Confines

AUTHOR: Harker again....
EMAIL: [email protected]
DISTRIBUTION: Just ask - I won't bite unless you ask nicely
SPOILERS: Entire Jossverse
RATING: PG
CONTENT WARNING: Postmodernism
RELATIONSHIPS: Angel/Angelus
FEEDBACK: Yes please even if it's hatemail. Just so I actually GET some mail.
SUMMARY: Angleus reflects on his captor
DISCLAIMER: I own nothing, not even my mind. I think Joss has that too.
DEDICATION: To Tess. I promise those marks will heal eventually, my lamb.
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After a while, the small, stuffy confines of your prison become all you ever knew. Before this place, there was nothing bright, no clarity. Only these half-remembered shadows flitting around, flirting with the deeper darkness that lurks on the edges of the mind. The same place that I inhabit.
There is no worse prison than your own head, and it makes it so much worse when you have to share head-space with everything you despise. Choked on humility, force-fed nobility and honour until you want to vomit, or at least pull the eyeballs out of your agressor's head, and use them, nerves still attatched, as the flagelatory end of an improvised scourge to beat the undead shit out of this moron you've got to deal with.
He doesn't like it when I talk like that. That's my salvation.
All the while he's got the wheel on this body, then I can't stop it going around like some sort of defending angel, helping the helpless, seeking redemption for everything I did, and yes that has got to be the most annoying thing. Having to look out of those eyes and see this body, the one whose hands have squeezed the life from countless human frames, masquerading as the Saviour. It makes me sick to see that, but it's not as if I have eyelids to close anymore, and I can't control his, so I have to suffer it. But that doesn't mean I can't control what goes on in *here* does it?
Out here in the dark where for humans the worst things are hiding waiting to get them, and for any normal vampire - not an emotional cripple like the one currently using the flesh and bones that are rightfully mine - is a sanctuary, there's me. There always will be, no matter how hard he fights it. And here on the mental plane I'm the King, the stronger will, and here every day, while he tries to rest enough to carry on those pitiful activities, that's where I can finally get him.
It's a commonly held belief that to torture someone you require a great deal of complicated and grisly looking equipment; this isn't so - good torturers need only their hands and maybe a set of pliers. The best don't even need that - all they need is to have a little talk with their victim. Get inside their head, pull out the stuffing from their mind and set everything they hold dear ablaze. And if course, that's so much easier if you're inside their head in the first place.
That's right Angel; no matter how much good you do, no matter who you help survive another day, protecting them from your own kind like the treacherous fuckwit you are, when you close those eyes, *my* eyes, I'm going to be standing right there behind them. No way you can escape something that's all in your mind is there? Stay in the light all you want in your waking hours, my sweet idiot friend, when the sun rises, and you crawl away to your bolthole to hide from the toxic rays, you're going to find yourself so deep in the darkness you can't find your way. And the darkest thing in there is me, waiting for you. One day I'll trip you, one day you won't be able to take the attack any more, then you're going to trade places with me, and that filthy soul will have to watch while I make up for years confined and starving. Mine is not an evil that sleeps too often - so for a long, long time you're going to have 24/7 entertainment. It's going to be you wishing you could close these eyes.
Until then, I'm bouncing my thoughts off the walls of his mind, twining my consciousness with his, whiling away time that is marked only by whether he sleeps or wakes. To tell the truth, I've no idea how long it's been since I was last in control. Maybe a year, maybe a century. There's nothing here but me, and him, and the circles of ever increasing pitch dark that surround me. But it's not the nothingness in here that bothers me. It's the noise that damned soul makes. Because it feels everything too, and it screams like all the devils in Hell.
I'm a seperate being, that's for certain, but that body is connected just as deeply to the both of us, and my mind feels everything he inflicts on it; the razor slashes when he's alone, the blows of his adversaries, the stabbing sickness that comes of living off a stupidly insufficient quantity of cold animal blood, once a day, gulped down like medicine so that he can't even enjoy it just for being blood, the grinding pain that follows that cursory feed, liquid that's far too cold in our belly, body screaming to be properly fed. And beyond even all of that the lust to kill and take the hot gush of fresh, human blood. He'll pay for starving me, for locking me up, for torturing me while he wakes as surely as I do him while he sleeps. When I get loose, it's going to *rain* blood in here.
But until that happens, all I can do is kick at the walls of mind-stuff that lock me in, try to find that one loose link in his mental armour. Stay here in threadbare velvet and crumbling lace, picking at the darkness, drawing it around me. Waiting.