Fic: All Souls
Nov. 28th, 2003 09:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
doyleNot sure if I can post this before it's on the index, but this is my Angel Book of Days fill-in fic.
Title: All Souls
Author: Doyle
Pairing: Just Connor
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: Up to 'Home'
Summary: Five months into his new life, Stephen celebrates Halloween.
Notes: For D.M.Evans who wanted Connor, Halloween, no slash and no C/A.
"My sweet boy."
The woman's voice was sugary-sweet, but her tone was so sad he wanted to cry for her. She was beautiful; golden-blonde hair and blue eyes and a face that was frustratingly familiar. He knew her - he'd always known her - but when he tried to pin that memory down to a place or a time it slipped out of reach.
"Who are you?" he asked. His voice sounded alien, as though he'd forgotten how to speak.
She cupped his cheek. It was like being caressed by a ghost, or by empty air. "My precious boy."
"Who are you?" he whispered. Then: "Who am I?"
And, as he always did, Stephen woke up.
**
He slumped in the chair beside the payphone and half-listened to Tracy talk about the Halloween party her friends were throwing. The dorm phones were right outside the TV room and he let his attention wander, dividing his listening time between his girlfriend and a Simpsons Treehouse of Horror rerun he'd seen a thousand times. Three years ago he'd been grounded for telling his little sister the real story of the monkey's paw. With added violence, of course. Cathy had had to sleep with their parents for two nights.
After a few minutes he'd tuned the phone conversation out completely.
Even Tracy sounded bored with her recitation of the costumes people in her dorm were going to wear. What had happened to him and Tracy, he wondered. The first few weeks of college he'd called her at NYU every day, spending hours doing the angsty transcontinental relationship thing. Now they seemed to have nothing to say to each other.
Whenever she asked how he was, he always said 'fine'. Never what he really wanted to say.
I'm having these weird dreams.
I asked my parents and they said I've never been to LA, even as a kid, but I know all these places around the city, and it's not just déjà vu, I swear. There was this building, this empty old hotel, and I could walk you around it blindfold.
Last night I came back from the library late, and I think someone followed me.
Yeah, and then she could call his parents and they could get a padded room ready.
"…even listening?"
"Sorry, Trace, what'd you say?"
She was quiet for such a long time that he thought they'd lost the connection. He was about to hang up and call her back when she said, "this isn't working."
He closed his eyes. Weird how you could expect something, think you wanted it, and still have it blindside you at Mach five. "Why?"
Another drawn-out silence. Girls probably practised stuff like this, he thought. Maybe they exchanged ways to make the break-up process as painful as possible for the guy. "You've changed, Stephen," she said, finally.
"We're in college," he said, twisting the phone cord between his fingers. "Everybody changes." He pulled the cord straight and released it. It slowly twisted back to its original shape.
There was a soft sigh. "More than that. You've been different," she said. "Ever since the summer. You're so… I dunno. Out there."
The jangle of title music filtered out from the door to his left. In a minute people would be heading to their rooms to change. Getting dumped in public, even by phone, wasn't a college experience he was particularly eager to get under his belt.
"I gotta go," he said brusquely. "I'll talk to you later in the week." He slammed the phone down.
The hard plastic shattered in his hand.
He stared at the pieces of the broken receiver. It didn't really need technical expertise to know it was trashed. It could have been in a fight with a monster truck.
"I didn't even hit it hard," he murmured, pushing a hand back through his hair. He glanced around. The hallway was still empty. Crashes and breakages were common enough that nobody had come out to investigate.
His mom's upbringing meant that his instinct was to sweep them up, then go and report to the warden that he broke it and offer to pay. But admitting that he'd done it would mean being asked questions about how, and he didn't have any answers to give.
His room was only three doors away, on the first floor. He swept aside a pile of comics and threw himself stomach-down onto the bed, chin resting on his crossed arms. He didn't want to think about Tracy, or about going Bruce Banner on the equipment. He kind of wanted to sleep, but that never seemed to go well these days.
He glanced at the spiral-bound notebook on the floor. He'd felt self-conscious at first - a dream diary sounded like the pink journal Cathy kept when she was ten, the one he picked the lock on and teased her later about her crush on Adam Marcus. It had been better than he expected. After the first few nights of disorientation and scrabbling for a pen before the memory could escape, it just became habit.
The disjointed words wouldn't make sense to anyone else. Most of the time they didn't make sense to him, either. 'Fire from sky -> biblical?' he'd written in a few places, cross-referenced with notes from the dream books he'd been taking from the library. 'Blonde woman' came up a lot of times.
So did 'blood'.
Stephen closed his eyes and tried to let himself drift. He'd been reading meditation books lately. Clearing his mind of all thoughts sounded good. No thoughts, no dreams.
He really didn't want to think about words like 'paranoid schizophrenia'.
**
"You're not in costume," Dex said when he opened the door. She was dressed as Snow White. The dress showed more cleavage than he remembered from the Disney version, and had obviously been altered to accommodate her expanding waistline.
"I was asleep," he lied.
"Oh, did I wake you? Come out here," she said, not waiting for an answer. "Everyone else is upstairs, I need help."
He hurriedly stepped outside, closing the door behind him. "Is the baby okay? Should I get Si?"
She patted her bump. "Nah, little one's fine. There's a dead bird on the porch. Wanted to get it thrown away before someone trampled it, but bending over's kind of an issue." She frowned. "Plus I think I read something about staying away from birds in the third trimester, but maybe I made that up."
"A bird?" he said, heart dropping like a stone.
"Yeah." She must have read something in his expression, because she said, "hey, if you're squeamish, that's cool. I can get my worthless boyfriend to say bye, bye, birdie."
"How'd it die?" he asked, thinking: coincidence. Has to be.
Dex made a face. "Some sick fucks. I thought it hit a window, but there was this pile of little sticks with it. Like somebody killed it on purpose. Guess it's somebody's idea of funny. Blair House. Blair Witch Project. You want I should get Si?"
"It's fine," he told her. "I'll deal with it."
"You sure?" She looked down at herself, a smile spreading across her face. "Hey, somebody's awake." She grabbed his hand and, before he could react, splayed it flat against her stomach.
He jerked back as if he'd been burned. He shook his head, clearing it, and when he looked again there was no blood on his hands, no bloody palmprint on her body. Just the crimson of her cloak and the quizzical look on her face.
"…sorry," he said. "I'll go and… yeah."
"Typical male," she called after him. "You can stomach those gorefests you watch, but you freak out at a baby kicking."
He stepped out onto the porch, leaving the door open. Any hope that he might have been wrong evaporated. It was just like last time.
Tiny bundles of twigs flanked the tiny body on both sides. He picked one up, holding it under the hall light. It had been tied with dark threads, so thin they were nearly invisible. The bird was a sparrow, a small one. Its head lay at an awkward angle.
That made two. In as many days.
**
By the time he made it upstairs the party had spilled out over most of the second floor. Most doors were open to the walls, smaller parties branching off in each bedroom. A couple of different stereos were battling for dominance. Catwoman raced past him, shrieking laughter, and he flattened himself against the wall as Austin Powers hurtled after her.
He looked down at his white costume, feeling underdressed. When he was a kid, he'd spent most of October planning his Halloween costume. This year he'd had other things on his mind, so he'd gone for the easy option.
He reached the room at the end of the hall. The door was open, as he'd expected. "Hey," he called.
"Stevie!" Si said magnanimously, pulling him into the room. "Guess what I am."
Stephen took in the blue surgical scrubs and the red paper hearts glued to them. "Are you the love doctor?"
The older boy slapped him on the shoulder. "Take a seat."
Stephen picked his way between the people sprawled and sitting on the floor. Dex and a girl he didn't know shifted to give him space on the bed. He perched on the edge.
"What are you?" the girl asked. She was wearing a black dress, too much eyeliner and a pair of black, glittering wings.
"You're such a pleb, Raven," Dex laughed. "Stevie's a Star Wars nut."
"I'm Luke Skywalker," he said.
"Oh," she said. "I'm a fairy." She twirled her wand. It was black, too, and the star on the end almost took out his eye. She leaned in and tapped the wand to his forehead. "You shall have a wish, Mister Skywalker."
She smelled faintly of pot and the perfume Tracy used to wear. Something like homesickness swept over him.
The fairy stuck out a shaky hand. "I'm Raven."
"Stephen," he said. "Stevie. Whatever."
He was willing to bet that her mom didn't call her Raven, but that was typical of Dex's friends. It fit with the pseudo-goth makeup, too. She probably spelled it "Rayvynne" and thought it made her deep. Stephen didn't really get that; what, you could change your name and be a totally different person?
"Raven's from Hamilton House," Dex said. "She's gonna be a nurse."
"I'm here in case the baby comes early." She squinted up at the disco ball on the ceiling, craning her neck around to follow the lights. "Ooh, shiny."
Stephen raised his eyebrows. Dex grinned and shook her head. "You want some, Stevie? Si! Hey!"
Si stumbled over. Stephen took the offered joint between his thumb and first finger. He took a drag, not pulling it too deeply into his lungs. He was wary of altered states of consciousness, just recently.
"You want a toke, baby?" Si dropped onto the bed beside his girlfriend, hitching an arm around her.
"Nah, I shouldn't."
Stephen suddenly wanted to lecture her about the effects of secondhand smoke on unborn children, but he kept quiet. Not as if he was the father. He wasn't even sure Si was - their relationship was so on-again-off-again that it was hard to know. In the month that he'd known them he'd never even worked out what Dex did, except that she wasn't at college and that her residence in the dorm was unofficial.
In his most private fantasies, the ones he wouldn't write down in the dream diary or anywhere else, he thought Dex was hot. That squicked him and made him uncomfortable around her, sometimes; it felt wrong to think that way about somebody who was going to be a mom.
Maybe this older women thing was why things had gone wrong with Tracy, he thought. Dex was hardly Mrs. Robinson material, but she had to be at least twenty-one. He'd noticed that, lately, that girls his own age seemed dumb and one-dimensional. It hadn't mattered, because he was with Tracy, but if he was a swinging bachelor again…
The pot was definitely having an effect. He'd been staring down Dex's dress for the past two minutes. He looked away, hoping his face didn't look as hot as it felt.
The joint completed another circuit of the room. He inhaled more deeply this time, enjoying the warmth and the buzz. The tension he'd been carrying round for weeks eased, and he wiggled backwards until he was leaning against the wall, legs stretched in front of him.
"What are we doing tonight?" he asked. He changed his accent, just to see what it sounded like - made it more precise, kind of English at the vowels.
'Raven' leaned into his shoulder. "We could tell ghost stories."
"We're going to the place," Si said. "The club. Uh." He snapped his fingers. "Doll's House."
At least it was nearby. "Good," Stephen said. His eyelids were too heavy. He let them droop closed. "I don't think I can walk far."
Someone shoved him lightly. "Mile in my shoes, sweetie. Mile in my shoes." Dex. He smiled.
"We can get cabs," he said.
"Your phone's totalled," Raven said. "I saw it on my way up here." She giggled. "Maybe it was the bogeyman."
Stephen grimaced.
"I've got a cell," Si said. "Anyways, they don't open doors till fifteen after eleven. It's only…."
Stephen opened his eyes and checked his watch. "Ten before ten," he said, and grinned. Both hands were in the same place. That was just so cool.
**
"And it turns out the guy was only trying to warn her about the maniac in her back seat," Dex said, sounding bored. "Please, I knew that one in second grade. Told it better, too."
The girl who'd been telling the story sat back, looking sulky. Stephen tried to feel sorry for her, but couldn't manage it. Trying to think too much was like swimming through jello. He was comfortable, wedged between Raven's overt flirtatiousness and Dex's familiar warmth, and now that the lights were off and the candles had been lit the room looked more suitably spooky.
There was a tugging at his belt. "Is this your lightsaber?" Raven asked, voice breathy and warm against his ear. "Can I see it?"
"S'just a toy."
Her fingers brushed against something that definitely wasn't a toy. Stephen laughed. It came out more giggly than he expected, and that made him laugh more.
"Hey," Si said, "did any of you ever see a vampire?"
The room fell quiet. Stephen stopped laughing. "Vampires aren't real," he said, feeling all of a sudden totally sober. He brushed Raven's hand away.
"Telling you. Swear on my life, on my baby's life…"
"Shut the fuck up, idiot," Dex said mildly.
Stephen leaned forward for a better view of Si's face. He looked deadly serious, for all that he was clearly stoned out of his mind.
"This was during the eclipse last year," he went on, oblivious.
"Eclipse?" Stephen said. "An eclipse of the sun? Where?"
Si spread his hands wide, nearly knocking over a candle. "Right here in The Angels, my friend."
He relaxed. "There was no solar eclipse last year. Not in America. My dad's an amateur astronomy freak. He would so think that was the greatest thing ever. I'd still be hearing about it."
"I remember that," a girl he recognised from his history class said. "It went on for days and days. Like the sun went away." She blinked slowly. "But, you know the weird thing? I asked my mom about it and she never even remembered it happened."
Stephen looked around. The few people who were conscious and paying any kind of attention looked as non-plussed as he felt.
"What, were you high?" he asked, then felt stupid. Of course they were. Mile-High Si, that was his full nickname. Hadn't been clean since he was twelve. History-girl tended to look spacy and happy in their classes, too, and nobody looked happy in Dr. Millarship's company without chemical enhancement.
"Anyway," Si said, "I'm walking down the street, on my way back here from the store - I needed wraps - and this guy just jumps me."
"You got mugged," Stephen said, "I thought that was meant to happen in LA?"
"This guy didn't want my wallet. He wanted my blood."
Dex snorted. "Bitch, please."
"Hey," Si said, "I don't swear on the life of my baby if'n I don't know I was attacked by a vicious creature of the night. You should've seen his face. It wasn't human. It was all -" he moved his hands in front of his own face - "lumpy."
"That's a vampire, all right." They looked over at the speaker. He was slumped by the blank TV, his arm curled around another guy. His friend nuzzled his neck. "Hey, I'm from Sunnydale, we know this stuff."
"You're as high as he is, Scott," Dex told him.
"How'd you get away?" Stephen asked Si.
For the first time, he looked unsure. "I can't… somebody got him away from me. Somebody saved me." He was staring at Stephen now, with an intensity that frightened him. "Can't see his face. It's like it's right there, only I can't remember."
His mouth was dry. "Vampires aren't real," he said again.
Si held his gaze for a long moment, as if he was trying to think of words.
In the end, he just said, "if we're going to the Doll Casa, we better go now."
**
Stephen trailed a little after the rest of the group as they left the building. Across the campus, in the small patch of trees, tiny flickering lights wheeled around like languid fireflies. He was puzzled, until he remembered seeing the posters about the Wicca group's Samhain celebrations. He didn't fully understand what they did, but assumed it was something magic.
No reason at all why that should give him prickles on the back of the neck.
"Stevie, come on," Raven shouted back to him. He got a decent view of her legs for the first time. They were nice legs, longer than Tracy's, and the dress was very short. And she seemed to like him.
He could have fun. This could be a good night. Had to put stupid dreams and kids' fairy stories out of his mind.
No such thing as vampires.
Whisper of a touch across the back of his neck, like a ghost's fingers. He wheeled around, but there was nobody there.
**
The Doll's House was noisy. Noisy was good. Noisy meant it was hard to think.
The inside of the club was black year-round, but a few orange streamers and plastic jack o'lanterns were stuck to the walls. Stephen was one of the few people wearing white, and he realised why as soon as he stepped under the lights. The fluorescence made him look radioactive. He moved off the dance-floor and into the darker area near the bar, where he amused himself by counting the number of comics characters he could see. DC were better represented than Marvel. They were both totally outnumbered by people dressed as vampires.
He watched the spotlights swing arcs across the ceiling. At a certain angle they would suddenly illuminate the china dolls set high on the walls. For a second the beam caught a row of glassy, glittering eyes, and then the light dropped back and they were gone.
He tried not to look at the dolls.
The couple of drags of pot had long since worn off. Angry metal music had to serve as a replacement brain-cell murdering device. He shoved his way through the crowd at the bar and bought beer on Dex's ID, the bartender apparently not caring that he was neither female nor noticeably African-American.
He let Raven drag him out to dance, and weighed up the probability of her sleeping with him. He judged it was high, given by how she was winding herself around him, even on the songs where everyone else was moshing.
He was about to kiss her when she pulled him towards her and yelled, "that creepy girl keeps staring at you."
"What girl?" he shouted back, hardly able to hear himself.
Raven pointed, looking pissed off. "The goth chick. God, what's she meant to be, a vampire? Lame."
In the kind of movies his mom watched there was usually a moment when the hero and the heroine saw one another across a crowded room and everything stopped. The background music faded, the other people went into soft focus, and there was nothing in the world but the two of them.
He'd never realized that could actually happen.
The girl - woman - wasn't dancing. She was stock still as everyone else moved around her, staring at him as if she could see through his skin and bones and straight to his soul.
She was so beautiful it was unreal; like a David Mack picture made three-dimensional.
Stephen couldn't remember how to work his lungs.
The woman smiled, extended a hand, and crooked a finger towards him.
**
The light from the hallway spilled out onto the dark porch. Dex peered out, one arm curled around her stomach.
"I lost my keys," he said apologetically.
Her eyes went wide. "Stephen?"
He found himself with an armful of Dex. The baby kicked against his stomach. There was an old woman who swallowed a spider that wriggled and jiggled and tickled inside her.
"Where the hell have you been?" she said, when she pulled away. "Fuck's sake, Stevie, you were gone three days. We thought that skanky goth chick you skipped out with murdered you."
"I've been going through some stuff," he said, with every bit of false sincerity he could pull off without laughing. "I'm sorry I worried you. I really didn't think anyone would notice I wasn't here."
She hugged him again. "Of course I noticed."
The clothes he was wearing were a size too large. The previous owner's blood was still on the shirtsleeves. She hadn't noticed a damn thing.
Humans were idiots.
The pulse in her neck throbbed beneath his mouth. He licked his lips.
She released him, and brushed at her eyes with a watery grin. "Well, get in here," she said, cuffing him on the shoulder.
He smiled.
**
"Naughty little bird to fly away all alone," Drusilla scolded him. He reached for her hand as she glided through the doorway. She was so elegant, so graceful; he'd never seen anything like her. Never loved anything like her.
"I'm sorry," he said, meaning it. "There was something I had to do."
She peered around as if she could see the devastation upstairs as well as smell the blood in the air. "A house of broken dollies."
Dex's body had been arranged by the stairs. He watched Dru anxiously; in his past life he'd known nothing of Caligula, but Stephen had. He hoped she understood the tableau, and that it was a tribute to her. It was the best way he could think of to thank her for what she'd done for him. The stories in her head went all wrong, she'd told him, and she was muddled until the stars told her what Daddy had done. She'd felt his blood calling to hers, she said, and put true pictures in his mind.
He hadn't dreamed since his death. He didn't need to, now.
She touched his cheek with one long finger. "My baby brother does ever such good work."
He smiled.
"And now we can go to the box of law-people," she said. "Daddy will be so pleased to see us. A happy family we shall be."
He stroked his thumb across the backs of her fingers. "Family."
There was a whimper from one of the bedrooms, so faint a human wouldn't have heard it at all.
He kissed Drusilla on the lips, a chaste peck, and released her hand. "Stay here."
He followed the noise, slipping through the house as silently as a shadow. He remembered how to move that way, now, and it was like suddenly relearning how to walk after months of paralysis. He relished his own stealth, and the scream the girl emitted when he swung open the door.
"I thought you were dead," he frowned.
Raven looked up at him. He guessed she couldn't see well; her hair, matted with blood, was obscuring her face, and she couldn't push it back with crooked, broken arms. The bone in her left arm was poking through the skin, he noted dispassionately. He toed it with his boot. She gave out a strangled gasp.
He crouched down beside her and stroked back her hair; the blood streaked off onto his hand. There was so much there already that it didn't make a great difference. She stank of blood and fear and Tracy's perfume.
He wondered if Dru would like a trip to New York, once they'd dealt with Angel and the others.
"Please," she whispered. "Please."
He waited, but she didn't complete the plea. Mercy, he guessed. Her life. Less likely, she was so far gone that she didn't realise who'd done this, and she was asking for help.
"What's your name?" he asked. "Your real name."
Her eyes were blue or green, he remembered. They looked black, now, the pupil totally dilated. Even with vampire hearing, he barely made out her answer.
"Michelle."
That was the name her parents would put on her grave. Not Raven. They'd visit every week and cry for her.
More than his father had done for him. He scowled at the memory: pounding heart and a line of fire across his throat as the blade slashed down. His reflection was gone, so he couldn't check for a scar on his neck. He couldn't feel one. Stephen hadn't had one, but Stephen wasn't real.
"My name's Connor," he told her, and snapped her neck.
He was beginning to love that sound.
END
Title: All Souls
Author: Doyle
Pairing: Just Connor
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: Up to 'Home'
Summary: Five months into his new life, Stephen celebrates Halloween.
Notes: For D.M.Evans who wanted Connor, Halloween, no slash and no C/A.
"My sweet boy."
The woman's voice was sugary-sweet, but her tone was so sad he wanted to cry for her. She was beautiful; golden-blonde hair and blue eyes and a face that was frustratingly familiar. He knew her - he'd always known her - but when he tried to pin that memory down to a place or a time it slipped out of reach.
"Who are you?" he asked. His voice sounded alien, as though he'd forgotten how to speak.
She cupped his cheek. It was like being caressed by a ghost, or by empty air. "My precious boy."
"Who are you?" he whispered. Then: "Who am I?"
And, as he always did, Stephen woke up.
**
He slumped in the chair beside the payphone and half-listened to Tracy talk about the Halloween party her friends were throwing. The dorm phones were right outside the TV room and he let his attention wander, dividing his listening time between his girlfriend and a Simpsons Treehouse of Horror rerun he'd seen a thousand times. Three years ago he'd been grounded for telling his little sister the real story of the monkey's paw. With added violence, of course. Cathy had had to sleep with their parents for two nights.
After a few minutes he'd tuned the phone conversation out completely.
Even Tracy sounded bored with her recitation of the costumes people in her dorm were going to wear. What had happened to him and Tracy, he wondered. The first few weeks of college he'd called her at NYU every day, spending hours doing the angsty transcontinental relationship thing. Now they seemed to have nothing to say to each other.
Whenever she asked how he was, he always said 'fine'. Never what he really wanted to say.
I'm having these weird dreams.
I asked my parents and they said I've never been to LA, even as a kid, but I know all these places around the city, and it's not just déjà vu, I swear. There was this building, this empty old hotel, and I could walk you around it blindfold.
Last night I came back from the library late, and I think someone followed me.
Yeah, and then she could call his parents and they could get a padded room ready.
"…even listening?"
"Sorry, Trace, what'd you say?"
She was quiet for such a long time that he thought they'd lost the connection. He was about to hang up and call her back when she said, "this isn't working."
He closed his eyes. Weird how you could expect something, think you wanted it, and still have it blindside you at Mach five. "Why?"
Another drawn-out silence. Girls probably practised stuff like this, he thought. Maybe they exchanged ways to make the break-up process as painful as possible for the guy. "You've changed, Stephen," she said, finally.
"We're in college," he said, twisting the phone cord between his fingers. "Everybody changes." He pulled the cord straight and released it. It slowly twisted back to its original shape.
There was a soft sigh. "More than that. You've been different," she said. "Ever since the summer. You're so… I dunno. Out there."
The jangle of title music filtered out from the door to his left. In a minute people would be heading to their rooms to change. Getting dumped in public, even by phone, wasn't a college experience he was particularly eager to get under his belt.
"I gotta go," he said brusquely. "I'll talk to you later in the week." He slammed the phone down.
The hard plastic shattered in his hand.
He stared at the pieces of the broken receiver. It didn't really need technical expertise to know it was trashed. It could have been in a fight with a monster truck.
"I didn't even hit it hard," he murmured, pushing a hand back through his hair. He glanced around. The hallway was still empty. Crashes and breakages were common enough that nobody had come out to investigate.
His mom's upbringing meant that his instinct was to sweep them up, then go and report to the warden that he broke it and offer to pay. But admitting that he'd done it would mean being asked questions about how, and he didn't have any answers to give.
His room was only three doors away, on the first floor. He swept aside a pile of comics and threw himself stomach-down onto the bed, chin resting on his crossed arms. He didn't want to think about Tracy, or about going Bruce Banner on the equipment. He kind of wanted to sleep, but that never seemed to go well these days.
He glanced at the spiral-bound notebook on the floor. He'd felt self-conscious at first - a dream diary sounded like the pink journal Cathy kept when she was ten, the one he picked the lock on and teased her later about her crush on Adam Marcus. It had been better than he expected. After the first few nights of disorientation and scrabbling for a pen before the memory could escape, it just became habit.
The disjointed words wouldn't make sense to anyone else. Most of the time they didn't make sense to him, either. 'Fire from sky -> biblical?' he'd written in a few places, cross-referenced with notes from the dream books he'd been taking from the library. 'Blonde woman' came up a lot of times.
So did 'blood'.
Stephen closed his eyes and tried to let himself drift. He'd been reading meditation books lately. Clearing his mind of all thoughts sounded good. No thoughts, no dreams.
He really didn't want to think about words like 'paranoid schizophrenia'.
**
"You're not in costume," Dex said when he opened the door. She was dressed as Snow White. The dress showed more cleavage than he remembered from the Disney version, and had obviously been altered to accommodate her expanding waistline.
"I was asleep," he lied.
"Oh, did I wake you? Come out here," she said, not waiting for an answer. "Everyone else is upstairs, I need help."
He hurriedly stepped outside, closing the door behind him. "Is the baby okay? Should I get Si?"
She patted her bump. "Nah, little one's fine. There's a dead bird on the porch. Wanted to get it thrown away before someone trampled it, but bending over's kind of an issue." She frowned. "Plus I think I read something about staying away from birds in the third trimester, but maybe I made that up."
"A bird?" he said, heart dropping like a stone.
"Yeah." She must have read something in his expression, because she said, "hey, if you're squeamish, that's cool. I can get my worthless boyfriend to say bye, bye, birdie."
"How'd it die?" he asked, thinking: coincidence. Has to be.
Dex made a face. "Some sick fucks. I thought it hit a window, but there was this pile of little sticks with it. Like somebody killed it on purpose. Guess it's somebody's idea of funny. Blair House. Blair Witch Project. You want I should get Si?"
"It's fine," he told her. "I'll deal with it."
"You sure?" She looked down at herself, a smile spreading across her face. "Hey, somebody's awake." She grabbed his hand and, before he could react, splayed it flat against her stomach.
He jerked back as if he'd been burned. He shook his head, clearing it, and when he looked again there was no blood on his hands, no bloody palmprint on her body. Just the crimson of her cloak and the quizzical look on her face.
"…sorry," he said. "I'll go and… yeah."
"Typical male," she called after him. "You can stomach those gorefests you watch, but you freak out at a baby kicking."
He stepped out onto the porch, leaving the door open. Any hope that he might have been wrong evaporated. It was just like last time.
Tiny bundles of twigs flanked the tiny body on both sides. He picked one up, holding it under the hall light. It had been tied with dark threads, so thin they were nearly invisible. The bird was a sparrow, a small one. Its head lay at an awkward angle.
That made two. In as many days.
**
By the time he made it upstairs the party had spilled out over most of the second floor. Most doors were open to the walls, smaller parties branching off in each bedroom. A couple of different stereos were battling for dominance. Catwoman raced past him, shrieking laughter, and he flattened himself against the wall as Austin Powers hurtled after her.
He looked down at his white costume, feeling underdressed. When he was a kid, he'd spent most of October planning his Halloween costume. This year he'd had other things on his mind, so he'd gone for the easy option.
He reached the room at the end of the hall. The door was open, as he'd expected. "Hey," he called.
"Stevie!" Si said magnanimously, pulling him into the room. "Guess what I am."
Stephen took in the blue surgical scrubs and the red paper hearts glued to them. "Are you the love doctor?"
The older boy slapped him on the shoulder. "Take a seat."
Stephen picked his way between the people sprawled and sitting on the floor. Dex and a girl he didn't know shifted to give him space on the bed. He perched on the edge.
"What are you?" the girl asked. She was wearing a black dress, too much eyeliner and a pair of black, glittering wings.
"You're such a pleb, Raven," Dex laughed. "Stevie's a Star Wars nut."
"I'm Luke Skywalker," he said.
"Oh," she said. "I'm a fairy." She twirled her wand. It was black, too, and the star on the end almost took out his eye. She leaned in and tapped the wand to his forehead. "You shall have a wish, Mister Skywalker."
She smelled faintly of pot and the perfume Tracy used to wear. Something like homesickness swept over him.
The fairy stuck out a shaky hand. "I'm Raven."
"Stephen," he said. "Stevie. Whatever."
He was willing to bet that her mom didn't call her Raven, but that was typical of Dex's friends. It fit with the pseudo-goth makeup, too. She probably spelled it "Rayvynne" and thought it made her deep. Stephen didn't really get that; what, you could change your name and be a totally different person?
"Raven's from Hamilton House," Dex said. "She's gonna be a nurse."
"I'm here in case the baby comes early." She squinted up at the disco ball on the ceiling, craning her neck around to follow the lights. "Ooh, shiny."
Stephen raised his eyebrows. Dex grinned and shook her head. "You want some, Stevie? Si! Hey!"
Si stumbled over. Stephen took the offered joint between his thumb and first finger. He took a drag, not pulling it too deeply into his lungs. He was wary of altered states of consciousness, just recently.
"You want a toke, baby?" Si dropped onto the bed beside his girlfriend, hitching an arm around her.
"Nah, I shouldn't."
Stephen suddenly wanted to lecture her about the effects of secondhand smoke on unborn children, but he kept quiet. Not as if he was the father. He wasn't even sure Si was - their relationship was so on-again-off-again that it was hard to know. In the month that he'd known them he'd never even worked out what Dex did, except that she wasn't at college and that her residence in the dorm was unofficial.
In his most private fantasies, the ones he wouldn't write down in the dream diary or anywhere else, he thought Dex was hot. That squicked him and made him uncomfortable around her, sometimes; it felt wrong to think that way about somebody who was going to be a mom.
Maybe this older women thing was why things had gone wrong with Tracy, he thought. Dex was hardly Mrs. Robinson material, but she had to be at least twenty-one. He'd noticed that, lately, that girls his own age seemed dumb and one-dimensional. It hadn't mattered, because he was with Tracy, but if he was a swinging bachelor again…
The pot was definitely having an effect. He'd been staring down Dex's dress for the past two minutes. He looked away, hoping his face didn't look as hot as it felt.
The joint completed another circuit of the room. He inhaled more deeply this time, enjoying the warmth and the buzz. The tension he'd been carrying round for weeks eased, and he wiggled backwards until he was leaning against the wall, legs stretched in front of him.
"What are we doing tonight?" he asked. He changed his accent, just to see what it sounded like - made it more precise, kind of English at the vowels.
'Raven' leaned into his shoulder. "We could tell ghost stories."
"We're going to the place," Si said. "The club. Uh." He snapped his fingers. "Doll's House."
At least it was nearby. "Good," Stephen said. His eyelids were too heavy. He let them droop closed. "I don't think I can walk far."
Someone shoved him lightly. "Mile in my shoes, sweetie. Mile in my shoes." Dex. He smiled.
"We can get cabs," he said.
"Your phone's totalled," Raven said. "I saw it on my way up here." She giggled. "Maybe it was the bogeyman."
Stephen grimaced.
"I've got a cell," Si said. "Anyways, they don't open doors till fifteen after eleven. It's only…."
Stephen opened his eyes and checked his watch. "Ten before ten," he said, and grinned. Both hands were in the same place. That was just so cool.
**
"And it turns out the guy was only trying to warn her about the maniac in her back seat," Dex said, sounding bored. "Please, I knew that one in second grade. Told it better, too."
The girl who'd been telling the story sat back, looking sulky. Stephen tried to feel sorry for her, but couldn't manage it. Trying to think too much was like swimming through jello. He was comfortable, wedged between Raven's overt flirtatiousness and Dex's familiar warmth, and now that the lights were off and the candles had been lit the room looked more suitably spooky.
There was a tugging at his belt. "Is this your lightsaber?" Raven asked, voice breathy and warm against his ear. "Can I see it?"
"S'just a toy."
Her fingers brushed against something that definitely wasn't a toy. Stephen laughed. It came out more giggly than he expected, and that made him laugh more.
"Hey," Si said, "did any of you ever see a vampire?"
The room fell quiet. Stephen stopped laughing. "Vampires aren't real," he said, feeling all of a sudden totally sober. He brushed Raven's hand away.
"Telling you. Swear on my life, on my baby's life…"
"Shut the fuck up, idiot," Dex said mildly.
Stephen leaned forward for a better view of Si's face. He looked deadly serious, for all that he was clearly stoned out of his mind.
"This was during the eclipse last year," he went on, oblivious.
"Eclipse?" Stephen said. "An eclipse of the sun? Where?"
Si spread his hands wide, nearly knocking over a candle. "Right here in The Angels, my friend."
He relaxed. "There was no solar eclipse last year. Not in America. My dad's an amateur astronomy freak. He would so think that was the greatest thing ever. I'd still be hearing about it."
"I remember that," a girl he recognised from his history class said. "It went on for days and days. Like the sun went away." She blinked slowly. "But, you know the weird thing? I asked my mom about it and she never even remembered it happened."
Stephen looked around. The few people who were conscious and paying any kind of attention looked as non-plussed as he felt.
"What, were you high?" he asked, then felt stupid. Of course they were. Mile-High Si, that was his full nickname. Hadn't been clean since he was twelve. History-girl tended to look spacy and happy in their classes, too, and nobody looked happy in Dr. Millarship's company without chemical enhancement.
"Anyway," Si said, "I'm walking down the street, on my way back here from the store - I needed wraps - and this guy just jumps me."
"You got mugged," Stephen said, "I thought that was meant to happen in LA?"
"This guy didn't want my wallet. He wanted my blood."
Dex snorted. "Bitch, please."
"Hey," Si said, "I don't swear on the life of my baby if'n I don't know I was attacked by a vicious creature of the night. You should've seen his face. It wasn't human. It was all -" he moved his hands in front of his own face - "lumpy."
"That's a vampire, all right." They looked over at the speaker. He was slumped by the blank TV, his arm curled around another guy. His friend nuzzled his neck. "Hey, I'm from Sunnydale, we know this stuff."
"You're as high as he is, Scott," Dex told him.
"How'd you get away?" Stephen asked Si.
For the first time, he looked unsure. "I can't… somebody got him away from me. Somebody saved me." He was staring at Stephen now, with an intensity that frightened him. "Can't see his face. It's like it's right there, only I can't remember."
His mouth was dry. "Vampires aren't real," he said again.
Si held his gaze for a long moment, as if he was trying to think of words.
In the end, he just said, "if we're going to the Doll Casa, we better go now."
**
Stephen trailed a little after the rest of the group as they left the building. Across the campus, in the small patch of trees, tiny flickering lights wheeled around like languid fireflies. He was puzzled, until he remembered seeing the posters about the Wicca group's Samhain celebrations. He didn't fully understand what they did, but assumed it was something magic.
No reason at all why that should give him prickles on the back of the neck.
"Stevie, come on," Raven shouted back to him. He got a decent view of her legs for the first time. They were nice legs, longer than Tracy's, and the dress was very short. And she seemed to like him.
He could have fun. This could be a good night. Had to put stupid dreams and kids' fairy stories out of his mind.
No such thing as vampires.
Whisper of a touch across the back of his neck, like a ghost's fingers. He wheeled around, but there was nobody there.
**
The Doll's House was noisy. Noisy was good. Noisy meant it was hard to think.
The inside of the club was black year-round, but a few orange streamers and plastic jack o'lanterns were stuck to the walls. Stephen was one of the few people wearing white, and he realised why as soon as he stepped under the lights. The fluorescence made him look radioactive. He moved off the dance-floor and into the darker area near the bar, where he amused himself by counting the number of comics characters he could see. DC were better represented than Marvel. They were both totally outnumbered by people dressed as vampires.
He watched the spotlights swing arcs across the ceiling. At a certain angle they would suddenly illuminate the china dolls set high on the walls. For a second the beam caught a row of glassy, glittering eyes, and then the light dropped back and they were gone.
He tried not to look at the dolls.
The couple of drags of pot had long since worn off. Angry metal music had to serve as a replacement brain-cell murdering device. He shoved his way through the crowd at the bar and bought beer on Dex's ID, the bartender apparently not caring that he was neither female nor noticeably African-American.
He let Raven drag him out to dance, and weighed up the probability of her sleeping with him. He judged it was high, given by how she was winding herself around him, even on the songs where everyone else was moshing.
He was about to kiss her when she pulled him towards her and yelled, "that creepy girl keeps staring at you."
"What girl?" he shouted back, hardly able to hear himself.
Raven pointed, looking pissed off. "The goth chick. God, what's she meant to be, a vampire? Lame."
In the kind of movies his mom watched there was usually a moment when the hero and the heroine saw one another across a crowded room and everything stopped. The background music faded, the other people went into soft focus, and there was nothing in the world but the two of them.
He'd never realized that could actually happen.
The girl - woman - wasn't dancing. She was stock still as everyone else moved around her, staring at him as if she could see through his skin and bones and straight to his soul.
She was so beautiful it was unreal; like a David Mack picture made three-dimensional.
Stephen couldn't remember how to work his lungs.
The woman smiled, extended a hand, and crooked a finger towards him.
**
The light from the hallway spilled out onto the dark porch. Dex peered out, one arm curled around her stomach.
"I lost my keys," he said apologetically.
Her eyes went wide. "Stephen?"
He found himself with an armful of Dex. The baby kicked against his stomach. There was an old woman who swallowed a spider that wriggled and jiggled and tickled inside her.
"Where the hell have you been?" she said, when she pulled away. "Fuck's sake, Stevie, you were gone three days. We thought that skanky goth chick you skipped out with murdered you."
"I've been going through some stuff," he said, with every bit of false sincerity he could pull off without laughing. "I'm sorry I worried you. I really didn't think anyone would notice I wasn't here."
She hugged him again. "Of course I noticed."
The clothes he was wearing were a size too large. The previous owner's blood was still on the shirtsleeves. She hadn't noticed a damn thing.
Humans were idiots.
The pulse in her neck throbbed beneath his mouth. He licked his lips.
She released him, and brushed at her eyes with a watery grin. "Well, get in here," she said, cuffing him on the shoulder.
He smiled.
**
"Naughty little bird to fly away all alone," Drusilla scolded him. He reached for her hand as she glided through the doorway. She was so elegant, so graceful; he'd never seen anything like her. Never loved anything like her.
"I'm sorry," he said, meaning it. "There was something I had to do."
She peered around as if she could see the devastation upstairs as well as smell the blood in the air. "A house of broken dollies."
Dex's body had been arranged by the stairs. He watched Dru anxiously; in his past life he'd known nothing of Caligula, but Stephen had. He hoped she understood the tableau, and that it was a tribute to her. It was the best way he could think of to thank her for what she'd done for him. The stories in her head went all wrong, she'd told him, and she was muddled until the stars told her what Daddy had done. She'd felt his blood calling to hers, she said, and put true pictures in his mind.
He hadn't dreamed since his death. He didn't need to, now.
She touched his cheek with one long finger. "My baby brother does ever such good work."
He smiled.
"And now we can go to the box of law-people," she said. "Daddy will be so pleased to see us. A happy family we shall be."
He stroked his thumb across the backs of her fingers. "Family."
There was a whimper from one of the bedrooms, so faint a human wouldn't have heard it at all.
He kissed Drusilla on the lips, a chaste peck, and released her hand. "Stay here."
He followed the noise, slipping through the house as silently as a shadow. He remembered how to move that way, now, and it was like suddenly relearning how to walk after months of paralysis. He relished his own stealth, and the scream the girl emitted when he swung open the door.
"I thought you were dead," he frowned.
Raven looked up at him. He guessed she couldn't see well; her hair, matted with blood, was obscuring her face, and she couldn't push it back with crooked, broken arms. The bone in her left arm was poking through the skin, he noted dispassionately. He toed it with his boot. She gave out a strangled gasp.
He crouched down beside her and stroked back her hair; the blood streaked off onto his hand. There was so much there already that it didn't make a great difference. She stank of blood and fear and Tracy's perfume.
He wondered if Dru would like a trip to New York, once they'd dealt with Angel and the others.
"Please," she whispered. "Please."
He waited, but she didn't complete the plea. Mercy, he guessed. Her life. Less likely, she was so far gone that she didn't realise who'd done this, and she was asking for help.
"What's your name?" he asked. "Your real name."
Her eyes were blue or green, he remembered. They looked black, now, the pupil totally dilated. Even with vampire hearing, he barely made out her answer.
"Michelle."
That was the name her parents would put on her grave. Not Raven. They'd visit every week and cry for her.
More than his father had done for him. He scowled at the memory: pounding heart and a line of fire across his throat as the blade slashed down. His reflection was gone, so he couldn't check for a scar on his neck. He couldn't feel one. Stephen hadn't had one, but Stephen wasn't real.
"My name's Connor," he told her, and snapped her neck.
He was beginning to love that sound.
END
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on 2003-11-29 06:44 am (UTC)