Author's Note: Warnings: Torture, Extreme Language, Sexual Situations, Violence Buffy/Spike; Drusilla/Angelus Pairing
Chapter 8
It didn’t take Angelus long to pack up his childer and operation with so many minions at his disposal. Most were used as scavengers of food when they had his grandsire, The Master, as the head of the clan, and Spike had used them as bait-lackeys for the Slayer before Angelus took over. But Angelus now used them as his own personal Moving Service, and with as many minions as he had, moving only took a few days to accomplish.
While the minions were bringing in the meager items that belonged to the three vampires and Slayer, Angelus had decided to play tour guide. He led his childer around the huge modern-style mansion. His “tour” stopped in an atrium off the living room.
“. . . and this . . . this is the garden,” Angelus said as he finished the tour. He was proud of the mansion he had picked to be their new home. The place had huge rooms and large beds that he wouldn’t feel cramped in like he was in that godforsaken factory. Why his grandchilde chose that place of all places to live was beyond him. But he was Angelus, for evil’s sake, and he loved his space. Enough room to sleep, feed and torture the hell out of someone or something. He came from a time when boudoirs were decked out to the utmost opulence and even if he was a vampire, he would do with nothing less.
Drusilla squealed happily as she walked through the atrium, “Wow! Look, my Spike, Jasmine!” She held up the flower for Spike’s inspection.
“Yes, my childe, and they are night-blooming,” he smirked as he played with a set of pruning shears. He knew Drusilla would love the flowers. He had thought of her when he chose the house. The atrium would keep her occupied until he wished for her company. Besides seeing the smile on her face such as it was now, where could he go wrong?
“Like us,” Drusilla smiled seductively at Angelus. “Oh, Angel, it’s fairyland,” she squealed as she twirled around in excitement.
Spike was still at the entrance with Buffy behind him, her hands handcuffed to the back of his chair. Angelus had waited until today to move Buffy, giving her that week-long reprieve to heal from his whipping while the minions moved the other items. Her being shackled to Spike was the older vampire’s security that Buffy wouldn’t dare try to run from him, especially when she would have to lug a wheelchair around. Her current expression was one of utter boredom.
Spike acknowledged his sire, “It’s a bloody paradise. Big windows and lovely gardens, it’ll be perfect when we want the sunlight to kill us.” I doubt that’s how Angelus plans to end my bloody un-life. Turned to ash by the sun is too quick a death for his grandsire.
Angelus growled and glared at Spike. “If you don’t like it, Spike, you can always get up and walk out of here.” He walked to stand behind Drusilla and said, “Take a stand, boy.” Angelus knew Spike would never leave his family, never leave Drusilla. He was too loyal for that.
Spike glared back at Angelus and gave his own feral growl. The bloody ponce knew he couldn’t walk because of what the bleedin’ Slayer had done to him, and as Angelus’ cruel idea of a joke, now the same Slayer was nursing him back to health. He shifted uneasily in the wheel chair, and continued to glare at Angelus. Why the bloody hell was Angelus doing this? What purpose did it serve to have the Slayer baby-sit him or him her? Why did Angelus insist on having them in the same room together or like now, shackled to each other? Does he know what I’m starting to feel for her?
“Things change, Spikey. You gotta roll with the punches,” Angelus said as he walked around the stone table in the center of the garden. “Well, actually, you pretty much got that part down, haven’t you?” Yeah, you’re stuck in that wheelchair all helpless, and where Dru is concerned, unimportant now that I’m back.
“Very funny, mate, you’re a barrel of laughs,” Spike said snidely. You’ll get yours soon enough, Angelus, albeit not too soon for me, soddin’ bastard.
Angelus walked back up behind Drusilla. “What can I say?” he asked peeking around the other side of her head. “I just love to see you smile, buddy.” He held up a Jasmine bloom and brushed it across Drusilla’s cheek as he growled low in her ear causing shivers to slide along the vampiress’ skin. We’ll see how you feel when you hear her screams of pleasure and pain tonight, ol’ boy.
Spike smirked, “Yeah, you’re a giver.” He didn’t want to see his grandsire and sire get it on in the garden of evil. It was bad enough he had to hear her passionate cries whenever Angelus laid a hand on her whether to inflict pain or pleasure when he fucked her. Spike tilted his head back and looked up at Buffy. “Can you wheel this chair to my room, love?” Anything to get this display out of my sight, please!
Buffy was startled out of her bored state to focus on Spike and what he had just asked. She nodded when his question finally hit her like a memory. She backed the wheelchair into the house and rolled it into a bedroom on the ground level that Angelus had designated for her and Spike to share when he had no use for them.
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Two days after Angelus moved his “family” and operations to the mansion Giles had decided to finally pay a visit to the factory. He had told Willow and Xander that he would just go and survey Angelus’ dealings. He left the library through the stacks as not to run into Principal Snyder on the way out of the building.
When Giles arrived at the factory after noon, he pulled a stake out of his pocket and carefully entered through a side door. When he entered the building and met no resistance by one or more of Angelus’ minions, he was confused. Was Angelus slipping in posting guards? He crept in through the outer layers of the factory, working his way to empty dining hall. He searched through the office-rooms that the vampires had converted to bedrooms, and came across Buffy’s torn shirt in the waste basket of one room and an ashtray with spent cigarettes in them. She had been in here with Spike. He searched the other rooms and found a few dolls Dru had left behind. When he realized the place was empty with no trace of Angelus, his family or his operation, the Ripper in him came to the forefront in anger. Damn Angelus. He hadn’t anticipated that Angelus would move so soon and take his slayer with him to boot. He took a metal bar that was lying on the ground and proceeded to demolish the place, smashing the remaining pieces of furniture to bits. When the Ripper in him still was not assuaged, he located a box of matches and upon exiting the building, he lit a piece of cloth and threw it back into the building. Angelus may have left, but he wasn’t going to return to his sanctuary, Giles made sure of that as he watched the fire rise, breaking the glass and billows of smoke emanated from the windows.
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Angelus had given Spike and the Slayer two days to grow accustomed to their new surroundings. In that time, Buffy had become closer to Spike through a series of conversations about his early years as a vampire. He claimed to have relished the freedom his vampiric state had given him. He had become free of growing older, of sickness, of disease, of society’s straitlaced rules on propriety. He took what he wanted without reserve of being caught, and even when he was, he killed the authority who dared. He had even eaten a decorator in the 1992 when Drusilla went ballistic over the way the woman talked to Miss Edith.
Buffy was gaining a new respect with each new insight her partner in captivity offered her. She saw Spike now as a vampire like no other she had known or dusted before. He wasn’t like Angel all broody over his deeds and un-life. Granted he had no soul to care, but in being turned he had kept a conscience, making him better than Angelus in that regard.
She in turned confessed to Spike that she was just like Cordelia before she was the Slayer, a ditzy cheerleader who’s only care was the latest hairstyle, the hottest boy in school, and the most fashionable clothes, which didn’t seem to surprise Spike in the least. That had all changed when she became a Slayer. She never realized until then how superficial she had been. When she became the Slayer, she did away with the frivolous thoughts and concentrated on her training, when she had finally taken it seriously. Just about the time she had become serious about slaying the evil undead was when she had lost her first watcher to Lothos. Which Spike didn’t entirely agree with, he was more upfront, he wanted only one thing, to kill the Slayer, not to play cat-and-mouse as Angelus loves to do and as Lothos did with her former watcher. No, Spike promised her, if he was going to kill a Slayer be it her or anyone else, he would seek her out and dance with her. He loved the dance too much to pass it up.
Buffy smiled to herself when she thought that maybe Drusilla was in one of her more lucid moments when she had turned William the Bloody into a vampire. Did it make her a bad Slayer to think that was a good thought, to praise Drusilla on a wise choice for a childe?
Just as she shook the thought away, Angelus stormed into the room, as if her thoughts of Drusilla had conjured him up. He loomed tall and dark and handsome and evil incarnate all in one. It was like seeing Angel’s face with Angelus’ demeanor. It still confused her how he had changed, turned against her, how he could be both beautiful and deadly at the same time. A demon with an angel’s face. He grabbed a hold of Buffy’s hair in one hand, and her arm with the other, dragging her up against him. He licked her cheek, causing her to shudder in revulsion and watched Spike’s reaction. “Do you think it’s time for another lesson, Spike?” Angelus asked the wheelchair-bound vampire before growling low in Buffy’s ear.
Spike visibly shuddered at Angelus’ question. He remembered the Slayer’s torn body from the whipping before they had moved. If he knew Angelus, as he knew he did, his grandsire may have given them a two-day reprieve, but Drusilla’s ramblings had bored the big poof, and now here he was looking for entertainment to occupy his time. Angelus never knew how to deal with Dru in her craziest moments when she talked of burning cherubs in the sky and hopping body-less frog legs. Angelus never knew how to appease her ramblings.
“Follow me, Spike,” Angelus bit out as he pushed the Slayer out the door in front of him, he still had an iron-grip on her. He needed the distraction of tormenting someone else the same way his favorite childe drove him mad with her constant visions of the Slayer joining them, making the family better, stronger, complete. Angelus didn’t want to believe it no matter how many of her visions came true, having the Slayer join the Aurealian family wasn’t one of them that he particularly liked. Whoever heard of a vampire clan turning a slayer?
Spike sighed, not knowing how to stop this in his incapacitated state. He had been alone with Buffy for two days letting her ask questions of him and care for him because it kept her busy and kept her mind off her current status as hostage. She was much easier to be around when she was calmer and not so jittery with worry.
Ever since Spike had licked Buffy’s wounds clean after her first whipping, he’d been feeling his body heal a lot faster than with the bagged human blood that Angelus had Dalton deliver to him. He was a bit anxious about trying out the strength in his limbs. He didn’t know if that little bit of Slayer’s blood had done any more than just help heal his broken body, and wasn’t ready to find out just yet.
Spike could do nothing but follow Angelus into the wide living room. The room was big and devoid of anything but a couple of long couches that half-framed the fireplace taking up eighty percent of a wall. It was opulent; Spike smirked knowing it fit Angelus too well.
Angelus struggled with the Slayer as she tried to kick back at his legs. He twirled her around in his arms, trapping her legs in between his strong thighs, tightening until the squirming was at a minimum; before he pushed her down to sit on one of the couches. “I don’t want to have to tie you up, Buffy. I won’t have to, will I?”
His smile seemed dark when she shook her head in the negative. But then she kicked out at him when he wasn’t expecting her, and hit him in the stomach with her foot. He stumbled back a bit, before gaining his footing again, chuckling at her. “Oh, Buff, you still have some zest in that tight little body after all,” Angelus praised snidely. “Not to worry, though. I’ll break you of that soon enough.”
Angelus sat down beside her with an exaggerated sigh of tiredness and stretched his arm out on the back of the couch. Spike winced the same time Buffy did. Angelus was playing nice, which if memory served him well meant he was baiting the lure before he went in for the pain of the psychological sort. Spike remembered the long ago years of this cat-and-mouse game, when he would hunt with the older vampire. He would watch in awe as Angelus led their victim into a false sense of security, promises of no harm, even promises of protection before he struck the hapless victim like a snake coiled and trapped in a corner.
Buffy felt the crackle in the air as much as she saw Spike stiffen when Angelus had sat down beside her. She didn’t know why it had surprised her that Spike had nearly froze in the wheelchair when Angelus had become overly friendly to her. She quickly glanced over at the blond vampire catching his eye and he visibly relaxed a bit. Unfortunately, Angelus had seen the look pass between them as well and said in a voice that was calm and cool as you please, “Ah, Buffy, believe me when I say, that even if Spike was up at the top of his health, if I wanted to kill you, he couldn’t move fast enough to stop me.”
Angelus’ smirked when he saw Buffy’s shoulders fall dejectedly. He knew he gave her no hope. Spike couldn’t save her. Her little Scooby gang couldn’t even begin to know where to look now. She wasn’t there, yet she was right under their noses. It gave him grotesque pleasure to dangle something just out of a person’s reach. Like Spike, his boy always rose to the bait whenever Drusilla was close enough to touch, but still too far away to lay claim to. Ah, his Drusilla knew who she belonged to; it had taken him a half decade to teach her that she was only to be used for his pleasure. Since then she never looked back, no matter how Spike tried to cajole her with whispered promises and sex. She would always belong to her sire.
"Hey Buff, wanna know how brass and bad ol' Willie here used to be? Back in the good ol' days he was what you might call a pansy, about as big and bad as a fluffy kitty,” Angelus broke off to see how Spike reacted. When he got a glowering look, his smile was sweet and false before he continued, “When Drusilla found him, he was running the streets crying because some stupid socialite cow broke his heart. She wanted a playmate, and vamped him. She swore she saw something in him, but I still think to this day, a century later, that she felt sorry for the spineless little boy."
Spike closed his eyes and gritted his teeth, slowly counting to ten before opening them again to start into Angelus’ chocolate-colored eyes. “When I get out of this chair, we’ll see who’s spineless, you sadistic . . .” Spike ground out before emitting a low growl of irritation.
“Now, now, William, no need for name calling in front of the . . . guest,” Angelus curled his lips in a cruel smile. He knew he’d get his digs into Spike tonight. He relished Spike’s reactions to his endless taunts. His errant grandchilde never failed to rise to the occasion.
Angelus turned to face Buffy, tightened his arm around his shoulder, and pulled her against his side. He smirked at her saying, “But then it's kind of fitting that you two are roomies, Buff. What with the way you were panting after Angel, all it took was some sad puppy dog looks and a 'oh, my tortured soul' and you were instantly in love with him. Just as Spike was instantly in love with my Drusilla the moment she took notice of him.”
Spike saw the pain of Angelus’ words cloud Buffy’s vision as she tried to slink away from her former lover. He could picture the wheels turning in her mind as she tried to mentally console herself that this was Angelus speaking and not Angel. Then he saw the determination in her eyes, something he hadn’t seen there since the day of the ritual.
Buffy had had enough of Angelus’ taunts. She tried desperately over the past few weeks to separate Angelus and Angel but they were one in the same, where Angel may have loved her, Angelus had no conception of the word. Thus, she took her life into her own hands when she straightened her figure, looked straight at Angelus and said, “What are you talking about? I was never in love with Angel. I was just stringing him long. Stupid fool, thinking a Slayer would ever fall for him. Angel was a convenience. He kept me preoccupied. Besides, Angelus, even if I did, any love I did have for him was shot all to hell the moment I met you.”
Angelus surprised them both with a bark of laughter. She was so much like William: impetuous and daring to defy him even to the very last syllable. It has been a century and the reincarnation of William, now known as Spike, is still as reckless as he ever was. Angelus wondered how long, how many centuries it would be to knock the spitfire out of Buffy before she was docile as his Drusilla.
Spike saw the cruelness in Angelus’ eyes, knew that the next words out of the dark vampire’s mouth would be biting and painful cutting into flesh as surely as the whip had last week. He knew Angelus’ laughter was part of that false sense of security before the wrecking ball came to destroy the resolve she had bravely built up in those few moments it took to tell his grandsire how beneath her he was.
“Ah, Buffy, you’ll change your mind about me once you find that there is no one around to save you. You’ll change when you see me drain your family and friends dry. It seems like forever since I’m taken out a whole family so maliciously. I took Drusilla’s family out one by one before I turned her. I’m all she’s ever known for over a century, and her blood is still as sweet as the day I made her a demon,” Angelus said softly, as he ran his fingertips over her collarbone. “Given that you may still be a slayer, albeit with depleted strength, if I took a sip now, would your Slayer’s blood be just as sweet in a hundred years? Would you forgive me if I killed your friends off first? Harris was always annoying; maybe I could do you the favor of eating him first? Ah, and that cute little red head, she seems like she’d be as smooth as red wine sliding easily down the throat . . .,” Angelus watched her the whole time he spoke and grinned when he saw her shut her eyes tight and her hands jammed over her eyes. He circled his fingers around the wrist nearest him and gently pulled her hand away, whispering, “Pleasant dreams, Buffy.”
Angelus rose from the couch and looked at Spike. “I’m going to go find Drusilla, and get a kill in tonight. I’m starving. Think of what I said, Buffy.” He turned and walked away, and had the audacity to whistle an Irish tune on the way to his bedroom to collect Drusilla. He signaled a minion to escort Buffy and Spike back to their room and stand guard. He would check on them when he returned.