SKIN
Author: Jo
Feedback : Pretty please, whatever you thought of
it. It will feed my muse for
the next story – honestly.
Send it to thelibrarian2003@yahoo.com
Disclaimer: None of these characters are mine. If they were, I’d look after them
better. No money will ever be
made from this fic.
Distribution: The Angel Texts; Scribes of Angel; The Angel
Elders Mansion
You want it?
Really? Gosh. Just tell me where it’s going
please.
Spoilers: None
Content: Angel.
Perhaps.
Summary: To wear the trousers, or not ?
SKIN
Every day, when he rises, he observes the ritual. Humans are always full of
existential dread. When they
wake up in the mornings, there are things they need to establish. For most, the immediate questions,
which require at least a few neurones and synapses in the brain to be
firing in some sort of meaningful way, are: ‘Who am I?’
‘What day is it?’ and ‘Am I late?’
He isn’t human, and for him the existential dread is so much
more than any human could possibly imagine. That makes the Great Question of the morning very much
simpler. It’s a little known
fact that the most important questions in the universe have the simplest
expression. E=mc2. He’s already late, has been for two
hundred and fifty years, and the day of the week is inconsequential. What really matters to him, and to
every human being on the face of the planet if they did but know it, the
moment he awakens and prepares to rise is: ‘Who am I?’
And so, he has the ritual.
It is his litmus paper, his acid test. The skin test.
When he’s clean and fresh he opens the closet and
wonders whether he will wear them today. Whether he will wear another skin. That’s all they are, just skin; the
dead remains of a dead animal, treated and cured, and fashioned into
garments that cover the legs.
That’s true, but they are so much more than this, and when he has
them on, he’s not sure whether he wears them, or they wear him, in some
strange form of symbiosis.
He remembers when he bought them, all those years
ago. Whistler had pulled him
off the streets and given him a slim, blonde reason to get cleaned up. He had only the clothes he stood up
in and, if he’s honest, those clothes didn’t need him to be in them in
order to stand up all by themselves.
So, Whistler took him shopping.
He’d seen these, and wanted them. He’s always had a thing about
skin. The demon wanted them
even more. He, too, has always
had a thing about skin, usually prettily patterned with purpling bruises,
sharp-edged cuts or elegant trails of blood. Or simply removed from its original owner; a bit like
these. They’d been wrapped up
with the rest of his purchases, and gone onto the shelf in the closet. Whichever shelf of whichever closet
he’d been able to call his own at the time.
The first time he had thought to wear them the demon had
been exultant, relishing the feel of skin on skin, drinking in the sounds
and speech of leather. The
demon was used to wearing skin.
After all, it had worn him for two and a half centuries. With these on, he wore them, and it
wore him, like a nest of Russian dolls.
Except, sometimes he doesn’t know who wears who. Might he be a man wearing a demon
inside him? That’s what he’d
like to think. That’s what Wesley
once said. That’s what he
tries to be. If he can
remember that, if he can be the skin that presents a face to the outside
world, the skin that holds everything else *inside*, like a wineskin –
except that this wine is very sour indeed – then all might be well.
But he’s too well aware that it’s only skin deep, and
sometimes it’s just too damned skin-tight. Then the man-skin splits, and the demon sheds it, like a
snake emerging jewel-bright and perfect from the worn and shabby old skin
of its past incarceration.
Sheds him as easily as the man has shed these other skins that he
holds in his hands each day.
Cuts him away like an unwanted foreskin. Peels him away like an onionskin, leaving only tears
before bedtime. Makes
sharkskin out of sheepskin.
This garment is the skin that the demon puts on then. These are its new face. Then, it’s time for some skin
games.
There’s more than one way to skin a cat, and he’s pretty
sure he’ll feel the pain of all of them, before his time is through. He’s already felt more of them than
he wants to remember. More
than he wants his friends to remember.
So he doesn’t wear them. He can’t afford another skin, pressing him closer to the
demon. Any way, if he did,
he’s pretty sure that by now his friends would try to stake him first and
ask questions afterwards.
So each day, he has the ritual, to find out who he is
today. This day, he puts them
back on the shelf in the closet, and prays that tomorrow, he’ll be able to
do the same.
THE END
16 June 2004
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