// Hellbound
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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For Moira. Wesley and Faith/Angelus, AU from "Not Fade Away." Adult.
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I thought it would be harder to get used to Los Angeles' devastated landscape. Turns out I'm a pretty adaptable creature. It's not that I'm glad the city's turned into a demon-infested wasteland. But when you get right down to it, most of my life has been spent in some kind of wasteland. It's just that some are more literal than others.
"Admiring the view?" Angelus's voice came from behind me.
I whirled and kicked. My foot caught the edge of his coat.
"Getting slow in your old age?"
"Stuff it," I said.
His smile was blindingly sweet and utterly untrustworthy. "One of these days--"
"One of these days," I said, "you'll break free and then you'll wear my intestines as a belt. Haven't you come up with any new pickup lines?"
"You wound me."
A hot wind blew from the ledge. We looked up to see a dragon. It blinked languidly and opened its maw.
I swore and went for my crossbow. Angelus had drawn his sword. I got off one shot, which stuck in the dragon's chest at a shallow angle. Angelus sliced at its hamstrings.
The dragon lunged and snapped at Angelus. Angelus laughed. He plunged the sword deep into bone and levered the crack apart. The dragon screamed as it reared back, wings beating against the air.
I felt queasy. But hey, I'm a practical gal. I aimed my next bolt at the dragon's eye. I missed when it swung its head around. Another bolt sang through the air to embed itself in the other eye.
The dragon took a long time to die, the way Angelus hacked at it. Wesley came up to stand beside me. "That was efficient," he remarked. His expression didn't change as he watched Angelus swagger back toward us. "Faith, you need to work on your markmanship."
"Dragons have beady little eyes for being such big creatures," I said. "I could practice on Angelus here--"
"Not with wooden bolts, you're not."
I didn't mean it, of course. Even if I liked the trick where Angelus snatched arrows out of the air.
"We'll eat well for a while," Wesley said.
I eyed the dragon's corpse and made a face. Just what my life needed, more dragon jerky, with its vaguely sulfurous reek. "I miss fried chicken and Twinkies and pixie sticks."
"Not in combination, I hope," Wesley said dryly. "I'd shoot down a pigeon for you, but I don't think any survived the apocalypse."
"So many things didn't survive the apocalypse," Angelus said. He almost sounded like Angel, voice low and quiet, his shoulders hunched. Then he straightened and laughed.
Wesley didn't flinch the way he used to during the early days. "Only words," he had said to me once, bitter and resolute.
"Why don't you make him shut his trap, if you've got this geas thing?" I asked.
Wesley's mouth curled. "Because he's my conscience," he said cryptically. That was the point at which I decided that Wesley had lost it.
I don't know exactly what went down between Angel and Wesley and the Senior Partners in the alley before hell came crashing down on L.A. Maybe things would have been different if I'd made it earlier. All I know is that, when the dust cleared, the city had gotten stuck between dimensions, Angel's soul had gone AWOL, and Wesley was left holding Angelus's geas.
Possibly Angelus was screwing with our heads, but I didn't think he had the patience. The geas had to be for real. You could see the murder in his eyes every time his gaze lingered on Wesley. When we were on patrol together, he liked to tell me about his plans for when the geas broke.
We spent the next few hours hacking up and preparing dragon meat. It was hard to tell the passage of time--light came and went, ghost-colored, but there wasn't a sun in the sky, or moon or stars either. Wesley said it was a consequence of our drifting in and out of phase with nearby dimensions. I asked him once if that meant we'd ever drift back home. I didn't make the mistake of asking twice, not after seeing the despair in his eyes.
"Hey, boss," I told Wesley, who was hanging up the last of the strips of meat. "I'm going to wash off."
"Of course," Wesley said without really looking at me. "Enjoy your bath."
We'd picked this haunt because of access to water. As a result, we had a working bath. The water was always lukewarm, and okay, it was a little freaky that there were little sparkly lights in it. But it hadn't killed us yet.
I peeled off my clothes, which were sticky with blood. I'd have to rinse them clean, but that could wait. I sank into the bath, shivering, closed my eyes, and relaxed.
And almost shot up six feet in the air when a cold hand closed on my shoulder. "Jesus!" I said. "Shouldn't you be harassing Wesley, not being a voyeur?"
Angelus's hand rubbed a knot in my back I hadn't even realized was there. I inched away. Angelus said, "Torturing Wesley is so easy it's almost not sporting."
Damned if I was going to let him ruin my bath. I sank back into the water, pulled up my knees to my chest and glared at him. I probably looked ridiculous. "You should go away before I--"
"What? Stake me with your bare hands?" He crouched beside the bath and trailed his fingers in the water.
I was running out of space to inch away into. And he had such nice hands, too, if you ignored the fact that he had murdered and tortured, oh, about a zillion people with those hands. There's a sense in which every life is infinite, yeah, but there's also looking at Angelus and realizing that my sins are small change. Helps keep the whole thing in perspective.
Too bad he was standing between me and my clothes, although the thought of getting back into bloodstained fabric was making my skin itch. Being clean was one of the few real luxuries we still had.
I splashed out of the bathtub and went for my clothes. I should have known that wouldn't work. I mean, I'm fast, but he was waiting for me. He dragged me in close and kissed me, long and hard, just a hint of tongue.
I couldn't even remember the last time I'd had a little romp. I mean, yes, there was Wesley, but I wasn't sleeping with Wesley, not in his state of mind.
It probably would have been even better if Angelus's clothing, too, hadn't smelled of butchered dragon. "This is about five hundred kinds of bad idea," I said, as if Angelus cared. More accurately, that was the point, for him.
His grip didn't loosen. "What are you going to do, go crying to your Watcher for help?" His eyelids lowered. "We could have a very nice threesome."
I stepped on his foot. "You are not messing with him," I said, very distinctly. "You are not messing with me."
He pressed against me, and, oh God, he was hard, and it had been so long since I'd gotten any--why wasn't Wesley intervening with his damn geas? "Haven't heard the safety word yet," Angelus said, husky. "A man does get lonely."
"You're only lonely when you don't have access to sharp pointy things," I said unsympathetically.
"You know me so well." Was that approval in his voice? Never good. He nuzzled my hair and began kissing my shoulders and collarbone. "Angel never wanted you the way I do."
Fuck it. Yeah, I could scream for Wesley, and Wesley would do something about it, but the truth was? I didn't want to bother him. I was a big girl. I could handle myself.
Also, Angelus? Was hot. Except for--"You need a dry cleaner," I said, wrinkling my nose. God knows how he stood the stink of dragon, with vampire senses.
He was very nimble with all those fiddly buttons and zippers. "One day," he crooned, "I'll crown you with bone and robe you in flayed skins, and you'll be the queen at my left hand. I'll show you what roses look like when you carve them into flesh."
Maybe Wesley wasn't the only one who'd gone crazy. I contented myself with pressing close to him, desperate for the heat that his body didn't hold anymore. The smell of leather lingered everywhere on his skin. It was a perverse kind of comfort, but it was all I had here in the ruins of the city.
We ended up on the floor, me on top. I rode him and rode him, and he just wouldn't stop talking. There was something hypnotic about that voice. You could have tied me up and blindfolded me in a dark room and I would never have mistaken it for Angel's voice. I shut out the words, because he was talking about Slayers and shadows and things to give little girls nightmares, except I wasn't a little girl anymore.
Of course, I knew the hard way that Angel could fake being Angelus, so maybe it could work the other way around. But if Angelus played that game with me, I would deck him.
I came first, because he knew what he was doing. He had warmed to the touch of my skin, although he would never be as warm as a human was. He plunged in, deeper, and I pressed down and kissed trails across that pale unmarked skin. He came at last, stubborn bastard. No gasping, no breathing, nothing.
I bet Angel would at least have faked a gasp. I'd never know for sure.
I washed up first and went for a change of clothes, naked and dripping. Wesley raised an eyebrow. There was no way he hadn't heard what was going on.
"You probably think that's the worst decision I've ever made," I said as I climbed into my underwear. I straightened and glanced over my shoulder. Wesley was looking politely in the other direction.
"I'm hardly in a position to judge you," Wesley said. There was an odd hollowness to his voice. "You've never asked what happened to Angel."
"Isn't anything I can do about it now," I said, careful to keep my tone casual. I pulled the rest of my clothes on.
There was the sound of running water from the bath. Hey, clean vampire was better than grubby vampire. Or maybe he thought I had given him Slayer cooties.
"I sold him out," Wesley said. "He was going to die in a useless final gesture against Wolfram & Hart. I bargained for his soul and got his life instead."
My breath caught for a second. "Was this before or after they destroyed L.A.?"
"Somewhere in the middle." His mouth tightened. "Angelus may be a soulless killer, but I'm the real monster."
He was going to start to laugh. I didn't think I could bear it, except I can bear anything if you give me enough time to get used to it. Here, in the ashes of apocalypse, I had all the time in the world.
I sat down cross-legged and patted the floor next to me. He sat down and regarded me gravely. I said, "What did you think I was going to do, Wes? Run away screaming? We're all sinners here."
"I suppose that's one way to look at it." He sounded--not lighthearted, not ever again, but like he'd worked his way back up to a certain black humor about the situation.
Angelus came out. He was naked to the waist. I admired the view, because, hey, why not.
"Go on watch, Angelus," Wesley said.
Angelus's eyelashes lowered. "Every hour you live," he said, "you'll look at me and remember him, and how he was never as cooperative as I am now."
"You don't have a choice," I pointed out.
"Don't I," Angelus said.
Wesley was on his feet almost as quickly as I was. "Faith--!"
I slugged Angelus, straight from the shoulder. He took the full force of the blow and staggered back. "I could have dodged that," he said. "I could have killed you so easily, sweetheart. But I didn't. And I never will, and still, each time you'll wonder--"
"When did the geas wear off?" Wesley asked, as if we were discussing different varieties of tea.
"Latest dragon," Angelus said, just as clinically. "You should know better than to rely on magic."
They started discussing something that sounded like the bastard offspring of quantum physics and contract law, or would have if I knew anything about either of those subjects. The smart thing to have done would be to clock Angelus. Truth was, I thought he was being honest when he said he wouldn't kill us. He would enjoy himself driving us crazy, because he knew damn well that we wouldn't kill him, not if he was acting as an ally in this fucked-up world.
We couldn't afford to lose him, and not just because we needed the extra pair of hands.
Besides, I could survive anything. Angelus would just have to find that out the hard way.
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