Fallen AngelsBy Kristi
Sins
@--Buffy--@
I wake up screaming. My skin is too tight. It feels like I’m going to claw my way out of it. Maybe this is the way the swim team at Sunnydale felt before they turned into sea monsters. Maybe I’ll crawl out of my skin and the entire world will see what I look like inside, putrid and rotting.
He’s at my side immediately. He’s holding me and making comforting sounds. I don’t want him to touch me. He sets my skin on fire. I push his hands away. I scream over his soothing noises. I don’t want to be soothed. I want heroin. “Just call Mike.” I plead with him. “He’ll get me some.”
He doesn’t say anything and that makes everything worse. He just looks at me and I don’t think I’ve ever seen such pain, even mine. And I’m glad. I want him to hurt. I want him to feel pain. I want him to know how he hurt me. After all, this is his fault. He could have made it go away. I know I’m not being logical. It’s hard to be logical when you’re crawling out of your skin.
I’m shivering. It’s so cold and my skin is still screaming. I’m sweating and I’m completely gross and I wish he’d go somewhere else and stop looking at me like I’m the same girl he fell in love with.
“Go Away!” I scream. “You’re so damn good at it!”He doesn’t. Instead he comes closer. Why couldn’t he have done this the day I graduated? Why couldn’t he have done this when Mom died? Why did he have to be so damn good at leaving me then? He sits down on the bed. I pull up in a ball and try to get further away. He scoots closer and pulls me into his strong embrace. I scream and flail and hit him. He never stops holding, he never stops talking in quiet whispers. He doesn’t understand. At one time my body screamed for him like this. Now it just wants the heroin.
“Angel, get the hell away from!” I scream again. The nausea sweeps over me suddenly. “Oh God, I’m gonna be sick.” I mumble. He picks me up to carry me to the bathroom. I puke all over him. It serves him right. If he had left me the hell alone when I told him to he wouldn’t be dealing with this. I didn’t ask him to take me out of there. He probably thinks he saved me. He doesn’t know when he leaves me again I’ll die and it will be even worse. Every time he leaves it gets harder. I die a little more inside. You can only kill a girl so many times before she’s really gone, even a slayer. He carries me to the bathroom and sets me down on the cool tile floor next to the toilet. He holds my hair while I throw up again. He sits with me until the dry heaves pass. He removes his soiled shirt and sits back down on the floor with me.
I lay my cheek against his chest. It’s cool and that’s soothing to my tight, itchy skin. The silence of his chest is wonderful. There’s no constant thump thump thump to hurt my head or bring the nausea back on. His cool hands stroke my hair and he sings an Irish lullaby. He acts like it doesn’t matter that I smell like vomit.
“Buffy, do you want to go back to bed?” he asks.
I shake my head slightly. “Can we just stay right here?”
In answer he settles against the tile wall and rubs my back in slow circles.
*
*
*
@--Angel--@
She is stick thin, even skinnier then Fred. Her shoulder blades are sharp points beneath her delicate skin. I can feel each vertebra. Her spine stands out against the middle of her back. Her collarbone is a sharp ridge. I have never seen anyone so skinny. She has bruises all over her body. I don’t want to imagine how she got them, although after the encounter with Mike, I have a good idea. I’ll kill him. As soon as Buffy gets well enough to leave for a couple of hours I’ll track him and kill him. I left 17 lawyers for dead once, one scumbag will be nothing.
She’s finally fallen asleep in my arms. Her breath rattles in her chest. I pick her up gently and carry her back to the bed. She needs a shower. She smells of sweat, smoke, filth and drugs. I’ll settle for clean clothes, for the moment. I get a long sleeved shirt out of my closet. I slipped her dirty clothes off, trying not to notice that her stomach is concave and hip bones look like they will poke through her skin at any moment. I slide the shirt over her head and down her legs, pulling her thin arms through the sleeves. She stirs, but never wakes up.
I sit in a chair and watch her sleep. It was once one of my favorite pastimes. She always insisted on sleeping with her window open. I spent hours sitting on the window sill, watching over her sleep. She called me her Guardian Angel when she found out. She used to smile in her sleep. I’d imagine she was dreaming about me.
Now her dreams are haunted. She whimpers, drawing up into herself. She wrinkles her forehead and cries. I want to hold her and make the pain go away but I know our history. I’ll end up hurting her, whether I want to or not. The First Evil told me I was born to hurt her and it was right. I was also born to love her. I don’t know how those to correspond but I know they are both true.
I’m going to have to call Giles and let him know I’ve found her. I want to wait until she’s better. He will want to see her. She is, for all practical purposes, the daughter he never had. I thought losing her would kill him. He has stayed in Sunnydale all these years because he is afraid she will come back and find him gone. He wanted to be there when she came back. How do I tell him she was never going to come back? She was going to stay out there until her lifestyle ended up killing her. I wonder if she has been in LA all this time or if she had just gotten here. If she’s been living her the entire time I should have found her sooner. Logically I know there are 9,637,494 in Los Angeles alone, but when has logic ever applied to Buffy and I.
She shivers in her sleep. I pull another blanket up over her skeletal shoulders. She whispers my name in her sleep. I wonder if she has always done that, or if she senses me nearby. I slid into the bed next to her and wrap my body around her. In two hundred and fifty years I have done many horrific things. I was once the vampire that vampires feared. I could write a book on the many ways to torture someone without killing them. I have raped women and killed children. And for the last hundred and fifty years I have regretted every single action. I have felt more guilt then a hundred men. What I have done to Buffy rates as one of the worst. I have never wanted to walk into the sunrise more then I do right now.