Fic: Half A Loaf (Angel) (original) (raw)

jaded_jamie wanted you to have anything which involved: 'Spike knew Angel was the only one who understood.'

Well, yes. Yes he did. But it doesn't mean he wanted him to.

Ficlet, sad, end-of-days.

Well then, he says, in the days that follow the dragon. Well then, tell me.

Tell you what?

Angel's voice will never be that of Angelus, it will never mean strength or conviction, but it does mean knowledge, it does mean experience (bitter and twisted and somehow wrong, but experience nonetheless, and Spike takes what he can get, these days) and sometimes, pale copy though he is of a once great vampire, Angel's a kind of rock.

Sandstone rock, ready for erosion and erasion under the glacier-melt of the world's end, oh, to be sure, he's that weak, Angel has always been that weak; but in this new world (o brave new world, that has no people in it!) that quasi-, half-human, almost-but-not-quite quality to the Irish bog-trotter's dully pious souled self still matters.

Tell me how to go on.

I don't know,

Angel says. But I don't know how to stop, either.

Stop going on?

Stop being.

But we aren't alive. So we can't be.

Oh, for fuck's sake, don't use Wes's --

-- and there, there, that's it, that's the full stop, because that's what they know, that's what they don't want to know, that's what's impossible to believe. There are no arguments, there is no sophistry, there is no more rhetoric, because there is no more Wes.

He didn't even have the decency to die in front of them.

Tell me how to mourn, then, Spike says, exhausted of all things, run dry of emotion.

I can't. And Angel, for once, is being honest. You were always the one who taught me how to feel things that're important.

His heavy, earnest, boring face flickers with what could be a smile.

Never said I wanted to learn, though, he adds.

And Spike learns that at the end of the world, that is ending not with a whimper, as Eliot said, but with fire and blood and a fucking brilliant bang and a dragon, two things remain.

He can still share laughter.

And Angel still understands the things no-one wants him to.