lmx_v3point3

Fic Collection (Theme - Hands)
Part 7, 40 Points: Silk, Blizzard, Handcuffs, Desk, Fade

Author: LMX
Fandom: Angel the Series
Rating: PG-13
Pairings: Angel/Darla, Spike/Drusilla (Silk), Wes/Fred (Fade), Desk/Everyone (Desk)
Spoilers: All of Angel The Series, up to and including the finale
Warnings: Inaccurate timelines
Edit: Betaed by chokolattejedi, despite other far more important demands on time ;) Thank you hugely.
Continuity Warning: The bits and pieces from Lindsey are going to come out fairly non-linearly. I will probably reassemble them once this is all done.
Thank you to: iulieki, bucybuce7590, chokolattejedi and skargasm for allowing me to use their W+H alter egos in "Desk"



017. Silk (Angel/Darla, Spike/Drusilla, 605)

Angelus leant back on the chaise longue, kicking his muddy boots up onto the elegant embroidered seat carelessly and watching as Darla oh-so-slowly pulled on a pair of elbow length silk gloves. She was swaying slowly in time with the music echoing up from the bar downstairs, only briefly punctuated by screams now, though there had been a lot of noise before.

Darla leant down to roll the still body at her feet onto its side and take the scarf from it, wrapping it around her own shoulders and examining it in its new position. She rolled her hips back and forth suggestively.

"What do you think?" she asked, pouting prettily at him and wiping a little blood from the side of her mouth with her silk-clad fingers.

"You wear it better than she did," Angelus mused, reaching out as Darla swayed past him, dancing now around the room with neat ordered steps. His fingers brushed the edge of her skirts but she pulled away at the last minute, laughing. He was full and lethargic and content to watch her dance.

The final sobs from downstairs stopped abruptly, along with the last of the music, and moments later Drusilla stumbled into the room, laughing as she tugged Spike in behind her, the two of them beautifully debauched and bloody.

"Daddy! We had a party!" Drusilla declared airily, "There were so many pretty dollies there, all so pretty and sad."

Darla sighed. "Did you have to kill the musicians?" She pushed Drusilla away when she crowded up close, fingers on her silk-covered arms, apologetic. "I was dancing."

"I can dance!" Drusilla sing-songed, and started waltzing to the music in her head. "I can dance ever so well."

"I didn't like the song," Spike growled, and was ignored.

Seeing Darla start to steam, Angelus pushed himself up off the chair and wrapped both hands in the scarf, tightening it just lightly, making her short of breath. "Calm down, precious," he murmured into her ear. "She doesn't know."

Drusilla romped past them enthusiastically, dancing with her invisible partner, and Spike cut in, twirling her around. Darla shut her eyes and looked away, pouting until Angelus crept around in front of her and kissed her greedily, hands still holding the scarf tight around her neck. Darla's breath was quick and shallow when he pulled her head back and she thought about stopping - the air wasn't necessary, after all, just habitual - but she was enjoying the drowning feeling too much.

She felt her face change as Angelus replaced the restriction of the scarf with his own hand, and she tipped her head back to give him better access as his own face changed, exposing his vampiric side. She stroked the silk of her gloves across his forehead and down his cheek, and then into the front of his trousers. Across the room, Spike and Drusilla had already stripped to nothing, cotton and lace and the metalwork of Drusilla's skirts all piled in one messy heap, and had fallen together onto the bed. The sounds they were making made Darla's pupils dilate behind yellow irises, her breath quicken even beneath the restriction of Angelus' hand.

Angelus cupped her neck to bring her closer, releasing her only enough to restrain her further, and she caressed him with the finest silk money could buy. Angelus bit her lip, drawing blood and with it the memory of the meal still cooling on the floor behind them, and Darla shoved him to the floor, careless of her own beautiful and expensive dress, and rode him to the sound of Drusilla humming the fiddler's tune.



020. Blizzard (Lindsey, 626)

Lindsey finally found the man he was looking for in Nepal, three days hike out of Chame. He’d been travelling for nearly two months with only the shamanistic equivalent to patch jobs done on his hand to keep it from being completely rejected by his body with the donor now dead. The pain had turned into a distant thing that he could almost ignore if he didn’t try to do anything with his right hand, and so long as he kept moving. Kept *doing*.

He was high enough up now that it was cold despite the blazing sunshine, and the change in climate had been a shock to his system, curling his hand into a painful fist like the one he had nightmares about, and making his right arm more or less useless to him.

The shaman was not, as he’d half expected, a withered old man with wispy hair and a walking stick, but a man in his early thirties with a thick head of black hair. A coloured sash over his grey robes the only thing that set him apart from the other members of his order.

The temple was glorious in white marble and highlighted with a strange blue stone, subtle against its snow-white mountainous backdrop. The members moving slowly through the space with books and brooms and gardening tools were all absolutely silent around him, and Lindsey had a feeling that speech wasn’t welcome in this place. No one from the order had acknowledged his foreign presence, even on the walk up to the temple, but then no one had asked him to leave either.

He approached the shaman, trying to cultivate a respectful air. Before he’d gotten more than a handful of steps into the marble entrance he was grabbed by his shirt collar and hauled from the pillared space.

He managed to get free of the restraining grip as he was pulled out into the courtyard, furious for as long as it took him to realise that the man who had pulled him out of the hall was the one that he had wanted to see - he hadn’t even seen him move. He schooled his features carefully, but the shaman slapped a hand over his mouth before he could say anything.

Over the shaman’s shoulder, Lindsey watched as the sky darkened, clouds surrounding them and thickening and darkening. In moments the sunny day had turned and snow was falling, thickening every second.

"Now we can talk," the shaman said in softly accented English, taking his hand away from Lindsey’s mouth, and Lindsey was aware of people in the temple behind them talking and laughing.

"I need your help with..." Lindsey lifted his hand, already starting to unwrap the warded and sigil-painted bandages from around his wrist, but the shaman grasped his other wrist and stopped him.

"That's not why you're really here," he interrupted. "That's not why you came to me."

Lindsey hesitated. He'd not wanted to ask this question first. If he got turned down now... "I want to take down Wolfram and Hart. I want to be free."

"I know." The shaman gestured behind him at the gathering blizzard. "Why do you think we needed such cover?"

"They say you know everything there is to know about the Senior Partners." They had said a lot more besides, in hushed voices as he'd travelled the globe. "They say you taught the last man to try and take them on. Can you help me?"

"No," he shook his head, and Lindsey's heart was suddenly in his throat, limbs heavy and head pounding from the altitude. "I cannot leave this place." He considered Lindsey carefully. "But I can teach you. Maybe that will be enough."



028. Handcuffs (Fred + Gunn, 292)

"No! I didn't do anything!" Fred's voice was rising from fear to hysteria and Gunn couldn't help, his hands already cuffed behind him as the officer approached her. Her eyes were wild and her hands thrashing as the other officer fought to hold her still.

"Ma'am, between you and your friend here, you were carrying an arsenal beyond anything I've ever seen," the officer observed breathlessly, taking the cuffs off his partner and holding Fred back as she thrashed again.

"That was for the..." Fred started, and Gunn flinched.

"Fred. Stop talking," he said sharply. There was getting arrested by LEOs and sitting in a cell for a couple of hours until Wes came to get them, and then there was getting them both committed.

But from the minute the handcuffs had disappeared out of sight behind her, Fred had gone silent anyway.

On the ride into the police station, Gunn found himself watching Fred carefully. It wasn't like she was the most chatty girl in the world, but this silence was different. With her hands cuffed behind her back it was like the girl he knew was all tied up too. Her eyes were on the ground, her shoulders rounded forwards, rocking gently and her face terrifyingly blank and pale.

It took him the journey to the station to remember when he'd last seen that lost look on her face, back in Pylea. She'd been withdrawn, those first couple of weeks home, but never like this.

When Angel came to break them out later that night, he took in the marks on her wrists and his eyes went cold and hard. They took her out of there as quietly and carefully as they could, but Fred... Fred didn't seem to notice.



041. Desk (Alter egos & unknowns, 754)

In a place so full of the magic, mystical and occult of the world as a Wolfram and Hart headquarters, in a city built on land so saturated in millennia of tribal gatherings - human and demon alike - it's not altogether unexpected that the building itself might start to act a little strangely after a while. Self-aware desks were barely uncommon even in the most traditional office.

When the desk is first brought into the building it is not aware, and it is not entirely sure how long it lives there - occasionally moving from office to office - before it starts to become so. Its first conscious thought is that the hands that most often rest on its surface are fine and delicate. That it is nice to think of such a refined hand resting on its top. Caressing it. It is too young still to consider learning a name, or more than the touch of those delicate hands, but that's enough for a newly conscious desk.

When those delicate hands leave - perhaps to go to some other desk, it muses - the desk is moved to a room with many desks; some old, some new. The older ones creak and groan about how hard they are worked, how often their drawers are opened, how roughly they're closed. The desk becomes more aware just from being near so many others, and so it learns its next companion's name. Darcy Ferguson.

Darcy leaves an enchanted document in the desk's bottom drawer, an itchy energetic thing, and takes it out when there aren't piles in her 'to do' tray. The rattly typewriter has rubber feet to stop it scratching the desk's surface, but in between quick-fire typing, Darcy taps a half-remembered song on the desk's top with the rings on her thumbs. The desk loves her when she does that. She's been down here with all the others for a while when her workload increases - the desk knows they're thinking about promoting her, but perhaps she doesn't know that, and perhaps it is this frustration that leads to a shattered runner and one of his drawers in pieces on the floor. He forgives her, perhaps a little grudgingly, when she find out about the promotion and goes back to tapping happy tunes into the varnish while she glues the broken pieces back together.

The next pair of hands - Adrienne Jaquar, with a curling looping signature that tickled in *just* the right way - came with dirt under the fingernails, metal on her wrists and henna on her hands. The desk was in love immediately, and shuddered in all four legs every time ancient sacrificial sigils were absently traced into its surface. She wasn't at her desk as often as the other paralegals, too often 'out there getting things done', but her bangles and cuffs rubbed little marks into its surface as she worked on the brand new computer - the first in their department - and the desk treasured every one.

Remington Durry was perpetually nervous. His hands shook when he wrote and when he typed and when his computer broke down for the first time, he actually cried salty tears into the desk's surface. The desk did all it could to reassure him, to conceal him from the other paralegals and from his bosses in Entertainment, but it wasn't to be. When Remington was collected by one of the science department... well the desk was aware enough these days to know he wasn't considering a change in field.

At first the desk had been offended by the intrusion of a typewriter on its surface, blocking it from feeling the words of the user on paper. The computer had been no nicer, whirring and heating up its surface, damaging its varnish. But now it seemed just the way things were - a computer and screen, scanner and printer, all cluttering up the space with no in trays or out trays or anything so classic. Donovan Kane came to the desk all weapon-calloused hands on its edges and rapid typing, more documents over the desk's surface than it had ever seen. On Donovan's first day, a document tried to take over the computer - only quick action on the paralegal's part saving the desk from serious burns. The desk decided to take a closer interest in the computer from that day on, if only for the sake of its varnish. And as for Donovan... well, maybe it'd keep this one.



060. Fade (Wes/Fred + Illyria, 202)

He can see her fading, brilliant as she was it seems to have been happening for weeks now - an eternity in which to consider how much darker the world would be without her presence. He holds her hands because that's his right, and he tries not to think about how much life she used to express in those hands. Every thought, emotion and desire had been seen in those hands before she had spoken it.

He could read the language of her, there in her hands, but now they're just grasping hold of his own, as if they were her only link to the world. She doesn't release him as she starts to fall, as her shoulders tighten in pain and then relax in surrender. He pulls her much closer, her hands settling on his shoulders, still firm. She tells him she's not scared, and her hands are strong against him.

And then they're not.

They're not.

She's...

It's barely a breath later, no time to grieve or even understand. When she... When Illyria... When she pushes him away, when she sits up and looks at those hands that do not belong to her, judges them and finds them only acceptable... It takes all that Wesley is not to kill her there and then.