// In the Cards
Disclaimer: The characters of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer and Angel are not mine and belong to Warner Brothers, Twentieth Century Fox, Mutant Enemy. They are used without permission. No copyright infringement is intended.
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Feedback is incredibly welcome.
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Angel post-"NFA"/Planescape. Fallout and a Deck of Many Things. No polyhedra were harmed in the making of this fic.
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Angel opened his eyes, groaning, and looked around. Demon bodies beyond counting littered the alley. Spike, Illyria, and Gunn lay nearby; he had expected them to become separated during the fight. Then again, that was one thing they hadn't been, at the last: separate. He tried not to think about Wesley.
Angel looked up. The sky was gray. Not cloudy gray, not misty gray, but a gray that made him wonder if his eyes weren't working right. He got up and walked over to Gunn first. Gunn was breathing, but very shallowly. He tried Spike next, kicking him in the side. "Wake up," Angel said.
Spike groaned and rolled over. "What'd you do that for, Dr--oh."
"I need you awake. Did you want me to wake you up with a kiss?"
"No!"
"Well, then." He jerked his head in Gunn's direction. Comprehension lit Spike's eyes.
"Illyria," Angel said, "can you hear us?"
"Yes," she said, "I can hear your useless prattle."
"Then why are you still lying down?" That was an understatement. She looked like another corpse, broken upon the street. An extraordinarily blue corpse.
"I'm resting. The shell is frail."
"Care to get up and help get Gunn to some kind of"--he fumbled--"shelter?"
She stood up in one jackknife motion. "In the Outlands there will be places of comfort for the--injured." She had been about to say "weak." He just knew it.
"You lead," Angel said shortly as he and Spike lifted Gunn. "Outlands?"
"We have left the prime material plane for the Outlands, although I cannot tell you precisely where."
"But aren't we still in the alley?" Spike said.
Illyria shrugged. "Your manipulations have brought your kingdom closer to the center of the planes."
As they walked, Angel heard the tremulous beating of Gunn's heart. "Hold on," he said in a low voice. There were people in the distance. Well, not exactly people, not that he should be one to judge, as Lorne would have reminded him. In fact, it looked like a tavern set up beneath a large tent.
Illyria strode up to a table with what looked like a young woman with scaled hands and talons. "I require assistance for one of my subjects," she informed the woman.
Unsurprisingly, the woman seemed unfazed by Illyria's appearance. "Berk took a beating out there? Hell of a fight. Might have something for that, but--"
Angel growled.
Illyria said, "I do not have time for your bartering."
"Patience, patience," said the woman. She opened up a pouch at her belt and drew out two things: something that looked suspiciously like a bottle of Gatorade, and a deck of cards. Angel blinked and the bottle turned into a plainer flask. "Potion," she said in a cheery tone. "Berk fights bravely, we don't let him enter the dead-book so easy. Get this down his gullet."
"Doesn't smell like poison," Spike said.
"How would you know?" Angel said. "Some of the things you drink--"
"Says the man who lived on rats."
Illyria grabbed the potion. They lay Gunn down. Angel shrugged off his coat--the thing was ruined anyway--and pillowed Gunn's head on it. Illyria began feeding Gunn the potion with more delicacy than he would have thought her capable of.
The woman smiled. It was a pretty smile, which made Angel immediately distrustful, given his history with women. "Up for a card game? A little gambling, so's you have a fair shake." She looked him up and down. "I fancy that coat. Or his, it's all one to me."
If she wanted it so badly even in its current condition..."How do you play?" Angel said. Gambling, like women, never went well. It was a rule. But he had Gunn to worry about.
The woman set the deck down on the table. "You'll figure the rules out, I'm sure. Draw."
"How many?"
"Up to you."
"Four," he said. There was something hypnotic about the design on the back of the cards, like a poem in an unfamiliar alphabet. He flipped the first card up. It showed an ornate key hanging from a chain. "This," he said, "is not out of Hoyle."
The woman was blinking at the deck, as though she had expected something different.
"Oh, quit whingeing," said Spike. He jumped back as a sword materialized in Angel's hand. "Watch where you point that--Bloody hell! Where'd that come from?"
"Definitely not out of Hoyle," Angel said, regarding the card on the table with alarm. But: "Hey, this isn't so bad." The sword was larger than the one he had left in the dragon's throat, but felt lighter, and finely balanced. He swung it experimentally. The blade warmed to a golden radiance.
"Quit waving that thing around and let me read--" Spike squinted at the runes on the hilt and began sounding them out.
Illyria looked up from where Gunn was sputtering softly and said, "I would not do that if I were you, half-breed."
Spike stopped.
Angel glanced at Illyria. "Why?"
"Observe the pattern of lines etched upon the blade," said Illyria. "The shell would have identified it as the spectral lines of your G-class stellar furnace."
They took a second to digest that.
Oh. "Sunlight," Angel translated. Wonderful. "You know, maybe this card game's not such a hot idea."
The woman smiled mockingly at him. "Come now. Many a cutter would be happy to have a sun sword. Assuming your blue friend is correct."
"Look, it's not that I'm unappreciative," Angel said, "but..." He slid the deck away.
No such luck. The key card blurred at the edges, then vanished in a flash of coin-colored light. A new card flipped itself over, revealing the visage of a skull against a velvet-dark background. A shadowy shape emerged from beyond the card. For a second Angel had flashbacks to Vocah. It was a reaper of some sort, complete with dark robes and scythe and skeletal face. "I come for your life," the reaper intoned.
"Sorry," Angel said insincerely. "Vampire."
"Your soul burns within you."
Spike snickered.
The reaper's scythe came at Angel in a vicious arc. Angel blocked; the sword glowed more brightly.
"You want help, old man?" Spike asked.
"I'm fine," Angel said through gritted teeth. The reaper was not, frankly, a more challenging opponent than Vocah or the Beast, and the few times it grappled with him its chill touch had no ill effect whatsoever, but its hollow gaze suggested an emptiness vaster than his own. "You know," he said, "we don't have to do this."
"Actually," said the reaper, "we do."
"You sure?" Spike asked Angel.
"Don't," said the woman, "unless you want to fight one yourself. They do tend to multiply."
Spike made a disgusted noise. Or maybe he was disappointed.
Angel cut off one of the reaper's arms and wrenched away the scythe. It said, "I hate fighting undead," just before it crumpled in a pile of misshapen bones.
"You took pleasure in the soul-devourer's death," Illyria said. "A trophy would not be an inappropriate reminder."
"I don't have anywhere to put a trophy."
She raised her chin. "You can remedy this."
"Wait a second," Angel said belatedly. "Soul-devourer? Is there anything else we should know?" He wasn't sure whether he was addressing Illyria or the clawed woman. Probably both.
"You're doing fine," the woman assured him at the same time Illyria said, "You have proved triumphant. What more do you require?"
Gunn groaned, and they turned toward him. "Yo," Gunn said. "Is it just me, or did someone just feed me some really nasty Gatorade?"
"Glad you're back with us, Charlie-boy," Spike said. "Unfortunately, we're in the middle of a bit of a..."
Gunn closed his eyes. "You mean I wasn't imagining the Danse Macabre sequence?"
They were interrupted by the third card: a set of scales. As they watched, a glowing orb appeared on one pan, a malevolent yellow gem on the other; the balance tilted from one side to the other. Angel staggered and dropped the sword. Spike snatched it out of the air.
Gunn said, "Hey, man, you feeling okay?"
Angel straightened. "I'm hungry."
"This," Gunn said, "really can't be good."
"Good is so overrated," Angel said.
Spike interposed himself between Angel and Gunn. "This soul thing is getting old."
"Tell me about it," Gunn said. At Spike's glance, he said, "It was that whole thing with the sun going out."
"Oh, it has nothing to do with the soul," Angel said. He felt light for the first time in, oh, decades. He tapped his head. "Still here. Not an obstacle."
"Wonderful," Spike said. "Bloke has an evil soul now." He lifted the sword. "Look, is there a rewind button on those cards?"
The woman was watching them with fascination. "I take it your friend was not of the evil persuasion before?"
"You know," Angel said to Spike, "it's a good thing Buffy didn't stake you the first time around, because I'll have the fun of doing it myself."
"This is definitely a nightmare," Gunn said.
"But first things first," Angel said, smiling at the woman.
She didn't flinch as he reached over her hand to flip over the last card. It was black the color of night behind your eyelids, with a swirling circle at its center. A voice whispered out of the card, "Close your eyes." This time Angel dropped to his knees, eyes flaring with red and white light.
"Don't you worry, Charlie," Spike said, despite sounding nervous himself. "Me and the sword's got your back."
"You're in front of me."
"Trivialities," Illyria said.
Angel lunged. Then everything went blank.
When Angelus opened his eyes he found himself pinned. "Illyria," he said, "I'm losing the circulation I don't have. Ease up, will you?"
Spike had the sword pointed at his throat.
"Spike," Angelus said, "I'm not going to do anything. But if you do, I just want to say that I'm sorry for turning Drusilla into a vampire, and that she turned you into a vampire, too."
"Are you sodding out of your mind?"
Angelus wasn't sure whether Gunn was choking, laughing, crying, or some combination of all three. Angelus said patiently, "Look, I'm not going to go mope in the sewers for several decades proving it to you. You could torture me for a few days to find out if I'm sincere, but frankly you were never any good at it."
Spike was looking at him with horror. "You are Angel. Except the whazzit over there turned you inside-out and upside-down."
"It's another epiphany," Gunn wheezed. "Another goddamn epiphany."
Clearly both of them were going to be useless. "Illyria," Angelus said, "I can be of more use if you let me go."
"You are truly soulless," she said, with a hint of a question.
"Yeah, I should have mentioned that," he said.
"The shell recalls that you were at your most effective when you lacked the shackles of your soul," Illyria said. She released him. "I will permit your freedom."
"Hold on, hold on, hold on," Spike said. "There's this whole bit about scourging Europe and terrorizing my ex and--"
"She was my ex first," Angelus said.
Spike's expression was not forgiving.
"If the card did what I think it did," the woman said, "his soul is indeed imprisoned elsewhere."
"This," Spike said, "is all your fault. What's your game?"
"No threats, now," she said, stepping lightly backwards. "Your friend's alive now, isn't he? And I had to find someone to identify the cards for me. And before anyone asks, they're gone. Artifacts do that sometimes."
"Smart," Angelus said. "Get someone else to risk the unknown magical artifact. We could use your brains in this place. I mean, I'm here with a vampire who has less attention span than a whirligig, a god-king whose idea of tact involves tactical nukes, and a man who thought becoming a lawyer was the lesser of several evils."
Three glares met his gaze.
"Just assessing the situation," he said. "After sitting in the back seat from a man who thought locking lawyers in a basement, strangling his best friend, killing his son, eating the Guardian of the Deeper Well, and dragging half of L.A. into another dimension were good judgment calls. That's what I loved about Angel. Aside from his menu, he was almost doing a better job than I could have. Not that I'm in that business anymore."
"Son?" Gunn said to the world at large. "I missed the memo on that one."
"Wait now," the woman said. "No one said anything about joining up."
He smiled at her, all fangs and yellow eyes. "You'd be doing us a favor. And not eating you every day would be good practice not being evil. I'm volunteering you."
"If you say anything about being a champi--" Spike began.
"Spike," Angelus said, "if you say that word in my presence, I will temporarily remember what it's like to be evil."
"I liked him better when he was non-evil Angel," Spike said to Illyria, who was busy inspecting the remnants of Gunn's gut wound.
Angelus ignored the conversation that followed. They had a city to save, after all, and he wasn't about to let an evil past get in the way. Now if only he could find another one of those decks, maybe he could get Wesley back...
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