// Unwritten
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 S5 AU, with thanks to Glossolalia and Elisi. Angel and Wesley, and cutting out your heart with your demon.
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Part I
Files and Records has gotten to know him quite well. It makes no difference to her whether he is written in innumerable volumes, shifting statistics, or dead flesh and stillborn air. They have that in common, along with memory. Hers is wider-ranging. His suffices.
"Eversion again, Mr. Angel?" Her smile is professional, though not impersonal. Files and people: these are indistinguishable in her eyes, indexed in the same comprehensive system.
He thinks, for no reason at all, of Cordelia. Her eyes are closed. Her lips are silent; her heart is not. There is nothing left for him to understand.
"Something different," he says. He makes the small motions that counterfeit living: blinking, chest rising and falling, the occasional tensing of hands or shoulders. It has become habit. This pleases him. He is almost where he needs to be in the machine of things. "I want what you have on Lindsey MacDonald."
The smell of bourbon, blood. Gunsmoke and rage and desire.
"Would you care to narrow the search parameters, sir?"
"His hand," he says. "The replacement." He thinks Lindsey has the map to this game. Play by your rules, not by theirs.
He knows Wolfram & Hart's history from the inside, now. He will not be a part of that long chain of doors opening and closing, the inexorable descent.
There are binders upon binders, even on this small thing. He memorizes them all.
*
"It's--it's quite an offer, Angel." Wesley reached up for his glasses. Leaves them on. "Some of these are--"
"You've looked through them before." Volumes of poetry, essays. He hooks his hands in his pockets. He thought he'd dress down for this.
"Well, I was cataloguing all our resources," Wesley says, deadpan. Then the corner of his mouth lifts. "It's remarkable how well-preserved these volumes are, given what they" (we) "have endured. You're sure you want to part with--"
"I thought I'd make you first offer. Besides, I could use the office space."
The complex expression on Wesley's face settles on a midpoint between bemusement, gratitude, and suspicion.
He can track the movements of muscles--so many of them, in human faces--beneath skin. He has experience with cadavers. There are things people tell him by having faces at all.
It's a relief to read books rather than people. No pulse beats through the pages or spills across the ink. Books are as dead as he is, words without breath. This is why he can't keep the books.
"This one--" Wesley holds it up, a faded, unremarkable volume. "Something for the pleasure of the words alone. Not a first edition, nothing collectible in itself."
And Wesley doesn't understand. Invisible to Wesley's eyes are the brittle flecks of blood. Angelus took the book as a souvenir. Read it twice, even. He's never cracked it open, or been able--until now--to dispose of it.
The instructions didn't mention the shadows in Wesley's eyes. He could stand. Walk closer. Drink of the things he sees there that Wesley doesn't talk about. No.
Bullet points only. He'll stick to the business plan.
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He's visited the cage before. He had them move it to a basement beyond basements in Wolfram & Hart with access through his private elevator. They were most accommodating about the request; he wouldn't have phrased it otherwise. Politesse, small courtesies. These are a language of their own, and he can speak them when he chooses.
Through the bars, the intersecting shadows and receding lines, he sees the demon pacing, preying. Not a ghost; a visualization. Extrapolation, really, from the last time he saw his human face (eyes in the water, swimming in that face), in Pylea. Which makes it the wrong face, not the demon's face, but he works with what's available.
He let his friends unhinge his soul. He won't make that mistake twice. Wolfram & Hart has swallowed him before, and that was a mistake, too. All kinds of things happen in basements. He needs all the help he can get.
He thinks the others, despite being kept out of the loop, will appreciate his decision. Maybe he should have made a flow-chart.
"Angelus," he says to the cage, "have a nice stay."
Eversion. He has the knife and the bonesaw, the incantation's necessary text. He can't amputate his other face--can't exorcise his nature entirely, the hunger/hunter--but this will suffice.
When he's done, he staggers away from the cage. For a moment he sees himself silhouetted through the bars. The empty cuff. (Ruined suit.) He's dizzy as hell with the stench of his own blood.
His missing hand isn't missing. It's here, the sinews dripping, bones stretched and braided among the bars in a grip stiffer than steel. Rigor mortis.
He feels lighter. He feels heavier. He doesn't know how he feels. And then he doesn't feel anything at all, crashing into shadows.
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Part II
The moment Lilah steps through the door, Wesley wants to hear the news he doesn't want to hear.
"What, no fond greeting?" She smiles brilliantly. In his weaker moments, he wonders about a perpetuity clause that guarantees perfectly-applied lipstick, perfectly chosen barbs.
"Whatever you're here for, it can't be--" Last-second change of word choice. "--promising." He doesn't know why he troubles himself over things like this. She'll find a double entendre anyway. Sometimes he finds himself thinking them up for her when she's elsewhere.
Which is all the time, except for times like now.
"I'm not here to tease." But she is. It's all in the malicious warmth of her voice, the tilt of her head. Not subtle, never subtle. Which is why he fell for it (for her).
Lilah tosses something bright; he catches. "Keys," she says unnecessarily.
Forcing him to ask the necessary question. "To what?" His fingers are curled around the oddly uninflected metal, seeking some rag of warmth. There is none. The dead shouldn't walk. He supposes Angel killed that assumption.
"The executive suite," Lilah says. Her smile becomes more crooked.
He can smell the perfume of her, heatless though she is. (Flames. Consumption. Eternity.) "The what?" His voice cracks. There's no need to pretend embarrassment. She knows every nuance of his voice. He isn't sure the reverse is true.
"Angel's indisposed," Lilah says, showing him her back. Looking over her shoulder, hair falling away from that livid scar around her neck. "You're next in the chain of command. His explicit instructions."
He wonders if the scar would be any warmer than the rest of her. Cold bastard that he's (failed to) become, maybe he likes her better like this. Then the words sink in. He's out the door, keys in hand, before she can say anything else he doesn't want to hear.
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Once Wesley would have had the others meet him on the way upstairs. Chain of command, though--this is unlike Angel, whose idea of long-term planning usually isn't. (He can admit these things to walls that hide behind books, rooms that hide behind doors.) He isn't sure they're ready to see whatever is behind that door.
The key slides in. The key slides out. The door opens before him. The door shuts behind him.
He isn't ready, either.
The view out the windows is magnificent: sunset through the smog. Angel stands watching, head cocked backwards. The blood has not been cleaned from the carpet. It leads from the private elevator and trails up the windows, a painting coagulating on the glass.
One of Angel's sleeves is half-empty (half-full). He turns. His eyes smile. "I would have done the walls," he says, almost an apology, "but there wasn't enough--"
Wesley can finish that sentence for himself. He reaches for words, finds only: "The architectural detailing is especially fine." No, that isn't what he wanted to say. "Was there a reason a more traditional medium wouldn't have sufficed?"
Angel glances back at the glass. "It was there," he says.
"That must have been a significant amount of blood loss."
"Easy enough to replenish." There are no cups on the desk. Or corpses. Perhaps they have been cleared away. "It's over."
"We could still go back, you know," Wesley says. If he closed his eyes, he could see the familiar empty halls of empty rooms, the balconies and the lush green garden and the last stains of rituals on the ground floor. The Hyperion was far from the worst place that Wesley has worked at.
He suspects that, if they returned, he will never see it except in lines and angles of blood.
Something has gone wrong, badly wrong. It doesn't take a lifetime's intellectual honing to realize this. He's impressed that Angel managed to evade Wolfram & Hart's overzealous surveillance long enough to do whatever required him to lose his hand.
Blood loss, he tells himself. Shock. "You're sure you don't need medical attention." He wants details. He knows he isn't going to get them from Angel. He has other means.
"You know the answer to that question."
If Angel is still standing, Wesley supposes he does. "I presume you wanted me here for a reason."
Curiously, Angel's next words give Wesley the impression that he is reading from an outline. "I have to leave for a little while, Wesley. It involves--family. I wanted you to watch things while I was away."
"Family," Wesley says, with delicate skepticism. "Has Darla returned yet again?" It's at this point Wesley realizes he can't read the man at all, who once spoke wordlessly in his stiff, stilted posture, in ready violence or quiet steadiness. Wesley has spoken that language himself. And he knows what happens when Angel slams shut all expression.
"Darla?" For a moment Angel sounds genuinely startled. "No." He taps the glass with a faint thunk, leaving a bloody fingerprint in a place where it further completes the painting. An artist's studied gesture. "The one that matters." His gaze is direct; what Wesley glimpses in it, he's not sure. "All of you. I have to do this for you. That's why."
Wesley stands facing away from the windows while Angel explains, trying to understand, and finding, to his dismay, that he does, in fact, understand.
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