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
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