quesarah | Spike fic

"Anne Sexton Was an All Right Bird"
Fandom: AtS
Rating: R for coarse language.
Spoilers/Continuity: Season 5 Episode 6 “The Cautionary Tale of Numero Cinco”
Summary: Spike is all alone at the drive-in
Disclaimers: Angel the Series is the intellectual property of Mutant Enemy. This original work of fan fiction is Copyright 2003 Sarah Parsons, who wrote for fun and will make no profit from it. Therefore, this story is protected in the USA by the fair use provisions of the Copyright Act of 1976. All rights reserved. All wrongs reversed. Na-na na-na boo boo.

“We are all alone here and we are dead.”

It was 11:55 PM and the offices of Wolfram and Hart were hushed and dim. Spike was reasonably certain he wasn’t the only being still occupying the premises, although he was also reasonably certain he was the only being with access to the swank living quarters in the penthouse. He’d wait here for another hour or so, by which time most everyone was gone, then he’d go walking through the halls. He hated being spotted by the office drones; they looked at him with a mix of curiosity and pity. “Look, there goes the ghost vampire. He sacrificed himself to save the world. Well, he got better. Sort of.” He hated it. He would rather stand here and do nothing than feel that rain down on him.

He wished he could do something, effect the world around him in some tiny way. He’d give anything to have enough density to turn the page of a book. Contrary to popular opinion, Spike hadn’t entirely stopped reading after Dru sired him. Granted it wasn’t his favorite pastime anymore, what with hunting and fighting and eating; but he could still appreciate the written word. Just not those cobwebby old English writers he used to model; nor the mechanical German prats that Angel was so fond of. Buncha tossers; they were more in love with ideas than with anything concrete. And they were most in love with their own mechanical brains for stringing together enough clanking German words to describe the ideas. There was no soul to them; no blood, no passion. There was no struggle but the pronunciation. Spike had no use for them.

Give him Miller any day. Now there was a man very much of his world, by turns enchanted or disgusted by it but never shying away from the breathtaking rawness of it all. Henry was a man of appetites, whether it was for writing, eating, fighting or fucking and Spike respected that. How he would have loved to find the writer on a darkened Paris street, both their bellies empty and growling. Spike would have drained him, savored the piquancy of the blood and the smell of a cheap whore clinging to his cooling skin. He even would’ve taken someone like Sexton on a good day; “Oh my hunger! My hunger!” There was the sort of bird who knew what he was on about. She may have been half mad most of the time, but she always understood craving. Oh my hunger! My hunger, and no mouth to eat!

It sucked being incorporeal. It was just past midnight in Los Angeles and by all rights a beast like him should be getting down and rolling in the muck. But in order to roll around he’d have to have some weight, some solidity. He couldn’t fight; he couldn’t smoke; he couldn’t read a bloody book. He couldn’t even turn on the blasted television to catch the latest episode of Passions. He could do nothing but gaze out from the 25^th floor and wait for a twitchy little girl to figure out a solution--and then for Angel to do something about it.

Bloody Angel. Pompous, pontificating, poncey Angel. Fat lot of good he’d do; not much more than Spike could. Angel was getting soft and spoiled, a great pale maggot rooting around in the filth of Wolfram and Hart. He’d about convinced himself he was in charge of the machine, when the reality was he was being steamrolled into depravity by it. The way things were shaping up, Spike would still be here watching years from now. Angel would shrivel up in his isolation; Fred would spend her last hours in the lab; Buffy would even grow old and die. Worse, she’d finally fall in battle and he’d be unable to be at her side. All the people in these offices would drop away like petals on a lily only to be replaced by new drones. The building itself would one day fall and still he’d be gliding through the rubble, unable to leave and unwilling to move on.

All the while the soul inside him would lie like a tumor, growing blacker and more massive, pressing outward on his nonexistent edges. He’d fought so hard for it, for Buffy, and he never gave a thought to the repercussions of him having it. It separated him from the rest; marked him like Cain. No longer was he a demon to wink out of existence with the stroke of a sharp piece of wood. Now he was a man condemned for a multitude of mortal sins. No hands, no chance to work for salvation. Spike could feel reality shift beneath his feet; the maw of Hell yawning under him, hungering for his soul. Why was he struggling so hard to stay in the mortal realm, when there was no guarantee he’d ever have a physical body; when in fact there was a significant possibility his morbid vision would come to pass?

He laughed humorlessly. It was simple really, as all his decisions were. Spike wasn’t a deep thinker; he wasn’t ashamed of the fact. The simple truth was that he didn’t want to give up, that he’d rather fight an un-winnable battle than surrender. Maybe when he won back his soul, he set something in motion. Maybe there was a grand design somewhere with his name on it; his demonic name writ in glowing blood red letters, thirty feet high and luminous. Maybe he did have a destiny out somewhere beyond his mother, or Dru, or even Buffy.

Maybe none of that fucking mattered. Maybe he’d just fight the best he could, for as long as he could keep it up. He stared hard out the window, willing the neon of downtown to burn him into place. Reality tilted beneath him, ever so slightly. He gritted his teeth; hung on; kept fighting.

Maybe that was his destiny all along. He set his mouth in a disdainful snarl and started prowling the building.