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snoggedTitle: Holding Her Own (5/10)
Author: snogged
Disclaimer: Joss Whedon and Co. own the characters of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I don’t.
Pairing: Willow/Angelus, Willow/Tara, Willow/Angel (friendship)
Word Count: 1990
Overall Rating/Highlight for Warnings: FRAO/NC-17; *angst/dark themes, character death, drug use, crude language (including sexual swearing) violence, sex*
Setting: Set Post-Season 5 of BtVS/Season 2 of AtS.
Summary: Still struggling with Buffy's death, Willow gets an unexpected visitor that brings a whole new set of problems to Sunnydale.
Beta: the unmistakable![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
velvetwhip and whichclothes. All other mistakes are mine.
A/N: Several years ago, I started a WIP that never went further than the first chapter. This is my attempt to fix that. Enjoy!
A/N 2: This story is completed and chapters will be posted weekly.
Previous Chapters
Featuring artwork byrua1412 any spikesredqueen
“’Round and ‘round and ‘round she goes,” the sorcerer chanted, moving his spindly index finger in lazy, clockwise circles, mirroring the movements Willow made above him. His eyes were dark and glittering with malice. “Where she stops, nobody knows.”
The wizard’s actions were about the only things she could see and hear, though. Everything else just looked blurry, like colors of a painting blending together into one goopy mess.
What made things even worse was that she had absolutely no clue how long she’d been a puppet on the wizard’s dizzying strings. For all she knew it could have been minutes, or hours, or possibly even days. She really didn’t want to think about that last option actually being an option, though. She just hoped that Xander, Anya, Giles, and Spike would do whatever it took to figure out where she was instead of letting her die.
Plus, she knew that Spike knew Angelus was back and he also knew that she would be nuts enough to go on a rescue mission by herself. If it hadn’t been for him setting Buffy straight a few months ago, there would have been no telling how much damage Glory would have inflicted upon her.
Now was really not the best time to start over-analyzing how much she could really trust Spike. She had to believe that he would tell them what was going on. She had to believe that he would round up the troops and set out to find her if she didn’t come back. Because he was one of the good guys now, wasn’t he?
Closing her eyes, Willow slowly exhaled, centering herself. With the way she was currently being manipulated, there was no way for her to use her own magic to fight back. She also didn’t have the vial of holy water or the cross on her person on account of them succumbing to the laws of gravity and shattering once they hit the ground. All she knew was that if she planned to get out of here alive and accomplish what she came to do, she absolutely needed to keep her cool. There was no room for error, no time to fall apart, no time to revert back to the babbling, innocent schoolgirl who quaked with terror when she saw a flash of fang. This was a time for strength, not fear.
The whirling came to an unexpected stop a few minutes later. She would have loved to imagine that the wizard had gotten bored of this game and she would soon float gently downwards and land in a big cushion of fluffy pillows. But she knew better than that. It was far more likely that he would watch her drop like a ton of bricks and cackle with glee when she landed on the flesh-eating pillows or face-planted into the hardwood. He was a friend of Angelus’s after all.
Opening her eyes, Willow gazed down at the divan where the wizard still sat and sucked in a sharp breath. He stared back at her with equal intensity, a sneer twisting his lips as he extended his palm. The flat expanse of yellowed skin and his change of posture signaled that a new spell was coming her way. In fact, she was pretty sure he was about to use the same spell she’d used once when she and Tara made pancakes. If she recalled correctly, it took days to get the gooey batter off the ceiling.
Her theory was proven correct when her body instantly lurched upwards from the powerful surge of energy produced by his magic. Like the pancakes, she was immediately stuck to the rafters like a fly caught in honey. No matter how hard she tried to wiggle her shoulders or kick her legs, the invisible bindings produced by the spell did not permit it.
Whether her state of immobilization would be better than being a wizard’s personal dreidel remained to be seen. On the one hand, she could see more clearly now, but on the other hand, this was not the time to be afraid of heights.
“So lovely of you to wear a skirt today, baby.” Angelus smirked, peering up at her with amusement dancing in his eyes. “Never would have guessed that the view would be so… womanly.”
Willow shuddered, watching his tongue lewdly dart across the seam of his upper lip. She wasn’t entirely sure what he meant by that, but she certainly felt increasingly aware of the fact that she hadn’t worn tights today. Most of all, she didn’t want to think about how many times Angelus (or the super skeevy wizard) had likely gotten a glimpse of her white cotton panties printed with bright red cherries. She closed her eyes, knowing that even if she was powerless like this, she could still ignore the perverted look on his face.
“Aww, don’t be like that,” Angelus said. “Rack and I have been so nice to you since you dropped into my home without an invitation.”
Nice? Willow almost laughed, but then she realized that he wasn’t exactly wrong. Angelus hadn’t bitten her. He hadn’t strangled her, beaten her, or raped her. Rack hadn’t cursed her. There were no bruises on her skin. None of her blood was dripping onto the floor. This was, in fact, probably about as nice as Angelus got.
Below, Angelus’s one-sided conversation continued: “It’s quite rude to just barge in on someone unannounced. At least when I came to see you earlier I had the common decency to bring a present." Lick lip number two. "Did you like it, Willow? Did you sneak a peek between her gaping thighs and see how moist she still was?”
“You’re sick,” Willow said, her voice barely above a whisper.
Angelus chuckled. “Is that why you came to me, Willow? So you could experience the same guilty pleasure she did? Did you want to be spread out on the mattress and fucked like she was before I killed her? Is this whole lesbian thing not working out for you anymore?”
Willow’s cheeks burned hot and red and she felt sick to her stomach. Why had Angel allowed himself to become this monster again? Why couldn’t he just deal with grief and depression like a freaking normal person?
It was about darn time she asked him that very thing.
“Angel, I know Buffy’s death hurt you. It hurt all of us. But she wouldn’t want you to do this. Your soul was the most important thing in the world to her. What she loved most about you. So why are you doing this?”
Angelus snorted, fury building behind his dark eyes at the mention of his souled counterpart. “Funny you should mention Angel, baby. Do you know what that old boy got up to after you left? Damn fool nearly drowned himself in a pool of his own tears from brooding so much and then literally tried to drown himself in fucking holy water.”
Willow’s eyes widened with horror and she felt a flare of anger puncture her heart. When she had left Los Angeles, she had been certain that Cordelia, Wesley, and Gunn could handle any suicide watches that might be needed. Sure, that brown-haired girl – Fred? – who had returned with them from the alternate dimension needed one-on-one attention too, but that left at least two of them to keep an eye on Angel. There was no way they would be dumb enough to fall into the whole “he’s a big boy, he can take care of himself” mentality. Or were they?
Taking a deep breath, Willow returned her focus to what Angelus was telling her. If Wes, Cordy, and Gunn had screwed up, that was their problem and right now, she figured she could do what she knew how to do best. She could be the supportive friend Angel had needed at his side…provided that he was still in there somewhere. “I’m so sorry, Angel. If I had known, I never would have….”
Angelus growled in agitation, clearly not interested in being mollified. “You couldn’t have stopped him and neither could those pesky morons he calls friends. He could get a stake in his heart faster than you could blink.”
Despite the fact that she wasn’t used to having a conversation while plastered to a ceiling, she was grateful that he couldn’t attack her. Sure, Rack could, but the wizard had been quiet during this exchange and she doubted that Angelus would suddenly start including him.
“So what stopped him?” Willow asked.
Normally, she would be surprised by the bluntness of her question, but she remembered a lecture Maggie Walsh (pre-discovery of her crazy leadership tactics) had given about self-harm and suicide. She had talked about working with clients who had seemed so determined to end it all until Maggie asked them this question. It caught them off guard enough to think about the things that were keeping them on this Earth and 95% of the cases she had presented yielded at least one positive response. As for the other 5%, Maggie hadn’t exactly offered the grisly details, but it didn’t take a rocket scientist or a trained psychologist to figure out the outcome.
“Couldn’t handle the burn,” Angelus replied as another peal of laughter erupted from him like a volcano. “So instead, he decided to crawl into the dark, dank cargo hold of a ship sailing off to the edge of the world with the hopes that he’d just fall off the face of it.”
Willow nearly interrupted him to point out that scientists had already proven a long time ago that the planet wasn’t flat, but she had a feeling from the dramatically exaggerated edge he was giving this adventure that he already knew that.
“We ended up in Sri Lanka and visited a nice little monastery that I had once burned to the ground back in my glory days. Admittedly, monks don’t taste quite as sweet as nuns, but none of that matters when it all ends up in the same gullet anyways.” Angelus said, recalling the events of his past with a twisted fondness before he continued. “As you can imagine, they weren’t all that thrilled to have Angel return, but after they shook a stick at him a few times, they felt assured he wouldn’t bring them harm.”
Willow suspected that a “but” was well on its way into Angelus’s monologue and she opted to keep quiet in the interest of hearing more.
“Weeks went by and we subsisted on the mouse blood and chamomile tea. Instead of becoming Zen, Angel sank deeper into his depression. So much so in fact that he didn’t notice when the monks started to lace his tea with a low dose of Ecstasy. As Angel started getting happier, they started uping the dosage. Turned out they’d been waiting for me to return all these years and they’d sold their souls to the devil to figure out how to bring me back the moment Angel came tromping through the door.”
Willow didn’t need him to spell it out for her further. What the monks had done was pretty clear. The Angelus who was standing beneath her still had his soul intact. It was just buried beneath the artificial euphoric feelings produced by the drugs. Drugs that he would have to keep taking more and more of to maintain his state of mind. “So you’re popping pills?”
“They’re ridiculously easy to obtain in L.A. Drug dealers roam the streets like filthy rats. Of course, once I got my stash set up, I had to pay a visit to an old actress friend of mine and thank her for introducing me to the idea a few years back.”
Willow imagined that the visit probably hadn’t ended well for the woman in question. But she didn’t have to think about it for very long because, to her surprise and relief, Rack’s hand twitched and her body peeled itself off the ceiling and gradually descended to the floor.
When her feet made contact with the ground, Angelus reached his hand forward and cupped her cheek.
“And now, you’re going to help me make it permanent.”
Author: snogged
Disclaimer: Joss Whedon and Co. own the characters of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I don’t.
Pairing: Willow/Angelus, Willow/Tara, Willow/Angel (friendship)
Word Count: 1990
Overall Rating/Highlight for Warnings: FRAO/NC-17; *angst/dark themes, character death, drug use, crude language (including sexual swearing) violence, sex*
Setting: Set Post-Season 5 of BtVS/Season 2 of AtS.
Summary: Still struggling with Buffy's death, Willow gets an unexpected visitor that brings a whole new set of problems to Sunnydale.
Beta: the unmistakable
velvetwhip and whichclothes. All other mistakes are mine.A/N: Several years ago, I started a WIP that never went further than the first chapter. This is my attempt to fix that. Enjoy!
A/N 2: This story is completed and chapters will be posted weekly.
Previous Chapters
Featuring artwork by
rua1412 any spikesredqueen“’Round and ‘round and ‘round she goes,” the sorcerer chanted, moving his spindly index finger in lazy, clockwise circles, mirroring the movements Willow made above him. His eyes were dark and glittering with malice. “Where she stops, nobody knows.”
The wizard’s actions were about the only things she could see and hear, though. Everything else just looked blurry, like colors of a painting blending together into one goopy mess.
What made things even worse was that she had absolutely no clue how long she’d been a puppet on the wizard’s dizzying strings. For all she knew it could have been minutes, or hours, or possibly even days. She really didn’t want to think about that last option actually being an option, though. She just hoped that Xander, Anya, Giles, and Spike would do whatever it took to figure out where she was instead of letting her die.
Plus, she knew that Spike knew Angelus was back and he also knew that she would be nuts enough to go on a rescue mission by herself. If it hadn’t been for him setting Buffy straight a few months ago, there would have been no telling how much damage Glory would have inflicted upon her.
Now was really not the best time to start over-analyzing how much she could really trust Spike. She had to believe that he would tell them what was going on. She had to believe that he would round up the troops and set out to find her if she didn’t come back. Because he was one of the good guys now, wasn’t he?
Closing her eyes, Willow slowly exhaled, centering herself. With the way she was currently being manipulated, there was no way for her to use her own magic to fight back. She also didn’t have the vial of holy water or the cross on her person on account of them succumbing to the laws of gravity and shattering once they hit the ground. All she knew was that if she planned to get out of here alive and accomplish what she came to do, she absolutely needed to keep her cool. There was no room for error, no time to fall apart, no time to revert back to the babbling, innocent schoolgirl who quaked with terror when she saw a flash of fang. This was a time for strength, not fear.
The whirling came to an unexpected stop a few minutes later. She would have loved to imagine that the wizard had gotten bored of this game and she would soon float gently downwards and land in a big cushion of fluffy pillows. But she knew better than that. It was far more likely that he would watch her drop like a ton of bricks and cackle with glee when she landed on the flesh-eating pillows or face-planted into the hardwood. He was a friend of Angelus’s after all.
Opening her eyes, Willow gazed down at the divan where the wizard still sat and sucked in a sharp breath. He stared back at her with equal intensity, a sneer twisting his lips as he extended his palm. The flat expanse of yellowed skin and his change of posture signaled that a new spell was coming her way. In fact, she was pretty sure he was about to use the same spell she’d used once when she and Tara made pancakes. If she recalled correctly, it took days to get the gooey batter off the ceiling.
Her theory was proven correct when her body instantly lurched upwards from the powerful surge of energy produced by his magic. Like the pancakes, she was immediately stuck to the rafters like a fly caught in honey. No matter how hard she tried to wiggle her shoulders or kick her legs, the invisible bindings produced by the spell did not permit it.
Whether her state of immobilization would be better than being a wizard’s personal dreidel remained to be seen. On the one hand, she could see more clearly now, but on the other hand, this was not the time to be afraid of heights.
“So lovely of you to wear a skirt today, baby.” Angelus smirked, peering up at her with amusement dancing in his eyes. “Never would have guessed that the view would be so… womanly.”
Willow shuddered, watching his tongue lewdly dart across the seam of his upper lip. She wasn’t entirely sure what he meant by that, but she certainly felt increasingly aware of the fact that she hadn’t worn tights today. Most of all, she didn’t want to think about how many times Angelus (or the super skeevy wizard) had likely gotten a glimpse of her white cotton panties printed with bright red cherries. She closed her eyes, knowing that even if she was powerless like this, she could still ignore the perverted look on his face.
“Aww, don’t be like that,” Angelus said. “Rack and I have been so nice to you since you dropped into my home without an invitation.”
Nice? Willow almost laughed, but then she realized that he wasn’t exactly wrong. Angelus hadn’t bitten her. He hadn’t strangled her, beaten her, or raped her. Rack hadn’t cursed her. There were no bruises on her skin. None of her blood was dripping onto the floor. This was, in fact, probably about as nice as Angelus got.
Below, Angelus’s one-sided conversation continued: “It’s quite rude to just barge in on someone unannounced. At least when I came to see you earlier I had the common decency to bring a present." Lick lip number two. "Did you like it, Willow? Did you sneak a peek between her gaping thighs and see how moist she still was?”
“You’re sick,” Willow said, her voice barely above a whisper.
Angelus chuckled. “Is that why you came to me, Willow? So you could experience the same guilty pleasure she did? Did you want to be spread out on the mattress and fucked like she was before I killed her? Is this whole lesbian thing not working out for you anymore?”
Willow’s cheeks burned hot and red and she felt sick to her stomach. Why had Angel allowed himself to become this monster again? Why couldn’t he just deal with grief and depression like a freaking normal person?
It was about darn time she asked him that very thing.
“Angel, I know Buffy’s death hurt you. It hurt all of us. But she wouldn’t want you to do this. Your soul was the most important thing in the world to her. What she loved most about you. So why are you doing this?”
Angelus snorted, fury building behind his dark eyes at the mention of his souled counterpart. “Funny you should mention Angel, baby. Do you know what that old boy got up to after you left? Damn fool nearly drowned himself in a pool of his own tears from brooding so much and then literally tried to drown himself in fucking holy water.”
Willow’s eyes widened with horror and she felt a flare of anger puncture her heart. When she had left Los Angeles, she had been certain that Cordelia, Wesley, and Gunn could handle any suicide watches that might be needed. Sure, that brown-haired girl – Fred? – who had returned with them from the alternate dimension needed one-on-one attention too, but that left at least two of them to keep an eye on Angel. There was no way they would be dumb enough to fall into the whole “he’s a big boy, he can take care of himself” mentality. Or were they?
Taking a deep breath, Willow returned her focus to what Angelus was telling her. If Wes, Cordy, and Gunn had screwed up, that was their problem and right now, she figured she could do what she knew how to do best. She could be the supportive friend Angel had needed at his side…provided that he was still in there somewhere. “I’m so sorry, Angel. If I had known, I never would have….”
Angelus growled in agitation, clearly not interested in being mollified. “You couldn’t have stopped him and neither could those pesky morons he calls friends. He could get a stake in his heart faster than you could blink.”
Despite the fact that she wasn’t used to having a conversation while plastered to a ceiling, she was grateful that he couldn’t attack her. Sure, Rack could, but the wizard had been quiet during this exchange and she doubted that Angelus would suddenly start including him.
“So what stopped him?” Willow asked.
Normally, she would be surprised by the bluntness of her question, but she remembered a lecture Maggie Walsh (pre-discovery of her crazy leadership tactics) had given about self-harm and suicide. She had talked about working with clients who had seemed so determined to end it all until Maggie asked them this question. It caught them off guard enough to think about the things that were keeping them on this Earth and 95% of the cases she had presented yielded at least one positive response. As for the other 5%, Maggie hadn’t exactly offered the grisly details, but it didn’t take a rocket scientist or a trained psychologist to figure out the outcome.
“Couldn’t handle the burn,” Angelus replied as another peal of laughter erupted from him like a volcano. “So instead, he decided to crawl into the dark, dank cargo hold of a ship sailing off to the edge of the world with the hopes that he’d just fall off the face of it.”
Willow nearly interrupted him to point out that scientists had already proven a long time ago that the planet wasn’t flat, but she had a feeling from the dramatically exaggerated edge he was giving this adventure that he already knew that.
“We ended up in Sri Lanka and visited a nice little monastery that I had once burned to the ground back in my glory days. Admittedly, monks don’t taste quite as sweet as nuns, but none of that matters when it all ends up in the same gullet anyways.” Angelus said, recalling the events of his past with a twisted fondness before he continued. “As you can imagine, they weren’t all that thrilled to have Angel return, but after they shook a stick at him a few times, they felt assured he wouldn’t bring them harm.”
Willow suspected that a “but” was well on its way into Angelus’s monologue and she opted to keep quiet in the interest of hearing more.
“Weeks went by and we subsisted on the mouse blood and chamomile tea. Instead of becoming Zen, Angel sank deeper into his depression. So much so in fact that he didn’t notice when the monks started to lace his tea with a low dose of Ecstasy. As Angel started getting happier, they started uping the dosage. Turned out they’d been waiting for me to return all these years and they’d sold their souls to the devil to figure out how to bring me back the moment Angel came tromping through the door.”
Willow didn’t need him to spell it out for her further. What the monks had done was pretty clear. The Angelus who was standing beneath her still had his soul intact. It was just buried beneath the artificial euphoric feelings produced by the drugs. Drugs that he would have to keep taking more and more of to maintain his state of mind. “So you’re popping pills?”
“They’re ridiculously easy to obtain in L.A. Drug dealers roam the streets like filthy rats. Of course, once I got my stash set up, I had to pay a visit to an old actress friend of mine and thank her for introducing me to the idea a few years back.”
Willow imagined that the visit probably hadn’t ended well for the woman in question. But she didn’t have to think about it for very long because, to her surprise and relief, Rack’s hand twitched and her body peeled itself off the ceiling and gradually descended to the floor.
When her feet made contact with the ground, Angelus reached his hand forward and cupped her cheek.
“And now, you’re going to help me make it permanent.”