Cold Steel

Author: Jo
Disclaimer: Not mine, alas.
Wordcount: 500
Setting: Becoming Part 2
Notes: Written for ba_rosebuds. Prompt ‘Cold Steel’.

**


Cold Steel

He didn’t kill her. He could have, but he didn’t. He taunted her instead, knowing that she would make a recovery. She understands that this darker Angel was never going to kill her, with cold steel or any other way. He’s enjoyed the game too much.

Now, she’s going to have to be different, because it seems he’s different, too.

Without warning, the demon has sunk back beneath the weight of the soul, and Angel has returned. Her Angel, holding her, still in love with her, his tears in her hair, his shoulder moist from hers. Her palms feel the solidity of muscle beneath the thin fabric of his shirt, and her body presses against him of its own accord, the connection between them an electricity crackling through her blood. His arms are firm around her, and she has missed this so much.

And behind him is Acathla, gaping and grinning. Taunting. Awake. Angelus’ boy, through and through. She hadn’t noticed that Angel pulled the sword from the stone, and now she’ll pay for that inattention forever.

“What’s happening?” he asks.

He has no idea, and her heart cracks. Innocent. He’s innocent of everything that has been done here in his name.

“Shh. Don't worry about it.”

If he knew, he would take this burden from her, he would do the deed himself. He doesn’t deserve that. He doesn’t deserve this, either, and nor does she, but destiny is a cold-hearted bitch. And that’s what she will have to be.

She brushes her fingers over his cheek, and then she kisses him, as she kissed him on that night when she first killed him. He responds, and the smouldering fire between them flares into incandescence, the growing red vortex behind him paling into insignificance. That will change, too...

“I love you.”

He must know. He must understand that much.

“I love you,” he whispers back, his voice filled with his strength, his tenacity and resolution. He’s going to need all of that. So is she.

She touches his lips with her fingers, and the words have to be forced out around the lump in her throat.

“Close your eyes.”

He does, and she presses another kiss onto his lips, but she can’t linger. The vortex now rings him round, a fire-framed portrait that she will never forget.

Her hand grips the leather hilt of her sword, but the tender flesh between thumb and forefinger, the flesh on which he has so often traced thrilling lines as they held hands, that flesh is pressed against the chilly rigidity of the quillons. She wills the metal to sink into her spirit, to flow through her veins like the kiss of a vampire, to smother her heart in an armoured shell.

And then she pulls back the sword, and shoves three feet of cold steel into her innocent lover’s heart.

The steel wrenches him away, into the infernal fire, forging a bleeding metal husk to imprison her soul, as hot iron tears fall.



The End
August 2010

| Fiction Index | Home Page | Back |