Prompt 355-Dust you were...-Innocent - BTVS - comlodge

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Title: Innocent
Author: comlodge
Charachters: Spike/Angelus/Angel/Dru
Genre: Fiction, Angst, Dismemberment
Words: 595
Rating: M for cutting bits off and vampire stuff
Prompt tamingthemuse Dust you were and to dust you will return.
Disclaimer: Charachters belong to someone cleverer than I. Just having a free for all play with them. The sandbox is big enough for all of us.
Summary: Angel S5 - Damage - Angel visits Spike in his hospital room

Angel stood beside the hospital bed Spike was lying in. He looked at the bandaged forearms of the vampire he had at one time, raised as his childe.

"What happens to her? She's one of us now, a monster." Spike looked up at the vampire who had been his grand-sire in another life.

"She's an innocent victim." Angel stared across the figure in the bed, looking down his bloody history, his long line of innocent victims.

Spike leaned back into the pillows of the narrow hospital bed. His arms ached, a deep bone grinding ache, where the girl; the innocent, some human monster had long ago broken and Willow's spell had finally destroyed; had removed his hands, with a rusty hacksaw. He could feel the severed tendons and muscles, the fractured splinters of bone in his arms. He could feel the pain, heavy, throbbing, from the rough separation and from the recent reattachment procedure. He couldn't, however, feel the actual lower arms and hands. He felt each stitch the surgeons had put in, but not what they had been able to rejoin to his body.

He looked at the offending limbs, willed them to lift from the bed, but they ignored his direction and simply lay where they were. Not so much as a twitch. Funny. He remembered years ago, decades, when he'd asked his sire if something was cut from his body, would it turn to dust. She'd laughed, grabbed his hands and twirled them in a dance, singing, "Dust you were and to dust you will return."  The question had been prompted after he'd witnessed another vampire, a minion, who had angered his grand-sire, turn to dust, when Angelus had plunged a piece of wood into her chest. Apparently, his new found power and eternal life were not so eternal after all.

He'd found the answer to his question of separated body parts, some days later, after Angelus had thrown the tongue he had just ripped from another hapless minion, to the kitchen floor, where it lay glistening, leaking dark fluid across the stones. Its previous owner gurgled out, what would have been loud screams, but were instead, wet mushy sounds of extreme agony. He remembered being mesmerised by the organ, staring at it where it lay. It didn't turn to dust but withered over the next several days, as any piece of meat would when left out.

The vampire who'd lost the tongue, did regrow another one, over the next few weeks, but ended as dust when he once again fell foul of his master's temper. That it regrew, had at least reassured William, in his powerful new form, he could overcome any injury. The knowledge refueled his reckless behavior. Which led to his discovering, first hand, the recuperative powers of a vampire, as he took on larger risks and brought the wrath of Angelus on himself. The fact that he was also close to destruction from any precisely implanted piece of wood, did not slow his enthusiasm for the fight, anymore than his total lack of fighting style.

He'd been stupidly ignorant when he'd said yes to Drusilla in the stable, but he determined to make the best of his new life and his new family. He'd embraced the demon within him, learned the lessons that Angelus inflicted on him. He'd become an uncaring monster. He shook his head, brought his attention back to the room he lay in, to the answer Angel had given him.

"So were we, ...once upon a time."

"Once upon a time." Angel whispered in reply.