Notes: For Snow, who wanted rough bitey A/O, "dialogue optional", and the contrelamontre "volume" challenge. Used up the full 90 minutes. Set sometime around "Reunion"/"Redefinition" (AtS s2).
There's nothing living here, not any more. With Cordy and the others gone, the hotel is as silent as an old thing can be; pipes both rattle and moan, the floors shift and sigh, the walls sink, settle, whisper. But this is all architectural; Angel suspects that crypts must have their own orchestral backdrop, too -- marble, mud, bone and rotting silk.
Nothing living here and the (relative) silence of death is welcome. Death and absence really are this quiet; dust really does sift endlessly, constantly, and Angel can hear it all. Death, absence, dust. He barely listens any longer, however. He has to prepare, has to ready himself to meet Darla.
Even when sound does break out, sharp as sunrise, he takes his time reacting. Curtains tumbling off the rack in an upper-floor room, a raccoon or coyote nosing through the trash bins in the garden, plaster crumbling in the hall: Angel hears, nods, returns to his exertions.
He is quiet inside, wants to be even quieter. Wants and needs to be a shell and a husk as the hotel has become, impenetrable, encasing only ghosts and nightmares. Silent things.
Dru was right. How the two manic children ever survived to tell the truth -- Dru and William, cruel and delighted and so unprepared for terrors on which Angel himself thrived -- *how* they became his Cassandras, taunting and correct, he will never understand.
But she was right: He still remembers Darla's warmth, the sweet flutter of heartbeat and rapid well of hot tears, and he is not ready. He needs more time to kill off the cacophony of memory, let stupid hope cool back into resignation.
He no longer sleeps. He patrols the streets and the hotel's halls, wanders and reacquaints himself, as if by touching and moving, he too will shift, settle, silence.
He rehangs the curtains and repairs, then paints over, the crumbling plaster. The coyote proves harder to catch, but Angel waits for his chance. Waits with the focused rage he brings to swordplay and tai chi for it to reappear. Vermin and scavengers, hotblooded and noisy, are not welcome here.
Everything he does now is extermination. Or it will become so.
He returns to the hotel one night, after another several fruitless hours spent tracking his women and tamping down the questions and the timidity born from too many years spent among the living and the human. Whether he *ought* to track her, what he'll do with her when he does find her, where Dru will go, if she'll be abandoned once again or simply vanish, cackling, back into the dark. Querulous and indecisive: His state is the legacy of thinking that he might live, might do something more than continue to exist. He will shed the questions; he has to.
Rustle in the jasmine hedges, rapid drum of a heart, bright clatter of a metal lid against concrete: The noise assaults Angel as he returns home. It should not be so loud - he's been out in the streets all night - but *here*, nowhere else, he needs the quiet.
The scent is not vermin, nor is it purely human. Some mix, mystical, and Angel wastes no time deciphering *what* kind -- analysis and interpretation are just more questions, more human luxuries -- as he grabs a bony shoulder and hauls the creature from between the bins.
A snarl greets him, just as fierce as the heat of human skin beneath his palm, and there is a shimmer of a half-remembered face (delicate, pale, boy) before everything thickens. Grows. Pelt, fangs, and snout, snarling at him, jaws snapping, and then the face shudders back into sight, smooth and fishglimmer pale.
"Angel?" Whispered, half-fearful, half-hopeful, from curving, living lips. "I -"
Both husks and plaster crack, vein and split open, and Angel snarls -- scent of both prey and predator, orange juice and blood -- before covering the pink, hot mouth with his own.
Shutting it up, sucking it down.
There are no screams to swallow, very little fear to lick off the palate, but the racket of life, human and demon-curse, thunders through the boy's body. And if Angel knows him, knew him once, the kiss delivered with fangs and a surge of feverhot blood from the boy's tongue is enough to erase that memory. Babyblue veins throb under Angel's mouth as he backs the boy (*Oz*, memory insists, and Angel chokes off the yell resounding against his skull) against the wall, lapping at his throat, tasting old sweat and new joy. Memory and human care dwindle down into idle whispers against the rough symphony of breath, wet heave of lungs and hot skin, the heat buzzing high and sweet off the skin as bees over clover.
Clothes shriek as they're ripped away and at one shallow bite -- not to kill, just enough to suck a flood into his empty shell -- the boy moans, clutching at Angel and quivering, grinding teeth against a yelp.
Some things still require language and sound: "Let go," Angel whispers, tugging at delicate human limbs, scraping fangs over the ear, "let go and it will all be better -"
Demon thoughts, clean and sharp. Simple, single long notes. Demons never ask; they order, comply, scream with joy. The pretty little boy shakes, shoves Angel back with clawtipped hands, and *howls*. This is song, better than any girl's scream, calling down moon and tide and night. Bleeding from its neck, the wolf drops on all fours, howling, and *this* sight, Angel can let himself remember.
He's thought of it a thousand times: Over a girl's corpse, staring into eyes darker and deeper than Angel's half-breed gold could ever hope to be. The wolf uttered a single snarl, low and urgent, and Angel replied in kind.
There is no corpse now, nothing between them, and Angel's been hard since the first kiss, full of clacking teeth and bitten tongue. He drops to a squat, matches the wolf snarl, and opens his pants. Paints his palm with the scent of his cock and extends it, offering.
Grunts, slap of lips, wheeze of breath: These sounds are animal, demonic, better than any architectural silence.
The wolf's tongue is long and so hot, curling over Angel's palm and fingers. Its blood mats the ruff of fur around its neck, black, bristly, beautiful.
Paws on Angel's shoulders, it shoves him onto his back, onto gravel and asphalt, broken glass crunching brightly. Blood taken from the wolf's neck tastes just like the boy's did, musky, mystical, more alive than any human's. It whines above him, strangled and high, thrusting a slick, heavy prick against Angel's thigh.
One fist in its scruff, the other on its haunches, mouth still latched on the wound, Angel sucks and thrusts back and wrestles until the wolf is splayed below him on its back. The black marble eyes roll and gaze, then lock on Angel's face like he's moon and sun and prey all together. Choral arpeggio of howls and tearing flesh, constant gravelly crunch, as Angel tugs on the wolf's dick and pushes his own, slicked with wolf/boy blood, inside. A howl that dies off, replaced with Angel's own scream -- terror and pleasure sound the same; there are no differences, not for the demons they are -- and his throat aches with the joy of it. Inside, the wolf is hotslicktight, perfect, and it whines, struggling, until it flips around and backs up against Angel. Until Angel, on his knees, is fucking the way one used to pray -- with body and blood and nary a soul to whimper its constant questions -- and holding the wolf's haunches. Pressing in and deeper as the wolf cants up its backside and begins to howl again, front claws and neck dragging on the ground.
This is music, harmony of thrusts and grunts, and Angel has blood singing through his belly and heat enfolding, squeezing, *yanking* at his dick. Brutal, primal, and he has no claws but fingers will do, knotted in heavy coarse fur, pushing and heaving, and then the wolf comes. The howl breaks like crystal to a scrabbling whine and the throbbing splash of come over glass and gravel.
Communion, the wolf's hold clamped around Angel's cock, still pulling and pulsing around him, and Angel comes as he has been fucking, blazing and shouting, thanksgiving, with a joy indistinguishable from horror. His body tightens unbearably, skin shrunken and humming like a wire drawn too tense, his mouth empty of anything but noise.
Black, flatter than the wolf's eyes, heavier than marble, falls over-against-through Angel and he tumbles back into an arctic cold, silent winds battering from every quarter. Dimly, he hears the wolf whining, panting, as it pulls itself away. His cock is peeled raw, painful and overripe.
Tears are hymnal, hushed but gathering like shadows and grief, over Angel's cheeks, and he could swear he hears the clanking drag of chains, deep in his skull's whited sepulchre, as the demon withdraws. Leaves him, yet again, alone and empty.
"Hey," Oz whispers, kneeling next to Angel. Clouds of heat and the stink of sweat and blood are murmuring, purring, around the boy, soft staticky backdrop to his voice, which is pure and clear, balm and well-water. "Been looking for you."
His fingertips move over Angel's cheek and lashes, swabbing away tears and shame, and then he bends forward. Kisses Angel, giving off a sigh softer than a baby's contented gurgle.
"Looking in the trash?" Angel asks, and his own voice is broken. Shattered and oozing around dandelion-bitter laughter. "Found me. Such as I am."
It's quiet then, truly and fully quiet. Oz helps Angel up and Angel wraps his arm around the narrow, bare waist. Feels the welts and glass shift in his skin and in Oz's. Punctured, wheezing, shuffling inside, they are as quiet as can be.