DISCLAIMER: Dru, Angel and Spike belong to Joss. Don't sue. Please. NOTES: Swiftly written short vignette. During the 19th century, in the alternate universe of 'the Wish', a character finds a kind of redemption-- at a cost. Dru's POV narrates... Basically a 'what if Spike wasn't vamped?' story. The title is taken from the symbolic image of a snake devouring itself-- eternity, time, immortality, paradox, armageddon, ourobouros... Quote at start from Leonard Cohen.
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...and when we fell together
all our flesh was like a veil
that I had to draw aside to see
the serpent eat its tail.
* * *
1865, The Tower, London
Everything is dark here.
A score of ravens perch on the gallows, their feathers reflecting in morbid rainbows. The crowd smells of lust, and blood, and salty humanity as they seethe at the foot of the platform. They form a sea of faces; faces which already possess the appearance, if not the substance of death--pale, formless wax, bobbing on that ocean of blackness.
The stones that surround the people in the courtyard, above and below, cobbled pavement and bricked walls; wish to suck them down, even as the heaviness of the tower's shadow diminishes and overrules them. Though it is daylight hours, there is no sunlight, and no fear of even a single sunbeam lancing through the greyness.
Everything is dark here.
I love it.
All of me dances to this-- lives for this, the heavy blanket of anticipation that smothers the crowd. Better yet is the cornucopia of scents and sounds and *knowings* which go with it.
Secrets.
I know secrets. I am a secret.
My Angel named me today, for what he has made me. My nature is the biggest of the secrets I keep-- so many have found it out, all a split second before they died for the knowing. Now I am named for it, too: 'Drusilla' my saviour called me, my unknowing seducer, bringer of tragedy. I'm a candle to a moths fluttering wings now, like the small, fleetfooted insects that suck the blood of the living. I whisper my new name, trying it out.
Some of the people in the crowd look back at me as I speak, not disapproving, not curious even, but with a complete lack of any emotion at all. They see a maid's beauty when they gaze at me, a beauty displaced, that it should be sharing the cobbles with such as themselves. Perhaps this awakes a sense of disquiet within them, for as one, they turn their heads back towards the gallows.
This crowd is waiting to see the death of a bad man, my Angel told me.
He laughed as he said it.
The noose sways slightly in the wind as I watch, with a frown, then loose a laugh of my own for the rope's whimsy.
I love my Angel's laughter-- the way it turns in on itself, biting like a blade, cutting away pieces of my insides. There must be so many scars there now... for a moment I see them, the way I imagine they must appear, all white and pink, some healing, some fresh, behind them images of all the pain my Angel has caused... but the image turns around suddenly, and the network of rose and ivory carved into my soul looks exquisite to me-- some brilliant and rare ornamentation, intricate and wondrous; the wounds gashing away memories, an anaesthetic of pain.
I cannot suppress a giggle at that; my chuckle turning into a happy sigh as the thoughts of the mob spiral around me. Every feeling takes on a different hue of the dark spectrum I saw in the bird's wings, beautiful enough to break your heart.
Luckily, I am without one of those.
The people feel lust, a proprietary approval, enhanced by the delicious fear that it could as easily be them being marched to the gallows foot. Words do not express how intoxicating it is.
I see my Angel's head, off to my left, somewhere in the crowd. He is darker than them. Than the humans. Darker even than this place--whilst the people are a rainbow of blackness, and the tower is the colour of night; my Angel is a night without stars or moon, or any light at all. I am continually suprised that none of the mob notice his difference, his strangeness.
I want to go to him now, but the sharp warning glare he shoots at me from afar, lets me know that he has brought me to this place to hunt. By myself, for once. He is busy stalking, looking for a challenging kill, or a pretty maid. He does so love to play with his food.
In resignation to my lone hunt, I gaze about me, looking for one to be *my* playmate. I like the little ones best-- children, babies... they're naught but a bite, but what concentrated feeling, what a short, sharp, bright lift their blood is. Naught but a bite... I cannot help but giggle at my own joke. The very old as well, are like a long slow draught of fine wine; rich and varied, but not so exciting. Angel prefers me to dine on the babies anyway, to him an old man is too much of a mercy killing.
The crowd is stirring restlessly when the sharp beat of a soldier's drum sounds, heralding the arrival of the prisoner. The sound tears the air in two, dramatic in its effect. I pick my target quickly, so as to not miss anything. I decide on the young man directly in front of me, strapping and tall, even if his beauty is marred by the malleable clay-like dullness of his features. He will keep while I watch the show; and in the raucous aftermath, no one will notice another death.
The prisoner is led onto the wooden platform. He must be led, for he is hobbled by both manacles around his wrists and ankles, and also a sackcloth hood over his head. I wonder why they bother with that. Perhaps it makes the unveiling all the more dramatic. He looks young, judging by what I can see of his limbs. Strongly and gracefully made. This conclusion utilises a fair amount of imagination on my behalf, since the youth (if youth he is) is gaunt and sick-looking now,his veins visible through pale skin, thinned by poor diet, his muscles wasted away, atrophied by lack of exercise whilst so chained.
I do not listen to the solemn booming voice of the Queen's representative, listing crimes, or single crime, as the case may be. I am however, watching avidly when the sackcloth is snatched away, even that slight movement jolting the boy enough that I fear he will fall, and be torn to pieces by the crowd. He regains his balance though, and his face, when he looks up, sends a strange thrill through me, the likes of which I've never felt.
It is the eyes.
I tell myself that it is only the eyes, that they only touch me because of the darkness in them, blackness rivalling my Angel's.
But there is more than that.
There is a memory locked within their greyness, the same precise grey, it strikes me, as the sky overhead.
It occurs to me then, as well, that I am frightened. I do not get frightened. Except of my Angel, and that is just one edge of the whirlpool of love and fear that that one evokes in me.
No, I am frightened of a half-dead boy with metallic, skyborn eyes.
The moment ends as quickly as it came. I sense the flickers of confusion and pain and resignation in the condemned man, and he is only human again. The droning voice of the priest has ended, and I step closer to the man in front of me in the crowd, my targeted victim, watching over his shoulder as the boy's manacles are removed. He can hardly walk without them, the red rawness of the sores on wrists and ankles making him pitifully weak without the heavy, painful support of the iron.
The executioner eventually resorts to the simple expedient of lifting him onto the trapdoor, as lightly and effortlessly as you would pick up a broken-winged bird. The boy's eyes are closed now. The removal of his gaze is like the cessation of a constant pain, a relief almost painful in and of itself.
And I can almost remember... no...
It slips beyond my grasp, and I push away the unsettling idea of myself being linked with this dying boy.
Now it is time to hunt.
I engineer my staged stumble forwards, my prey, the young man standing in front of me. He assumes I am overcome by the savagery of the scene unfolding before us; he turns his back on the gallows to take me in his strong arms, bewitched by the studied shimmer of my large dark eyes. Disturbingly, I find that the role of distressed maid comes easier to me than I would like, this time. The human's skin feels coarse against the poreless, inhuman porcelain of my own. I rest my cheek against his upper arm, peeking at the gallows behind him.
The broken youth stands still on the trapdoor, a black-garbed man places the noose around his neck-- he wears it as if it were a murderous necklace, so contemptous of his fate is he. The youth becomes thin and sharp in my eyes, and bright, above all, bright. A thin sliver of light gleaming above the darkness of crowds, and walls, and Angel...
A prayer is being said. The black clad man's voice is monotonal. He reminds me of the ravens.
He recites the words without passion.
Not a prayer for the dying, a prayer for the killed.
How appropriate, I think, as I sink my teeth into the throat of the young man who holds me. He makes no noise, the wound is deep, his windpipe torn open. We stand in a parody of a lover's embrace, his head whipping around helplessly, soundlessly requesting help from the crowd. But their eyes are fixed on the gallows tree, and I am just a delicate creature-- what danger could I be to this strapping man whose life I am swallowing?
Something is wrong in the order of things.
Up on the gallows, the boy opens his eyes.
And looks straight at me.
Our gazes meet.
The trapdoor opens.
The crack of the boys neck is the loudest sound I have ever heard.
His body jerks on the rope, thin and sharp and bright. He is akin to a knife, and somehow he has cut me. Unwanted knowledge invades me, and I scream a silent cry of rage and pain, muffled by the cheers of the crowd, absorbed by the wounded throat of the dead man still clasped to my chest.
I can no longer tell whether the magistrates voice is in my ears, or in my brain, as he ascends the platform. His voice is as dead as the fragile jerking body of the boy.
"I hereby witness justice to have been done."
The rope is cut.
"According with sentence, as penalty for the murder by duel of one Antoine LaVarre and the unrepentant ruination of one Rosemary LaVarre; the prisoner has been hanged by the neck until dead."
The boy's body is lowered from view.
"May the Lord have mercy on his soul,"
His bright light has gone out, yet for once the darkness fails to comfort me.
"William the Bloody is no more."
How curious that tears of blood begin their slow crawl down my cheeks at those words.
~finis~
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