Summary: "I waited through eternity for you, lover. Yet how quickly you forgot." Angel/Darla 2x05, Dear Boy.

A missing moment from the (in)famous water tank scene in 'Dear Boy'. My humble contribution to a severely underappreciated ship. Yes, my love for Angel has recently reasserted itself, so expect a Wes/Lilah fic to be appearing… soon.

Dark Paramour

He had passed days and nights dreaming of nothing but her. He saw it even now, in a dark haze of memory and dream fragments swirling through his mind, sensual glimpses of pale flesh and red, red blood splashed across a hundred thousand throats, churches with fallen icons, lengthening shadows, and eyes only for him, glittering, endless azure, oh, he would do anything for those eyes, he would destroy the world just to watch them light up, for her, for Darla. His love, his sweet death, his dark paramour.

And now she stood before him, flesh and blood. Honey-coloured hair, soft, warm, belying the ice-cold skin and hardened heart (but she's human now, Angel reminded himself). Her brightness was deceptive, for she carried only death in those pretty white hands and laughed as she killed, adding her own silvery music to the agonised screams that signalled the ending of another life (and another and another).

But human? It sounded strange even in his head… Darla… human?

He could not grasp it, even though he had seen so many different facets of her over the years; dressed in seductive, skin-hugging scarlet, dressed in oriental elegance, dressed in sweeping gowns that simultaneously revealed and concealed, dressed with the chaste mockery of a Catholic schoolgirl that was somehow the most erotic ensemble of them all… so many garments he had savagely torn from her porcelain body over the years, wanting to see only the spill of her gold hair and white, white skin, or the gush of red-hot blood as he sank his fangs into her in the midst of animal passion -

"We were so young. We had the world at our feet."

Her voice. That oh-so-familiar seductive lilt, each syllable a delicious caress that seemed merely a prelude to the wicked pleasures that would follow.

"Together we could do anything. And we did. No souls. No humanity. Just the hunger and desire."

Angel said nothing. She's sad, he realised. It shouldn't have moved him. It did.

"That was a lifetime ago, Darla."

"You think that matters? I waited through eternity for you, lover. Yet how quickly you forgot." For a moment, bright, sharp pain flashed through her eyes; it speared him like a shard of glass. She's hurt, he thought wonderingly. I've actually hurt her. "You put a stake through my heart without a second thought."

Four years ago, yet he could still recall it with perfect clarity. It had been instinctive. Buffy never knew the hours he had spent confined in the darkness as he sought to forget the memories of a hundred and fifty years (I'll always be with you, lover. You think just because I'm dust, I can't still haunt you?). "Darla, I -"

"For her." Her voice was accusing. "You killed me for her."

She never said Buffy's name, but her cerulean eyes met his and burned like flames. Angel swallowed hard. She was going to make him pay for that, he knew.

"So that's what this is? Revenge?"

"I just thought I should give you a taste of what you're missing."

Oh, he'd had more than a taste. In her eyes and touches was death, yet she threw herself into the trappings of decadent life with a hedonistic ferocity unmatched even by him in his wildest days. She had lived for sensual delights, drowning in the pleasures they offered, never doing anything by half measures. He remembered all too well the sharp passion in her delicate, high-boned face and laughing eyes. It had entranced him. That ecstasy of sensation, enticing and destructive as the addict's descent into an opium den as they ceaselessly gorged themselves on vice and depravity for years without remorse.

So very different to everything he had shared with Buffy. Buffy shone with sunlight and purity and fierce conviction. Darla was the darkness behind the sun, the cold, ivory kiss of death, the writhing sin in silken sheets. He had thought Buffy was his salvation until he realised she was a tragedy waiting to happen; she brought him too close to the darkness. Buffy and Darla. So different, and yet, in some ways, not very different at all.

"You were… my obsession," he confessed at last. "More than the kill. More than Dru."

"I still am."

He could deny it all he liked, but the truth was that she had reawakened something in him, something that had compelled him to willingly pursue those erotic dreams, to almost rush out into the blazing glare of full sunlight just to follow her, to inhale the intoxicating scent of Cordelia's hair and fleetingly imagine her body laid out beneath him, something that had never happened before, and it disturbed him.

Angel closed his eyes. He could feel the ancient stones of this place, what it used to be. A convent, where the worst things he had ever done were branded into his memory. He had deliberately sought out those places of innocence and sanctity, relishing the irony of it. They had violated and perverted the houses of God, making a mockery of communion in the innocent blood they spilled on the sacred stones, twisting the glory of the Resurrection into something foul and corrupt, turning rising from the dead into an act of damnation. Oh yes, he knew this had been a convent. Memory endured and stone did not lie. It lingered on beneath the other scents of damp, hard pressed earth and the modern industrial smells, the highway above, and her scent, of course. Perfume for the darkest recesses of the soul. Darkness. Desire. Delight. Taste it.

His dark eyes opened. Darla had moved closer and he thought irrationally that her hair was the closest thing to sunlight he had seen in two hundred years. An unholy halo shrining her beautiful face (take my hand and I will show you eternity).

"Tell me you don't want just another small taste."

He could smell her scent above anything else now, that never-forgotten haze of seduction and danger, but now there was the musk of humanity, of warm skin and a pulse that beat so close to the surface… so tantalisingly close…

Angel wrenched his head away. She laughed with wicked delight. "Not so easy, is it?"

He shoved her away from him, violently. She stumbled in those ungraceful human shoes (oh, how he used to love pulling the silken slippers from her small, delicate feet) but righted herself instantly. He always forgot how small she was, how fragile the slender bones of her shoulders were. And with her body bound by the mortal weakness of humanity… it excited him, in some wickedly dark, primal way, the knowledge that he could break her so easily. And just below the surface, sensing a change in the air, Angelus stirred.

Darla was watching him narrowly, her dark green blouse hanging from one shoulder, the watered silk of her chemise visible beneath. He knew every inch of that body; had mapped it out in crimson paths with his fangs and nails, had adorned it in plush velvets and light satin. All for her. Once, he would have set the world alight for her. He would have set the world alight and risked the flames for her. Even now, the demon within him wanted to fall headlong into that addictive darkness.

But he had a higher calling now. He saved souls. He rescued people from their inner demons (not all the monsters could be seen and touched, Kate and Faith had shown him that). He was a champion, on a mission from the Powers. After eighty years of wandering and always falling (into his darker impulses, into rat-infested sewers, and into Buffy - that had been the sweetest fall of them all) he had finally picked himself up, stood tall and walked in the world, even if it could never be in the sunlight. Angel had a purpose at last, while Angelus lurked in the shadowy recesses of his consciousness and silently hated him for it.

But now she was here. Darla. She hinted at the possibility of awakening, that perhaps Angel was not so reformed after all. You couldn't make a saint out of a demon and it was not Angelus who had danced with her in his dreams. In a way, it would be easy to succumb. The world of light and redemption he endlessly strove for rejected him, while the world of darkness and damnation longed for him. He was poised on the brink the abyss, and she was the catalyst.

"I can still smell it on you, you know. That soul they cursed you with."

"It's not a curse." The lie crumbled to ash at the back of his throat. Even now, the demon beneath the surface longed to give in to reckless abandon, to savagely tear at her flawless ivory of her neck with his teeth until the blood filled him in an unholy communion, made him complete once more. Oh, they had been unstoppable once. Angelus and Darla. Darla and Angelus.

"You used to be so much better at lying. You really have grown soft, haven't you?"

"I wouldn't bet on it," he growled. She had toyed with him on the brink of madness for months. She had seduced him, damned him, condemned him to commit unspeakable atrocities for two centuries, the guilt of which he could never assuage, never atone for. He loathed himself and hated her beyond reason. So many deaths by her hands. His eyes fell on the marble column of her throat, so white, so vulnerable and exposed. He could snap it in an instant, make it quick, clean death. They couldn't blame him for that, even if she was human now. One human life to save countless others. He wavered. Her angel, her sinner. Dear boy.

And how he had grown up.

"Do it, then," she breathed, sensing his hesitation. "Kill me. I'm human now. I wouldn't be able to stop you."

She leaned in, her face inches from his own, the gold hair falling into her glittering eyes.

"But it doesn't have to be this way. Those dreams were just the beginning of what we could be together." Ivory hands that had bathed in the blood of a thousand innocents were sliding in a languorous caress along the cold skin of his jaw, down the line of his throat. Although he could no longer feel the cold, Angel shivered.

He must have been mad to bring her here. If only Cordelia or Wes could find them. Cordelia would make some scathing comment (Gee, I guess working for Wolfram and Hart still can't buy you class), Wesley would read him a stern lecture, God, anything to break him free of this madness…

He grappled with her, his large hands locking around her fine-boned wrists, pinning them above her head, holding her immobile between his body and the pillar. Once, she would have been able to fight him off. Now she merely pressed her slender body further into his, relishing in the unfamiliar helplessness, the vulnerability. She was actually enjoying this. And God help him if he wasn't, too. He had walked through two eternities and still he came back to her. She was sin and blood and darkness and the very embodiment of seduction, blurring the line of pleasure-pain until it drove him to the brink of insanity with wanting. He shouldn't want her, he knew that. But this was different; she was warm, she had never been truly warm before… And he could feel her heart beating, a hypnotic rhythm against his own marble-still chest, her unsteady breaths fanning his mouth.

He could feel the press of her full lips, ripe, inviting. And somewhere not so deep within, Angelus laughed, sensing the hesitation, the half-forbidden longing. To give in to the demon (to the human). Angel realised he had unthinkingly released her wrists the moment her hands slid down the folds of his shirt, tracing the muscles in a familiar, enticing caress. He still remembered how her blood-soaked fingers used to move downwards, grasping his length, and he unconsciously groaned against her mouth.

"Mmm, that's nice." Darla bit down on his lower lip, hard, and Angel felt the tang of blood as it hit his tongue. The sweet-sharp taste of it caused a feral growl to escape the back of his throat. His demon revealed itself at last, the muscles of his face shifting, his sharpened fangs inflicting a bite of their own in return with no restraint. Her moan of pleasure infuriated him and he tightened his brutal grip on her shoulders, almost enough to splinter the bone beneath; he didn't want her to enjoy this. He wantedto hurt her, to silence that knowing laughter that shook through her maddeningly delicate body even as his elongated canines pierced her lower lip. His amber-gold eyes narrowed beneath heavy lids as his tongue greedily sampled the blood (hers now) smeared across her mouth. When had he last drank human blood? When had it ever been this addictive? Oh, he could drain her dry, free himself of her forever, but killing her was no longer enough…

She was every dark fantasy he had ever had, the promise of every secret perverse thought that had flickered in the deepest depths of his mind, fuelled by the demon that fed those impulses. Months of longing for her in his dreams had withered his resistance away to ashes. She was pressed against him, close enough to breathe in his ear, "You've missed this, haven't you? She can't have been good for much, that little schoolgirl of yours -"

That galvanised him. Roughly, he tore his mouth away from hers and staggered backwards, anger coursing through his insides, burning through the mindless haze of feral lust.

"Leave Buffy out of this," he warned her darkly.

"You should have left Buffy out of this," Darla responded swiftly, her face contorting into a vicious snarl. Then she smirked. The blood was very bright against her white skin. "Who knows, when I'm done here, I might just pay a little visit to Sunnydale. Your Slayer and I have a score to settle."

"Over my dead body." He had killed Darla for Buffy once; he could do it again (couldn't he?)

"That's easily done."

Angel shook his head. "You won't get away with this. I will stop you, Darla."

"You and what army? That little bunch of tag-along humans? Doesn't exactly strike the fear of God into my heart."

"Innocent people have died."

Darla tossed her blonde head impatiently. "Oh, who cares? We are so far beyond them, Angelus."

The smell of her sun-kissed hair made him ache as she drew closer. "Forget them," she breathed. "Forget all of them. Join me and we can take down those pesky lawyers. That's what you want, isn't it? And after… we can make this city ours, start over." She ran a hand over his chest, lingering over the place where his heart had long ago stopped beating. "And if you let me give you that moment of happiness… you won't have to worry about that soul for much longer. Then maybe…" She arched her neck invitingly; he could see the pulse jumping, throbbing with blood… "You can return the favour."

"Not a chance."

Darla stared at him, everything wrong and sinister in her eyes that were so old, belying her young face. "All that goodness. God, it makes me sick."

And yet, she still pursued him. She had let him go once. But now she was clinging to him with belying words and delicate fingers and whispered longings. It hadn't always been like this. She had cast him from her side easily enough in China. He remembered that lovely face blazing with fury and madness, lit from within by unhealthy fires. She had been disgusted by his soul, by his humanity. Looking back, it seemed so simple. She had wanted nothing more than to be rid of him. So what had changed?

I killed her, he thought sombrely. And now she's looking for payback.

Wolfram and Hart must have thought it too good to be true. The enemy of my enemy. But something about the picture didn't fit. The former Darla would have killed these bureaucrats in an instant.

But she's not the former Darla. She's mortal.

He frowned at her. "What is it you're really after, Darla? Me? Or more power?"

"I've always wanted you." The predatory mouth curved into a smirk, the sensual rictus of a hardened killer. He knew that smile well; it was branded onto his heart (oh, the things he had done for that smile). "But I can't say the power's a turn-off, either. Lindsay can be very… accommodating."

Angel looked at her, disgust rising within him. "Is that how it is?" He forced a laugh; he would rather have torn her throat out. "I mean, I know you're a whore, Darla, but Lindsay's a drop in standards, even for you."

"Jealous?" Azure eyes dared him, taunting, provocative.

Angel turned away. He added it to his list of very long reasons to hate Lindsay McDonald. He was jealous. And she knew it, too. She knew him down to the blood, down to the very bones.

"So you don't want to kill me, yet you won't make love to me, either. So what did you take me for, Angelus?"

Angel hesitated. He had known he should kill her. He wanted to have sex with her, wrong as it was. What did that leave?

A human. Just a human.

He remembered what it was like to have a heart that beat, to have a pulse and breathe. To feel the warmth of sunlight on his skin. To be truly alive. Sacrificing that last year and giving up Buffy once more had been a blinding agony, one of the hardest things he had ever done for a higher cause, resigning himself to an undead life without her. The shining hope hinted at in the Shanshu Prophecy was the one bright point in an immortal existence he was doomed to live out in shadows and darkness. The thought of becoming human was the greatest reward he could imagine for himself. Yet Darla was willing to throw all that away, as though it meant nothing. He looked at her, the force of desperation in his eyes, expressing itself in his low, earnest voice.

"You're human now. This changes everything. You have a second chance. To walk out in the sunlight. To live a human life."

Her eyes darkened to steel sapphires. "Is this your attempt to recruit me to the dream team? I'm not part of your little soul squad. And neither are you."

"You don't know what I am now. I've been to hell and back since you saw me last."

She smiled beatifically. "I know more than you think. And let me tell you something, honey. Those dreams weren't one-sided. Not by a long shot."

Angel wanted to argue, but she was right. His dreams proved otherwise. He had never stopped desiring her. He had only buried it for a time, but while the demon remained inside him, he could never cut away that part of himself. She was an insatiable hunger in the blood. He was bound to her and she would never leave him.

"It doesn't matter. You won't get what you want. Not from me."

"I already have. I've tasted it. And I won't stop until my boy is back. Every… last… inch of him."

No, she would never stop. She had come too far for that. Pale fingers traced his the contours of his face in an almost maternal gesture, she who had brought him into this world and sent it crashing down around him. He was drowning in the blue of her eyes, the beguiling conviction in her soft voice.

"The real you is in there somewhere, and you are suffocating. You can lie to your little human friends. But I know you, Angelus. Better than anyone. And I always will."

Her smile was like a candle blowing out.

"Sweet dreams, lover."

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