taxonomites | 024: The Saints Can't Help Me Now [Location: Hyperion Hotel / Accidental Visual]

While Drusilla slept on the silk sheets that Angel had promised her, the figure reflected in her window pane - a girl who was both like and unlike the vampire - said her prayers.

Her lips barely moved as she murmured her supplications up to heaven. They were secrets, her prayers. Secrets that weren't for the ears of anyone but the Lord. (It was strange, wasn't it? The girl gave her heart and her trust to the same deity who had, in another life, abandoned her to the clutches of the devil.) The rosary clutched in her pale hand was worn with use and with piety.

The Drusilla on the bed wore red. In the right light, it looked as if she was a corpse in a pool of fresh blood, stark against the snowy sheets.

The Drusilla in the glass wore a coarse nun's habit. In any light, she glowed with virtue.

It was the life that she could have lived. The person that she could have been. She rarely dreamed of such things - the pixies whispered of the future, not the futures that had never been able to come to pass - and, when the sudden sharpness of the reflection pierced her head, Drusilla woke with a start. For a moment, she gazed - wide eyed and unblinking - at the window.

"No."

She snatched up the lamp that stood on the table next to her new bed, throwing it without hesitation. The glass shattered and the girl disappeared before she'd had a chance to ask for forgiveness for the sins that her other self had committed.

"I'm not sorry," she snarled, addressing the broken window and the shadow that had stood there, "I'm not sorry."

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"I knock knock knock," Drusilla sang, picking her way through the broken glass, "Upon the big front door. My mother smiles at me. 'Come in, come in, my child. You're just in time for tea.'"

She picked up a shard, but it was too damaged to show a reflection. Any reflection.

When she dropped it back to the ground, her hands were red. The ragged cross on her palm bled and burned at the same time. It was deliciously painful.

She should have remembered to lock the door.

Perhaps she should've, for as soon as Angel figures out that the door is unlocked, he's twisting the handle, throwing it open and launching himself inside. Had he still been a vampire, he would've been able to smell the blood on her hands long before the door granted him entrance. As a human, however, he only notices the cuts on her hands when he reaches her, taking her own in his and staring down at the crimson liquid which makes his stomach churn unpleasantly in that way he always found irritating about being human. Revulsion to blood was so foreign for a vampire -- or former vampire, in his current glitched state.

"What happened?" He asked her.

How could anyone - even a human - be revolted by something so pure and so true? There were times when Drusilla thought that blood was the only real thing in the world. It had no choice but to tell the truth, while she spoke in riddles and shared half truths because her friends and enemies alike were rarely ready for her words.

"I broke the window," she answered honestly, looking up at Angel with unblinking eyes. "It was trying to tell me a story."

Edited 2011-07-19 08:11 (UTC)

Taking gentle hold of her wrists, Angel tugged her back towards the bed, hoping she would comply. He wasn't strong enough right now to force her to do anything she didn't want to, chip or no chip. And how it still was to interact with his childe while he was human and without the connection between them that bound her to him.

"Tell me," he urged. "What was the story?"

Drusilla tensed at first, but, because the vampire was a frightened child in so many ways, she soon sank down on to the bed and collapsed limply against him. When she buried her face in his neck, it was because she needed comfort, not because she was hungry. She tried to close her ears to the pulse that beat in his neck and the blood that hummed beneath the surface.

"A story of a girl who never existed," she murmured, "A girl who never could."

Angel tensed at her words, a wave of guilt washing over him. While she could've been talking about something else entirely, he couldn't help but jump to the more obvious conclusion: The girl she could have been had he not taken an interest in her and drove her insane, then eded her life.

"It was just a story," he told her, cradling her against his chest like he imagined he would have a frightened young Connor had his son grew up at his side and not in some hell dimension.

She didn't blame him. If anything, she was grateful to him from saving her from a life she had never been supposed to live. He'd rescued her and raised her out of the light and into the darkness.

Drusilla hoped that he'd never let go.

"I'll write a better ending," she said hotly, against his shoulder, "I'll make it mine."

Perhaps not, but Angel blamed himself. He'd come to terms with a lot of what he did while soulless, accepting fate for what it was. There were volumes upon volumes in history about what he'd done while he claimed the name Angelus, but he couldn't do anything to change that. Nor could he hold doing them against himself. He'd been without a soul, evil, and it had simply been in his nature. It was all he knew in the new life Darla had bestowed upon him. He couldn't, however, forgive himself for what he did to Drusilla.

If he were being honest with himself, he'd recognize that part of that was due to Drusilla still being around and not a face lost to the sands of time like all his other victims. He'd turned her in order to preserve something he'd considered to be a masterpiece, a work of art found in the total destruction of a human being, and instead got a constant reminder of just how terrible he was capable of being.

"Pen it in a way the stars can't change."

Her eyes closed she imagined digging her teeth into the cool flesh that she felt against her cheek. The skin would yield easily to her sharp white fangs, but those days were long gone. Not just because the tin soldiers wouldn't like it, but because he wouldn't like it.

"I miss the stars. Nothing else sings the same."

024: The Saints Can't Help Me Now [Location: Hyperion Hotel / Accidental Visual]

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