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Disclaimer: Characters from Buffy the Vampire Slayer are property of Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, Kuzui Enterprises, Sandollar Television, the WB, and UPN.

This story was done for the 2023 summer_of_giles.

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They buzz at her, these men, twitter and buzz and flutter and gape. Some of them. Some speak in biting tones, scorn and anger, staring or glowering or trying to show no expression at all. Some avoid her eyes, say nothing, move as if pretending she’s not there … or that they are not, wishing-wishing. Emotions boil off them, fearhate(desire?socomical)malicecontempt, rolling like the fogs she remembers from her girlhood. It used to seem as if she could swim in those fogs, and she swims now in what she feels from these men. Diverting, and little else for her to do.

How they captured her? too unimportant to be worth remembering. Why they brought her here? too unimportant to be worth considering. What they want with her? too unimportant to be worth wondering about. She is where she is, she is who she is, and there is no need for her to look beyond that.

Drusilla could break the bars, if she could hold them, but the nasty men have worked crosses into the metal. She could tear the mortar from the walls, or perhaps even shatter the weaker stones, but recessed nozzles spray a mist of holy water if she approaches them too closely. The window is always shuttered … except, on days when the sun is very bright, some of her gaolers will open the shutters so that she must find a safe corner away from its vindictive path.

Unconscionable impertinences, all of it. She will remonstrate quite strongly when the time comes that she can. Especially those who play with the shutters; she has marked them, and with them she shall be particularly stern.

When the time comes.

As it shall. She does not know her end, but she knows it does not come here.

*               *               *

There are other eyes, other minds. The lackeys are of no true import, but here and there something will tickle at her, even from those who are careful to never come near her. The dry man, he feels dread creeping up on him (and not from her, which nettles a bit but doesn’t actually signify), holding it distant with urbanity and determination and a lifetime habit of putting on a good face, for his own pride and for the benefit of his subordinates. The foolish lamb, the one fixated on Spike: that one lies awake at night, her mind churning over and over in his history and his dangers and his awful sinful promise, hot and yearning and aching and ashamed, hopelessly berating herself and then flitting straight back to her endless empty fantasies. The sour man, laboring to convince himself that his disappointment in his son has nothing to do with his own conviction of personal failure.

Drusilla takes pleasure in suffering, even when she can’t be the one to inflict it. That simply makes the taste something to savor, rather than to drink deeply. (For now. The deeper draughts, those will be heady indeed, and she banks her anticipation into a gathering, seething background hunger.)

She is aware of his eyes before she sees him — the book man — but she sets that aside for the nonce, for he holds himself remote and there is presently more interest to be found in other musings. She notes it all the same. There will be time (there is always time), and when he moves closer, she will respond. Or not. She will see when the time comes, for it always comes.

Drusilla dreams, and her dreams would send shudders through Hell.

*               *               *

He stands before her at last, and she smiles at him in memory and satisfaction and terrible shared reminiscences. “Rupert,” she purrs. “We’ve missed you.”

His face shows nothing — he prepared himself for this, then — but she feels the hatred surge up inside him all the same. “You’re wasting your time,” he says to her: crisply, dismissively, rigid behind adamantine shields of impatient disdain. “I never believed you were her, only that she was present.”

“Ah, but she believed in you,” Drusilla returns, stretching her smile into something mocking, knowing, teasing. “All to the last, a part of her was still sure you would save her.” She shakes her head slowly, letting herself bathe in the intimate, titillating recollection. “It was … delicious.”

His shields thicken, strengthen, swell. “Angel is once again tethered to a soul,” he says evenly, watching her. “Spike betrayed you and Angelus both. Acathla was returned to dormancy, and you expelled from Sunnydale.” His tone is clinical, almost disinterested. “You lost everything, your plans falling to ashes.”

She waves that away negligently. “There are other treats to sample. So many. So yummy.” And he seems not to account her return to that dreadful town, when precious Spike chained her up again (but then let her drop, unfulfilled, such a disappointment after such promising foreplay!) … did no one ever tell him of that? Intriguing. “I live for the moment,” she continues languorously. “And the moments tiptoe up to me one after another after another.”

His pointed glance takes in her cell, and her place within it. “You are a prisoner, and so you shall remain until it is determined that the punishments you have earned outweigh any possibility of your being of use to us.” He shrugs. “You are welcome to make free of such … treats, as you may find here. I can’t imagine they would suffice.”

She has to giggle at that. “But, Rupert, you are a treat, endless and thrilling!” The look she sends him is arch, sly. “Didn’t you know?”

His mouth doesn’t so much tighten as settle into place. “There are outlets for the holy water spray in the ceiling, as well as the walls.” His eyes show nothing; his loathing, however, is a dancing flame, lambent and captivating. “The next time you speak that name, I shall have a half-second burst let upon you. And every time thereafter.”

“Thrilling,” she repeats, still smiling. She arches, stretching, watches his gaze stonily refuse the temptations of her lissome form; predictable, dreary, yet a small amusement even so. “So, then, how may I entertain you?”

He regards her for most of a minute, face expressionless and the welter of emotions denying her any clear focus. “No,” he says at last. “It’s clear you are feeling … playful. I’ve no patience for play just now.”

He turns, walks away. Drusilla pouts, then draws into herself to await his return. For return he certainly shall.

*               *               *

He does.

“What is in Sunnydale?” he demands of her without any opening courtesies, standing outside the barred door. “What do you see?”

“A cauldron,” she answers him, rising on her toes to begin a slow twirl. “A ravenous, gaping maw. A turbulent volcano.” She shrugs, smiles. “You know this, you labored so tediously just above it. Toil and perusal, rest and tea, did it never sing to you?”

He shakes his head, his eyes weighing her with acrid disapproval. “I studied it. I never wished to … subsume myself to it, let it seep into me. That was a battlefield, not a place of residence.”

She wriggles her shoulders, sweeps her foot in a loop, toes pointed. “And yet so much resides there.” Pirouette, sway. “So very much. Squirmy. Granular. Colloidal. Thorny. Layers interleavening, a grasping blancmange.” She stops, makes a mouth. “And quite muggy, much of the time.”

“You see things,” he tells her. “I am … quite interested in what you may see.”

Sigh, hands move aimlessly. “I see her tombstone,” and she needn’t look his way to feel the grief — delectable! — leap up within him. (And … the awful girl will leave her grave, the busy bees are already working the darkness there, but Drusilla decides not to spoil the surprise.) “And the second grave you dug, oh yes, that as well. Wouldn’t do for them to know. The boy, now —” (such a sweet kitten, he was!) “— he wonders, and pushes it away, and is shamed to be relieved it wasn’t his decision.” Soft, still, the boy. But not forever, she thinks.

The book man makes no pretense at not understanding. “She couldn’t have done it,” he replies. “And it was necessary.” And says no more, for more needs not saying.

Drusilla falls into stillness, weary for the moment of motion. “She would have been quite disapproving, yes indeed. But she doesn’t care now. Buried there, and her mother before her —” She looks to him. “Her mother, her father: they didn’t love each other — though there was passion, oh, yes, such a tangle! — but they shared love of her. Mawkish and pedestrian, all of it.” He doesn’t know what that means, she sees instantly, he still doesn’t know … but he shall, she can see that, too, and she hides her laughter at what an amazement it shall be!

His nostrils flare, but he betrays no other hint of his feelings. “I suppose it was unrealistic,” he observes bitingly, “to expect that you would have anything remotely useful to say.”

“Useful?” She considers the word. “Have I cause to be useful?” She tilts her head, regarding him from the corners of her eyes. “You are a divertisse­ment, an amuse-bouche. Your wishes stir the tedium, for a moment. Past that, you are of no consequence.” She smiles suddenly. “And you are rude … but, in a quite mannerly fashion. Perhaps you shall have … tidbits. If you continue to entertain.”

And he tries to ask more, but she has gone away inside herself, and he has left by the time she is again aware of the outside world.

*               *               *

He returns, and again, but she is not of a disposition for play, and gives him nonsense riddles.

*               *               *

At intervals, they offer her sustenance. In sealed bags, lifeless dross, an insult she normally spurns. Sometimes, though, she will need something to hold body and no-soul together, and she casts her mind elsewhere while she drinks, to keep from marking the taste.

There is no warning, either from her (ignored) tongue or from the second sight that usually rests behind her eyes. Time stretches monstrously, colors flow, her skin crawls all over her and she gasps in tones that radiate, vibrate, coruscate, oscillate, scintillate. Stockwood, she thinks dizzily, she felt an echo of this from Spike that time at Stockwood (Stookwode? Wokstead? Ahh-hh-hhh!), and she leaps and rolls and whinnies her distress, undone undone all undone!

He is there, the hateful man, pounding at the barred door and demanding, “What do you see? Tell me the visions, send them away from you to me, it’s the only way to get them off you!” And she babbles, panting, gibbering, gasping out she-knows-not-what, cast it off shed it all make it go away! Eternity, eternity, and at the end of it she huddles shivering on the stone floor, and the book man clicks off a small device in his hand and regards her with eyes that hold no pity or rancor, nothing­nothing­nothing, and says steadily, “This is all probably useless, even more garbled than your usual ravings. I’ll review it, even so, to see if any meaning can be gleaned.” He stands back. “My main purpose here was to show you that you are not unreachable … and that my imagination can produce possibilities that go well beyond run-of-the-mill torture.”

And he turns, walks away, and the bars do not melt from the wave of bitter, impotent hate she blasts at him, and she falls back and weeps helplessly.

*               *               *

She gives him no smiles when he comes again, teasing or otherwise, and she can feel the cold satisfaction from him even as his face shows nothing. “I considered the use of antipsychotics,” he says conversationally. “It’s still a possibility, of course, but I held back, for now, because I suspected that any lessening of your insanity might affect your prophetic gifts.” He shrugs. “Also, it occurred to me that you might possibly find that to be … pleasant. Which would not suit me at all. Thus, the administration instead of lysergic acid to your rations.”

She glares, giving him no reply. His response is a small smile, for they both know he has found her weakness. Physical torment is routine for one such as she; what he can threaten instead, she now fears. “Tell me, then,” he says to her. “What shall we discuss, you and I?”

*               *               *

She talks, and talks, and he prods and probes and sifts ceaselessly, exactingly, focused intellect dissecting every syllable and ferreting out every elusive clue. (What a merciless lover he could be, if only he had the physical stamina for such! and a crafty, exhausted part of her notes that down for future musings.) She tries to feed him truths that will distress him — she is too weary now for lies, and he too meticulous at weeding them out — and blur or evade whatever could be of use to him, but her equilibrium is too depleted for her to have more than the vaguest grasp of how well she may have succeeded.

The brain-scramble acid shook loose so much!, and it left a residue of fragility inside her, and she was still too shaken to hold steadfast against such pitiless interrogation, knowing worse might come. She told of the man on the false cruise ship, but thinks she held back that it was the awful girl’s not-father. There was no reason to conceal truths about the desperate, secret combat in the little Missouri town — the still-so-new Slayer she later killed in Sunnydale, and the treacherous wife of the man that Slayer saved — but the book man marked that down for later study while disregarding it for the moment, as that was past and not future. She gave him a tangled tableau of other Slayers coming to Sunnydale, doing her best to confuse him with depictions of the awful girl’s sister and mother as Slayers themselves, but didn’t say from whence they will come. She told of the sour man’s son, and the bitter letter he will write for the Dark Slayer: of no use to the book man, she hopes, but he is keen, keen, and may find meaning that escapes her. She alluded, she knows, to the likely death of the seer-girl who struck/freed her from the Slumberer in Mexico; will he perhaps be able to use the knowledge to save the seer-girl? that would be vexing. And another version of the seer-girl, coming from outwise with stolen power and so much new capability: see what he makes of that! The machine-woman’s birth from the rubble: meaningless to the book man, Drusilla hopes but can’t know for certain. The meeting-to-come of the awful girl and her poor, shackled Angel in that dreary motel, and that’s all the book man will ever know of their meeting! The sweet-kitten boy’s saving of the world … and, which should befuddle, how the boy will briefly be a girl, and couple with a dishwater reduction of Spike (which would nauseate them both if the memory were to persevere).

Confusing, trying to hold it all in straight form, and he used her so cruelly! Implacable, relentless, wrenching answers from her while she was still too weak to formulate resistance. (Worthy of Angelus, in his own way. The comparison leaves Drusilla uneasy.) Still, through it all, she believes she may have succeeded in keeping three key things hidden:

The dark rising of the nasty little witch. No warning for him there, let him face it as a surprise, and she will clap and sing when that time comes.

The different rising of his dead Slayer, the awful girl returning to wreak more awfulness on the night creatures who flourished in her absence, but carrying such wonderful anguish inside her. Soon, so soon — if it hasn’t already happened — but he still might find a way to prevent it if he knew its advent. Secret, then, shh, shh, shhhh!

And the pale woman. Descended from Drusilla herself, in her own wretched way, walking the earth in a form that would horrify the book man. That would be diverting, yes … but her death still pains him, an unhealed scar that twinges and never fully settles, and Drusilla will not see that wound given any balm, not if its soothing can be prevented. Let him never know, never know, go on carrying that pain.

If she can continue to hide it. For he has found a lever now, a niche through which he can pry into her, and Drusilla fears his plundering of her has barely begun.

*               *               *

His next appearance is abrupt and violent as a thunderbolt. He does not speak or move, simply stares at her, but wrath and hatred emanate from him like scalding bursts of lava; and, similarly, Drusilla shrinks away from him inside herself, while outwardly she gives what she can of an appearance of serene haughtiness.

“You knew,” he says at last. “Knew, and hid it from me. Did you enjoy your game? for I’ve several I’d like to play upon you.”

She didn’t know, but she does now. The earth has burst, the dead Slayer reborn with a dead heart, and he has the news and will soon away, away. Strength floods back into her, and assurance, for despite his threats and his genuine desire for retribution against her, he will not tarry here when she might need him. Drusilla smiles at him, hands fluttering in languid satisfaction. “A new birthday,” she croons. “The third for her? Yes, the third. She dies, she comes back, she dies, she comes back —” A coy, triumphant shrug. “She has more risings than we do!” (Except for Grandmother … but that thought discomforts her somehow, and she pushes it away.)

His eyes are on her in brutal assessment, as if marking a target. “I would not expect you to find happiness in such a development as this,” he observes with ominous evenness.

“Hide and seek,” Drusilla tells him, twirling in her glee, soon he will be gone! and she can begin choosing an avenue of escape before he returns. There are promises there: the hard men, confident in their prowess, surely she can play upon one of them, have him believe she is weaker than she is, strike out while he still deludes himself he has the upper hand. Men are toys, have always been, she has no cause to worry there. (She doesn’t precisely think these things — ‘thought’ is a tenuous, transitory state for her at the best of times — but it’s simply there, a sure and certain knowledge awaiting only to decide and act.) “Yes, we played a game, you and I. Hide and seek, run and catch, the lamb is caught in the blackberry patch … You thought you rode atop me, but I ran tunnels beneath, saving the treat. Do you not like your treat?”

Vengeful and cruel, he weighs her where she stands, yearning to strike but already his mind calls him elsewhere, and he will not attempt nor even wish to resist that call. “You are a ruin,” he says to her at last. “An empty, sterile waste. I once thought you almost innocent in your madness … but you enjoy that madness, don’t you? You are no different from others of your kind, not really; merely a variation on a theme, caroming about in random, arbitrary chaos but taking the same vicious delight in the infliction of pain. For all your gifts, all your intelligence, there is no more true individuality in you than … than in a rabid serpent, if there could be such a thing, mindlessly compelled to strike and spew venom but with no real self beyond that hateful compulsion.”

She laughs, giddy with relief and triumph; his departure is all but done, and she will be as she has always been. “And you?” she says to him, still laughing. “You are nothing, the wisp of a moment. In the turn of a season, you will be gone like winter grass, while I dance through centuries.”

Control comes back upon him as she watches, taking him over as completely as any possessing demon. His eyes rest on her, steady now, unmoved, overlapping bands of inflexible restraint coiled over cold, curdled loathing. “I shall live for so long as I live,” he tells her levelly. “And when that span is done, I shall have lived.” He shakes his head minutely. “You have only … existence, until some happy providence wipes you from it, and the earth shall register your departure with relief, if it notices at all.”

She wants to laugh again, and yet something twists her insides with unease. Her time in his hands has been … wearing, beyond her ability to anticipate, and she trembles suddenly at the prospect (for which her inner eye can offer no reassurance that it will not come) that she might ever find herself under his power again. So she says nothing, fearful of what terrible consequences a word might unleash, now or ever.

He continues to regard her with those terrifying eyes. Then he turns, without further word, and the sound of his footsteps continues on after the echoes are gone from the clanging of the iron door at the end of the hall she cannot see.

– end –
 

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