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22 October 2003
BtVS Spoilers for A New Man, a few things for Angel S3. Disclaimer: Joss makes my hair stand up. As well he should. Belatedly, for the "five things" challenge: six (actually) things that never happened to Ethan Rayne. Cell Block Tango
by Jane St Clair 1. Pop London pulses whenever he touches it, but he loves the radiant power of the south coast. Tiny, ancient villages, wrapped in blood sacrifice and incest and seagoing things without names. The trains run, though not regularly, and it's not difficult to go down for the weekend. The things he finds are beautiful and slick and nothing like vampires. Old creatures that crawl out of the sea and change into human skins. They steal souls and eyes and the victims are only ever 'gone missing on holiday.' The bodies go. Somewhere. Down with the sailors, perhaps. There are so many dead here they could trigger a new hellmouth. He finds her on the rocks, licking her fingers and singing to the water. Black, black skin and huge, irisless eyes. One of the few walking things that asks little more from other walkers than respect. He offers her an open face and his hands behind him. She offers him a single, vividly green eye, clean and wet in her palm. Later with him in the pub streets, she walks in dreadlocks and dark-sugar accent, shredding his shirt subtly with her nails. Mouth on his throat tells him armies, press-gangs, corroding silver on the sea floor. Crushed aircraft. She walked across the channel once and watched them coil wire across the beaches at Calais. The room he took over the pub is filthy, far outside the tourist trade. She peels down to that sea-slick skin and crawls on top of him. Breasts and hair and darkness and he calls her as many names as she calls him. Salty-wet where she opens, wraps around his cock, carves his chest and tells him the taste of other people's skins. Fucks him bent over the bedstead, leaning against his back and pushing her fingers deep inside, twisting in ways he can't take and loves. Later, prone, he runs her power through from fingertip to fingertip. She spits fire from her curl in the chair. 2. Six The Jaguar near Hampstead Heath is black and finished with a hand-rubbed sheen that suggests more than a passing interest in the vehicle's well-being. Whoever loves this car chose a competent witch to charm it, but even Ripper's better than she is. He cracks a grin when the charm breaks apart, pushes Ethan back against the hood. Ethan loves the feel of the car. It shapes itself to his back, seems to take an interest in the fate of his trousers after he kicks them off over his shoes. When Ripper shoves inside him, the car whispers back, *again, again*. It's almost living. Endowed, maybe, with something of the owner's essence, and if it is, then the gentleman is question is almost certainly on his knees somewhere in this darkness, bent over his own cock and utterly unmindful of passers-by. Ethan pushes his nails into the wax when Ripper thrusts and hoists, almost into his lap and never off the car. He'd give so much for a wall, but this. He wouldn't give this up. In his ear, "What do you feel?" "There are no names. The link's not strong enough for -- for that." Filthy grind against his ass that breaks him apart from machine and soul and for an instant he's spitting furious. Kicks away and rolls onto his belly, lets his whole mind slide into the car. Almost casual fuck, Ripper less interested and Ethan too fascinated to bite the ways he needs to. When Ripper comes, Ethan slides away, snatching his trousers and walking into the grounds. The man hunched against a tree has a beautifully tailored suit. He's easily sixty years old, and no magician. But. He's wide open to Ethan's sliding fingers. Old, soft skin and a long time until orgasm. Warm against his nose, Harrods cologne and silk-cotton shirt. Old family crest marked in his cufflinks that Ethan steals. Weeping after, and Ethan can feel the whole city opening up while he strokes the raised crest. He can feel windows opening all over London. Mercedes-Benz, Bavarian Motor Works, Ferrari, Audi, Cadillac. Jaguar. Six. 3. Squish He wakes and it's half-dark. Some unspecific length of time ago a 'night' period was instituted, to calm the nocturnal demons. It worked, to the extent that most now sleep on a strict schedule, rolled in on themselves in full light and snarling ineffectually at anyone who disturbs them. Once, he thinks mostly for amusement, the guards took Ethan and put him in a central cell, surrounded by four nocturnals. Then they opened all the doors connecting him to them and waited until 'night' fell. The results, though contained, were spectacular. At the end of the night, he was bleeding from a dozen places, laughing softly. Alien fluids running down his thighs and in his mouth and all over his skin, and he's fairly sure what happened wasn't at all what the guards had intended. There was carnage, of course, but it was more easily achieved with the demons quieted and their living force inside him. He sat in the midst of the mess and waited to see what they'd do. No one was fool enough to walk in there with him. They unlocked a single escape door and waited for him to come out. Six days, longer than any mundane could have survived, and if he hadn't been riding an otherworldly high . . . Chaos screamed under his fingernails every time he sucked water from the conditioned air. He composed subtle charms that exploded later, far from him, under the skins of those who deserved them. It was more justice than he usually cares for, but his usual skew in his own favour simply wasn't possible under the circumstances. Later, he thought of ways he might have served the cause of Chaos in the process of making the stupid children sorry. The damage was usually subtle, often epic, sometimes Shakespearean. He rather likes the version that leaves the lovelier of the two boys with no tongue and only sticks where his hands had been. He curls up and licks his raw places. Grins inward, where he can keep the look for himself. 4. Ah ah Every fantasy he had of walking out into the desert night, is somehow less than the real thing. Hospital scrubs and slippers, a dead soldier's leather coat. Instantly, he's thirsty. There are, he thinks, thirty miles between this point and the highway. Somewhere this high and clear, he can still smell it -- gasoline and hot metal. It's dark and he's bleeding when the car slides up behind him. Behemoth of a Cadillac, pale champagne and mirror-windowed. The very finest in transportation for the very feyest of oilmen. "Walking snakes tire so *easily*. . ." Dark, dark eyes and a filthy approximation of an accent. Genteel manners and East End drawl. White skin and crawling, immortal psychosis. He feels Slayer, dead under her nails. "I could offer you lovely things in exchange for your hospitality." "What *kind* of lovelies?" "Leeches. Bird hearts. Grandmothers." "She has her own grandmother." Blonde whore curled in on herself. And. Oh. Chaos. Everything he doesn't have he gives to these two, and he half expects them to devour him the instant he sprawls into the rear bench seat. Together they've consumed more power than he's wielded in years. And in spite of that, he walks through a Nevada nighttime village in a dead man's clothes, looking for something so purely alcoholic it can wipe away everything he remembers. Beautiful, aching-wanting boys in tight denim and leather, stroking close to their friends in the pub, but everyone turns toward Ethan when he walks in. The American hostility to this Outside Thing is expected. British Faggot Witch. Money with blood on the edges, and he wonders how many of them will follow him out looking for his mouth. In the highway motel room, Darla and Drusilla are still tangled, still naked. Madwoman-blunt nails comb white-blonde pubic hair, mouths locked. Fingers inside so slick he can taste it across the room. Even dead they're more vivid than hard Mexican liquor. Dark spills hair across white legs, and he can see Drusilla's tongue snake out. Tiny white flesh-swell, all that preternatural concentration, and really, women together ought not be watched, because it lasts far longer than any man's attention. Soft begging and he can see Darla's clitoris swell. So close, so close, what feels like hours of it while he drinks himself into new sight. Darla's still trembling when Drusilla straddles her and fingers herself, fast and fierce. Hits deep and growls. The perfect Victorian, blankly mad. He wonders if she knows her grandmother is pregnant. He crosses, fully dressed and only half-hard. Extends a hand and slides his fingers across Darla's belly. "Do you know?" Softly. She opens a blank blue eye. "Know *what,* wizard?" And he wouldn't have thought she could not-know, but perhaps the possibility is simply outside her. It's going to be fascinating to watch. 5. Cicero She's more beautiful at forty than she was at eighteen. Undisguised grey at her temples, lines around her eyes that reflect under her glasses. The last time he saw her, she was nothing to him. A baby mage. But she grew into her skin, gained enough weight to make her interesting, shed the Californian self-consciousness that plagued all those children, in the day. She says, "Help me open the door." "Why?" In her open hand, light swirls and breaks open, and the gift inside her is like nothing he could have dreamed of. Though not precisely dangerous, it's chaotic and powerful, a lump of pure magic. There are things he could do with it that defy description. So. Walking in Amsterdam. Girls in the windows of one street, boys in the next. Smoke from the cafes that reminds him of childhood nights with Ripper. Chaos and Order dance here every night. He can see his own soul in the canal waters. The building's old. He thinks it was a coven house, but centuries ago. Its wards were powerful enough to keep it intact through the wars, and some of the paintwork is probably original. The garden, out behind, it full of unnatural flowers. The used bookstore it houses is out of business. He's not entirely sure why; a collection of scrolls this impressive should make a solid economic foundation in any city in the world, let alone one with a black market on this scale. Some of the vellum's so fragile it's held together only by magic and the will of those who wrote on it first. Millennia of spells and knowledge. He thinks, on reflection, that the shop owner must be dead. The heirs will find a tangle the likes of which they could not possibly have imagined. Latin curses and the promises of Lebanon. She lays his hands on the wall, and he can feel the door on it. Plastered and spelled over, deep and fragile. "Open for me." Hours he sings to it. Such a swirl of light and dark; he could get lost in this portal without ever throwing the latch. Under him, he can feel the bones of the last wizard who tried. It cracks at seven in the morning, on a Tuesday. He opens it and Willow steps past him. Silver-green world on the other side. She looks at that world for a long time. Then she folds it up and puts it in her pocket. 6. Lipschitz It takes seventeen years. He loves it every day. He remembers coming over from London. 1976, wrapped in his uncle's favourite cardigan and a muffler from the box by the door. One suitcase, two hundred books spelled into it, and the memory of Ripper still in his mouth. Cambridge, Massachusetts. One furnished bedsit, one desk. One grant for research in purest mathematics. There are nights he takes the train into Boston, gets drunk and looks at the Atlantic. Every shape of the wave is numbers, shifting. He can sit in a pub and run numbers in his head that know exactly when the next fight will or won't break out. They pay him to breathe this. Butterfly numbers and music in the small hours of the morning. Students who sit around him in colloquia and they learn it too. You sell chaos like this. Quiet in the ticking world. jane go back |