// Submerged
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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Post-"Soulless," Angel S4 AU.
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He is trying not to give names to the faces, faces to the names. The artist's eye he permits himself to keep: the decomposition of light into lines and shadows, the anatomies submerged beneath skin. He can think of these people as components of color and mass. Not even people, but cadavers (cattle). He is not unaware of the irony.
"Angel," says one of the voices. Voices are harder to reduce to noise. He's no musician. The voice hardens: low, grim rather than threatening. "Angelus."
He focuses on a vanishing point of walls and chairs and never, never people. "I'm here."
"Are you sure he's back?" A different voice. A woman's. More things he doesn't know how to shut out, knowledge he'd rather not have. "I mean, no offense--"
The in-out hiss of breath, the cacophony of heartbeats. He could close his eyes and drink of their heat. He knows exactly where they stand in relation to each other, in all the senses of the phrase.
"You can leave on the chains if it makes you feel safer," he says. He wanted his voice to be matter-of-fact, but the intonations drift. Nuances of rhythm, drawing out the vowels on chain and safer by a fraction, alchemizing assonance into mockery.
Maybe he's a musician after all.
"Well, I'd be pissed, too." A different woman. For a second, the salt of her skin fills his mouth: memory, smell. No. Vanishing points, a first-year perspective study. Follow the lines converging to a point; stay there.
If he looks any of them in the eye, they'll see him. Which is why he has to tell them first, so they're prepared.
"I don't mind the chains," he says. Has better luck with the voice this time. "You're not wrong." The joys of English (don't think about it; it's not a name), where you is singular and plural both. No need to address individuals.
He can count the beating hearts without reconstituting faces. Five, like fingers. It's a correct number. They survived. There's a sun again. He knows better than to feel gratitude; it was none of his doing.
"Leave him. I'm sure he's comfortable. He always finds a way to be." Another male voice, also low, which hasn't reached its maturity, its darker, rougher undertones. He knows this about his own voice: for all the scarring, it doesn't age, either. Give it time, and he, no Orpheus, will sound the youngest (oldest) of them all.
He suspects there will be time, and time again, despite his efforts. Punishment works that way.
"It's all right now. You're not Angelus anymore. We got rid of him and he's gonna stay gone."
He's not here. He's never been here. Malleable soul, variation on a name. And demons know all about souls. He's read Faust in its varied incarnations. He knows the story from both sides.
"That's what you've never understood." He stills his fingers, which do retain some freedom of movement. A feather-touch, the right (wrong) gesture, applied at the lever-point: these break men. "Angelus isn't nobody. Angel is." He's quoting someone, or near enough. It's his voice. Nothing to attach to a face. "Angel is just something I'm forced to wear." Another quote. A flinch. "And I'm wearing him now."
A skitter of footsteps, shifted weight. His muscles tense, sensitive to the movements of prey. He might be thirsty, at that.
One more voice, at last: "English, I swear if that shaman forgot to dot some i or--"
"The incantation was correct. I saw to it." Such a world of implication. He likes this.
"I don't understand. If he has his soul back, why's he talking like this?" Again, she means. Again.
He makes the mistake of turning his head, changing the frame of view. Her face snaps into focus, furrowed brow and long hair and glasses slipping down her nose. The flutter of the pulse in her throat. "And your curiosity is purely intellectual, as always," he says. "Four men in how long? I always lose count."
Her voice becomes colorless, a thin frayed thread. "My personal life--we've been over this."
"Ain't nothing you haven't said to us, Angelus. Give it up."
He can feel the others' tension, a weight against his skin, sweeter than chains. "All I have to do is listen for the musical chairs," he says. His finger and thumb cross each other, uncross, cross again. Over and under. "I didn't start the dance."
If he's not careful, he could get off on this.
"Angel." That dark, grim voice again. "Can you tell us why?" A pause. Inhale, exhale. "How much do you remember?"
And the younger one, several beats behind the dance of words: "I didn't know, at the time. I meant it. But I didn't know what it meant." A black shirt over that taut, lean body. He waits for everything to dissolve back into tones and shapes. He could use this pigment, that. The world his canvas.
He's painted in blood before. It's not the kind of thing one forgets.
"You still don't get it." There are sharper ways to explain this to them. He doesn't have any confidence they'll get it if this conversation, and the past hellride month, haven't shown them the modus ponens. "I remember all of it."
"Then explain." Maybe several of them say this, overlapping, waves in that sea.
"Angel's my puppet." He hates the words, which is part of the problem. He's good at drowning the things he doesn't want to think (to drink). He supposes that's orchestrated, too. "He's always been my puppet. He blunders into so many things to lose. Discovers whole new ways to break his friends or make them come begging." His voice drifting again, culminating in those last vicious syllables. He's breathing hard.
They forget, when they're around him long enough, that he doesn't need to breathe. He makes the motions. They forget what it means, that every breath is by choice.
Dead-level, English: "And you prefer to be referred to as Angelus, yet you have your soul." Oh, yes: this one knows all about choices.
"Of course he has it." He knows exactly what's looking out of his eyes. He thinks Wesley (no names, no names) is responding to it in all the wrong ways. Watchers always did have a weakness for shadows; wanted to drink from the dark chalices, because all that ink on parchment never measured up. "There's no use pretending. I'm right in front of you and you're still blind. You were always into--"
He can't say it.
"It must be hard," she says. "Everything you've done, in higher-fi than you experienced it. I saw it, remember?"
"But not everything I would do. Or will." He's speaking in silk, at the boundaries of pleasure. It's a promise.
"Angel," says Wesley, with particular emphasis, "you weren't responsible." There's a riptide of fear beneath that controlled voice. Deaths upon deaths, the small quiet slaughters and the large ones. Red in his wake.
If he could paint Wesley, it would be in dark colors, drowned of light. So difficult for you, he thinks, the things you want, and shouldn't. A taste for sleeping with the enemy, or having her (him) breathe your secrets. There was much of that in the last several months. It becomes an addiction.
"You miscalculated, Wes." He thinks he might be laughing. He's mapped them so painstakingly, and they've helped him all the way, as though they want their weaknesses abraded. "You thought it'd be quick, and easy: subtract soul, extract info, do the math, put it back. You didn't count on one thing."
He supposes he couldn't have avoided looking into that dark, direct gaze. No words. None needed. He's being dared. He savors it. And the others, the others stand outside this game of shadows.
"Angel didn't want his soul back," he says. And smiles, because it's worse that way. If he can't cut his strings, the least he can do is cut them free of him. They don't move.
He knows they have stakes.
He needs enemies right now, and all he has are friends.
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