All Quiet
The railroad was like a gash in the land's flesh, strange and dark in the dirt.
Xander stared out at the plantations as the train roared past them. The railroad was new, and the tracks and stations and engines did not fit here, amongst the farms and the leaves and the stooped sharecroppers.
He was not comfortable. He was not comfortable here, he was not comfortable when he had sat at the station with the young lady he was meant to take to London to begin her training as a Slayer. And he definitely was not comfortable on this train ride to Charleston through a land that still simmered with a balmy anger.
The railroads fit better in the North, the North that had become comfortable wearing soot and grime and smoke, like some of the parts of London he had seen. And to some extent, the sprawling tracks fit out in the sprawling West where he had grown up, where he had lived half his life on a cursed town until a strange girl from out East had come and he had suddenly found his purpose. But they did not fit here.
There was a slowing as the train pulled into a stop, and Xander nudged the young lady -- Elizabeth, her name was, and he tried not to think of the strange blonde girl who he had known, the one who had given his life some meaning.
"I thought we were going to Charleston," she said, as he stood, and offered her his hand. "To take a ship to London."
"No," Xander said simply, quietly. He put on his hat and made a show of dusting himself off, of taking her bag for her.
The girl didn't ask him many questions after she realized that he wasn't going to give her many answers. She was a little frightened of him, Xander realized, and that thought -- it disturbed him, although he knew that the eyepatch made him intimidating, to say nothing of the situation she had found herself in so suddenly.
It had been perhaps three miles' walk from the station to the plantation house where he'd been told to bring her.
For Buffy, he told himself. This was for Buffy, and the only people who might ever know were himself, and Dawn, and Giles.
He sent her in first, and she had looked at him suspiciously -- there was even fear there, he was certain, and he carefully cleared his throat and looked down so that he would not have to look. He heard as she was grabbed, heard a thump, and then laughter.
"So, you made good after all," came sardonic woman's voice from inside. A graceful, delicate arm reached out, one with strength greater than his own, and a gloved woman's hand grabbed him, and before he knew it, Darla had his arms pinioned behind him, the door somehow closed again.
Xander said nothing. The Slayer was unconscious in Angel's arms -- that had probably been the thump Xander had heard -- and the vampire grinned at him. He still wore his human face, and unsurprisingly, it was no harder to hate him than it would have been otherwise.
"Lovely thing she is, too," Angel laughed quietly, running a hand along the unconscious girl's cheek. Xander bristled, but Darla snapped her teeth at his neck, and Angelus looked up and laughed.
"Ever the white knight, aren't you?" he asked, smiling. "Drusilla?"
"Yes?" Dru asked, though Xander would have sworn that she had not been hearing a word that was being said. He had only just noticed her, and she had been wearing a distant look, staring off in another direction entirely.
"Look what the Slayer's knight has brought for us."
Drusilla squealed, clapping her hands, and looking eagerly at the unconscious girl. "Is she all for us? Is she?"
"For Dawn," Xander said, finally breaking in, and he was pleased that his voice did not shake much. "You said it was her life for Dawn's."
"Oh yeah," Angel said cheerfully. "I guess I did."
Drusilla was still cooing over the girl as Angel walked out of the room, and Xander watched her unhappily. For Buffy, this was for Buffy, and if Dawn had been unconscious, had never heard the price, perhaps she would never know, either. Giles would not tell Buffy, because Giles, he thought, he hoped, would understand.
"I suppose I didn't give you enough credit, Cyclops," Darla said, and there was a bored, cruel note to her voice. "I didn't think you'd go through with it."
Xander said nothing, and, except for Drusilla's quiet singsongings, there was no sound in the parlor until, finally, Angel came back in. Dawn, gagged and bound, was slung ignominously over his shoulder, and Xander looked away, humiliated on her behalf.
Angel dropped Dawn unceremoniously onto the ground, and she looked at Xander, confused. Perhaps she didn't know what was going on, then. Perhaps she didn't know of the deal.
That was best, because Xander didn't know how she might look at him if he did.
And then Drusilla bit the girl, who was just beginning to wake. The young Slayer's eyes widened in terror, but she died silently. She had only been lucid enough to be frightened, not enough to scream. Dawn twisted around, trying to see, and then watched helplessly as Darla, grinning, shoved Xander towards Angel.
"You said -- " Xander managed, before Angel backhanded him.
"Shut up," Angel said simply.
"He says a lot of things," came Darla's smooth, amused voice.
The night stretched on for a long time, and Xander half-wished that Angel would just kill him.
But only half, because when it came down to it, he found that he did not want to die. Even now, he was afraid to die, and the thought that if he went along, if he could live out the night, then Angel might let him live out the rest of his life, that was what kept him going along.
That little possibility, that fear, was what let him, or made him, do it. It was why he knelt, took Angel's cock into his mouth, let the creature his friend had loved spill his seed down Xander's throat. It was why he let Angel take him, bent over the edge of a bureau. It was an old piece of furniture, and the dust that rose off it with every violent thrust made Xander wheeze, made breathing even harder as Angel took Xander's length in his hand and began, grinning, to squeeze and rub at it.
He slept sometimes, for perhaps a few minutes at a time. Never long, for young Elizabeth's eyes and the memory of her body would wake him, and he would wonder, in the quiet space before Angel noticed he had wakened and began it all again, why he had let himself be fooled.
A few hours later the sun rose, spilling red and gold over the green weeds that had overtaken the field. Xander did not see the dawn, nor did he see how the Dawn he had come to see managed to run, then, to stumble out into the light.
Of course, no one in the huge house's rotting grandeur could follow into the sun to stop her.