Title: Ritual

Author: RavenWolf

Pairing: Angel/Darla

Rating: PG

Summary: Rituals develop between sire and childe.

He did her make up every night. When the sun went down and they prepared for their night on the town, there would come a time when she would sit down at her vanity (mirror-less, of course), and he would kneel in front of her and carefully apply her blush, her lipstick, her mascara. Make her pretty.

Eye shadow wasn't popular at the time he was made, but he followed the trends closely enough to know when it came in. And he got some for her. He painstakingly learned how to apply it, practicing on a pretty little blonde who had Darla's complexion. He spent hours trying to get it right, before he was satisfied, and then he killed the girl and took off to put his learning to the test.

It was unspoken between them. Darla could not do her own make up, with no way to see her reflection, and felt that she needed to be beautiful. So Angelus became her make up artist. A trivial title for a meaningful job. She trusted him, and no one else, to make her presentable to the world. She let him see her with her guard down, her face clean, her eyes bleary from fresh sleep. In a way, she trusted him, between sire and fledgling.

Angelus, for his part, was eager to make his sire happy. She was beautiful to him, and he wanted her face to befit the face of death, which she brought to so many on a daily basis. He watched her voraciously, the way she set up for the kill, leaning forward to show her cleavage, dropping seductive hints and come-ons to entice both men and women to her bed, where she proceeded to humiliate them, terrify them, and then kill them. Her form was simple, but Angelus saw the beauty in what she did, the art she made of it. She was death's angel, and he would someday be her equal.

Things change over the course of two-hundred years. When Angel met Darla in Sunnydale, dressed as a Catholic school girl and ready to kill his soul mate, he was surprised to find that her face was freshly-scrubbed.

She wore no make-up.

Back to Buffy Fanfiction