A Victory March
You acquired a facility when it came to being around Angel. Bred into your bones, written into your blood, the red-fire surge of heart and finger-perfect care, and when you see him you want to drop to your knees because it's like coming home.
You have a reverence for him that you never show, except in your weakest moments when the words spill from your mouth like sweet wine on a battlefield, broken and crazy and no one pays attention to you anyway.
He is like the air you do not need, an open sore in your side that will not heel, and best of all you can't seem to be more than thirty feet away from him at a given time.
You've never been one to moan your grief unless somewhat other has taken hold of your mind, because he taught you long ago to never show your soft underbelly to any but him, and you even grew out of that after awhile. Angelus gave you lessons; Angel shows you how to master the art.
You know the brilliance of being between yourself, when one side of you pulls you from the other until your bones crack and your joints scream in pain, and it's something you miss from Sunnydale with the vagueness of the insane.
You're not insane now; he wouldn't allow it, wouldn't care for it, would leave you out in the cold to your pain and your torture because if anything, he thinks you deserve it, like he did. But making comparisons between the two of you has never been easy, even when you go out of your way to parallel him by taking his girl and taking his prophecy and generally tilting the balance more in your favor every day.
It makes him angry, and that makes you smile.
You've been unable to coax an emotion out of him other than depression and fear since longer than you can remember, and you remember everything with the clarity of the walking dead and tonsured scribes.
You find yourself on your knees before him, reverence choking you with its backwards torment. You would crawl to him and lick his boots if he ever gave you a gentle glance, but he is hard like the diamonds Darla was so fond off and instead you weakly mouth off to him.
You have never been an easy one to break in, always went out of your way to be recalcitrant and proud, but the submission is in you, lying in wait for someone to treat you kindly. It never happens, but when it does you feel like you are going to break apart at the seams.
It's the key to unmaking you, and Drusilla knew it but was too dotty to use it, and Buffy did it without ever knowing what it truly was.
Angel was too blind to see it, when all you wanted to do was rest your head on his thighs and hear him call you pet and carefully guide your head to the leather that covered his cock.
Instead you sit in his office, watching him waste his life and his power until he is spent with only you to protect him, and not even the will to ask for help.
You figure the fact that you're still here is a sign you're more besotted with him than you expected to be, because even if you were mailed to him in a plain brown package it was a shiny bright light that brought you before him once more.
The screams in your mouth changed from Buffy to Angel at the sight of him, and you hate yourself for being so easy, that you would leave yourself behind with the shape of his name forming on your lips.
He is your god in a world of gray, a dark splotch of repression and coarse fear that could decide every move you make with the mere brush of his fingers across your eyelids. He doesn't, though, he stumbles over the rules that guided your relationship for years with the clumsiness of Bambi on a contact high and willfully forgets all the commands he writ into your skin while you screamed and begged for more.
It is a cruel, cruel thing that every creature you love desires to cut you to the quick, time after time. But you have learned to crave the pain, to brave the unkind words and practiced brutality because it's all that they give you, and it is enough.