Kyra observed that "it's hard to fathom schmoopy fangs". In that vein, this is to cheer Kita up.
*
Groans, screams, agony. Death in motion, tearing skin, little pops that arteries give when they run dry, shattered bones ground under a vampiress's heel. Noise, orchestrated into terror.
Dracula gets a quote here: "Ah! What music they make!"
Angelus likes Dracula. Especially the early versions, jumpy cinematography, overblown gestures, ridiculous Mitteleuropa accents and all. Bats that shriek and whirl, girls who clutch white throats in fear. Angelus likes the gaudy, the fantastic, the honesty that soaks melodrama.
Angelus isn't here.
*
When rich people die, their blood stinks just like anyone else's. Their shit and piss, too. His daddy was right.
Lindsey reads dusty labels, squints at French, Spanish, Italian, all the languages he doesn't know.
A wine lover is an oenophile.
He took a course.
His stump aches.
--Should've gone home, he mutters,, tossing another bottle of wine into the corner. Steps forward, grinds glass into burgundy and blood.
--You think? Angel asks.
Lindsey turns. --Wasn't talking to you, was I?
--Thought I'd see what's going dowwn here.
Over Angel's shoulder, he can see Drusilla turning a slow tantarella, feet bare and red with blood. Blood painted over her face, insane-Bozo-the-bloodsucking-clown paint from ear to ear. Rubs her face over Darla's breasts, Darla's hands in black hair, maroon-white-threads of black. Darla's head tipped back. White throat, bent like a birch tree. Tiny throat he could cover with both hands.
If he had them.
His stump aches some more.
--Show's behind you, asshole.
Angel shrugs, moves until he has Lindsey up against the wall. Usual move, Lindsey knows to pull a civil-disobedience slump and go limp. Let the psycho have his fun.
--But I've already *seen* that, Anngel whines. --Show me something *new*.
*
Lindsey doesn't smell like fear. Lindsey smells like expensive cologne and little-boy sweat. Soap that didn't wash away all of the cum from his noontime wank. Lindsey smells good.
Alcohol stink, enough blood to wade through, sweet-sharp scent of his girls getting wet, and he's here. Smelling the little weasel and liking it.
Angel holds him here, against the wall. Shoves his hand into softprettygolden hair, tilting Lindsey's head back. Looking him over, talking - not that he expects an answer worth replying to - avoiding lingering too long on wide blue eyes that are dark like the petals of pansies. Bright like them, too.
--What're you looking at? Lindsey asks. Breathy like a good boy.
--Nothing. Just thinking.
--Got a brain up there? Blue eyes squinting, plump lip twisting, and Angel would like to laugh at the confirmation he's just received. Would laugh, but he's struck by something more important.
He squeezes Lindsey's throat until the pulse runs like a stopwatch under his palm. Pets his hair roughly, savors silken texture courtesy of the twentieth century. No lye and lard clinging to the strands, making them thick, almost gooey, catching grime and blood faster than you could blink, everyone smelling organic, earthy, edible.
--Other boys, Angel says. --With llight hair, blue eyes. Mouths on 'em that won't quit. No wonder Darla hates you.
Lindsey wriggles. Just a little, just enough, Angel knows, to prove he's still got his balls attached. --Doesn't hate me.
--Hates you, needs you. Trust me, ends up the same way.
*
Lindsey could knee him in the balls, shut up that fucking endless, drowsy reminiscing tone. Slap him across the face with a prosthetic hand hard and rigid enough to break bone.
He says, instead, --What, dust?
Angel steps back.
Lindsey takes a breath.
Inhales death, across the room, right up close. Fresh and warm over there, cold and aged up here.
--Or crippled? he asks. Raises thee plastic hand. Offers it to Angel. --'Cause that's true, too.
Angel tilts his head. Slow child, bulky present he can't unwrap. He grips Lindsey's arm, pulse point in the elbow.
Lindsey supposes that's habit for him.
He winces anyway.
He knows first aid. He has a certificate in it that's probably expired by now. But he can wrap a tourniquette. He could help people.
Darla lies on her back. Giggles drunkenly, arms moving. Blood angels.
Sweeping arcs, pink, then dark.
Drusilla between her legs. Pushing up her skirts.
--Nicely done, Angel says, lookingg up, stroking the stump. The hand is on the floor. Broken, like everything else.
He must have heard it shatter, but Lindsey doesn't remember. The pinky finger spins slowly in a puddle of wine.
--Not my best work, of course, butt given the circumstances...
Angel's face creases with a faint smile. Lindsey knows he's reminiscing again. --Want a fucking medal? Maybe the other hand?
Angel shakes his head. --Nah. Don't need a monkey's paw. My luck's shitty enough these days.
One of the associates in torts is twitching spastically next to Drusilla. She giggles and pokes him away.
--Yeah, Lindsey says. --Tell me thhe fuck about it.
*
Angel's not really one for talking. Never was, except when drunk, and singing at the top of your lungs is hardly talking. Hunger jerks and yanks around in his gut, moaning emptily.
Feels his control stretching til it goes threadbare.
Six months ago, he wouldn't have been here.
Ten years ago, he would have vomited at the story.
A century ago, he'd be fucking both girls, his gut full to brimming and his eyes plastered open with ecstasy.
Something about the passage of time there that's significant.
Last thing he needs is some stupid rich lawyer pretty boy mockingly commiserating with him. Looks Lindsey up and down, running his thumb absently over the oddly smooth skin on his stump until the boy shivers and sighs.
--Feel good?
Lindsey makes a move to pull away.
Angel nods. Yanks him close until he has an armful of sweaty, twitching boy, hair dark with blood and wine, blue eyes dark in the cellar's halflight. Moans of the dying, moans of his women celebrating carnage, moans of a crippled boy who won't look at him.
He thinks about this too long, he might get a little nostalgic.
--Fuck away from me, Lindsey mutteers as Angel paws his hair again, tips up his chin. Runs his thumbnail over Lindsey's lip until it splits laterally, then smears the blood over both lips. Chin. Eyelids. --Fuck're you doing?
--Painting, Angel says. Duh, the SSunnydale girls would say. --What do they say where you come from? Got a real pretty mouth?
Hard to shove a man away with only one hand. Especially when you're outweighed, shorter, and thoroughly outclassed. Lindsey tries, spitting, almost growling.
Angel's gut is *yowling* now. Caterwauling in time with the squish-squish rocking of silk dragged through blood and the crystal-sharp Oooooh Drusilla makes when she comes.
--Fucking evil psycho son of a *biitch*.
When Angel kisses Lindsey, he eats those words. Blood from his lip, then blood from his tongue when Angel bites it. Lies are sour. Then sweet, a plump tongue, bourbon-drawl complaints Lindsey still splutters out and Angel swallows them faster than Lindsey can think. Animals are always faster. Predators especially.
--Sorry? Angel says, pulling back to let the poor thing breathe. --Didn't catch that. Evil?
*
--Asshole, Lindsey breathes. Wipess his good - *only* - hand across his mouth and studies the smear. Pink, red, black. Black's probably from Angel. Fucker's blood is like ink, just like his clothes.
He can hear his heart pounding.
Tingles gather and double in his stump. Not an ache, it's almost pleasant, like the twitching expectation in the head of his dick before he gets hard.
Angel looms, like always. Squints thoughtfully, stupidly, Lindsey doesn't care, mouth a gash of pencil point tearing paper, terrifically pale and unearthly. Unearthly. Alien.
Oh, that's fucking funny. Lindsey giggles, grinding against Angel. --Oh, Mr. Spaceman, take me to your planet.
--You're drunk.
--Am not. Lindsey giggles again, ggnaws his human teeth on Angel's throat. Wonders what he used to taste like. What he tasted like to Darla that first time. What Darla tasted like to him.
Your lips, his lips, her lips, it's all muscle and blood and Lindsey *wants*.
--What the hell is *wrong* with yoou? Angel asks.
He stiffens under Lindsey's roving hand, turns his head, tries to escape lips and teeth. Doesn't move away, though. Just peers piggishly at Lindsey.
--You know better than I do. Lindssey shrugs, fumbling fingers on slick shirt buttons.
--Crazy, Angel says. --Crazy evil drunk son of a whore.
Someone's moaning again. Someone didn't die, besides Lindsey, and he or she is moaning like childbirth. Lindsey's never seen childbirth, not human, but he got lots of 4-H ribbons. He's stuck his arm up a cow and saved a breech calf. Once Maisy had a two-headed calf. He called it BertandErnie and sat up with it all night while it trembled and looked around with four huge black eyes. It died by dawn.
Suck and slither of teeth in throat, Lindsey can hear it all right now, and he cranes to see what the girls are doing to the last victim. He hopes it's not *the* last, expects they've been saving him for dessert. A dessert wine, thick and sweet, best served with cheese and fruit.
He rips Angel's shirt, then his own. Tugs at his lip and smears the blood over his chest. Opening his arms, he swallows laughter burbling up his throat like champagne.
--Daddy!
*
He's not evil, not good, he's stuck and twitching like a rat in a cage. Broken back, howling high enough to shatter glass.
When Lindsey guffaws, paws at his crotch, Angel's only - a man. An animal. It doesn't matter. Both get hard, both like pretty, smooth-skinned things who bat their eyelashes at you and secretly hate you.
Not so secretly hate you.
--Fucking hate you, Lindsey feels it's necessary to add while stripping Angel's pants to his knees. --Fucking self-righteous psycho prick.
Angel flips him over, drops him on the floor in the spangly crunch of glass, wine, blood, yanks his face up by the back of his soft, pretty hair. Probably a towhead as a child, shame it got darker.
Straddles his ass, moves his head around, makes sure he can see the girls lapping each other clean and touching themselves and sucking the last sweet drops from the secretary in Personal Injury's heart.
--Look at that, Angel tells him. ---Look at that and tell me you're not evil.
Lindsey's laughing, still laughing, tears smearing salt-clean tracks over the blood on his cheeks. Angel sucks him clean as he shoves Lindsey's legs apart. Scoops up wineblood and slicks the boy's hole so fast he squeals. Pulls his fingers out and Lindsey sighs.
Petulant and crazy. Pretty.
--Fuck some sense into you, Angel says.
Lindsey bows his back like a pro, shoves his ass up and back and looks over his shoulder. Sweet Jesus, even bites his lip and flutters those lashes.
--Sick of your stupid lessons - hee starts, and then his mouth drops open.
Angel thrusts in (slick, tight, *alive*), and Lindsey fucking licks his lips and wiggles back. He lives, he'll die some day, nicotine-stained with a failing liver to rival that Harris boy's, and he'll never, ever, understand what a fucking gift that was. He'll pout well past his prime. Shake that ass in his fine, expensive suits until he's pasty and droopy and his accent's come back. Die like he lived, blind, blinkered, pathetic.
*
Lindsey watches blood. Pool, then congeal, going darker like old bubblegum. Sticky. It squelches like mud as Angel fucks him.
He's not listening to whatever sermon the hypocrite's working up this time. Figures he knows them all by now. Good and evil, life and death, power versus assistance. Cruelty, helping hand.
Watches the stripe of blood in front of him.
Squeezes, then relaxes, takes Angel as deep as he can and then some. Feels his dick wearing grooves in the old plank floor. Moans.
Darla watches.
Darla's beautiful.
Bones like a bird's, hair like sun.
She's not watching him. Crazynumbstupid as he is, even Lindsey knows that. It's always him, always has been. Dickwad fucking *dusted* her and she still wants him.
Lindsey pushes up onto folded arms and knees, drops his head like a dog, and fucks Angel back just as hard as he can.
He knows how to make it good.
Didn't have to take a course or nothing.
*
Ammonia, shorn grass, pennythick blood when Lindsey comes, arching and shouting beneath him. Angel jerks him upward, hands nearly spanning slim boyhips, nails raking over pelvic bones, and Lindsey folds back against him, keening, clenching, twisting in his hold as Angel fucks his mouth with his tongue.
Shoots, again and again, blind to the girls watching, deaf to the dead already decomposing, eating Lindsey's tongue, snapping his hips harder to shove the last drops deeper. Clutching broken smartass boy to him, burying his face in warm, sweaty skin of neck and shoulder.
*
Asshole collapses on top of him. Knocks the breath out of Lindsey, pushes him into broken glass, knocks his head into an upended rack of wine.
--Do it, Lindsey says. Rolls his hhead to the side. --Fucking drink.
Shows his throat.
Darla's throat like a bone. Wishbone, stretched with the effort of hoping.
Angel's neck, thick like a log, still and cold.
Lips skate down Lindsey's neck.
--Wine? I do not drink...*wine*.