by Jane St Clair
13 April 2003

Fandom: BtVS
Vague spoilers for A New Man

Disclaimer: Of Joss.

 

1.  

The office's furnishings are probably replaced every half-decade or so, but they give the impression of having been in place since the days of Pitt the Elder.  Velvet and hand-carved nordic hardwood.  Sometimes he wonders if she likes it.  He suspects that she might prefer something cooler, perhaps brushed steel, with very little padding on every chair but hers.  The sheer imposition of her current chair would be hard to replicate, though.  A chair to stop the tide if ever there was one.

He remembers meeting her for the first time in Manchester.  She wore blue; he wore a badly-damaged suit that he thinks belonged to his grandfather.  Her eyes admired the line of the trousers long before they caught the wreck of the rest of him.  Nothing like compassion, but sharp interest, and he wasn't surprised to discover that no one stopped him when he came that night to her hotel room.  Only one dark-suited policeman waited by her door, and he carefully looked at nothing.

Six years since then.  She isn't always available, and he isn't always interested, but when he comes back from Amsterdam one of her tidy calling cards is tucked in with his waiting mail.  A small rune on the back that crackles power under his fingers.

He comes down by rail, crosses London on the Underground.  The ground beneath his feet whispers faintly of its life as Whitehall Palace.  Her office hisses pain and war for long minutes before settling around her.

The tension in her skin has always fascinated him.  Raw under the glossed surface in a way he respects.  Bare shoulders and clean bones, power in her that denies her age and muted public face.  Order in her careful makeup; something fierce and primal and pain-loving underneath.  Like some early, barely-remembered woman who first whispered chaos across him.

He licks across her shoulder, down her back.  Along one thigh where the stocking is pulled back.  Older than he is, older than any woman he ever wanted like this.  Her power along his rib cage while he licks her more deeply.

They did this more often during the war.  It was so totally hers.  He could feel it crackling in her, those remote South Atlantic islands ringing fire.  She fed him on that as much as on herself.  Her small, careful gestures could crack whole continents.  Men ducked away from her as she passed.  He thinks she grew with every voice that ever cursed her.  Quiet and careful, like him, given to grand gestures only when she's sure the outcome will be the one she desires.  He wishes he could do the things she can.  Wonders if that's why she always tastes so good.

He wraps around her on the sofa, surrounded by books and a softly glowing map of the world.  Scarlet portions that are or were British.  The small, non-Argentinian islands she loves so much have fragile wards around them.  Her collar bone stands sharp under her dry skin.

He's standing by the window, watching London slither through its own glow, when the knock comes.  Naked skin in the room's half-dark.  Black-coated palace messengers.  Ethan watches the men flick eyes over him without any real attention.  Wonders who they think he is.

When he walks out, one of the messengers is there, crouched in the building's shadow, unwatched by any of the dozen policemen guarding her door.  He can feel her watching him when he takes the man's face in his hands.





2.

He wakes up naked, covered in insects.

It's been long enough that he's no longer sure of time.  This may have been going on for years.  For weeks at least.  This isn't the first or the seventh time he's woken chained to a tree limb and stripped to his skin.  Tattoos that he feels all the time crawl over his shoulders.

The young lovely who chained him last night doesn't return, but someone else does.  Throws him trousers and sandals and holds him by the throat while unlocking his manacles.  Someone spelled the chains thoroughly enough that he hasn't yet found a way to break himself loose.  Possibly it was the same person who enspelled
him well enough that he can't walk away even when he's nominally free.

So.  This jungle, this day.  This group of lovely young Americans who shine even through the grime layers of the weeks or years they've been with him.  Breakfast is a generically-wrapped energy bar, thrown in the dirt at his feet.  The girl-child watching him eat fingers her gun idly in a way that suggests a plan of ritual mutilation far more than a simple execution-style shooting.

Even with the insects moving across him, he can feel the particular crawl of his tattoos.  Except for the scarred, naked patch where Eyghon's mark came free, nearly every inch of him is etched, now.  Runes he learned in childhood, done with a sewing kit and ball-point pen in his first night in this wet darkness.  Better, more unique marks that he traded for in villages.  Every shaman in this rainforest keeps her own rituals against the nameless horrors.  Most of them will share for money or traded knowledge, or in response to the perfectly articulate threat that this group of beautiful young soldiers represents.

The insects slide across his face and into his hair.  One many-legged spirit crawls from his lower to upper eyelashes on its upward path, and the girl-soldier flinches.

He didn't call them, exactly.  But the first time they took him out of the icy bunker he'd been held in, his skin shimmered and things began crawling out of the earth toward him.  The sheer satisfaction of it was hard to resist.  He'd been sterilized, studied, and finally subdued, but he could still make himself filthy enough to make the sternest of them turn away.  These rare moments of privacy he cherishes.

Since then, insects.  Every night new ones who across him while he sleeps and mark their self-lost knowledge of the place on his mind.  The days with visitors arriving and departing, quiet or humming.  He's never been bitten.

The earth opens under his touch, and burrowers come up to slide under his fingernails.  Tell him of the Things that passed some days before.  They're closer every day.  He knows another pack of these young ones went looking for this particular demon, fought it and lost.  He braided pieces of their torn skins into a bracelet while the others buried the more substantial parts.

The girl kicks him.

"Get ready to move out, wizard."  She strokes the control pattern invisibly marked on his neck and he shudders.  She grins at him, wolfishly, for just a moment.

He puts on his sandals and starts walking after her.






3.

At night, the city carves itself out in fire.  Bombs that weigh more than he does come plunging out of the darkness and crack earth and buildings and medieval gates into places he's never been.  Light from the fires spreads all across the clouds.

He should be to be underground.  He has, like everyone in London, a designated shelter.  It's little more than a tunnel, filled with blankets and damp and mewling babies and mewling adults and he doesn't have to be there, really.  He can feel where the next bombs will fall; he stands a stone's throw out of the blast circles.

Feels the city break open.

There are other reasons for the good citizens of London to lock themselves in.  Demons loose and walking in the fire.  He thinks the Germans have wizards, now. The first demons were opportunists, but there are too many, now.  He wonders whether Churchill is calling covens up from Sussex for assistance.

He isn't strong enough to fight the wizards in the planes, not yet.  He can feel them moving with the instincts She gave him.  Her own presence in the house felt like that.  Charges left on metal.  Two days ago he picked up a cold shrapnel fragment and almost howled for Her absence.  Only.  Teutonic magic, not Hers, something new that has him climbing ever higher towards the blacked-out planes.

In the open mouth of the Underground's stairway, something horned and vaguely lionlike is eating the remains of a dog.  Its eyes are luminous black when it looks at him.

He says, "Did they call you?"

It shrugs.  Swallows loose intestines and steps toward him.  He holds steady until it's close enough to smell his breath, then whispers the only real incantation She taught him.  Small wards barely strong enough to throw it back, but they hold.

The language in which the demon snarls is infernal and distinctly Teutonic.  Ethan nods and ducks away, holding Her cloak of protection around him.  He settles into the shelter of a building's ruin and watches the fire.


end




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