire life for the last hundred years has been a struggle to fix himself as Half and Half, never Two Parts in One. To separate and compartmentalize even though he can't really. Can't pin which desires are all him, which are not; what interests he owned all along and which came with his dying. If purple would be his favorite color if he were human or if that's older than this body. If the abhorrence of myrrh is from lived experience forgotten or came with the blood lust.

But he doesn't try anymore. Doesn't try to be purely human when he'll never be. His new mode of being, the epiphany of realizing how to let go, to just be what he is and who he is. With that comes distance, the ability to accept futility and continual failure and not make another run for daylight. It also brings the coldness to see one human life as only part of the picture, meaningful or meaningless as any other, one tiny stitch in a tapestry stretching out of his view. Tonight's stitch is Fred.

"...it's infinite, on and on and on and on..."



back to top