Warning- angst abounds
Description: Spike goes to the only person he can when he's lost.
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Liam spoke no English. No, actually, he spoke 527 words of the language. One was yes the other 526 were from assorted pick- up lines and jokes. He used his vast vocabulary to get girls, who didn't speak Gallic, into bed.
With the simple parroted words: "So I'd ask myself, what is a lady of your station doing alone in an alley with the reputation that this one has?" His whole life changed, it ended. When he rose Darla had been angered to learn the pretty boy spoke virtually no English. Within three months she'd beaten the language home into his brain. Behold the power of negative reinforcement. The words he knew before he still said in his wide Irish brogue the rest was in Darla's own American accent. She would not allow him to speak in his own tongue.
Drusilla turned me and wandered off. I rose to the sound of his Gallic mutterings about dealing with responsibilities, wayward childer, and sleeping in the bed one makes. Looking back I think he would have killed me were it not for my next actions. Without thinking I asked in Gallic where I was, what had happened, and who the hell was he? A light had shone in his eyes that I have never seen again nor do I think I will ever see it again.
For some odd, unexplained reason the rules of decorum never applied when we spoke in Gallic. I looked him in the eye. I called him Liam. I could touch him unbidden. Hell, not to put too crass a point on it I could fuck him into the floor. But most importantly, he told me he loved me.
When I was no longer William, when I was Spike things were strained. I would come in at five AM. Angelus sick with worry would submerge it with anger. He would ask where I'd been and I in my insolent state would tell him that he wasn't my sire and to fuck off. Only after he had beaten, and sometimes raped, me would I start to apologized in Gallic. Then suddenly his eyes would fill with remorse and things settled down. I would tell him everything in the soft tongue: who I'd danced with and who I'd killed. The discussion ran to things as daily and asinine as what I had drank, where, and who was barkeeping.
These conversations would start with him laying on the bed while I perched on the opposite edge. Over an hour or two I crept closer and closer until finally I was laying beside him. Somehow I had managed to enter his bed unbidden. He would listen and hold me until the wee hours before sunset. He would kiss me gently, so uncharacteristically softly, and me world was shattered. The first time he made love to me, instead of beating me into a position where I couldn't say no, I wept. This fact was something that, while speaking English, he taunted me for ruthlessly. The one thing that was never mentioned in English was that he cried too.
And I thought of all of this while kissing him in an empty kitchen. I must have wandered off as the sudden pain was a shock when Angel bite my tongue with blunt teeth. I laughed into his mouth.
"You're not paying any attention. Are you?" he said mock sullenly. He ran his finger through my hair and grimaced "How did you get so dirty?"
"Hey! You're the one who's always into chains." I said trying to evade the question; he raised an eyebrow. "I climbed out of a grave that I haven't been interred in in over a hundred years, while trying to breath and bleeding red blood. Then I got the first boat I found and came home. Bathing wasn't high on my list of priorities."
"How long were you up before coming here?" asked Angel doing that patented look of worry and horror.
"Six days."
"Did you eat?"
"Yes!" I said trying to feign that I was horrified at his charge that I might not have. If he tweaked that bloody eyebrow again I was going to be forced to kill him. "A bowl of porridge and a bloomin' onion both of which I threw up and thus gave up on food."
"Jesus, how can you consider that to be taking care of yourself!?"
"I don't. That's why I came to you." I said suddenly finding my shoes endlessly interesting.
"Will," he said and trailed off not knowing what to say. Finally he sighed. "Let's get you into a nice hot bath." He took me by the arm like, you would with an invalid. The gesture made me laugh at the same time as it made me see red. To prove how frail I was not I threw him against the island, which shook with the force, and gave him a through necking. Between unneeded gasps he told me he loved me. . . in English.