Bloodstains

The Adventures of Captain Peroxide and Deadboy

The Angel/Spike Zone of the BtVS Writer's Guild

ALL THIS AND MORE ARCHIVED AT:

http://www.geocities.com/debase_the_beef_canoe

DISTRIBUTION: When people want my fic it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy. List archives go ahead; otherwise, please send me the URL.

SPOILER: BtVS through "Crush." Up to around "The Thin Dead Line" for Angel.

COUPLE PAIRING: Angel/Spike.

SUMMARY: Love always leaves scars.

RATING: Hard R for dark themes, sexual content, broken bones, primitive body art, and other sundry strangeness.

FEEDBACK: "To coin a popular Sunnydale phrase, 'duh.'"

DISCLAIMER: The plot is mine and nothing else, blah blah blah, Joss is God and the "Grrr, Arrrgghh" monster could kick my ass. Don't sue, I'm broke.

IMPROV: wax, shelter, alert, vice.

DEDICATION: Donna for invaluable help every step of the way. Lar, Puca, and Donna for an awesome weekend in L.A., where this fic has its genesis. Lar for bugging me about it until it was done. And Te, whose complaints about rampant denial among S/A 'shippers inspired this.

NOTE: This is a kind-of companion piece to "Blood Loss," my last fic.

You don't have to read one to get the other, though. Hell, you could read both, and neither one might not make any sense. They sure don't make any sense to *me.*

~Throw me to the wolves

Because there's order in the pack.~

-The Red Hot Chili Peppers

Angel walks more slowly these days. It's not like his appointment-book is filled with anything crucial since he fired his staff; abuse Merl, torment Lilah, abuse Merl some more. Dragging steps back to the hotel, collapse into twisted sheets and broken sleep and blood-soaked, ash-scattered dreams. He's forgotten what excitement feels like: the warning shock of vision, the adrenaline-paced alert of sudden danger that almost felt like heartbeat again. And he certainly wasn't expecting anything different today.

Until the stench of blood catches his nostrils as he trudges tiredly into the Hyperion.

Not human; he doubts that human blood would excite his attention these days, although it might excite his hunger. No, this blood is cold, and it is ancient, and it is oh. so. familiar.

Familiar //familial// like dusty corsets and rotten apples and strong whiskey, like cheap tobacco, like communion wine, like the temples of Aurelius. He has smelled it in his spent seed and he has smelled it in the flakes of ash when their clothes and hair went up in flames and he could smell it, now, beneath the surface of his own skin. He has buried his face in Darla's hair and in the crook of William's neck and in the secret places beneath Drusilla's thighs and he knows that scent better than any other. It's Family. It's Home. He bites down hard on his tongue and coats the inside of his mouth the coppery-salt taste of his own blood. One of Them is here. One of Them is hurt.

He dashes up the stairs, tripping over his feet as he runs, and the smell of blood is all around him //as if it were pooling on the floor and running in lazy trickles over the wallpaper// but he can't tell which one it is, isn't close enough, doesn't know until he pushes open the door to his empty room, breaks down the locked bathroom door, and then it hits him: leather and nicotine and vodka, fragile subtext to blood, and he knows.

The boy is bleeding.

--------------------------

//My heart expands/ 'Tis grown a bulge in't...//

Rips and tears, poetry falling to the ground in tatters and shreds. //Effulgent? What the bloody hell were you thinking?//

"And I wonder," whispered the Voice, "what possible catastrophe came crashing down from heaven and brought this dashing stranger to tears."

"Nothing," he snapped defensively. "I wish to be alone."

//I'll stick with what I'm good at, thank you very much//

//i know i'm a bad poet but i'm a good man and all i ask is that you try to see me//

//i do see you that's the problem//

"A man surrounded by fools who cannot see his strength, his vision, his glory. That-" A dark smile. A knowing. "And burning baby fish, swimming all around your head."

"That's quite close enough."

//You can't touch me//

"I've heard tales of London pickpockets. You'll not be getting my purse, I tell you." Babbling, meaningless, stupid syllables. Words scattering around him in tatters and tears.

A sly smile. "Don't need a purse." Hands on his chest, his temple. He drew in a sharp breath. //touching me//

"Your wealth lies here and here... in the spirit and imagination. You walk in worlds the others can't begin to imagine."

She didn't pull away from him, didn't laugh in his face of scream in revulsion like other girls if he so much as stood near them- didn't coldly turn away or look through him as if he didn't exist, and that didn't make any *sense.*

"Oh, yes!" he sighed, and then caught himself- "I mean, no. I mean... mother's expecting me-"

//as if mother even noticed i was gone//

Her fingers were at his shirt collar, brushing against his throat. He began to shake violently.

"I see what you want."

//i wish to be alone//

"Something glowing and glistening," she murmured silkily. "Something..." Her hand drifted near his face and her eyes widened. "Effulgent."

His breath caught in his throat. "Effulgent..."

He wasn't absolutely sure that it was even a real word, but it hardly mattered now.

"Do you want it?" she whispered.

"Oh, yes..." he gasped, with a sigh that seemed to come from the very depths of his soul. Trembling fingertips against her breast. "God, yes..."

Gentle hands at his throat and he trembled under the pressure of her fingers.

//twenty-four and never been touched//she's so close and i'm so afraid//she'll hurt me//she'll hurt me//

As her sharp fangs pierced his skin, he cried out in pain.

--------------------------

The stench //remembrance// //childer// //blood// is almost overwhelming: spatters on the floor, fingerprints on the walls, the sink stained with streaks of dark red. Spike lies huddled and motionless in the foot of the shower, fully clothed, covered in the liquiddarkred that runs in steady rivulets from the cuts in his arms. The shower spatters over him, washing his insides down the drain and tattooing his skin in dark crimson lines. Angel rushes to his side, unable to pull his tightly locked form out of a fetal position- dragging him from the shower and finally wrenching his arms free, his hands coated in the blood that gushes from Spike's wounds, blade tumbling from nerveless fingers and clattering loudly to the floor.

Angel realizes with a sickening horror that the cuts are not random slices at all, but carefully carved characters. DRUSILLA, screams his left arm in thick, jagged gashes. BUFFY, cries the right in solemn, dark, painfully deep wounds. "Oh, Christ," he whispers hoarsely, and his hands are shaking. "Spike-"

//cold i feel so cold as if i were the one bleeding//

//why the hell should i feel that way? just because blood that took its genesis somewhere in my veins is running all over the floor, just because i've wanted to tear flesh in the name of both of those women at one time or another, what the fuck does it have to do with me?//

"Spike, what the fuck are you doing?"

Pale blue eyes seek him out, blink once, twice, slowly.

"I did them in the sink," Spike replies in a dull, lifeless voice. "I did them in the sink at first but they kept closing. Kept healing. I knew they wouldn't scar. They have to scar. I have to remember." He scrubs silent tears off his cheeks with the back of one hand, smearing the side of his face with blood. "So I kept them under the water. That worked." He lifts his head and looks up at Angel with misplaced hope. "What do you think?" he asks. "D'you

think it'll work? Or do you think I'll wake up and they'll be gone again?"

Angel traces his hand down the side of Spike's face, leaving a trail of bloody fingerprints in his wake. "Come on," he says hoarsely. "Let's get you cleaned up."

--------------------------

He didn't know anything of the boy's life before they found him, although Dru spoke vaguely of poetry and tears. Only knew that William left the house the evening after his making and returned moments before dawn, trembling and blood-covered, his eyes filled with a dark fury. He laid his head on Drusilla's lap and didn't move for hours. Angelus later discovered that the boy had killed his parents, most of his extended family, several acquaintances, and the better part of his class at the nearby university.

"He's a quick learner," Angelus said.

"He's a liability," Darla snapped in reply.

"Ours now," Drusilla murmured in a singsong voice, running her fingers through his bloodstained hair. "He's ours. Those naughty people were mean to our William and they can't play with him anymore. He belongs to us."

Angelus shook his head sadly. "Honestly, Drusilla, I don't understand what you see in that useless child."

William's eyes filled with tears then, and he bit down on his lower lip so hard that he drew blood. His Sire lifted his head tenderly and lapped up the dark trickle that ran down his chin. "Come here, Daddy," she whispered, and Angelus bent down. She pressed her lips to his, and he could feel the sweet, coppery tang of the boy's blood flowing over his tongue. Tasted the

willful bravery and the passion and the rage and hurt there. Tasted fragile feelings and breakable bones. "Do you understand now?" she murmured, amusement flashing in her dark eyes.

"Yes," he whispered hoarsely. "I understand."

--------------------------

He pulls Spike from the bathroom and begins to bandage the gaping wounds in his arms. Spike tries to push him away, but he is too weak from blood-loss and his head falls tiredly against Angel's shoulder.

"Spike," Angel says patiently, "what happened?"

"Don't give me that shit, Spike." Angel's voice trembles, almost imperceptibly. "Tell me what happened."

"Dru." A shocked whisper. "Dru came back. I let her leave." He runs his hands compulsively through his hair, absentmindedly working blood into the strands, and begins to rock back and forth fervently, his breath coming in harsh, panicked gasps. "I let her leave, she wanted me back and I let her leave, I can't fucking believe that I let her leave, what the hell was I thinking?"

"Did you want her back?" Angel asks. He's confused. He wants to understand, he knows he should understand, but he's very often clueless, and he doesn't.

Spike looks up in surprise. "That's not the point."

"But she hurt you." He remembers. Remembers Sunnydale, his head still aching with memories of Hell, and a screaming, drunken Grandchilde who wore his wounded pride like a badge of honor. //I can bleed more freely than you, I can love more unwisely than you, I can get my heart crushed better

than *anyone.*// Wasn't that always his greatest talent; now, his only remaining vice? Sure, Angel's last girlfriend sent him to Hell, but that's nothing compared to Spike's track record.

"Yeah, she hurt me," he mutters with a shrug. "I'm not sure if that was my reason for leaving or for coming back, but I remember that she hurt me."

It all makes a certain kind of sick, stupid sense, and Angel closes his eyes against the sudden ache and nausea that understanding brings. He knows he never intended *this*- this fucked-up, Pavlovian chaos, the vampiric conditioning of blood and bruise, a hundred years of Spike's own masochistic brand of arithmetic: pain equals attention equals sex equals love and back 'round to pain again, the jump of logic that Spike's mind has to take in order to link laceration to affection. Angel assumes, as he so often does, that he is clearly to blame for this, but he isn't quite sure how. The soul feels guilt for the bleeding, quivering mess on his bathroom floor- second nature after so long- but he somehow cannot shake the feeling that this is never what he *planned.* Never worked Will and his ever-expanding collection of issues into Angelus's two-hundred-year-long daily planner. Never made provisions for the youngest coming home to bleed to second death in his shower.

Still, he's gotten used to everything else in the last two and a half centuries, and surely he can get used to *this*- the rising and falling cadence of tears, the hoarse sobs that wax and wane, the scent of Spike's blood. Get used to the nagging certainty that

the sins of the Childe are delivered unto the Father. The understanding that this is Family, Spike is blood it's *always* his fault.

But he doesn't want this. He didn't make the boy, he never wanted the boy, and he doesn't want this responsibility. Doesn't want these bloodstains on his floor.

--------------------------

A few days after his turning, they began to seriously contemplate the wisdom of remaining in London. Everyone the boy had known was now mysteriously and violently deceased, and he himself was now no longer to be found at home or school. Darla demanded that they pack everything and be gone by nightfall. William rolled his eyes and laughed in her face. She checked him with a slap, and Dru's tongue darted out briefly to collect the trickle of blood from where her fingernails had sliced open his cheek.

"No one's looking for me," he said flatly. "No one will even notice that I'm gone."

And indeed, no one did.

--------------------------

He tugs the boy's shirt off, checking for other injuries: his lip is cut, his torso decorated in a network of bruises. "The Slayer did most of 'em," he whispers. "Y'know, she keeps telling me she doesn't love me. I don't understand. It must be love because I bleed so well for her."

Angel bites down on his lip hard and swallows back the urge to scream, or to sob, or to beat the boy senseless, or to bolt from the room. Nothing hurts quite so much as loving Buffy. He remembers that, at least.

"You told her how you feel?"

"She hit me, didn't she?" Spike snaps tiredly. "Pay attention."

--------------------------

The first time that Drusilla refused his bed in favor of her new Childe, Angelus said nothing. The second time, he fumed, raged, and fucked Darla in her stead. The third time, he ripped Drusilla's bedroom door off the hinges, tossed her into the hallway, and proceeded to break every bone in William's body.

When he was done, the boy lifted his eyes as best as he was able and smirked at his grandsire.

"It's not enough, y'know," he murmured. "It's not enough to make me leave." He gave a sick chuckle. "I belong here. I belong to you- to all of you."

--------------------------

He wakes in the middle of the night to a low humming and opens his eyes again to the sight and smell of blood. Spike has scraped the healing scabs open again with his short fingernails and is found scribbling all over the walls with bloodied fingertips. He can see the wild pattern of letters on the wall: one single word, over and over again.

When Angel tries to pull him away, Spike dashes his own forehead brutally against the wall: once

He lays still as an icepack is pressed to the bruises, and weeps silently.

The next day, as Spike sleeps, Angel scrubs away at the walls for hours. But the name traced there in bloody letters won't go away.

--------------------------

Darla never liked the boy.

He was too pale, dammit. Too fair, too frail, too blue-eyed. Too violent, too sarcastic, too easily offended. He was too much like Darla and it drove her insane.

But he bled so pretty, dangling there in his chains, didn't he? He wouldn't scream for her, no matter what she did, but he bled pretty nonetheless. She didn't like him, but that didn't mean that he didn't have his uses.

Her lover was fucking the boy. She *knew* her lover was fucking the boy. She'd known since the third night after his turning, when Angelus, clad only in his dressing gown, had shut the bedroom door hurriedly in her face. She barely caught a glimpse of the younger one: naked, chained to the bed, shivering in delighted anticipation. She was disappointed, of course, and she was hurt, but she was not truly furious until she heard her Favored Childe's open-throated scream of pleasure.

Angelus never screamed for her, either.

--------------------------

Weary and sore from scrubbing at the stains, Angel falls into an exhausted sleep. He dreams.

//a pack of wolves rip one another to shreds with sharp fangs tear each other into broken bloody ragged pieces and howl with pain and fear and rage and then the fucking begins, and when it's all over they lick one another's wounds//

He wakes to find Spike huddled at the end of the bed; his features shift briefly into gameface and he sinks his teeth into his own palm before resuming his human features again. Draws his teeth from the flesh and watches in fascination as blood pools into his palm before lapping it away slowly with his tongue.

"What did Dru's blood taste like to you?" he whispers. "To me it always tasted like cloves." He puts his lips to the gash and sucks hard.

"What are you doing?"

"Tasting," he says, as if it should be the most obvious thing in the world.

"Oh," Angel replies stupidly.

"It should taste the same," Spike says with a certain amount of determination. "Shouldn't it? It's her blood, after all. I don't understand why it doesn't taste the same." He works at the edges of the cut with blunt teeth, tonguing the wound. "It felt so warm. Drinking her. That doesn't make any sense, does it? She was cold and I was fast becoming colder but when she opened her veins for me I felt so *warm.* The bite is already healing; Spike mutters a frustrated curse and sinks his teeth in again. "I

can't remember what it felt like anymore. That warmth. Do you think it's still there? Somewhere still- in my veins- the blood she put there? That same taste, lurking inside me? It's got to be."

"Can you still taste Darla?"

"I hear you set them on fire," Spike murmurs.

No point lying. //Yes, I staked my Sire. Yes, I incinerated her, along with my only remaining Childe. Yes, I let Penn die. Hell, I even helped. Yes, I'm sitting here in dull silence, wordless, useless, watching as Spike loses his mind and takes himself to pieces. No, I'm not any better at being a vampire than I am at being a human. And I am sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, except for when I'm not.//

The boy gives a sick chuckle and begins to rock back and forth rhythmically. "Did they like it?"

--------------------------

He was young, he was willful, he was independent. Angelus understood all this. But he was late- *again*- and that simply would not do.

"When he gets home, I'm going to chain him to the ceiling," he fumed, pacing around the room, "and I'm going to run his skinny little body through with hot pokers until he learns to show some *respect* for me." He turned to face Drusilla, who was methodically binding Ms. Edith's hands together with a silken ribbon and driving pins into her chest. "For God's sake, didn't the boy's father provide any *discipline* when he was alive?"

Dru began to giggle hysterically.

"Drusilla," Angelus snapped with labored patience, "would you mind telling me just what's so damned funny?"

"Of course he didn't, silly," Dru snickered. "Our William was invisible."

Angelus raised one eyebrow disbelievingly. "Invisible."

"Like the stars on a black night that no one can see... the stars are prettier, but the clouds are so big. No one ever saw his sparkling." Dru tipped her head from side to side, humming. "Like mice in the forest, scurrying about, but no one can see them and no one hears until they step on their tails, and then they cry out in pain. Nipping at ankles. No, he never hurt him- not the way yours hurt you, because he *saw* you. But not our invisible boy. I was the first, you know." She cradled Ms. Edith to her breast and rocked back and forth. "I could see him when no one else could. I was the first."

He beat Dru for mentioning his father.

But when William finally got home, Dru was allowed to watch.

--------------------------

Burying it in the bottom of the trashcan wasn't good enough; he finds the blade and is caught only moments before he can replace healing cuts with fresh ones. Angel loses it then, sorrow and worry and rage exploding uncontrollably into the screaming of curses and the shaking of shoulders. Spike's head rocks back and forth on his neck as if he were a broken doll under the force of Angel's hands.

"Are you going to hit me?" Spike asks dully.

Angel drops his head in exhaustion, fingertips trailing off bruised shoulders, down slender, bandaged arms. "No," he murmurs, swallowing back tears. "I'm not going to hit you."

Angel bites back screams, reaches up to thumb a silent tear off Spike's pale cheek. He's not sure how much longer this can go on. Perhaps he should simply give the boy whatever it is he wants. A kick in the ass. A stake in the chest. Whatever. Get it over with.

"I always bruised so easily. Do you remember?" Spike whispers. "Your fists were so good at what they did... Dru always got to watch. Watch and sing songs about pretty patterns of purple and blue- flowers blooming on my skin. You could grab my arm- like so-" He clamps his hand painfully around his own upper arm; Angel reaches up and wrenches it away. "Just the slightest pressure of your thumb would cause the flesh to bruise. I would

watch in fascination for hours afterward, lay on the bloodspattered sheets and watch the bruises fade from black to purple to blue to green to yellow and finally into nothing. I always wept when that happened because the bruises and the bleeding were the only way I could convince myself that you had ever really been there."

//of course i was there// Angel almost says, but doesn't.

Wonders, briefly, which version of himself he'd be referring to.

Wonders if that would make any difference.

--------------------------

If Dru went to William's bed instead of Angelus', William was punished. If Angelus went to William's bed instead of Darla's, William was punished. And if he had dared refuse either, he would have been broken into little pieces. But it never occurred to him to refuse.

And sometimes the four of them didn't bother with separate beds, or, indeed, with beds at all. Sometimes he got lost in the tangle of limbs and fangs and fingernails and he couldn't tell who was fucking or being fucked. He always came away with cuts and bruises and tears in his flesh. And he always slept so peacefully afterwards.

--------------------------

On the third day Spike shatters every breakable object in the room. Angel watches the mass destruction unblinkingly from his vantage point on the bed, unconcerned by the crash of broken china and the rip of torn upholstery. Meaningless objects. Just things. *Human* things, and therefore never his to begin with.

Spike ends up in the bathroom again, staring in confounded horror at the blank mirror.

"Where is that child, Angelus?" he murmurs softly, tracing his fingertips across empty glass. "You remember? The small, frightened child that you all took and broke into tiny pieces and pasted back together again into a half-assed excuse for a vampire?" He runs a fist violently through the glass and turns to Angel in a blind rage. "Where the fuck is William, Angelus, what the fuck did you do with him, you brutal, ruthless, merciless son of a bitch?"

"I don't know," Angel whispers helplessly as Spike collapses into his arms. "I don't know. I don't understand how it happens."

"I was innocent," he insists. "Wasn't I? I remember being innocent. Not of violence or sex, I mean... oh, I was innocent of all those, too, you know that... but, the blood, Angel... the wanting... I didn't know what it was like to want like this, didn't know I could hurt this way, and *you* gave me that. You and Darla and Dru- you taught me how to love and you taught me how to ache and you taught me how to bleed for you and then you all fucking left me. Left me out in the cold and now all I've got are these two stupid fucking blonde chits and one of them fucks me and the other one bruises me and between the two of them it's almost like being home again." He positions his head in the crook of Angel's elbow and speaks with a weighted sadness. "You don't want me here." And Angel doesn't dispute this. Doesn't deny it. Doesn't try to cover it up with "it's all right it's what I do" because it's *not* what he does anymore and doesn't say "you were always one of us" because he might have enjoyed the boy but he very often hadn't liked him and he doesn't say "Dru chose you for a reason" because Dru never had a good reason for a single goddamn thing she did. Fortunate coincidence was all. The boy was a skilled hunter and a good fuck and Angelus never really minded having him around, but that has nothing to do with it. There was never any question of putting up with Spike. He was Dru's boy.

But indifferent tolerance isn't the affection that Spike is craving. He needs something more from him. Deserves something more. And he *is* family.

So Angel runs his fingers absentmindedly through the boy's hair and says the only true thing he can think of. Echoes Spike's own words. "That's not the point."

--------------------------

Muscles aching from kicks and punches and the post-killing shag; flesh scorched when, blissfully unaware of the building burning down around them, the flames had grown too close. Dru combed her fingertips through the long strands of his hair, matted with sweat and blood and ash. Blood trickled into his eyes, the cut already swollen and sore.

"I guess that makes you one of us," Angelus said.

Spike punched his Grandsire playfully on the arm to mask the sudden, overwhelming rush of pride.

"Do you think he meant it?" he asked Dru later, as she mopped his injured brow and combed dried blood from his tangled locks.

"I'm sure he did," she replied, humming softly under her breath. "You're so pretty when you're bleeding."

--------------------------

Crushing kisses and tangling fingers and the tear of clothing and he thought, for a moment, that everything was all right until he reached into the drawer. Spike snatches the lubricant from his hand and hurls it angrily across the room and sickening realization dawns on Angel. The boy is taking masochism to a whole new level and he is *not* going to be a party to *that.* "You never bothered with my comfort before, so there's no goddamn reason why you should now-"

Angel seizes the boy's face between his hands, tracing his thumbs along the sharp lines of cheekbones.

"I am not a blade for you to impale yourself on," he whispers harshly. "I am not your means to destruction. I will not be your beheading or your sunlight or your stake. I am not the bleeding that makes your bruises fade and I *cannot* hurt you any more than you can hurt yourself. Do you understand

Spike nods weakly, his eyes filling with tears. "I'm afraid. I'm so afraid I'll forget. What if I forget, Angel? I can remember belonging to you, to her, but I can't remember what it felt like anymore. And next week, when I'm alone in my crypt and all the cuts have healed, it won't be enough. I wouldn't be in the sorry state I'm in right now if memory were enough. And if I forget everything, what's left of me then?"

Nothing, Angel realizes. He wonders if Spike would simply fade away, dissipate into dust, if not for the aches and remembrances that he carries under his skin.

He finds himself shoved away with angry hands. "You spent twenty bloody years marking me. You branded me with your fists and fangs and cock and tongue and stupid Alpha Male bullshit for two fucking decades. Where are those scars now?"

And Angel thinks, briefly, that it's really a stupid question. Stupid when he can practically see those scars slithering across the surface of Spike's mind, lining the insides of his ribcage and trembling at the ends of his fingers. Spike is made up entirely of scars.

But the only one he ever kept was from the damned Slayer, and Angel still isn't entirely sure how that happened- magic sword? preternatural power? a token of bitter, begrudging remembrance? Doesn't matter; he can't see it in mirrors anyhow. All he has is flawless flesh and the memory of bruises. Spike hasn't come home, because there's no home left to come to, no real shelter beneath bandages and gentle hands weighted with guilt and time and half-assed notions of responsibility. He's come back for the memory of

Belonging, and Angel can sell him that lie if he's so inclined. He doesn't even mind- just one more falsehood to add to the ever-growing list these days. It not like Spike's still going to be here in the morning, sticking around to test it out. Broken and self-deluded as he is right now, he knows better. Knows that Angelus wasn't very dependable even under the best of circumstances, and Angel doesn't give a fuck about much of anything these days.

Maybe there is no Belonging, he thinks, and the horror of it is enough to freeze his blood. Maybe there was never any Belonging, and the dreams, the scars, the horror of tossing down cigarettes and watching Family go up in flames, maybe all that doesn't matter. Maybe it's all just blood and pain and sex and the half-assed longings of a poet.

Maybe nothing lasts.

--------------------------

There were a few things that he never told Dru. That he was the one that led Darla to the Gypsy camp that night, pointing out all the prettiest girls. That in the nights after Prague, when she lay whimpering atop bloody bedclothes, eyes blind behind bruised, swollen lids, he had positioned the tip of a stake over her heart and prayed for the strength to press down.

And that sometimes, *he* wanted to be the one tied up.

Wanted to feel the cold clink of manacles or the soft whisper of red silk scarves against his skin, feel that entrapment and loss of control, feel the sharp sting of the whip against his flesh as he twisted his eyes shut tight and drowned in the sensation of pain and memory and //Angelus//

But the memories that Dru nursed were even stronger than his own and she always preferred being the effect to being the cause and it was a moot question now that she was too weak to leave the factory, wasn't it? So he went to the high school and faced the Slayer, and he did it for her. Took his beating like a man and did it all for *her,* like the helluva guy he was. And her fists were sharp and her tongue was sharper and

//no spike it's gonna hurt a *lot*//

he hadn't hurt that way since Angelus.

He returned with a fading bruise marring his cheekbone and a nearly healed laceration decorating his lower lip.

"Spike," Dru said, with a touch of envy in her voice, "did she hurt you?"

He got used to carrying bruises again after that.

--------------------------

Sharp-bladed kitchen knife; permanent black marker. "Lay still," he whispers, and Spike complies, tightening his fingers around the bedsheets as Angel slices carefully into his skin. Tries not to hurt him any more than necessary; the pain isn't the point anymore; it's the marking that's important. That which remains. The scars.

The blade cuts through layers of flesh, exposing muscle and bone. Working the dark stain into torn edges of skin. He carefully licks away streaming layers of blood and ink as he works, unsure of his motions but trying not to show the boy his nervousness. He's never done this before, although he bears marks of the same nature on his own back. His fingertips leave dark smudges across the pale expanse of Spike's body, and he shivers beneath Angel's touch, his chest starting to heave with unnecessary breath.

"I can't." Spike blinks his eyes rapidly, hips squirming into the mattress, fingers rapidly clutching at the coverlets. Angel puts one hand between Spike's legs, feels the stiffness there.

Yes. Of course. Puts down the knife, half-done with the task, and unzips Spike's jeans.

"Sshhh." He doesn't want excuses. Doesn't want justifications- there aren't any- doesn't want any more of Spike's guilt and sorrow than what is already coating the inside of his mind in thick, cold layers. He just wants the boy to lie still so that this can be over with.

He's tired. They're both tired.

Reaches inside, closing his eyes. Spike puts his cold hands over Angel's, a choked sob dying somewhere in the back of his throat. Guides Angel's hands, shaking all over, tears streaming soundlessly from the corners of his eyes. Cries out when he comes.

Lays back down and lets Angel resume his work.

He pauses, for a moment, before finishing- wonders if he should feel some remorse for marking him for life, scarring him for what might come damn close to eternity. But Spike's very nature is nothing so much as a complex web of scar tissue... and he needs some comfort to help him sleep. And Angel will do this. Angel will do what is Needed.

When he is done, he sits back and observes the result. Four letters, perfectly preserved in black and red in the flesh over Spike's heart.

His. Not because he ever wanted him or ever promised to take good care; he wasn't given a choice in this matter any more than William was. His through grief and rage and blood-ties. His because Dru got bored one night and always had the strangest taste in men. His because this slayer of slayers was Made in his image. He presses a finger to the boy's lips before he can hear Spike's earnest "thank you." Doesn't want to hear his gratitude; it's not a gift. It's his responsibility. His blood.

He runs his fingers silently through the boy's hair until he falls asleep, and then leaves him alone in the bed.