Pairing: Doyle/Angel, others
RATING: NC-17. Angel/Xander,Xander/Other (I'm not telling!), Angel/Doyle.
Extreme violence, horror, male to male sex, failure to wait a full half
hour after meals before swimming.
SPOILERS: ANGEL "HERO", "LONELY HEARTS".
DISCLAIMER: All and sundry lifted from Joss Whedon's pockets whilst he was
distracted by all the pretty shiny things, except The Green Man, from
Anglo/Celtic folklore, and The Vivisector, my own creation. All Whedon
characters returned unharmed-if sweatier, happier and a little sleepy.
SUMMARY: Angel deals with Doyle's death with help from Xander comfort. But
can Doyle still be saved? what's that big green naked thing running
around? What's with all the mutants? Am I using too many question marks?
NOTES: For Viridian5, Adalisa and Jet (congratulations!), purveyors of much
slashy Angel goodness. This came about due to a discussion of Doyle's plant
origins. Also for the people who came up with the ANGEL series themesong-
haunting, sad and beautiful- much like Angel himself...(sorry, I
accidentally glanced at the cover of a Danielle Steele novel this
morning)...For those of you who, like me, like to cast people in the roles
of people you're reading, the part of the Vivisector will be played today
by my favourite actress, the diminutive yet hugely talented Linda Hunt...
FEEDBACK: Would you? WIRRRN@HOTMAIL.COM. Do not touch the glass. Do not
approach the glass. If He attempts to pass you anything, do not accept it.
Do you understand?
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
MOTHER OF MILLIONS
By WIRRRN
"He declared that he was merely human on the outside,
but a furred and ravening beast on the inside;
and bade them take up their swords, cut up his flesh
and see..."
-THE MAD VISCOUNT
Bryophyllum Species: Medium-sized noxious weed with a
highly poisonous sap that causes cardiac arrest upon
ingestion. The common name ("Mother-Of-Millions") refers
to the plant's astonishing talent for proliferation once
becoming established. According to one farmer "They're
absolute monsters; if you miss one, it'll make dozens more,
and they're very hard to kill, practically immortal".
-TOXIC PLANTS AND ANIMALS: A GUIDE FOR AUSTRALIA
Running a black-nailed hand through the cropped yellow whorls of his hair, Spike grimaced behind the muscle mask of his face as Drusilla's eyes glazed and went distant for the third time in five minutes. Though he was not the type who acknowledged he made mistakes, the wanly beautiful vampire was beginning to rue agreeing to meet his ex-lover in this nocturnal woodland on the outskirts of Los Angeles. He couldn't even kid himself anymore that he'd come for a final crack at linking up with her again, as the rotted, skull-grinned, emaciated but jocular infant he liked to imagine as his own personal cupid, had shot its vectored arrow into a new, somewhat surprising target.
Xander Harris. What had started out as being simply forced room-mate status (under mutual, vocal duress) had developed into begrudging friendship and from there had taken the first toddler-small steps towards caring.
When the boy had decided to move to Los Angeles to help Angel deal with Doyle's death, Spike had immediately offered to tag along. He'd heard vague rumblings of a particularly nasty force discreetly amassing power in the City of Angel's, and, strange as it was to admit it, the thought of the boy being hurt or worse was not something he wanted to face. Damn chip.
//Yeah, it's the chip. You keep telling yourself that, Luv//.
Besides, he'd seen the subtext heavy looks between his human - friend?- and the souled vampire. If his sire wanted in, Spike thought with a sharp-edged smirk, he was more than willing to share.
Though the cold, alien thing in his brain locked out his capacity for glorious, red-wet chaos, it gave him a degree of comfort that he was still able to revel in his own carnal decadence.
With a mental yawn, he turned his roving attention back to Dru, who'd apparently been prattling on for some minutes.
//Wonder what the stars have been yakkin' to her about this time...//
Indeed, they appeared to be positively chatty tonight.
Dru smiled in the general direction of her ex-lover. "I like these woods, Spike" she breathed "The clouds like them too...all these oaks...they remind us of Brighton...Remember the puppet shows beneath the boardwalk? I miss the Thirties..."
//Here we go// "We haven't been back to Brighton since the Industrial Revolution, Dru..." //and I hated it; over expensive rock candy and lung-clogging coal fumes//
Drusilla paid him no attention whatsoever, twirling around in the whisped spidersilk petticoats of her memories as she was. "Oooh, remember that couple we caught on the beach on May Day, Spike? Mine tasted lovely and salty...but you let yours go afterwards, you never told me why..."
//Because he asked me. Because he was beautiful// Spike wanted to say, and maybe would have, but a tremendous, sussurus exhalation from the mad creature at his side cut him off.
"OOOOOOOoooaaahh.......Spike...something's coming...something from home...a countryman....he has power...."
Her hands, scrabbling randomly around her in the loam amongst the beetles and worms where she had fallen in her fugue, locked onto Spike's flesh. He hissed through his teeth as his ankle creaked beneath the force of her delirium.
"Great power, Spike...Ouhh! the rushes bow before him...the very trees make obeisance..."
Indeed, it seemed as though the forest around them was being whipped by a sudden wind.
A wind that bent the branches. A wind that growled their names. A wind that seized Dru around the waist and began hauling her bodily backwards through the undergrowth.
Spike caught a vague glimpse of something massively male, dark and leafy whipping around the still keening woman and wrenching her right out of her shoes and actually into the air several feet. Instinctively, despite his earlier misgivings, he reached for her...
And then came the voice. Whispered, musical, gently crackling, like an Autumn breeze through leaves turning slowly to red and orange and yellow- but its lightness did nothing to hide its awesome, ageless power.
"WILLIAM" came the ragged whisper " WILLIAM ELS SANGUINUS..."
Spike paled. Actually went white. "Bloody fuck..." he breathed.
He looked at Dru //-her skin- God, it's... is that- bark?// and she looked at him, her eyes for once laser-focused, clear and sane. She knew what was happening.
He backed off, her eyes tracking him all the way, fixing him like a bug to a board.
"Sorry Dru" he managed. "You're on your own".
Spike ran.
* * *
Angel woke, as usual moving from the death-like state of his sleep to consciousness with an instantaneous snap, like turning on a switch. This night, however, saw him surfacing from the dark, alien seas of his subconscious in a much lighter mood than he was used to.
For a moment this puzzled him, then he felt the reason for his lifted spirits snuggle tighter against the bare flesh of his chest, tickling his nipples with a warm sigh, and rasping its long, lean, lightly- haired
//male//
legs against, beside, between, his own.
Opening his eyes, the vampire found himself staring into twin, rich pools of honeyed chocolate. Pull focus back, and he was looking at a handsome, smiling, slightly sleep-addled face.
Angel blinked. "Xander..."
Xander scrunched a fist into his eyes, rubbed, dropped it (the hand, entirely of its own accord, found Angel's under the sheet and squeezed) and flashed his million candle-power grin again.
"Deadboy..."
The hand beneath the sheet had tired of simply holding its mate, and had ventured lower, mapping this new territory. Angel gasped as it found an area it deemed particularly worthy of exploration.
Recollections of the previous night suddenly uncobwebbed themselves from Angel's mind.
Angel finding Doyle's jacket hanging for some reason in his own wardrobe //Cordelia?// Xander finding him on the floor, sobbing into its leathered folds. Xander's arms around him, holding him. Falling into Xander's chest //the smell of chlorine and chocolate// Soft, idiot words of comfort rumbling in his ear.
His lips touching Xander's.
//Xander's mouth on his eyelids, his brow, the swell of his chest. His hands on Xander's face, his hair, his cock//.
Angel looked up at Xander, his eyes guilt-hooded. "I'm sorry".
"I'm not".
"-But Xander, I used y-"
"You were in pain. You needed someone. You're my best friend, and I love you, and you've got nothing to apologise for. Now shut up and let me sleep, Deadboy...not all of us are up to being in Children of the Night mode..."
The boy's grin banished the skeletal fingers plucking at Angel's stomach. He and Xander had spent too long cultivating this friendship to have it die on the vine now.
Smiling back, Angel embraced his friend. Xander carded the vampire's hair- and bent double, muscle cramps turning him into an ravaged, epileptic marionette, face sweaty, veins standing out on his neck, tributaries flowing from a sea of agony. "G-God..."
Angel had him cradled in an instant. "Xander?! Xan, talk to me!"
Xander's pain-fogged eyes were focussed on a point over the vampire's shoulder; they moved wildly in their sockets, tracking fevered motion only the boy could see. His voice, when it came, rang oddly, as though from a long distance.
"Trees...a grove...maybe...Oaks?"
"What? Xander, honey, I don't understand...how can I help you?"
Xander thrashed. His lips were a razor slash of scarlet in the geisha-mask of his face.
"City outskirts......something big...something old...Green, Jesus..."
Angel gaped.
// Vision? It. Can't. Be.//
Abruptly, whatever gripped Xander let him go. He sagged against the vampire's chest, sweat bathed and quailing. Angel both felt and heard the boy's pulse points playing a dangerous tempo against the walls of his arteries.
//What just happened here?//
" Xan...? "
Xander leapt from the bed and began to dress. "We have to go. Now."
Angel shook his head. "We're not going anywhere- you're going to stay here and rest, and I'm going to worry myself sick until I'm sure you're okay".
Xander, now fully dressed, extracted Angel's clothes from the sweaty mobius band of bedsheets."That forest I saw...Doyle was there".
He offered Angel his shirt.
Angel took it.
* * * * * * *
Half an hour later they were pushing though dense, moonless night-foliage, that seemed imbued with a malign vegetable intelligence and drive to catch them with brambled claws and deaden their forward progress. Xander had brought a torch, but had lost it some minutes previously whilst flailing wildly after a face-first encounter with the world's clingiest spider-web, and the evident displeasure of its large, eight-legged mistress. Now he let the strange sensations in his mind- the residues of his vision- tug his feet forward, whilst Angel guided them, his pre-ternatural eyes soaking up thin starlight like blotting paper and providing a picture of their surroundings that would put an owl to shame.
Approaching a particularly dense thicket of what appeared to be a riotous mixture of heather and privet //British plants -here?/ Angel turned to the boy and put a pale finger to his lips. Xander cocked his head, trying to tune his ears to a level at least approaching Angel's perceptions.
As it turned out, this was un-necessary. Both of them heard equally well the discreet, somehow fearful rustling from the heart of the foliage, as of something desperately trying to maintain its hiding place despite an overwhelming need to bolt. Angel whipped the branches back, GameFace dormant but pregnant in the bones of his skull, ready to flow forth if needed.
Vampire and human both gasped as they took in the pitiful sight before them. Curled foetally about himself into the smallest ball possible, even as he tried to burrow backwards into the bushes, into the soil; reeking of the wet-hay funk of terror, the dark orbs of his eyes swallowed up by the huge crescent moons of panicked white on either side.
If not for the sculpted blonde hair that shone yellowly in the feeble starlight, neither of them would have recognized him.
Xander moved first. "Spike!" he bent down to help the obviously stricken creature. Who knew which of the three -Angel, Xander or Spike himself- was the more startled when the vampire clutched fiercely at the boy, burrowing his face into the mortal chest, drawing comfort from the presence of a heartbeat.
"Xander...Angel...." the sensual purr of the London docks still came through, diluted though it was by fear. "We've got to go...we have to leave now..." He got to his feet and let Xander go, not really noticing the flash of loss on both the boy's and his own face.
Angel restrained him with a hand on the shoulder //I've never seen him like this...not even when he was breathing//. "Will?" he asked, the old name both familiar and alien on his tongue. "Will? what's wrong?"
The strong, protective presence of his Sire //Xander// relaxed the British man somewhat; the swagger was returning to his movements,the hipshot snarl to the voice. It was a fascinating process to watch, like the shiny new skin of a snake pushing free from the necrotic girdle of its old cells.
"You want to hang around, you go right ahead, Sire..." He drawled. "Me- I've got better things to do than to lay down roots here". A sick, almost hysterical grin ghosted his lips and was gone. "I mean I've heard of bein' at one with nature n'all, but this's ridiculous..."
" What are you talking about? "
"I'm talkin'..." The voice threatened to surrender to panic again "about that..." Pointing behind their shoulders.
At first glance, the tree was unremarkable, if unusually robust for this late in the season. The bolus was sturdy, the branches heavy with leaves, the trunk-
Angel and Xander stared in horror. The trunk...
Tangled and thick, the tree's surface was a gothic patchwork of sombre coloured lichens- but despite their cryptic effect, the bark of the trunk had quite clearly formed into a face, a knothole in place of a mouth, screaming in wood-locked anguish. A face they both knew.
And one of the branches clutched a crushed porcelain doll.
//Jesus...// Xander's voice was iron. "Angel, get Spike out of here. I have to ...meet...with this thing, but I don't want you in danger. Either of you."
Unconsciously, Spike's brow raised a fraction. His eyes softened imperceptibly.
Angel paused. Xander's face was suffused with the seemingly bottomless courage he often manifested, a side of him the immortal suspected his human friends didn't even know existed, let alone had noticed. Angel was torn. Despite their frequent
//constant//
personality clashes, he did love his Childe, and did not want him hurt. But he was damned if he'd leave Xander alone in thi-
Spike rendered debate moot. "Like Hell", he spat, voice pregnant with defiance. "The only danger we're in is of severe leg cramps when we high-tail it the fuck out of here. All of us. If I have to carry you over me shoulder, Harris, I bloody well will...I was a fireman in the Twenties. Tell 'im, luv".
Trying not to smile //Only Will could make honour sound petulant// Angel nodded.
Xander paused, the muscles of his face warming from an unidentifiable //sure, Xan// emotion triggered by the cruelly sardonic creature's concern for his welfare. "But Doyle..."
"Is gone" Angel finished. "And you're not- let's keep it that way. We're leaving..."
The voice, then. Whispered, sibilant, dripping with power.
And close.
"OBVIUM IRE ABEO, MIHI AMICUS?"
Xander heard gibberish.
Angel heard "Going somewhere, my friends?"
Spike heard nothing after the first syllable, when he grabbed his Sire and his room-mate //friend// and pushed them bodily out of the grove at speed.
And the thing stepped nonchalantly out of the bushes in front of them.
Standing on the pathway before them, blocking their way out of the woodland, was the most beautiful man any of them had ever seen. Tall, defiantly young and insolently serene, he appeared to have been hewn from enough marble to ransom the Vatican and have life breathed into him from the worshipful lips of some lovestricken god.
He moved into the light, and they saw it was not marble, but jade, for his flesh was a verdant, fertile green. The long hair that poured down his shoulders in a windfall of fern was not hair at all, but grass. Moss stood out from his flesh in lieu of body hair, and his cock- impossibly huge and erect, a Burroughs' opium fever dream wrapped in skins, stood proud of the body nestled by a thick mat of lichen.
He turned eyes that made emeralds look like chips of broken plastic upon them, and moved forward; no, Xander saw, floated forward, not touching the ground. Looking at the two vampires, he saw their faces were wet, probably without them knowing.
"My God..." He whispered, awed.
Angel looked at him "No.." The vampire breathed "No- not yours- Doyle's..."
The creature opened His glorious lips and spoke, the voice coming not just from the man, but the surrounding trees, the rocks, the very Earth of the forest floor itself.
"MIHI DICO BELLATOR VIRIDUS...."
Angel gasped "It's the Green Man"...
Noting Xander's puzzled look, he whispered "One of the Council of One Hundred and Ten; The eldest of the elders...he's a nature spirit, the personification of everything feral and wild in the forest, protector of the animals and plants."
Xander nodded "What's he speaking?"
Spike scoffed. "Latin. Your true elders like speaking in archaic tongues, even though they understand every word you're saying- I think they reckon it adds to their mystery. Never learned it at school myself- I was too busy giving blowjobs out behind the dorms..."
Angel scowled good naturedly at Spike, turned to Xander. "I can speak it..."
Xander smiled "Deadboy knows the Dead Language. Surprise."
Angel pointed to himself. The Green Man nodded; nevertheless, His eyes did not leave Xander once. He addressed His words to the human alone.
"MIHI AN ALS MILITIS AB QUERCETUM, ALS LORICA NATURA. TUI, ADOLESCENS, XANDER HARRIS, MIHI CUSTODIA. AUTEM TUI AMICUS...ANGELUS EST SPIKE ALS LAMIA, ALS FERE-MORTIS, HOC CURA NATURA."
Angel translated, frowning. "Like I said, he's the embodiment of wilderness- the "knight errant of the wild" he puts it...I think. He says you're a human, and an animal, so fall under his protection... Spike and I are undead- we're not of nature".
"What does that mean?"
The Green Man moved forward, eyes huge, static energy sparking wildly from feral hair.
Spike paled, but stood his ground. "I think it means we're on the menu..."
Xander jumped in front of his friends.
"No!" He meet the terribly calm gaze, unflinching. The green eyes widened slightly in surprise, and some respect.
"They're my friends...you called me here...I won't stay without them."
Green eyes flashed darkly.
" ANGELUS EST WILLIAM HOC FOEDIS PROFANO LAMIA!" He seethed. "ALS CUR HABEO INAVIS ACCERSITUS ME..."
" He says YOU called HIM, Xan. I won't bother translating the adjectives he used to describe me and Spike..."
"I think I got it from the tone..." Xander looked at the Green Man again. "I summoned him?"
Angel nodded "He felt your pain..."
Xander was puzzled. "But...my vision was about Doyle..that's your pain more than mine...do you think...maybe the Powers sent the vision into the wrong head? because we were close... y'know" -here he blushed- "...Physically?"
Spike's eyebrows disappeared into the yellow depths of his head. "WHAT?!" he exclaimed, a grin on his lips that rivalled that of his GameFace. Angel made a show of pretending not to hear, as Xander addressed the plant-man a second time.
"Look, you've got the wrong guy...Angel here is the pained one... Doyle was his...well his...."//how do you explain this kind of thing to a god?//
Angel cut in. "Doyle was my lover".
The Green Man regarded him, His placid eyes swirling with this new information.
"DOYLE? ALS DEMONSTRUM CUR ABOREA? ERGO HOC AFFINIS, ALS COGNATUS.."
Angel relaxed visibly. "Then I'm considered a spouse, a blood relative " He grinned ironically. "Apparently, we're family now".
Spike also stood down, though he remained subtly intersposed between The Green Man and Xander. "So does he want to know who killed Doyle, or what?"
The Green Man's vegetative calm exploded, His eyes emerald lightning, the grass-hair flailing about gale-force, a gorgon caught in a hurricane. The trees around them bent double in the jade firestorm of His rage.
"QUAND?" came the roar "DOYLE EST MORTUS? QUI?"
"He gave his life for me.. I couldn't stop him...it should've been m-"
Spike stopped him, hands- gentle, for once- squeezing his shoulders, his Childe's soothing lips on the back of his neck.
"No it shouldn't, luv".
The Green Man's eyes rolled back in His head for a moment, then snapped back to attention.
"MIHI CONSULTO AVOD ALS AUCTORITAS. AUINT DOYLE DECCESSUS CARECTUM CASUS. ALS AUCTORITAS DEBEO TUI ALS BENEFICIUM..."
Angel bristled "Yeah, no shit they failed to help him. Tell them to keep their "gift" and their new messenger..." His voice fractured slightly " all I want is Doyle..."
The Green Man seemed to focus into the distance a second time, then looked Angel in the eyes, face set into a look of compassion so pure the vampire began to weep.
He floated forward, then landed, feet touching the ground for the first time. Where He trod, huge bushels of flowers grew, springing into a vigorous rainbow of life.
Stopping before Angel, He touched the vampire's cheek, gently. Angel's hitching gasps quieted, but did not cease. The creature spoke to him, in English, with visible effort and a look of vague distaste.
"GO TO THE SWAMPS...THE MAUSOLEUM IN THE MARSHLANDS...THE VIVISECTOR IS THERE, IN HER SURGERY....THAT IS ALL I KNOW...ALL THEY WILL TELL ME..."
Angel thanked him, and the creature began to dissipate, simultaneously seeming to stretch, fade and merge with the forest around him.
"How much of my blood do you need? You have to take some in payment for the information, right?"
Angel tore the collar from his shirt, but the fading Green Man waved him away.
"THE MAD WOMAN IS SUFFICIENT..." It said.
Reflexively, Spike barked, stung. "Hey!"
It turned a baleful eye upon him. "YOU ARE NOT AS WRONGED AS YOU WOULD HAVE THEM BELIEVE...WE BOTH KNOW OF YOUR TRUE AFFECTIONS..."
Its eyes lingered for a moment in the empty space where its face had been, a sensuous Cheshire Cat, then it was gone.
Xander looked at Angel and smiled, then moved to help Spike to his feet, but stopped, briefly.
//I never knew a vampire could blush...//
* * * * * * *
Which brought them to this point, moving with stickily suctioned shoes through a swamp that could have lain here undisturbed since the Triassic, gigantic winged insects, sulfurous fog, black waters caught in a stranglehold by weeds and all. They trod through it in search of a particular tree that Spike had apparently "heard vague whispers about", having to stop every few minutes when the rotten-egg clay greedily sucked the shoes right off their feet. The claustrophobic air seemed to retain more hot moisture the further in they walked. Xander was covered in thick perspiration, his high, salty funk filling the nostrils of both vampires, though neither found it objectionable. Surreptitiously, Spike inhaled deeply every now and then.
Xander sighed and wiped his forehead with the hem of his t-shirt, noticing that neither vampire betrayed even the slightest sign of a discomfort, their greedy metabolisms using up every drop of liquid they imbibed, leaving no waste products. Angel had told him that twice a week or so they coughed up crumbling, rust-colored pellets of indigestable cellular matter and bone, much like vampire bats or owls.
Though the air was filled with the dentist drill whine of countless mosquitoes, both he and his companions stayed undrained- whenever the parasitic flies came within a foot or two of the vampires, they suddenly stopped in mid-air as though flying into an invisible wall, buzzing in what Xander could have sworn was alarm before veering off rapidly in the other direction, heading wherever insects go when not being observed by people.
Angel noticed the boy's eyes on the tiny bloodsuckers "Nifty, isn't it? he smiled "Our scientists haven't figured out how they sense us yet...."
Spike shot his head up, pointing forward, to a huge Mangrove tree that had obviously been alive for at least two centuries, and dead for as long again, blackened, hunched and lightning-blasted as it was. And yet, as they watched, a heron alighted on one of the plant's aerial roots- and the roots whipped around the bird's body, breaking it in five places with a sickening crunch before hurling it inside a maw-like knot in the huge bolus of the tree.
Spike grunted. "I'd say this is it."
Moving underneath the seeking, seething branches, they crawled into a large hole in the trunk. Moving through, each of them felt a sudden lurch in their heads, and the fungi-smelling air inside the tree seemed to sparkle, then spin, around them.
Then they were Elsewhere.
The dilapidated hospital building reared up in front of them, its iron-hewn turrets and spires rending the black sky. It appeared to be the result of a hallucinogen-fuelled committee meeting between Florence Nightingale, Escher and Heironymous Bosch; impossibly angular, impossibly gigantic, its far side actually receeeded over the horizon.
They approached the door, heavy marble centred with a large brass knocker in the shape of a Minotaur's head. Carved in Gothic script below it was a sentence:
HELL IS MORE BEAUTIFUL THAN HEAVEN
Angel saw Spike shudder, and was inclined to second the motion. Any place that made his Childe AND his Demon nervous was probably not destined for cover status in Better Homes and Gardens.
"Where the Hell are we?"
Abruptly, the Minotaur head made a brassy lowing noise, and coughed up a rectangle of white paper. Unfolding it, the vampire saw a map. Spidery letters labelled it "SHIT CREEK" with an arrow pointing to "You are Here".
"Don't let that bother you", came a cheerful voice. "The Doc's just showing off; she does that a lot".
Rounding a corner of the building came the owner of the voice, and his companions. It was obvious which one had been the speaker. He was the only one with a mouth.
Standing before them stood four -beings- for want of a better word; "people" seemed only to apply in the flimsiest sense.
The first was a little girl, about five or six, wearing a checkered white and yellow dress and higly polished black shoes with buckles. Her skin was covered completely in a tight case of bones- a literal exoskeleton- and she gripped the leg of one of the others for guidance, as she had no eyes at all- not even sockets, just thin flaps of shallower bone, like the pale slippery ghosts of cave-dwelling fish.
The woman whose legs she held onto had the head of a hummingbird, expanded to human proportions. She cast ruby eyes around constantly, never still, flashed the metallic blue feathers at her throat, and every few seconds darted a thin, black tongue into a glass she carried containing a comb of honey -complete with bees.
The third was a large black man, whose pelvis and hips appeared to have been forcibly rotated until he was incapable of walking bipedally. Now, he walked on all fours, but still met their gaze at eye level, as his arms and legs had been stretched accordingly. Had he been walking erect, he'd have been ten to twelve feet high. He raised his head and warbled non-commitally at them with a series of stridulating chirps, through the mandibles and pedipalps of an immense spider.
The fourth one, the one who had spoken to them-
Angel gasped in shock, his head filling with molten lead that burned away the inside of his skull, robbing him of conscious thought //Jesus Christ...// His legs suddenly rickety stilts, he would've fallen if his alarmed Childe hadn't rushed to support him.
The Speaker was Doyle.
* * * * * * * *
Angel rushed forward. "Doyle..." he gasped, his voice tremulous.
Toppling forward, he took the startled demon in his arms, and kissed him full on the lips. For a few moments, Doyle returned the kiss, dreamily, then seemed to realise what he was doing and started to pull back, at the same time Angel had moved a bracing hand to the back of Doyle's sable head. Feeling trapped, the slighter man began to struggle violently.
"Get...the fuck...off me!" He shoved the bewildered vampire backwards, hard.
"Sorry mate, but if I'm gonna compare tonsil schematics, I prefer it to be with someone I actually KNOW, not some anonymous big lug from Nowhereland".
It is a testament to how stricken Angel was by the slighter man's actions, that he didn't notice Doyle's accent was gone.
//Is he rejecting me? Did he come back to life just to get out of mine?//
Huge, fat tears tracked room-temperature trails down the vampire's face. Anguished, he probably wouldn't have noticed if someone had chosen that moment to stake him -or if he had, would have welcomed it as less painful.
"Doyle" he managed. "Please...not like thi-"
The quadprupedal creature grabbed the vampire from behind and threw him off Doyle and onto the ground, chirping a warning.
Xander moved forward to help his confused friend up whilst Spike approached the Quadruped, GameFace on and snarling. Things would've gone downhill rapidly from there, if not for the intervention of the eyeless, bone-covered child.
She stepped forward, placing a skeletal hand on the side of the mutant's face, perilously close to its whirring mandibles. It calmed instantly, leaning into the touch with a gentle burble.
"That's enough, Kurt" she said, her voice both horribly viced by the bone clamping her throat, and somehow mature beyond her years. "They don't mean harm. They're just new."
Turning to Angel, who was doing his best to convince a worried Xander that he was alright despite his wet face, she seemed to regard him gravely, her eyeless face an enigmatic blank. She spoke to him in the same funereal, adult voice as before.
"He doesn't remember you, Angel".
The vampire looked at her, stunned. "What?"
"He doesn't remember you. His persona was scrambled by the trauma of molecular recorporation -here, of all places."
Angel quieted somewhat. "But it is Doyle, right?"
She was smiling, but then a skull always does. "Oh yes. Or the outer part of him, anyway; brought here by a certain green-hued gentleman of our mutual acquaintance. The Doctor has the rest of him, but she won't give it to you for nothing".
Spike's sneer was tattooed to his face. He may as well have worn a T-shirt and matching hat with "Pull the other one it's got bells on it" emblazoned in neon.
"You're quite perceptive, for a kid who should be selling matches on a Christmas street corner waitin' for Granny's ghost" he spat.
"Not all of us need eyes to see, William", she countered. "Nor a boy to do a Chaos Demon's job, it would seem...face it, when you got stuck in the chair, Drusilla just kept you around so she could get better parking at the mall..."
If Spike had blood, it would have boiled. Not having fed recently, he contented himself with an outraged roar and charging her, GameFace on.
The little girl sidestepped him easily. Catching him by his duster, she stunned him with a blow to the jaw, swung him around in front of her and slammed her hands palms down on his shoulders, bringing him to his knees with such force that his kneecaps shattered with a sound like a geode being struck by a sledgehammer.
"You of all people should know not to judge by appearances, boy" the child admonished. "Lucky for you I've seen your heart's in the right place where these two" -indicating Xander and Angel "-are concerened, or I'd be making sure you didn't live to regret it..."
Abruptly, the child/Elder vaulted to a parapet eighty feet above them and began scaling up the wall like a nightmare lizard. Pausing briefly, she shouted down to Angel.
"Bring this Doyle before the Doctor to regain the one you know...but don't let her take him; don't turn your back on her..."
She was gone.
Looking up from offering his arm for balance and soothing words for placation to a loudly and enthusiastically cursing Spike whilst his legs healed, Xander shot a bemused smile at Angel.
"Remind me again- when exactly was it when we fell down the rabbit hole?"
* * * * * * *
Two vampires, an amnesiac plant demon, a human and a patchwork assortment of vivisected hybrids made their way single file down the hot, narrow maw of a service tunnel into the Hospital's gullet. With the combination of Spike's hair, the Hummingbird-woman's animus head and entourage of bees, the quilted costumes and shambling gait of the hybrids and the leaping shadows thrown by the torches held in either hand by Xander (both Angel and Spike being leery around naked flame), they looked like a protest march sponsored by P.T Barnum.
"So, let's review". Doyle was pitching his oddly accentless voice back to reach Angel as he ducked under a large cobweb hung with the shrouded bodies of birds and a spider with the head of a child.
"You're a vampire, I'm a demon, and not only do I know you and work for you in your LA detective agency, thwarting evil and having strokes that give me psychic visions, but we've been gay lovers for almost a year, until last month when I proved how much you meant to me by dying for you in your place? Have I left anything out?"
Angel caught his eye over his shoulder. "No, that's pretty much, um...it".
"Okay" said the young demon. At Angel and the other's surprised looks, he raised an eyebrow. "What? after being exposed to this nutfarm, a guy can't take a few things on faith?"
An unconscious tic flipped in Xander's left eye muscle at the words "exposed to" and "on Faith".
Doyle kept talking as the group made its way up a set of stairs that appeared to be made out of a giant cluster of orange bracket fungi sprouting from the walls. "The BrackenDemon thing makes sense...that'd explain why my face keeps itching all the time. The visions would explain why I keep getting headaches..."
Angel tried to keep the rising peal of hope from leeching into his voice. Despite centuries of practice at being stoic, he failed. "And the rest?"
"The lovers part?" Doyle smiled. "I could do worse than you, I guess..."
The panic-tight corset around the vampire's chest slipped from his body. He allowed himself a wholly-for-show relieved deep breath, and took the young demon in his arms. Doyle was skittish at first, but his lips soon bowed to both confidence and passion.
At length, they reluctantly parted, both their usual pallors flushed deeper.
"There's just one thing, Angel...Whenever we kiss, I keep thinking..."
Angel's head jerked up sharply, ears pricked. "There's" and "I" had come out "Dere's" and "Oi".
//Keep coming back, love. Don't stop. Keep coming back. To. Me.//
"...I keep thinking of the Sun..."
The vampire nodded, blithe. "We have kind of, a ritual, I guess...Every night on the safe side of dusk, we go up to the roof and watch the last of the sunset. You insisted on it after that whole Ring of Amara fiasco; said it'd help me think of beauty when we're wading hip-deep in entrails and excrement..."
Doyle blanched. "Oh, God, I hope you're being figurative..."
They stopped short before a massive set of doors that appeared to have been constructed from the ribs and sternum of an enormous dinosaur. The Hybrids pointed at the door, then made themselves scarce, fading into the shadows.
Two astonishingly pale guards stood on either side of the door. Both were mesomorphically muscled, hugely tall, and unashamedly naked as they fucked each other. Their huge cocks roiled and seethed, scenting the air like flute-lulled serpents. Fox skull heads, articulated with solid gold pins and screws, imbued with some form of arcane life that shone from empty sockets in keyholes of scarlet. Yellowed snouts blackened with dried spit, semen and gore, each of them held wickedly long flensing knives, the type used to carve up blubber on Whaling boats.
As the three arrived, the things bowed, sheathed both their weapons and their cocks, and moved either side of the door, allowing access.
Xander had also picked up on Doyle's vocal changes. He grabbed Angel's sleeve.
"Question", he said. "If this Doctor we keep hearing about is nutty enough to make things like these-" He indicated the creatures, whilst smiling placatingly in a 'no offense, please don't maul me' way. "- and Doyle's starting to remember himself anyway, why are we so anxious to see her? couldn't we just...y'know...book?"
Spike overheard. "This isn't Angel's boy-toy, Xan..."
//der- XanDER-dammit, too late// "not all of him- just the human part...he doesn't smell of demon at all".
Angel nodded. "And without the demon, he's vulnerable. The vision headaches alone will eventually kill him...besides, he's not whole without it, and I want MY Doyle back. All of him."
The skeletal fox men moved forward,jaw hinges sparkling, growled in gutteral unison.
"The Doctor will see you now".
* * * * * * *
She was the oldest person Xander had ever seen.
When they first entered the room and found her up a two storey ladder, placing a book back on a shelf vast enough to consume entire libraries (a black leather book that screamed and gibbered and attempted three times to leap from her twig-thin digits rather than be reshelved), Xander's mind immediately flashed on an image from his Caroll; the Mock Turtle, perched high atop its rock.
For that is what she resembled; nothing less than a centuries old tortoise pried from its shell and left to crack and dry further under a desert sun. Remarkably tiny, under five feet, still she walked to them with an palpable air of cold authority, back calliper straight, hair a severe, fog-coloured bun, no adornments or makeup of any kind, save thick rings of kohl smeared round enormous, watery blue saucers of eyes that dominated the mummified apple-face.
She stopped before them, expression closed and unyielding as a locked steel door, unmindful of the skinned, feebly struggling rabbit writhing in lab-coat wrapped agony, even as a red tide broke the dam of her pocket and dripped down her leg and shoes to leave gore-streaked prints in her stead.
"You're late" - she spoke to Doyle only, ignoring the others, pinning the Irishman with icicle eyes; voice as chilled as her gaze, barren as her
//womb//
soul. "I'll have to adjust today's dosage accordingly. Remind me, later."
Angel prickled. //dosage?//
She turned to the others as if just noticing them, and the Winter of her face became Spring, her entire demeanour changing with the movement of a handful of muscles- though both vampires could still sense the glaciers waiting behind her face for the end of the thaw.
"And you are all expected. It is good to see that you have finally sought my chambers out...I was just about to print up engraved invitations!"
Her voice was peculiarly accented, subtley traced through with a strange brogue that mutated her long vowels, curled the ends of her words, and half-heartedly attempted to turn her "w"s into "v"s, but seemed embarrassed to do it completely.
Noting the three other's somewhat forced silence, she smiled- the expression, clearly not at home on her face, soon left for happier pastures- and seized Angel's hand, pumping it warmly with a dry, reptillian grip, the strength of which had the vampire damping down a surprised double-take.
"But forgive me...I hang my manners up with my lab coat, yes? I am Doctor Nesta Malachi." She dropped the vampire's hand to gesture around her. "Welcome to my workshop".
Spike leaned in to Xander, whispered. "Let's hope she doesn't make her own elves..." The boy swallowed a chuckle.
Angel was nodding, surreptitiously flexing numbness from fingers.
"Doctor. We've heard a lot about yo-"
"Good things, I hope?" she fluttered blackened lids at him and favoured him another lemon-lipped smile, then proceeded to nod in kind to the others.
"You're all honouring us with your presence here, of course, but I'm espescially delighted to have you here-
//on the dissection table//
-Angelus..."
In gutteral, medieval Gaelic, she continued to him alone. "The Phantom Springheel of Whitehall in my own quarters...I shall be counting the scalpels before you go..." She purred, an ancient tigeress remembering past meals.
//She doesn't know about the curse. Milk it, Deadboy//
His own Gaelic was rusted and weed-clogged from lack of use, but still driveable.
"That was a while ago...I'm not really into ripping any more...I'm more subtle now..."
She shook with laughter, raining crimson droplets to the floor.
"Yes...yes, aren't we all?"
The vampire switched back to English for the benefit of his friends, and added "I'm actually surprised you've heard of me- I've been keeping a low profile lately..."
Doctor Malachi unshackled her prisoner-of-war of a smile.
"One doesn't build up an empire of this magnitude by keeping One's hands white and soft as goat's cheese. I make it my business to know the names, physical descriptions and whereabouts of every major supernatural predator currently using this continent as its hunting ground. I'm pleased, therefore, to see that you've brought your Childe along..."Bloody Bill", isn't it?"
The vampire in question couldn't quite hide a smile. He loved being talked about. "Spike'll be fine".
"As you wish. This other one" she turned burning eyes on Xander. "I cannot place."
Taking a step forward, she sniffed the air loudly. "He seems mostly human" she said, her tone laced through with dry surprise "though with a trace of wild dog and even a touch of...fish? You are quite the quandry sir..."
Xander chuckled nervously //again with the hyenas?// "I always thought I was a Gemini..."
The sphincter-smile again.
"At any rate, I'm sure you'll fit right in ". //after some alterations//
She motioned to a darkened corner with a withered parrot claw of a hand. "Can I offer the gentlemen some refreshment?"
Three small, incredibly dirty children of about six or seven stepped blinking into the harsh laboratory lamps. Xander was puzzled.
"No need for waiters- just bring us your pluckiest house wine".
The Doctor's face creased exponentially as her eyebrows shot up, then smoothed again. "Waiters, yes...most droll I'm sure..." she clapped sharply, and the three children, without changing expression, pulled back their shirts and craned their heads aside, exposing freshly scrubbed, pink throats.
"They're quite contaminant-free, I assure you. Raised in my own pens".
Xander suddenly felt decidedly non-flip. Even Spike seemed taken aback.
Angel remained stoic whilst he considered how his demon would've handled this
//...let me out and I'll show you...letmeoutletmeoutletmeoutletme..."
before deciding on cruel but cool. Grabbing one of the children by the jaw, making it seem like he used more force than he actually did, he regarded it for a moment, then turned.
"No thanks, Doc. I'm trying to cut down on those between-meal-snacks".
The old woman waved the children away and they returned to shadows as hollow as their eyes.
"Very well then, straight to business". Blowing decades of dust from a ledger that had appeared in her hand, she poised a peacock-quill pen over it.
"What body parts do you require...? I'll need the organ name and, where possible, the species, please".
Xander tested his fright squeezed larynx. "What makes you think that's what we want?"
Malachi regarded him cooly from the depths of her road-map skull.
"I'm a vivisector, body parts are all I've GOT. You're looking for a cherry slushie, go to a Wendy's."
"We're not actually after a physical organ..."
"Well then?"
"We're looking for a soul." The vampire brought Doyle forward, keeping careful hold of his arm. "His soul".
Malachi paused, then finally allowed a terse nod. "I have the item. However...it was set aside for my own personal use." Sapphire eyes narrowed. "It will not come cheap."
"That doesn't matter."
The doctor rose and went over to a roll-top desk so ancient, it appeared to be one huge cobweb. "I assume you will be wanting that body too then, to go with the item...may I ask why?"
The grip on Doyle's arm tightened, the younger man leaning into the touch without even thinking about it. "He's...very important to me."
Malachi looked up from her rummaging. "Really? How interesting. The last I heard, you were mounting your childe..."
Though tense, Xander couldn't help a quick smile as both vampires simultanously muttered under their breath. "He wishes..."
The waterlogged, cobwebbed ruin of the desk was suddenly illuminated in all its dilapidated glory as the diminutive vivisector pulled an orb of Thessala from its interior. The ball hummed as it gave off a lime green bioluminescence.
"Shame"...she muttered, darkly. "After all I spent prepping this one." She looked Doyle over. "Still..."
"I suppose you want me to turn you, as payment". Angel sighed. Death would undoubtedly be foremost on the wizened little harridan's mind. Why else would she be playing God with such abandon, if not to extend her own miserable existence? Turning this obviously deranged mortal would keep him up with guilt for many months to come. Still, Doyle was worth it. Angel would pay the price.
The turtle was smiling again, only this time it was real, all but eclipsing the face. "No...." She pointed to Xander. "I want the boy".
Xander and Spike both looked simultaneously shocked. Angel's eyes flashed sulfur.
"You haven't got a chance".
The smile became a grin. "You haven't got a choice..."
Quicker than anything Angel had ever seen, the tiny woman had seized Xander in a grip of iron and dragged him away, even as she pumped a primed syringe into Doyle's neck.
"Doyle!"
Suddenly slack and echo-eyed, the young Irishman shuffled after the retreating vivisector, following her movements like a heliotrope does the sun.
"Did you really think I'd give him up, vampire, after all the effort of preparation for him? and to think I'd credited you with a modicum of intelligence..." Sardonic laughter burbled.
"Don't worry though, I'm true to my word; you can have Doyle back when I'm finished with him. Of course, there won't be much of him left, but you're welcome to it...just bring a mop".
Angel, by now in GameFace, worried at his bottom lip and bared his fangs in a red-toothed snarl. He had to lock on Malachi's position, keep her talking. Whilst she was talking, she wasn't grabbing a knife and slici- he trod the thought down.
"What preparation? What the hell do you want of him?"
Crow-caw cackles from the blackness to his left.
"Come and see for yourself; I won't stop you. I'm a great advocate for bringing the Sciences to the masses; and I have a MUCH better gift-shop than Spaceport USA..."
Sterile-bright floodlamps flashed on harshly overhead, an inert-gas Hansel and Gretel trail that Angel followed, picking through gore-strewn piles, long-dead machinery, and scuttling, predatory shadows that disappeared when he looked at them.
"Just don't pull any Alpha Male bullshit. I still have your little pet...Xander?...here with me; would you like to see his head come right off? his arterial blood pumping in your face? I'm sure that would do wonders for the conscience which you don't of course have, ANGEL..."
Angel heard a hot-grease hiss scald the air beside him, and turned to calm Spike down, only to find that he'd already gone.
Scarcely had he noticed his childe's absence when Angel was buffeted by twin, hugely-volumed screams that wheeled and boomed in the air around him like invisible bats.
The first was the cracking, hoarse timbre of an old woman- Malachi.
The other was male, and rang with the same, somehow defiant agonies as it had the first time Angel had heard it, two hundred years ago in London when, just before orgasm, he'd reared above the beautiful Cockney youth writhing in ecstasy beneath him, bared his fangs and...
//Malachi. Insane, but mortal. Malachi taking Xander. Spike. Spike's chip.//
Spike's Chip.
Angel blanched. "Will....oh Will, Jesus..."
He ran.
Towards the back of the building, the room branched off into an impossibly huge expanse that seemed to have been decorated to a slaughterhouse motif; the good doctor's raw materials store, Angel supposed. Rusted-metal grills on the walls, ceiling and floor, which also featured a large, crud-encrusted drain around which black, insectile shapes swarmed, gorging. Permanent fogs glinted with diamond-shard ice crystal, evidence of the extreme low temperature. Every available inch of ceiling space hung with hooks, naked, raw carcasses dangling from each. The fact that each body leaned disturbingly towards the anthropoid in shape, and seemed to twitch violently when he took his eyes from them, meant the vampire didn't look too closely.
Rounding the corner and suddenly Angel was upon them. He stopped, clammy fingers of dread gripping his stomach and wringing it out. Only the fact that he had not fed recently kept him from falling to numb knees and vomiting for the first time since he still breathed.
The room was red. Completely, totally, wetly red. If he squinted his eyes just so, the flood of sticky crimson on the floor and walls, coupled with the room's vaguely round shape, made it seem as though he had wandered into a titanic heart; the walls might at any time start beating to the vital drumbeat of some weird and incomprehensible life.
Doyle, still seemingly dazed from whatever the deranged vivisector had shot him full of, was slumped in a corner. Xander, obvously fighting panic- and doing a good job of it too, as always- had the young Irishman in an impromptu fireman's hold, and was in the process of hauling his insensate friend off the...killing floor... and to the safety of a large metal table bolted to the wall. Angel sent up a silent prayer of thanks to Saint Vigeous that neither of his mortal friends appeared to be hurt.
Malachi and Spike were the source of the red flood.
The elderly vivisector had what seemed to be a combination bone-drill/band-saw apparatus clutched tightly in one shock white hand. Approximately eight feet away from Doyle and Xander, she was up on tremulous hands and knees, slowly narrowing the distance between herself and her prey. A viscous slug trail of blood, bile, and most tellingly, partially digested foodstuffs, led from a point near the entrance of the room where Angel was standing, to the tattered ruin of the Doctor's abdomen where it dragged along the floor as she made her slow way across the room.
Behind her was Spike.
His face a red-stained rictus of rage and pain, Angel's childe had morphed his hands into claws and buried one in the meat of the Doctor's lower legs, the other in the stomach wound his initial attack had created. Gore continued to leak from his eyes and mouth, trickling into the ruddy brown waves of what used to be bleached blond hair, now soaked with his own blood.
Each time Malachi lunged painfully forward towards Xander and Doyle a foot or so, Spike dug his hands further into her leg and gut, hauling her back again, drawing more blood and screams from her. She, in turn, thumbed the button on the surgical instrument buried in the flesh under Spike's jaw, eliciting shrieks of terror and fury from the vampire.
It was a nightmarish game of two-steps-forward-one-step-back as played by the Marquis De Sade.
A game that even now, Angel saw his Childe was losing.
Had it been just the two of them involved in the struggle, Spike would have little trouble in gaining the precious inch or two more he would need to climb atop Malachi's back, find her wattled neck, and break it like a breadstick. But the damn inhibitor chip...
Each time Malachi inched forward and Spike wrenched her back, he tore her up, spilling her blood.
//The blood of a mortal//
Each time therefore, the chip in his head sent white hot wasps of agony buzzing around the vampire's skull. Determined as he was to save his Sire's lover and his own friend
//betrothed//
he ignored the chip, the machine in turn cranking up a notch the level of punishment it inflicted in a vicious circle of madness.
So Malachi crawled, Spike clawed, and increasingly dark gouts of stolen blood haemorrhaged from his determined
//noble//
rage set face, which even now, even for a vampire, was shockingly pale. Angel knew from experience that he didn't have much fluid left.
Then as Angel watched, the ancient madwoman seemed to muster strength from God-Knows-whatever alien reserves she had under her withered hide. Shucking free of Spike's grip on her calves, she slithered forward, eel-quick on the carpet of her own offal, one vulture claw grabbing and finding purchase around Xander's ankle, just as he pushed Doyle onto the tabletop.
Still clutching Malachi's stomach, Spike used the woman's ribs as leverage, pushing himself forward that last vital distance onto her back.
For the briefest of moments, the tiniest cog in the Great Wheel of Time slipped, and Sire and Childe locked eyes as equals. Spike flashed Angel a wry, I-can't-believe-I've-got-it-this-bad-either grin, mouthing the words "So Long, Luv". Angel felt his heart squeeze.
The Wheel began to turn again.
Leering, drooling redly from the multiple mouths in his head, his triumphant childe flowed into his GameFace, yawned his jaw hugely, and swooped down to the vivisector's unprotected throat.
Angel ran forward-
//Worried about Xander rooming with Spike. Asking Xander about the chip: "The more damage he inflicts on a mortal, the more blood he spills, the more pain he gets. If he ever KILLS a mortal, well; the chip is programmed to detonate, right there in his brain..."//
Complete cerebral destruction. No-one, not even the dead, could survive that.
-and screamed. "Will, God, No!"
//Theorbuseitnowuseitnowohfuck//
Pulling the greenly glowing ball from his pocket, thanking whoever was listening for vampyric reflexes, he hurled it towards the mostly unconscious Irishman on the table whilst frantically muttering the incantation he'd gone over with Willow after his return from the Demon Dimension, cutting out the ritualistic obeisance and flowery adjectives, and getting straight to the four or five words at the heart of the spell. The Powers would understand. Or to Hell with them.
The orb flew through the red-misted air, sparkling. Landed on Doyle's chest.
Cracked.
Shattered.
WORKED.
Doyle's body was bathed in a leafy glow that seemed to simultaneously shine on and from his tissues. Dark olive spots appeared all over his hands and face, seemed to shimmer-and sprouted, all at once, into familiar, jagged thorns.
Something spiny, wet and quicksilver fast seemed to SEETHE behind Doyle's face, moving the muscles into a smile of blazing triumph.
Doyle's demon was back.
Leaping from the table, Doyle, whole again, grabbed Spike's shoulders and pushed him backwards, just as the attacking vampire's fangs penetrated Malachi's flesh. Spike flew backwards, landing jarringly hard on his butt.
Deep in the fibres of Spike's brain-stem, the inhibitor chip, which had been about to activate its suicide switch, was broken out of Punishment Mode by the loss of contact. Switching back to Standby, it ran a diagnostic on itself, whilst idly flipping through the vampire's two-hundred-odd years of memories to pass the time.
Single-minded of purpose, Malachi had not even given thought to stopping whilst all her plans went to hell around her. Having successfully reeled Xander into her mantis grasp, she struggled to hold the wildly kicking teen long enough to bring the Flaying Instrument to bear on his chest.
Abruptly, she found herself in mid air, coughing, hocking her life-blood into the face that, were it not for the souled vampire's arrogant childe, she would have currently been inhabiting.
Doyle, still in full GameFace, regarded the dying woman gravely. A tremor seized him momentarily, and his crimson eyes shifted from the red, glowing for a moment a fierce, pre-ternatural jade. He whispered to her in a voice from outside himself.
"MEDICUS"... Whatever looked through Doyle breathed. "TUI EST MORTUS, MEDICUS..."
The jade glow died, and Doyle was back. Blinking, he looked around himself, taking in his stricken lover and friends-
and tore her throat out with one of her own scalpels.
Dropping her, he ran over to Angel and hugged him. The vampire gave a tiny whimper of absolute joy, taking in his lover's redly glowing eyes and prominent thorns.
"Hey, lover..." The Demon said, his voice thick with the Dublin streets -"miss me?"
For an answer, Angel simply folded the younger man in his arms and kissed him breathless, delighting in the feel of the spines pressing against his face.
After a while, Angel released Doyle's mouth, for once remembering his lover needed oxygen every now and then. Turning to give a last contemptuous look at Malachi's corpse, the vampire froze.
She was gone.
A trail of wet footprints led to a small door in the rubble they'd overlooked earlier. The vampire and the demon ran to it, and hauled it open.
They emerged into a small room filled with refuse and rubble, of bodies as well as junk. Malachi was at a rusty iron door, apparently some sort of fire escape, that was welded shut in its frame. A growing pile of viscera pooled at her feet, increasing with each juddering shake released as the elderly woman shoulder-charged the door.
"Malachi". Doyle's voice, deceptively soft.
They saw her shoulders sag. Turning, she regarded them both briefly, then looked at Angel alone.
"You....you said wanted...know why..." Clearly, speaking was an effort. She sounded like a wind-up toy that knew it was down to the last few turns of the key. Malachi licked her lips, reddening them.
"Wanted..know..why prepare Doyle...."
Angel nodded.
The woman gave a nightmare clown-smile. "Good... question ...here...look...have answer..."
Malachi threw back her lab coat. Bursting from the ruin of her abdomen came a huge, segmented cylinder, dripping with the doctor's and its own juices, thrashing wildly to free itself as it raised it's tri-barbed mouth and roared at them in rage.
It was huge and grey and glistening. It was alive.
It was a worm.
Angel, stunned, still manouvered a protesting Doyle behind him, preparing to fight. But no, the worm seemed as moribund as its host.
"Sssss...sssurprise..." Malachi's grin was weak, but determined.
Angel warily approached her. "Tiamat..."
Doyle looked at him. "No..we burned it...it burned in that bar- tender".
Malachi's eyes were glazing, yet even as her body commenced its final spasms, she spoke; or rather, the Worm spoke through her.
"Not Tiamat. offspring....Tiamat....were pp..parent".
"How?"
A hollow cackle. "Manhole in ss- in street. Eggzzzzz." The voice was almost inaudible. She was nearly done. She caught Angel's attention, and motioned him forward. He went, Doyle's hand on his arm all the way.
"Angel..." The worm sent a shudder through the tiny woman, and her eyes opened, gleaming, despite her state, with fierce triumph. "Not jusssst...me, vampire....many eggs...many lovely eggzzzz...more of us now....eventually....vampire...sooner or later... kill you...."
The voice quaked to a hitching stop. The woman and the worm collapsed to the floor, tangled together in an obscene last embrace.
Doyle and Angel stood, looked at each other.
The demon spoke first. "Well, what's the plan?"
Angel looked at him. "We tell Buffy to keep her eyes open for a whole lot of worms, grab Spike and Xan, and go on an extended vacation...just the four of us."
He took Doyle in his arms. "Any objections?"
Doyle looked up at his lover, then kissed him on the chest.
"Hell, no".
In the other room, Xander, meanwhile, had crawled over to the far corner. He manhandled the gore-soaked, exhausted, rust-stained shape that went by the name of Spike until the slowly recovering vampire was firmly cradled in his arms, and proceeded to feed the vampire on the moribund rabbit and four or five bottles of plasma that had fallen from the vivisector's pockets.
Spike leaned back. Now that the chip had gone quiet, his body was healing. He could have fed himself, if he had wanted to. Could have. He settled himself more snugly into the warmth of the human's embrace.
Xander suddenly laughed. "I guess now You'll have to start going by "William The Bloody" again..."
It takes great skill to manage to look affronted whilst being nursed like an infant, but Spike was up to the challenge. "Har bloody har boy...enjoy it whilst you can...and as soon as you're well enough, I'm telling Cordelia that you want a front-row seat at that one-woman play she's working on."
Xander smiled. "Not even you are THAT cruel, Spike."
Looking down at the vampire's healing yet multiple injuries, a cloud passed over Xander's grin.
"You nearly got yourself killed Spike...Nothing's worth that."
Spike looked at him, face open. "You are"...
Xander lowered his eyes, shaking his head slightly. For the umpteenth time, Spike wished he could kill The Slayer for what she'd done to this marvellous boy's self-esteem.
Xander looked up again, but his eyes kept darting away. "Look at you...you came this close to being ash-tray fodder. You saved me, now you're stroking my ego..."
Certain ribald, if entertaining, images flitted through Spike's mind. He surpressed them. For now.
Xander put his head down again. "Why, Spike? Why for me?"
Spike rolled his eyes. That. Was. It.
Propping himself up on one arm, he caught the boy's gaze with his own eyes. Xander gasped at what he saw in them.
"Why?" Spike continued, expasperated. "Because I fucking love you, you moron!"
"Oh. Oh..." Xander blinked- and the grin was back. "Well then, I guess I should let you know...I love you too, Spike."
Spike nodded. "Yeah. You'd damn well better" he grumbled in an affectionate way. Humans. Then he leaned forward and took the boy's lips in his own, Xander returning the kiss wholeheartedly.
After a minute or so, Xander considered breaking it off to tell Spike that he no longer had to be tied up at night in the room they shared, unless he wanted to be, and ask if this meant they could start double dating with Angel and Doyle. However, the high pitched yodelling of his own hormones, and a low, warning growl from deep in the vampire's throat convinced him otherwise.
He relaxed back into the kiss, content for now to let his beloved friend know his feelings in other, less verbal, ways.
----End----
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