Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

They were talking too loud.

Spike fantasized that one day, he wouldn't hear them. Instead, he'd live somewhere—in whatever sense of living a vampire would manage—either alone or with, perhaps, a companion—he'd thought many times about making one but never had.

What he didn't admit to himself was why.

It got bleak thinking about how unwilling he'd be to inflict his existence on another person. The last person he'd had a real conversation with was a terminally ill woman, whom he drank in at her behest. Consumption had taken her family, and as she felt it in her lungs, she thought, why not now? Why prolong it and suffer alone? It had never come up if she'd wanted him to sire her—he suspected she didn't ask for a reason.

He saw himself in her, and then he saw no one at all.

He stayed here because anything was better than being alone, though Angelus made him question that each time he took home another girl, and his entertainment echoed like the beating of a heart beneath the floorboards. All of it was about one girl—she was Angelus' obsession and magnum opus. She was the reason Spike was so disillusioned with being a vampire. She was the reason they'd never left London (at least, not in the short time Spike was a vampire).

It was always her.

Towards the start of the obsession, Spike made the mistake of asking why. The terms Angelus used stuck with Spike: pure, sweet, chaste... What made her most appealing to him, though, was that she saw everything he intended for her—she saw the future. She had to watch him murder her every night, for years, before it happened, and Angelus described the fruits of his prolonged psychological torture as creating her, as making her his masterpiece.

And Masterpiece was brave in ways Spike wasn't—Angelus had been testing her for years, seeing what she'd do when she saw him kill a neighbour girl, or a beggar, or some stranger on the other end of town. Skirting the edges of her vision and determining who was worth her life and who it would hurt her most to lose. And she rose to his occasion, over and over. Put herself between him and his prey. Plead with the night in case he heard that if he wanted her, he came for her, not the neighbour or her sister. Not to inflict her damnation on those she loved.

Every second that she did what Spike wasn't brave enough to do, she made her own fate worse. There was no way she'd walk away from it now.

When he was young, he'd been her. Walked in and saw Angelus and some stand-in Masterpiece, and it was too much. He'd killed before—creatively even, and he'd liked it. But this was drawn out, and it was vicious, and it was personal. Killing hadn't ever felt so violent—not when it was snapping a neck or goring someone with a railroad spike, and it was over in a flash and a spurt and a gurgle. It wasn't about killing, or even about feeding, or even about the kind of power that came with stabbing the men who'd mocked Spike's poetry. This was about power in much crueller terms: you hurt when I want you to, and you die when I let you. About the real Masterpiece, knowing she would die only when Angelus was done enjoying the way she suffered.

It was hours.

Spike had no soul.

He was a dead thing that feasted on life.

What he saw went beyond what he could even stand to watch.

And this was just a one-night affair. The real Masterpiece made this look easy—she hadn't watched the gratuitous slaughter of everyone that ever cared for her, and he tired of torturing her faster than he would with the object of his obsession.

That was when Spike learned what Angelus was—when it became real. That moment, and the ones after, when Spike had tried to pull the girl out of his grasp and found his face against the wall, blood trickling from his brow into his eye, the girl left in a trembling heap.

He hadn't been a vampire long. Angelus was faster, stronger, and knew how to fight. He'd nearly dusted Spike there for interrupting—only stopped because it was funnier to keep going, with Spike not fighting for his victim anymore, trying to save his own skin.

Spike didn't believe in God or the Devil.

Whatever made crosses burn hated vampires, but it didn't care about humans enough to save them—he saw that after long enough here. He believed, as Caliban put it, that Hell was empty and all the devils were here—that vampires had in them to be the devil when they got obsessive and gratuitous, and God wouldn't lift an almighty finger to spare anything more sentient than scrapwood. He bet the Masterpiece felt the Devil was real enough to her, every damned time she watched each beat of Angelus' little spectacle.

The difference between them was that the Masterpiece kept seeing, and she headed into the night to stop the devil killing and Spike pretended not to hear. He pretended the walls weren't thin. Blocked out the words. Told himself the screaming would be over, or he would leave the house when he couldn't stomach it.

Spike wasn't the knight he'd been the night he tried to make it stop—the only thing he'd been able to change was what he did—who he ate. He didn't have the same glee or reckless abandon. Instead, he ate the ones that were past saving, either because they were dying or becoming more and more like Angelus, and one of them was too much.

Especially when he was at it again, and the walls were thin. Spike heard it even when he tried to drown it out: Angelus telling Darla about the Masterpiece while a human girl in the room screamed incoherent pleas through her ragged throat. She was at the point where Spike couldn't tell which she wanted: to survive or just an end to the onslaught.

A scream pierced through the walls—Angelus was listing who had to be dead first: as it stood, the Masterpiece's family, parts of the extended family, definitely the older sister—the one he called the bride, and if all went how he wanted, half a convent. For someone who tried not to hear, Spike knew enough that it didn't shock him. Angelus had a fetish for nuns—so much the better for him if his obsession was sent there next.

He flinched the second time the girl screamed—wishing she knew reacting like that would make Angelus more vicious. By the third time, Spike was staring blankly into the mirror, searching futilely for the person he thought he'd been, and finding relief that he had no reflection and didn't have to look himself in the eyes.

"Her voice is higher," Angleus said, after another hoarse, throaty scream, "she screams high, and clear, like music—all those years of choir, so I can really make her sing for me."

Darla laughed and jibed back, "You know what range she sings in church choir, but still not what size a dress has to be to fit me? Should I be envious of your little masterpiece?"

He laughed at that, and quipped back, "You," allowing a pause in which he was almost certainly getting the blood on his hands on her dress, "have never been pure enough for any man to make a masterpiece of you—not even before someone fucked you properly."

Darla corrected him, "I've never been weak enough to be made some man's Masterpiece—that was why I never married—no man got to pretend he owned me."

"That, or because you were a whore," Angelus deadpanned back.

Spike flinched.

Another drawn-out scream echoed through the walls to punctuate Angelus' dismissal.

"Whores," Darla intoned, "survive. Which is more than can be said of any of the pious, chaste, glass-case girls you like to take out and shatter. Their bodies are always under lock and key, leveraged against them, until someone takes them out of their case and cracks them properly. Men thought they owned me because they were buying—this…this little porcelain doll girl would have been traded like fine china between men, until someone paid to break her for good, and she was worth nothing but a decoration. It's a mercy you'll only be breaking her the once, just like your precious Masterpiece, who could very well expire before you get on with shattering her."

Spike felt unclean, hearing Darla be so cavalier about a system that made marriage a type of sexual trafficking. He wondered how Darla—a woman who'd lived the other side of the story, and had known the degradation with which men look at women they could have sexually—and feel nothing for the plight of these other women. Find it funny that women were told their virginity was everything they possessed and not something they had any right to keep, and even less right to lose. That someone like Angelus could, in a violent moment, take that all away from them, and they'd be seen as less, for something they didn't choose. The church and their families owned their bodies, until their husbands would, until Angelus violently dispossessed them of the thing that gave them futures—no woman he'd violated, even if she survived, could ever marry, and marriage was subsistence. Darla had sold her body—how did it not upset her when Angelus violated the bodies these women had never had any chance to own themselves?

It upset Spike, even though he was not a woman, because he knew what it was to be dispossessed of something precious that never belonged to you, when he lost his life to his sire. He'd spent all his life owned by society, trying to make something of himself because his mother had no husband to care for her once the estate was spent, only to lose his life to a moment's violation. His body was suddenly and violently taken from him, in a way that cast him out of the world he'd known, and made him less than human—so in the least literal way possible, he could understand what that girl would go through, if she survived Angelus' assault.

Darla could try her damnedest to demean the girls—to dehumanize them, and talk about their bodies like they were the family's finest china, but he bet anything, she did that to bite back the brutal way in which she, as a sex-worker, and Spike as an unwilling vampire, had been the girls Angelus raped.

Angelus laughed, a harsh sound that made Spike flinch harder than any of the screaming did, as he turned the conversation away from Darla's mounting annoyance, to say, "you have little patience for the finery of torture, Darla," and then, as she scoffed, to turn serious, and say, "her uncle is coming to town tomorrow, with his daughter, and her husband—tomorrow night is my perfect chance."

"You mean it this time?" she prodded, "I'm not wasting another five years drinking choir girls?"

"Tomorrow night," Angelus promised, "we'll make what I'm doing to this little thing look like heaven."

Please no, please God no!

Spike did not initially realize it was the girl, and not his internal monologue, that screamed those pleas that Angelus was wrong.

The first stage of his masterpiece plot had always felt in equal measure inevitable and inevitably delayed. Like it would never happen or be cancelled, and the Masterpiece would die of some illness, or marry and become less chaste than Angelus preferred, or be sent to a relative's after having a nervous breakdown, and his perfectionism would intervene against the consummation of his obsession. The Masterpiece would be saved—insofar as having to see that every night could be considered saved—by Angelus' meticulous and obsessive need to twist the knife and spare her nothing.

That it could suddenly happen tomorrow was unfathomable.

Spike had only coped with hearing about it so far by telling himself Angelus' commitment to every detail would unravel the scheme, and he'd never actually make the Masterpiece he boasted about. That there was time for a slayer to intercede, or for the girl to change, or relocate, or die, that staved off the worst of it.

If Spike breathed, the world tomorrow would have ripped the air from his lungs.

Instead, he sat in self-imposed silence, not hearing a word nor a sound beyond the echo of tomorrow in his ears, testing him, if Angelus really had beaten the courage out of him. If he were still the vampire that would sit, face into the wall, licking his own wounds, while Angelus tortured someone in the room behind him, or if he had in him any capacity to be a knight: to take arms against a man who renewed his faith in evil, even if he, by opposing, ended.

If Angelus renewed his faith in evil, what faith did he put in himself? Apathy? Cowardice? His faith that men could be so self-serving as to let an innocent girl suffer that extent of depravity, over and over, to spare their own necks.

He was disgusted with himself.

The story wasn't over, he told himself. The Masterpiece hadn't died yet, and the ending was still unwrit. He could choose not to be that man—any man.

He could instead be a knight if he were willing to die for it.

His first foray into knighthood, he sucked in a deep breath, and wiped the anguish, and the horror, and the panic off his face, replacing it with a mask of mild annoyance—the face he made when Angelus decided to fuck Darla against his door, and he had to climb out a window to be spared their obscenities. When he felt it looked natural, he threw the door open and snapped, "If you're finally doing the bloody feast tomorrow, the least you can do is share."

Meticulously, he said it before he had to look at what they'd done to the girl in the living room, who stood in for the Masterpiece. Once he saw her, the horror would be much, much harder to downplay.

He only spared himself a moment before he came around the corner and took in the full scene. Darla, corset removed, and slip wrenched down around her waist, her chest spattered with droplets of red blood. Her lipstick smeared like she either kissed Angelus or tried to eat his face. Angelus, naked, his body concealed behind the girl Spike tried his damnedest not to look at, face smeared with blood, and wearing a cruel smirk.

Spike didn't want to look at the girl. He didn't have to feel guilty for waiting so long if he denied what had happened to her. It was also less violating to her if another strange man didn't take advantage of her with his eyes. He deserved the guilt of having to look at what he'd allowed to happen in his house, but she didn't deserve to be seen by him.

He didn't look, but registered details all the same. He registered that her dress hung off her in tatters and shreds—that more of her exposed flesh was red with blood than wasn't, and when he made himself look in her eyes, he forced himself to reckon with the tears that spilled down her cheeks. The pain in her eyes, the way her jaw clenched, and the ragged, pained gasps she took for breath.

He also knew she looked considerably like the Masterpiece—she had long dark hair, and big, scared, light eyes. She looked at him like that girl would if she knew someone had heard about what was happening to her. With the same plea written all over her face—to make it stop.

"You're a little late to save her, Willy," Angelus quipped, digging his nails into her hard enough that she let out a harsh cry.

Spike flinched—Angelus only used that name as a warning. It was the name he'd eagerly discarded from his human life. The name that was like a weight around his neck, and it was Angelus' favourite way to remind him he'd been human until he was victimized by his sire.

Darkly, he thought the use of his human name was a reminder that Angelus could victimize him like his sire had. That he could—arguably literally—be that girl if he stepped out of line.

It was a familiar, haunting threat that plagued him even when not made explicit.

Neither he nor Angleus knew quite why, but they both knew the score—Spike was more alike to the prey than the vampires.

The instant he showed that it registered, he might as well take her place. He had to force himself to speak Angelus' language. To put on the voice of evil, and be a real man, a real vampire that Angelus could respect as kin, rather than conflating with his victims.

As cavalierly as he could muster, he scoffed, "Saving her? I hardly think so." and swallowed his disgust as he said, "I'm asking for a go, is all—you wouldn't want to be too sated when you do your massacre tomorrow, after all. Takes the edge off. But if you'd rather spoil your appetite and have your fun now, by all means, take me with you tomorrow, and let me be the one finishing off the bride."

Spike had never, in his life, hated himself so much as he did having to mimic the way Angelus talked, and making gratuitous and disgusting implications about what he would do either to the Masterpiece's sister, or to this girl here. He hoped this girl hated him for what he couldn't do for her. For not saving her. For saying such despicable things about the way that she would die. If Hell existed, anyone who could play the part and sound this much like Angelus deserved to go there—regardless of why he did it.

Angelus growled at the insinuation that someone else could carry out his depravity in his stead, but the comment made Darla positively cackle with laughter, which only increased at Angelus' ire. "You hear that, Angelus?" she remarked, "You let Willy clean up the mess you've made of tonight's fare, so you're vicious enough not to be made a cuckold at your own massacre."

Spike hid the wince badly, but Angelus' attention was pinpointed on Darla, as Darla sweetened the deal, and said, "let Willy clean that up, so you can get to work cleaning all this blood off of me."

Spike thanked the apathetic god that Darla was both depraved and insatiable enough to keep pace with Angelus—she'd just taken all the focus off of him.

Disinterestedly, Angelus slung his victim at Spike, and wrenched Darla to him by a handful of her hair in his bloody hand, saying, "how about you get down, and lick me clean? After all, I'm covered in blood, and you hate it when I stain your dresses."

Spike wasn't ready to catch the girl when Angelus slung her at him, and just missed catching her, watching her fall into the doorframe with a crash he could only hope had ended it, and a groan that told him that it hadn't.

He staggered to her, and caught her in his arms, and whispered, so low neither of the others would hear over their spat over who had to lick who, "I can't save you…I'm sorry…But I can make it stop."

He hoped she would rebuke him.

He hoped she still had in her the fighting spirit to call him a monster, and tell him that making it stop was something he did to assuage his own guilt, and show no mercy to her. That she deserved a better saviour than a vampire who'd ignored her suffering as long as he had. He longed for her to rip into him half as viciously as his conscience did.

Instead, she whimpered against his chest and mumbled back, "Please make it stop."

He felt the damning weight of her body against his—her blood soaked through his clothes to his skin, marring him with the insufficiency of the only act of mercy he could show her without risking his own life. He would never try to cleanse these stains from them—he deserved to be marked for how he failed her. He let her slump against him, as he lowered his teeth to her neck, shifting his face at the last second, so she didn't have to see what he was, and then gently sank his teeth into her neck.

There was no relief in the taste of her blood, even if he had been quite hungry going into this. There could be no relief in being the last one to hurt her. The last one to take advantage of her body. If her blood nourished him, he hoped that it would also poison him—that it was holy blood, and all who touched it burned—though that gave God more credit than he deserved.

He felt her body slump in his arms—felt her heart beating faster and faster, fluttering in her chest, trying desperately to get her dwindling supply of blood through her weakening body. And then her breath caught in her chest, a final gasp that she never exhaled. He eased her body to the ground, unable to stomach the act long enough to discard her as though she was nothing, thankful her eyes were closed so he didn't have to see the light leave them, when he realized he could hear the mattress creaking, and the bedframe hitting the plaster one room over. Angelus and Darla had not lingered to watch how he chose to end her, and he found himself alone.

"I'm sorry I couldn't have done anything better," he hissed, barely above a whisper, and wasn't sure who he was talking to—if he meant the girl on the ground, or the Masterpiece girl, whom he'd equally failed every time he let Angelus send her another vision.

Something outside his body drove him.

He moved as if possessed. Stripped himself down, out of everything he wore that was bloody, leaving the clothes on the living room floor. Going to the wash basin, and cleaning the blood from his body methodically, with stingingly cold water, and then towelling off the water's chill, and dressing himself in the finest clothing Darla had taken off of one of her conquests, ignoring the ways in which it didn't fit him: too broad, too long, finer even than he'd worn when he was trying to flirt with debutantes. On him, it was a costume, just the same as his bloodstained clothes were a costume, but this costume had a purpose.

This costume made him look like a highly eligible bachelor.

The only thing that gave him pause along the way was to stop to grab his notebook—it was the only truth in his disguise—the only place where he was real, where he was himself. He couldn't stomach what he was to do if he didn't parse the act in poetry first. A sonnet of meaningless words that would steel him to kill someone undeserving tomorrow night, to spare her the whole ordeal that she saw each time Angelus re-planned.

He hoped she saw him coming enough to either call him a monster and deny his hollow, inadequate mercy, or to tell him with certainty that it was what she wanted.

He didn't doubt the Masterpiece would see through his costume—it wouldn't work, and he couldn't hide.

Chapter Text

Spike could still taste the dead girl—how dehumanizing was it that he didn't even know her name?—when he arrived in the neighbourhood. 

It seemed wrong for the site of one of Angelus' massacres. It was quaint, idyllic, even. Well-maintained, decadent houses, just close enough together that he could see the next house as he passed one, blanketed freshly in powdered snow, that was just interrupted by Spike's footprints—the only thing that was out of place. 

He didn't have long. 

The moon was nearly setting, just a sliver in the sky, veering toward the horizon, which was already purpling like a deep bruise with the first violent rays of sunlight. He walked past her house first, seeing another interruption in the blanketing of snow—deep footprints on the roof below one window, blocked tightly with thick curtains—he'd heard Angelus' vexation with those curtains—the Masterpiece shut him out of her bedroom.

He did not see, or else did not feel, the eyes on him.

He knew of only one place to stay in the neighbourhood that would allow him in—this place was far too upscale to have foreclosures and vacancies in which vampires could squat—if it did, Angelus would already have moved in. He headed toward the neighbourhood's church and was a couple blocks away from her house when he saw another person, stumbling around in the winter's chill, shivering, even through the thickly layered coats. 

He'd been out for a long time—his coat had amassed a dusting of snowflakes from the wind, and hollow, teary eyes locked with Spike's and searched him. When Spike looked into them, he flinched—he was staring into the dead girl's searching, blue eyes—just as full of tears as hers had been, set beneath a stern, wrinkled brow. The man had to have been out all night, looking for his daughter who would never be home again, whose blood soured in Spike's mouth. 

If there really was a God, Spike would catch fire at the moment he looked into the man's eyes, or better, at the moment he'd sunk his teeth into the girl. 

If this man was very lucky, his daughter would stay missing, and he'd never have to see the things that had been done to her body. 

Better to hold out an unrequitable hope than to forever grapple with the things he hadn't been able to save her from. Spike could imagine the guilt. 

"Are you lost, Sir?" the man asked him, a suspicious edge to his voice.

Spike winced at the address—even when he was human, and ought to have been called Sir it had never sat well with him. Sir felt like putting him in his dead father's clothes—something his mother had only made the mistake of trying once. 

Spike tried to hide his grimace, both at who the man was and at the title, when he said, "I was going to ask you that—quite peculiar of the both of us to be out while it's so dark and cold." 

The man's eyes hardened to ice. 

Spike leaned in, as though sharing a confidence, and hoped the man didn't notice that his breath didn't fog the air, saying, "Sir, I'm a detective, hired by a family up the way to investigate the disappearances happening in this area—I was looking about, seeing if I could see anything the policemen missed."

It was a kind lie. One that might let the man rest and stop his futile quest. Let him feel someone else cared for his missing daughter—like if he let himself rest, someone took up his mantle. He couldn't stand for this desperate man and his sad, searching eyes to be adrift in the cold a moment longer, looking for the girl that he'd killed. 

He wished he'd had a chance to ask her what she'd want her family to know, pass along last words—that she loved him. That it didn't hurt anymore. Trite things that wouldn't make it any better, except that she could leave some reassurances for the people she cared for. 

The man huffed out a relieved sigh, that tinged the air with a haze of breath, and his shoulders slumped forward, worn and exhausted. "You haven't seen a girl, then?" he asked, making a motion at his shoulders, saying, "yay high, eyes like mine?"

Spike shook his head, despite himself. The man again sighed and said, "Jane would never worry us like this on purpose. I told her that choir ought not to rehearse so late into the evening," he muttered, more to himself than to Spike.

Jane.

Just like that, she had a name.

It said something that Spike treated the Masterpiece's real name as something he was forbidden to even think. A word with power. An invocation. He knew it—Angelus didn't use it often, but he said it the occasional time. He couldn't stand to call her by a name that was given to her by people who loved her—call her a name like a person he knew, and then kill her so that Angelus couldn't kill her slowly and brutally. He used the title Angelus had given her, Masterpiece, not because he agreed that torture was art, or that she ought to be defined by Angelus' perversions, but because it was a permanent reminder of what happened to her if he didn't kill her first. 

He could not stomach killing a girl, characterized in the story by her supreme innocence, unless, down to the signifier he said in the place of her name, he reminded himself that if he didn't, Angelus would. 

Could he have killed Jane if he'd been able to call her name?

He ought to carve it into his skin, so he'd be permanently marred by what he'd done to her, right beside the masterpiece's holy name, that would probably burn his lips. 

Not even noticing Spike's silence, Jane's father continued, "The good Father doesn't understand this place yet, and I fear he's too soft ever to."

"What doesn't he understand?" Spike asked, relieved for the distraction.

Jane's father looked over Spike's shoulder for anyone who could overhear, and then he said, "Well, the family that hired you ought to have briefed you—there are strange and dangerous people in this neighbourhood—the good Father ought to fortify himself, and do as he ought."

Spike didn't even have the chance to ask what the priest ought to do when the man filled it in for him. "He even lets her sing in his choir—like she hasn't confessed anything to him when she's in the booth every bloody day, that makes him think, some people aren't worthy to give their voices to the lord. Some people need a goddamn exorcism, and then people would stop going missing. It happened before, mind you, and that girl, the Keeble girl, she told everyone that it was the devil. Now she's of age, and her choir girls are disappearing, because no one is thinking about the fact that she bloody well might be dealing with the Devil, and we all know it."

He looked Spike in the eyes, and said, "You want to know who you're here for—I got news, it's always been Drusilla."

Spike physically flinched, as though her name ought to burn him—he hadn't heard it spoken aloud in some time, and he was hardly able to stomach thinking it, let alone saying it. She ought to be his end—she ought to burn him, and Angelus both to ashes for their despicable schemes against her, and blister this man's accusing tongue. He knew nearly nothing about her, but he knew that she was innocent. He knew that she regularly risked her own life, playing chess with Angelus, trying to stop his plans before he could kill. She was supremely good, and supremely undeserving, and he had to kill her.

It was the most inadequate mercy he could provide her.

In penance to her, he stomached her name, confessing to the man, "I am here for Drusilla," on barely a whisper, like any more voice and he'd burn for it.

He hoped it ate the man alive when he attended her wake the next night, and knew he'd done something to instigate. He hoped the man would come to understand that she deserved much better than the ineffective saviour that she got. 

The man instead sighed his relief and bade him farewell, leaving Spike alone, trudging toward the church in the snow, watching snowflakes pile up in his hand, not even beginning to melt. He stood and watched them, and a couple of tears that froze rolled down his cheeks, as he hissed into the wind first, "I'm sorry, Jane," hardly able to push the words past the lump in his throat. 

He thought an apology to the Masterpiece, for dehumanizing her enough that he thought of her in Angelus' terms, to make it easier for himself in a way he didn't deserve. Her death should eat at him for the rest of his eternal life, and he should kill her anyway, to spare her. 

Another gesture of penance, he forced himself to breathe out her name, barely hearing his voice even with preternatural hearing: "I'm sorry, Drusilla." 

When he was a boy, in confession, he'd sometimes been assigned a number of prayers as an act of contrition. Perhaps, each time he said her name was a similar thing, a gesture to re-humanize the girl so many treated like so little. 

How many times would he say her name to balance out killing her?

The words felt as futile as prayer as he approached the church. It was a tremendous, hulking edifice, all sharp spires and stained glass windows. Above a strong pair of double doors, a glorious panel of their saviour cast his aspersions down onto Spike, his arms spread wide on the cross, and his golden halo surrounding his head. Spike felt he should burst into flames underneath the saviour's gaze, for all that he had failed to do. 

Her real saviour, who had the divine power to burn Spike if he so much as grazed a crucifix. Who ought to have made her blood a substance far more sacred than holy water, so that it burned out Angelus' throat if he dared drink of it. The God she'd sacrificed her life to had the power to render her body more sacred than any relic, for her devotion to him—make her a living saint—and meaningfully do as the prayers asked of him and deliver her of evil.

Spike could not do better than to kill her—he could not take Angelus, with or without Darla, in a fight, and there was nothing short of killing Angelus that would get him to abandon his obsession. Spike did not have the options a supposedly omnipotent deity who already hated vampires had to save her. If God really was omnipotent and omniscient, as Spike was told he was in church, he was as cruel and depraved as Angelus, for standing by and letting this happen. For making a vampire have to take the mantle as saviour, as unfit and inadequate as he was before the man on the cross, who supposedly died for her, but wouldn't lift a bloody finger to save her. 

God would burn Spike and damn him eternally for killing Drusilla, but would not lift a finger to save the masterpiece from Angelus' tyrannical insistence on calling himself her creator. If God was worthy of being edified in this glass, he'd strike Spike down where he stood for his unworthy attempts to spare her—he'd strike Angelus down for the years of psychological torture he'd already inflicted, and the masterpiece—and the girl—and Drusilla would be canonized and edified as her own window in this hall of saints, for her battle against the devil himself. 

But God was unworthy. 

God was cruel. 

The only deliverance the masterpiece would ever know from her fate was a trespass that would forever mar Spike's conscience—to kill someone so fundamentally undeserving. And it was still better than the Lord on High would ever deign to do for her.

Disgusted, Spike scowled at the saviour's unperturbed, peaceful expression—anyone who wasn't screaming for the injustice was complicit as he'd been until tonight when he put on a costume and took a stand. 

He trudged away, through the snow, to a little door on the back of the church into a bare cellar, snapping the frozen lock with relative ease. It was relatively bare—storage for the communion wine and a number of hymn books, choral music, and the sort. But it was dark, it was warmer than outside, and it was closer than where Angelus would leave from if Spike woke with the sun's setting. He borrowed a candle and set himself up in a corner, lighting it for warmth even if the cold wouldn't kill him, and told himself that soon the moon would rise, and the Masterpiece’s blood would stain his hands before Angelus ever reached her.

It was still hard to sleep in this place, surrounded by the ephemera of her wrathful God, who did nothing to save her but to remind him that he was damned from that pane of glass whose eyes he swore were still upon him.

***

Drusilla

She couldn't scream. 

She tried so hard it choked her, so hard her head swam, unable to so much as draw breath to fill her lungs and scream. 

Brutal, heavy, sharp-edged hands drove into her skin to pin her down. She was crucified underneath his body. Drusilla could hear her own ragged breath, tearing painfully from her chest—an animal sound, but then, she'd long since lost anything in her that was human. She could not feel the ragged, hard-won breath in her lungs, nor harness it to scream—her throat ached like he'd torn it open from all the screaming she'd already done, but she didn't feel it in the slightest. Not through the rest of the pain, like he was tearing her insides apart. 

She didn't dare look anywhere but at the window in the church's skylight—kept her eyes trained on Jesus, and recited, in her head, Job's prayer for the deliverance of death. Even if she was damned, even if she was bound for Hell, just to deliver her of this body that hurt so blindingly badly she could hardly think the words to the well-worn prayer coherently, stumbling through Latin, and repeating lines, and interrupting herself with sharp cries, so much weaker than they had been.

The flesh was weak.

She thanked God that the flesh was weak—that it could not withstand an eternity of this torture. She tried to remind herself that it wasn't actually real—that this only happened when she failed her family—the devil was sadistic, and he was cruel, and he was fair. It felt as though her real life was the dream and this pain the unending, relentless reality. Nothing but pain could ever feel so real, making her weak, brutalized body tremble, blurring her vision with tears, as his clawed hands drive into her flesh, vicious as Roman nails. Desperately, she clung to the prayer that it wasn't real—it wasn't happening yet—she didn't yet deserve it.

She only suffered this fate once she deserved it, for all the blood that stained her hands. 

He ripped her head back, one hand fisting a bloody handful of her hair, and just as brutally sank his teeth into her skin, just below her collarbone, where her heart was. It was a sudden, stabbing pain that forced her eyes to snap, to take in the devil, naked, but for the sheen of her blood coating his body, his warped, inhuman yellow eyes consuming her suffering like the sweetest wine. 

The body weakened faster. The pain got blurrier—less defined—she hurt more and more broadly, until there was no her, there was no body, there was only pain. Her eyes lost focus and faded in and out, vision narrowing to black—this was how she would go to Hell, slowly succumbing to her own destruction, leaving behind a brutalized body they would not dare dignify with a consecrated burial, as they would every person she'd damned for the immeasurable trespass of their compassion for her. 

"Oh no, lover, I'm not done with you yet," the Devil leered down at her, his face eclipsing the saviour on his cross, his mouth smeared with her blood. He raised his wrist to his lips and bit into it deeply, letting it well with his tainted blood, which spilled readily from the cut. One hand gripped her by the hair, and the other bled, as he pushed his fingers into her mouth, so that the blood could trickle down his hand, and then the fingers into her. 

She desperately tried to thrash away, gasping at the spike of pain that she felt moving her torso, and still unable to move underneath his weight. When she gasped, he pushed his fingers further in, far enough that she choked and gagged on both him and his bitter, vile blood, eyes filling with tears. she tried to bite down on his fingers, but he let her—he laughed when she broke the skin, more of his sick, tainted blood dripping into her mouth from the cuts that she made. 

He wanted her to fight—every time she bit him, she just gave him more of what he wanted.

It was all that she could do to try to scream, but she couldn't draw in breath through his fingers. She gagged, and choked, and tried desperately to find in her a shred of energy, a shred of resistance, to try to thrash away from him, but could do nothing but lie on her back beneath him and choke, as he laughed, and told her bitter things she could not hear coherently, violating her mouth just as he had all the rest of her, with his blood.

She'd sell her soul just to scream, but found her soul worth less than the breath she struggled for.

A shrill, ear-piercing scream escaped her chest as her eyes flew open, finding herself sticky with blood, her heart racing, every muscle in her body aching and throbbing, as though she'd actually felt it. Her eyes scanned the darkness, seeing arcane figures, an onslaught of devils, ready to pin her down, ready to make her know hurt, just as she had when she dared sleep. 

Her only salvation was to scream herself hoarse, over and over, just to hear her voice pierce the midnight air. If she stopped screaming, she'd feel his fingers into her throat once more, and she wasn't convinced she'd ever breathe again. 

Her mouth tasted of copper, like she'd already tasted his blood. Like he'd already corrupted her. Her body was sticky, with blood, or else with sweat, or else with the devil's fluids, and her screaming subsided rapidly into hoarse choking sobs, as she curled her body up so tightly into a ball that her arms and back strained, and her already tense muscles hurt. The stickiness on her body made her sick, as the copper taste in her mouth did. Proof of him—proof of what he'd already done to her, every night while she slept, in dreams, or else in visions—she couldn't differentiate nightmares from reality, except that the nightmares didn't hurt, and the visions did. 

This was real, then. This would happen to her. 

She sobbed hysterically, sucking in deep, fast breaths until it dizzied her enough she barely felt the pain in her head and her body. Sobbing at the violation that she'd allowed into her head and into her body yet another night. The devil's gift that she'd sell her soul to be rid of, except that if the priest who'd died was right, she didn't have a soul to sell. She was a damned thing—damned to this fate, damned to bring the execution of everyone around her for harbouring her, for trying to bring her to the Lord, who saw what they wouldn't—that there was nothing in her that was worthy of salvation.

She let out a particularly rough, choked sob as she forced her stiff, aching body from the bed and got down on her knees on the hard wooden floor to fervently whisper prayers between choking gasps for breath. She faltered when she reached the line Deliver us from evil, stopping to plead with God himself, if he heard the ramblings of the damned, "Please, please deliver them from evil…please, please deliver my family, and the church, please, please…"

She heard footsteps in the hall—wouldn't be long now. 

Her prayer continued, "Please deliver me from evil, too. Please, I know it makes me an evil thing to ask it of you when I'm not worthy of it but please, please deliver me from evil, please, if there's anything in me that can be saved, show me the way, and if there isn't, please strike me down before the Devil can, please, please Lord…"

Another gasping sob nearly split open her chest as she fell forward onto her hands and knees, and made an irreverent prayer—a sinner's prayer, for a type of deliverance that damned her even to want. 

"Please, please Lord, please kill me."

It was not the first time she'd been weak enough to beg for it—she did so regularly in the visions, and their aftermath. Another thing to confess to the good father once dawn broke and she could unburden her corrupted soul in his confession booth—another vicious instance of the sin of the flesh, another sinful plea the Lord struck her down, because she was too pious, or else too afraid, or else too foolish to take up Hamlet's arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing, end. 

"Drusilla?" she heard, after a tentative rap at the door that barely carried over the sounds of her sobbing. "Drusilla, love, it's okay. You saw it again—you can't help that. Can I come in?"

She did not deserve Cecelia's compassion but was not strong enough to reject any comfort she was offered after what she'd seen. Weakly, her voice coming out rough and breaking, she said, "Could you make cocoa?"

Really, what she needed was for Cecelia not to see what she had to do to again be clean. She didn't have time to waste, sobbing on the floor, indulging in the expression of her pain. When she heard Cecelia leave, she wrenched herself off the floor and, with her shaking hands, divested herself of her nightgown, letting it pool at her feet. Beneath her bed, she'd secreted away a wash-basin, that by now, the water would be frigid, almost icy, and she needed the shock of the cold. She took a coarse rag—the sort the servants didn't even use on their dishes—and dipped it in the freezing water, bringing it to her sticky, tainted skin, to wash away what could have been blood, could have been sweat, could have been him. 

The shock of the chill drew her focus away from the pain in her stiff, aching body, and made her shudder, but the chill was contrition, and the water was her own made-up sacrament of penance. She could wash away his hands on her. She could wash away the sin and make herself some pallid imitation of pure. 

There was no gentleness in this sacrament. 

She scrubbed her body until it was raw and stinging, and the cold seeped into her bones, making her shiver. Devoutly, and meticulously, place by place, she cleaned every trace of the Devil's violation from her shaking body, forcing herself to breathe in time with each slow but relentless circle of the rag, so that she didn't faint, and worry Cecelia. 

The water felt like another attack, because it was. It was supposed to be. She hadn't seen the full vision come to fruition this time, but in the end of the vision, a wicked thing rose in her broken body, with the face, and the horrible yellow eyes of the Devil, and she tried to clean some of the blood from her body with holy water, and the water made her skin blister and peel, filled the air with smoke. Whatever the Devil rose in her flesh was fully wicked, fully damned. That was why the water hurt, because every time she saw it happen again, she was made less herself and more the thing that rose from the church floor. For the water to purify her, it had to hurt. 

A devil child. A spawn of Satan. The Lord will use you and smite you down.


She sighed in relief when all of her body was possessed by the numbing chill and the stinging of the harsh cloth. She was again clean. She was worthy of her sister's audience now. She picked the nightgown up from the floor and shakily buttoned herself back into it, not caring if they were in the right holes, so long as she was clothed when Cecelia saw her. 

Her head was throbbing, like there was a second heart beating behind her eye, the way she always felt when she had a vision, and she clutched at her head, letting out a soft, pained whine. 

It was nothing to the hurt she'd experienced seeing it happen—there was a reason she had not even noticed until she cleaned herself—but now the pain in her head turned her stomach so badly she knew she would not manage more than a couple of sips of the cocoa Cecelia had left to fetch. She was ashamed to even ask for it, except that the alternative was Cecelia seeing her before she was clean—when she was unworthy to receive her. Drusilla would never taint her sister like that. 

The last thing she needed to do before Cecelia's return had her stumbling on her shaky legs to the window, and then slowly, delicately pulling pin by pin from the edge of her curtains to allow herself a look outside. 

The first purpling rays of morning brought her no relief—the sky was bruised from the rise of the sun—daily violence few awoke to see. The window was frosty, and frost always terrified her because it preceded snow, and her family always died when there was snow on the ground, one long, unending night. 

The ground outside was carpeted in a soft, plush blanket of snow that glittered sharply in the morning's light, interrupted only by one set of footprints, a man in a nice coat, trudging past the house slowly and contemplatively, as though he had reason to be out so early, when the streets were so dangerous. She wanted to scream at him to come inside until the sun rose and banished the devil from the streets, but there was hardly any voice left in her throat. 

In her more immediate vicinity, there were large footprints that had started to fill with snow on the roof beneath her window that set her heart racing, and a wave of cold sweat through her body. 

The Devil had tried to peer in her window last night. 

Desperately, she seized the pins she'd taken out in her shaking hands, and tried to shove them through the fabric, to protect her from his watching eyes, but she could hardly get them through the fabric, and drove one into her finger enough it bled on the dark purple fabric of the curtains. She could not stomach the taste of blood, to lick her thumb clean. She'd be sick if she had to taste blood, but her window had to be properly sealed. 

The door cracked open behind her, and candlelight illuminated the room as she turned over her shoulder to see her sister, carrying a tray with two cups of cocoa and a candle. Her face was creased with worry—making her look far older, and far further away than she was. "Dru," she intoned, setting the cocoa and the candle down on her dresser, and coming to the window with her, "please, let me get that, you're shaking."

Drusilla, relieved of her handful of pins, sat obediently on the bed and watched Cecelia line up the edges of the curtains, overlapping them, because the edges were so raw and frayed from being pinned shut nightly that they barely held the pins any longer. Cecelia was the only one who would pin her curtains shut when she asked—her maid, Martha, would insist that the moonlight was good for her, Anne would scoff at her strangeness, and her parents would suggest that she'd be less afraid if she tried sleeping without them pinned, and nothing bad happened.

Every time she slept, something bad happened.

Cecelia started at the stain of blood on the curtains, which Drusilla cringed from just as instinctively. She had purple curtains because she could not stomach wiping her fingers on a napkin after eating cherries and pomegranates, nor any painting that took the colour red to a blank canvas, nor wearing anything light enough in colour that blood would stain it irreparably. It reminded her too much of the blood that tainted her skin when it all ended—the Devil long since having torn away her dress. 

Red on white was one of her omens that she avoided devoutly.

Cecelia finished with the window and took Drusilla's shaking hands into her own, using a handkerchief—black, one used by someone in mourning—to staunch the pinprick of blood on her finger. She knew Drusilla's hatred of red on white—knew Drusilla would be sick if she used either nightgown to stop the bleeding. Wordlessly, after she'd addressed the bleed, she pulled Drusilla into a slow, tentative hug, like she wasn't sure if it would shatter Dru apart to receive her affections. 

It did. 

The dam Drusilla had barely, shakily built broke at her sister's undue kindness. Her shaky arms wrapped around Cecelia's waist tightly, and she buried her face in her shoulder, trying to cry silently, with delicate, hiccuping sobs that were more in control than the harsh, rasping cries she'd let out alone. 

Cecelia's gentle hands skimmed down her back and through her hair as she muttered the most compassionate lies Drusilla had ever been told: It's okay, Dru. We'll make it stop. you haven't done anything wrong. We can save you. We can save all of us. The Devil will not take your soul, I promise. 

She'd never forgive herself for the danger her life put Cecelia in, but weakly, she allowed herself this comfort, if only because it would grieve Cecelia more to hear her sobbing through the door than to hold her while she cried.