two and a 1/2 weeks

*Warnings: Angst, hints of sadomasochism

*Author's Note:  This starts rather abruptly, but it's all explained further on. The drugged Angelus in Eternity has killed Wesley, Rebecca Lowell, and Cordelia. The last one left him with a feeling of inexplicably overwhelming bliss, so.. the soul loss is permanent. And this is all 'cause I said so. Anyone want to actually write the beginning, feel free, 'cause I'm not planning to.
Skull lighter girl = Amy Blue

      "Why are you even leaving me alive? Why don't you just turn me, now?"
       Xander grabs at Angelus, who has scoffed at the youth's words and turned to leave the living room of their apartment where the argument began only a few minutes ago.
       Xander grips the vampire's upper arms with a desperation that Angelus finds both cute and annoying. Mostly pathetic. His Xander, always the one for emotional dramatics.
       "Why are you doing this? Just answer me!" Xander is almost yelling, his dark mahogany eyes glittering wet as the night, but stormy and muddled with confusion. This is all beyond his reach. Angelus is beyond his reach. A black star, too far away, cold to the touch and defying all physics and he'll never understand any of this. Never understand why the vampire is just letting him keep his mortality.
       Angelus angrily rips his arms out of his lover's grasp and then his fingers close around Xander's wrists, pushes the slender teen back against the peeling wallpaper of their room. He presses the sharp angle of his hip into Xander, keeping him still.
       "What do you want me to say?" He says loudly, and not able to help himself with the tide of electric emotions in the room, he slips into game-face, his lips pulling back from the mouthful of sharp teeth in an unconscious snarl.
       "You want me to tell you how much I love you? That I'm sorry you have to take so much of my shit?"
       Xander sobs once, trembling against Angelus as the vampire raises his captive wrists over his head.
       "You honestly think I can say that? When I've never loved anything in my life?" Angelus' face is close to Xander's now, and the teen feels the same terrible vertigo he always does, staring deep into those yellow eyes, falling from endless heights, always with Angelus whenever he hits.
       "Why haven't you killed me then?" Xander hisses back, surprising himself with his venom.
       Angelus gives him a fleeting smile that is as faint and dark as a whisper, and speaks again, his voice maddeningly savage.
       "Because I've forgotten how good it is to fuck something warm."
       And Xander flinches at this, as jerkily as if he'd been slapped, and he has to look away, so the vampire won't be able to revel at the pain in his eyes.
       "I don't believe that.." He says, although the slightness of his voice suggests otherwise.
       "You should. It would save you the trouble of mistaking all this for something else."
       There is a moment of black silence, filled thickly with too many faceless emotions. Xander feels a need to scream; to scream out these tears that are burning the back of his throat. He swallows salt and blood, falling into his memories, into the yellow and red his life has become. He gave up so much for Angelus. He had already left Sunnydale by the time they met, on his much deserved road trip. Which had also doubled as a way to escape from his friends, still mourning Cordelia and Wesley. Their deaths had signaled the return of a threat no one felt like facing again. And Buffy had been vacationing in Maui. No excuse, no excuse, but he didn't care. He'd left. Crept away in the night like the criminal in a noir film, only a shadow on the wall, away from Willow and Giles.. Taking with him the knowledge of Anya's secret return to vengeance, mentioned in passing after Cordelia's funeral, and his own betrayals.
       Maybe the trip was just him running away. Not as if it mattered. The need to get away had taken root under his skin and he had to listen. Taking to the roads as if they were the answers. Even though they only led to more problems.
       Like in Nevada, hanging out in a dusty neon-bright motel with a couple of scraggly squatters. Punked-out, completely
clueless, but too worldly for their ages. They gave Xander a little bit of their disease, where it festered and recreated itself inside his cells until he was ill with the realization that he could never be Xander Harris of the Scooby Gang again. Not the Xander they'd all known, anywise. And not one they'd particularly welcome back.
       Cities and towns sped by and he worked in dank rooms, in concrete boxes, as a cook, as a photographer's model in
dry cemeteries, as a one-time hustler, all to pay for his self-revelatory drift across the country.

       And that responsibility he said he was running from? The reason he told himself he was running?
       Angelus found him, of all places, in one of the back rooms of an underground S&M club with a pretentious french name. It'd been a spur of the moment act to go into the place, and it led to Xander being bound with leather straps and being 'punished' by a pale Elvira-lookalike in a vinyl corset and crotchless fishnet tights, wielding a thick leather whip. He didn't mind the atmosphere of the place; especially didn't mind being whipped, or the kinkiness of being called 'my little boy', but it was still a little too intense for him. And he'd been on the verge of calling out his safe word when his Mistress announced she was letting someone else take over. Maybe not the most canon thing to do, but Xander had wanted unpredictability.
       He remembered the sharp cracks of the whip, hitting carefully and with the precision of a practiced hand. Not just meeting its objective, but almost playfully, teasing out the brunt of the pain. The sound, loud fleshy smacks, echoing in the cold concrete room. And the tightness of the leather restraints digging into his wrists as he tried not to squirm, crying with half-agony, half- pleasure.
       Remembers the blows began to taper off, letting him wind down from his euphoric storm. Adrenaline still sparking under his skin, but calm like. Meditative frame of mind. Completely out of it, but he noticed the cold hands that suddenly situated themselves around his waist, toying with the elastic hem of his black underwear. He'd been about to ask who it was that had commanded the whip with such professionalism, but not in so many words, when one of the hands pressed tight over his mouth. And a voice he vaguely recognized told him not to struggle, and then there were wet lips searching over the sensitive space of skin between his neck and his shoulder, accompanied with a feeling of fear that hit him so fast he felt dizzy.
       And when the fangs sank into his neck, he tried not to swoon, tried to do what the man had told him. If he was going to
be drained by a vampire in the dungeons of Club Douleur, then there was nothing he could do about it. He kinda sensed that
this club catered to hungry vampires wandering around the dirty subcultures of New York at night, sharing their bloody kisses almost casually. Maybe the whole fucking club was run by vampires and he'd been doomed the moment he set foot inside it.
       But he wasn't really thinking about all that. It was just there underneath his stream of coherency, because for the first time in his life, he was being killed. He was still too diaphanous, too diffused to really know it, to actually fear it. But he was dying and he needed that. Wanted that despair and that end to hope. The suckling and the hands touching him and the wet juicy noises and he could see why people eroticized the moment. Once the blood loss hits, you just floated and the mouth burrowing into your neck, sucking with predatory abandon, was somehow so intimate that it became the deepest kiss you'd ever had, all pain, all pleasure.
       Yet, when he'd begun to slide inside a death faint, the vampire released him, and since he lacked the strength to support himself, he just hung limply from the wall where he'd been tied, panting softly. Mewling like a half-dead kitten.
       The vampire then untied him from his bonds and Xander slumped to the floor, infinitely weary with the loss of blood.
       And as he lay on the freezing cement, fighting against the gaping jaw of unconsciousness, the person who'd bit him knelt into view, leaning his face over him.
       Even upside-down, Xander recognized Angelus, grinning broadly in his human face, lips still smeared red.

      These memories hit Xander fast, like a scene from a film played back at twice the speed, and he swallows loudly against the tears that are rising. Salt and blood.
       "You remember when you found me? Before I knew who it was, I was thinking about how I'd finally.. discovered myself."
       Angelus regards Xander impassively, his yellow eyes betraying nothing.
       "I kept thinking, 'this is it.. this is what I'm supposed to feel like', and I didn't care who it was because it felt so horrible.. So horrible that it I just.. I loved it. Even when you bit me.. I didn't care.. I'd never been bit before, and it all just ran together."
       "And now?" The vampire asks, his voice flat and emotionless as granite.
       "I don't know.." Xander swallows again, wresting the words from his mind slowly, hazily.
       "I'm wondering why I feel so in love with you.. The best thing about this whole situation is that you like to hurt as much I like being hurt."
       "Not as much.. I could do a lot worse."
       "You know what I mean," Xander says frustratedly, trying to shove Angelus away. The vampire lets him go, releasing his death-grip on the youth's wrists and backing away from him.
       Xander rubs his arms, looks with surprise at the livid purple bruises encircling the flesh of his wrists; dulls and aches such as these seemed to be passing him by now.
       "I just.. I want you to want me. Even if you can't love me.. Can you at least want me? Enough to care about me?" Xander looks back at the vampire plaintively, doing his best not to sound too weak or too desperate.
       Angelus sighs, rubs the back of his hand over his ridged brow until he's shifted back to his human visage.
       "You should be grateful I've kept you around this long.."
       "You can't say it, can you?"
       "I just did." Angelus snaps, though his voice is barely a whisper, and his cold midnight eyes meet Xander's for a moment before he looks away. And the youth is left almost speechless at the vampire's uncharacteristic discomfort.
       Neither say anything for a long moment, in which Angelus walks to the apartment's bar and shakes out a cigarette from the pack on the counter. He lights it with the silver skull lighter Xander said he got from a quiet girl in black shades somewhere along the empty highways, and tries not to think about what he's just said. Or how about how it's made Xander feel.
       Focuses on his resentment and his anger. Why is Xander able to do this to him? He's completely fucking torn. He can't be himself when the teen is around. Can't be the murderous demon he's been towards all his other lovers, because Xander doesn't care about his friends or his family anymore, and besides that, even if the naive teen doesn't know it, he stirs up the last vestiges of human weaknesses in Angelus' psyche. Whatever love a demon is capable of feeling, then that's how Angelus feels. And it's nauseating how strong it could be. How the fuck could Spike have been love's bitch for so long and lived with himself? Then again, both of his Childes had no problem vocalizing love.. And neither had weakened for it. They'd been a murderous duo, all lace and spikes. Love was human, but it didn't have to be a weakness. Maybe if you let it tear you down, get under your skin, like Spike had after Dru left. Maybe then it was something to be hated.
       So what, should he embrace Xander, give him a kiss, rip out his throat and then feed him back to the nightlife? He didn't want to do that, because he hadn't been lying before, when he said he missed something warm to fuck.
       Is it more than that?
       And he resents Xander for all this confusion; for being the perfect victim.
       So perfect he can't bring himself to go through with the deed.
       Xander's hands on his shoulders interrupt whatever thoughts Angelus is fighting with, and the youth ignores the vampire's warning growl.
       "It's not so hard, Deadboy. Just say it. And I won't leave or kill myself or anything..."
       Angelus feels his jaw clench, his eyes fixed on the mirror behind the little bar. Xan's watching him with sad eyes.
       He doesn't have have to let Xander leave. Could grab him, lock him in the bathroom again until all this passes.
       "Do you really want me to lie to you?"
       There is a pause. Or he could let him leave.. Let him find worse things out on the dark streets.
       "I thought so.. Jesus, what the hell was I thinking?"
       Xander steps away from his lover, and heads towards the front door.
       "I think maybe I've been overestimating you, Angelus--"
       "Where are you going?" Angelus interrupts, turning around, forcing his voice to be cold when all he wants to do is call Xander back.
       Not for anything so romantic as a kiss and an apology, but for something that will make the teen know he wants him, without actually saying it. Could whip him. Hang him again. Anything painful. But I can't do it. He's nothing; I can't let him win--
       "To a bar, I don't know--" Xander says without looking over his shoulder, grasping the knob of the door and swinging it open.
       But Angelus is there in an instant, and he slams the door shut, holding his outstretched palm against it, glaring down at Xander.
       "You think you can just walk away from me? That I'd even let you?"
       "Well, gee, I didn't think you cared, Deadboy."
       "What would show you I cared? If I shoved you up against the door and fucked you hard enough? Would that be good, Harris?"
       Xander shakes his head bitterly, the sting of tears no longer out of grief, but out of anger.
       "I hate you." He says simply, flatly, but all his rage is so fiercely coiled in the words that Angelus can feel how much the teen wants to hurt him.
       "That's not what you said before."
       "Yeah, well, I've had a moment to think about it.. And yeah, I do hate you."
       Angelus laughs at this, pokes Xander hard in the shoulder. The teen stumbles, the fear he thinks he's hiding flashing across his eyes, because what if this is too far? If saying he hated him crossed some line and now the vampire will have no hesitations about killing him.
       "You expect me to believe you?" Is what Angelus says, and he doesn't move in for the kill.
       "You're shaking all over.. You're about to cry.. You expect me to fall for this little head-game?"
       "Fuck you!" Xander shouts before he can stop himself. "This is your game, Angelus. And I don't need it anymore. I don't." He reiterates this as the vampire rolls his eyes.
       "There's plenty of fucked-up people out there, you know, Deadboy? I'm pretty sure I can find one who has a soul.. Who can actually say, 'Gee, I love you too, Xander.'"
       Angelus grins cockily, tilting his face down ever so slightly. Gives Xander a look between gleeful and psychopathic.
       "You really think anyone could ever love something like you?"
       He catches Xander's hand before it connects with his face, and they stare at each other for a moment, Xander breathing heavily, fighting to keep from lashing out again.
       "I hate you, Angelus. And I'm leaving," he emphasizes the last word by jerking his hand out of the vampire's grip.
       "Fine.. but you'll be back." Angelus says, moving away from the cherry-wood door, letting Xander out.
       "Fuck you!" Xander calls, stalking angrily down the hallway, wiping the tears out of his eyes before they can fall.
       "You're going to regret this," is the last thing Xander hears as he steps inside the elevator, and stabs the button for lobby.
       In the elevator, he lets himself go, lets the tears run, burning down the sides of his cheeks. Just salt and blood.
       You're going to regret this.

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