Title: Nobody Knows me Like you do
Author: Bree
Feedback: petdrusilla@aol.com
Rating: PG
Pairing: A/D, S/D
Disclaimer: Angel, Dru, and Spike are not mine. Woe to slayers everywhere if they were.
Summary: Takes place in 1920s Paris after Angel has his soul. He seeks out Dru for his own strange reasons. I just wanted to get my two favorite characters together.
Of all the cities he had ever been to, and it seemed as if he had been to nearly every one, Paris had the most rats. They were fat as swine, too, filling up the alleys in their primal tribes and vicious crowds, piled over feasts of scraps and garbage. But he hated killing them nevertheless, hated taking more of those shadow creatures than he needed to satisfy his wounding hunger.
Maybe it was because he himself was a rat, a nocturnal being made of gray ashes. That meant that though he no longer ate humans, he was ever still a cannibal, sustaining his farce of an existence with the blood of his brothers.
William occasionally caught rats. It was ridiculous, watching the two of them return from the hunt in the early morning darkness, then seeing him emerge once more from their lavish apartment. He was always richly dressed, sometimes in a top hat, tails, and a starch white shirt that he desperately tried to keep clean as he chased the rodents around crates and barrels. “Come ‘ere, come ‘ere, you buggers!” he growled.
When he had caught two or three of them, snapping tiny necks or crushing little spines with the heel of his patent leather shoes, he would turn back to fetch the newspaper and go back inside before the faintest light of dawn dared to peer over the ornate buildings in their bourgeois neighborhood.
Angel despised him. Her poet. Her childe. Her Spike. If he was a rat, then Spike was a dog, one that has been chained and beaten for most of its life and then suddenly let loose to run wild in the streets, bearing its teeth and searching for the ecstasy of revenge.
He had not come to see Spike, for he felt no guilt where he was concerned, and no remorse. It was her he had come for, his ethereal daughter, the worst crime he had committed in two centuries of crimes that were unspeakable and likely unforgivable. These days, she wore her hair ironed and styled so that it shone in the moonlight as she walked. It was the fashion to cut it short, so that it curled over the ears or under the chin, but he knew she would have none of that. Dru was not one to change with the same speed as the world. She did, however, wear her hems shorter. Her dresses were soft pinks, whites, and cornflower blues, transparent thin material adorned with ribbons or cloth flowers, and her buckled shoes often matched. He listened to them click clack on the sidewalk next to Spike’s, like two clocks mimicking each other’s rhythm. For weeks, he did nothing but listen.
It was harder than he thought to bring himself to speak to her. He wanted only to follow her silently through the city, to watch where she went, whom she killed. The fact that she preferred children weighed heavily on him, and he knew that he might have stopped her, but he did not. She waited patiently outside toy shops and candy stores, her face as calm and serene as the angel she should have become. Dru was no fighter, she was only a frail girlish wisp of fog, and he could have saved those children. But he did not. In his mind, they were as lost as she, and the masochist that he now was believed that he deserved the blame for their deaths, and he welcomed it. The blood on her lips was on his hands. He preferred to have it that way, where she was still the victim, the innocent and broken one, for did her mind even know? Even realize?
One thing Dru did know was that he was there. Doubtless she had known from the beginning, smelled him through the walls with her preternatural gift. And finally, one night, while Spike was away making whatever ghastly messes he made, she wandered towards the cries of the rats and found him there, waiting.
“I think you are an unclean thing,” she said, in all solemnity.
He turned to look at her, how she glowed with her own light in the stygian black of midnight. A long moment passed where neither said a word, and then Drusilla laughed, a long and melodious sound.
“What’s so funny, Dru?” he asked.
“The saints are weeping for you,” she giggled. “So I am laughing instead.”
“Have you seen something? About me?”
“Grandmum didn’t want me to know about you. She thought I would worry. But I knew already. She didn’t understand that. She never really did.”
“I know. Darla deals in the tangible . . . The heat, the scent, the touch, the wound. She doesn’t really grasp something like the sight. It fascinates her.”
She moved closer to him, leaned in slightly, and studied his filthy face. “Have you come to take me back now, Daddy? Are we going to find her again?”
Her words stung him. “No, Dru. I have a soul. A conscience. It would disgust you if you saw how I live. What I am.”
“You want to be a good boy, but you’re just the devil’s child. Poor, poor Daddy.”
Angel wanted to hold her, to feel that she was really there and not some ghostly figure crafted by his tormented imagination. He wanted to remember a time when he possessed her without fear, knowing that she was a demon, but not so grand and merciless a demon as he.
“We aren’t to be a family again, are we? You and me and my Spike and Grandmum Darla, the four of us all in a row. Not anymore. Not anymore for the rest of time.”
“Doesn’t look that way.”
She frowned. “Why have you come, then? You want me to be to be baby again? Learn about the vermin and the sewers? Be all mopey and sad-eyed like you? Your insides sparkle like fireworks. Mine don’t. Not anymore. You can‘t teach me that.”
Angel looked at the ground, guiltily.
“Oh no,” she continued, snickering again. “You knew that bit. You want to know the rest.”
“Yes, Dru. I thought if anyone could help me, it was you. I don’t know why . . . I don’t know why I still exist. Helpless, wretched . . . unclean, as you said. I want to know if there is some purpose for me, some reason to go on . . . “
“Pain,” she widened her eyes considerably and stared right through him. The way she did that used to entice him, but now it was frightening. “You’ll go on for the pain of it. For the suffering. You like it. For the girl. She’s tiny and yellow and sour, just like a lemon. I hate her. But she makes such delicious pain.”
“Go on,” Angel said hoarsely, wondering who she might be talking about.
“I see years upon years, a whole mountain of ‘em. Love and death and grand parties. Your head is on my belly again. Then you are lost, gone far away like flowers and trinkets that fall through the cracks in the road. And when you come back again, the windows are all boarded up, and the fire is such that you cannot bear it. But you know what they say about closed windows . . . the Lord will then open lots and lots of doors.”
“The Lord? I didn’t know you still believed.”
Dru impulsively reached for his big, dirt-encrusted hand and held it between her two small white ones. “It was my screams you liked best,” she said. “You wanted me to scream for all eternity. But will I, at the end? Will I be screaming for you, my Angel?”
Cautiously, he pulled his hand away and walked backwards out of the alley. She never made a move to stop him. Poor, sweet, unsaveable demon girl. Her mind, like her soul, was forever absent. And because he couldnot grant her the kindness of killing her, he had to run, fast as he could, and block her from his thoughts. Most likely, she would not dwell on him either, and would go back into the apartment to wait for Spike to return with a late morsel. Say what he might about him, Angel knew that William would die before he let any harm come to his Dru.
The sun was fast approaching. He had to get underground soon. But when it left him to his will again, he would abandon that city, moving swift and certain across land and sea. There were trials waiting for him, payment, and torture, somewhere on the other side of the burning continent and the tumultuous ocean beyond.
The End
