Kin of the Soul

[lit_gal]

Kin of the Soul
Slash: Angel/Xander, Angel/Spike
Rated: ADULT 
banner by objectivelypink
Prompt: Achilles' elbow

I totally didn't plan this chapter, but Harmony wanted in.


( Part One ) ( Part Two ) ( Part Three ) ( Part Four ) ( Part Five ) ( Part Six ) ( Part Seven ) ( Part Eight ) ( Part Nine ) ( Part Ten ) ( Part Eleven ) ( Part Twelve ) ( Part Thirteen ) ( Part Fourteen ) (Part Fifteen ) ( Part Sixteen ) ( Part Seventeen ) ( Part Eighteen ) ( Part Nineteen ) ( Part Twenty) ( Part Twenty-One ) ( Part Twenty-Two ) ( Part Twenty-Three ) ( Part Twenty-Four ) ( Part Twenty-Five ) ( Part Twenty-six ) ( Part Twenty-Seven ) ( Part Twenty-eight ) ( Part Twenty-nine )( Part thirty )  ( Part Thirty-one )  ( Part Thirty-Two ) ( Part Thirty-Three ) ( Part Thirty four )  ( Part Thirty-five ) ( Part Thirty-Six ) ( Part Thirty-Seven ) ( Part Thirty-Eight ) ( Part Thirty-nine ) ( Part Forty ) ( Part Forty-one ) ( Part Forty-two ) ( Part Forty-three ) ( Part Forty-four ) ( Part Forty-five ) ( Part Forty-six )  ( Part Forty-Seven )  ( Part Forty-Eight )  ( Part 49 ) ( Part 50 ) ( Part 51 ) ( Part 52 ) ( Part 53 ) ( Part 54 )

55


Xander pulled against his seatbelt, annoyed at how it rubbed against his neck. He didn’t like it. For nearly an hour he’d been putting up with the rubbing against the soft of his neck, and he couldn’t take any more. With a snarl, he pulled again, and something cracked right before the belt went loose.

“Well that’s not good. If you go and get yourself whiplash or something, it’s not my fault,” Harmony groused. Xander felt a hot flash of anger sweep through him. He was angry with Harmony, with the car, with the seatbelt, with the thousand damn cars around them slowing them down as they tried to reach Sunnydale.

“If you get in an accident, it is.” Xander snapped out each word, his temper fraying.

“Nah-uh,” she disagreed.

“Ye-es,” he shot back.

“No, because you broke the seat belt.”

“Well you got in the accident.”

“No I didn’t,” Harmony said with a frown as she glanced over at him. Oh yeah, she hadn’t. Xander clenched his teeth and tried to ride through another wave of frustration. He was hot, fever-hot. He’d been better controlling this new anger when they were at the hotel. Of course, Faith sitting on him had encouraged him to control it more. Xander could snap and snarl at Harmony, and he knew it.

She gave a big sigh. “I liked you better when you were less with the grrrrrr,” she complained softly. Xander gritted his teeth harder. “You were sort of pseudo-cool in a nerdy-sweet kind of way, but now you’re acting like….” Her voice drifted off as she make a squinchy face. Xander thought fondly of the way Spike would backhand her, and for a second, he considered trying it for himself, but she was driving. Even with his last nerve threatening to break, he knew that backhanding the driver would probably be a bad idea when you were on the mortal side.

“Like what?” Xander demanded instead, his voice dark with warning.

“Like a vamp instead of a vamp groupy,” Harmony said with a big huff. “And I’m not talking about this because Spike’s going to be really cranky if you’re all in a bad mood when we get to Sunnydale.”

Xander sighed since he couldn’t actually argue with that. Angel’d be in a worse mood if he could grip with reality well enough to know what was going on. Xander’s morality was like Angel’s Achilles heel. Or maybe not a heel, but an elbow. Poke it and Angel might not die, but he’d be really cranky for a really long time. One little thought that he might be compromising Xander’s morality, and Angel turned himself inside out. It was annoying. Annoying and pointless. Xander’s morality was his own business. If he was going to fuck it up or throw morality out the window all together in favor of staking Harmony because her voice annoyed him, that was his choice.

“Hey, do you think Buffy will remember me?” Harmony asked after long and awkward silence.

Xander thought about their graduation day, and he could feel his emotions shifting. When they’d learned that a random vampire had killed Harmony, they’d all sat and stared at each other with this mute horror. Even if they never said the names of the people who’d died in that battle, Xander suspected that the others were like him—the names of the dead were burned into their memories. His fury faded in the face of that well-polished pain. Before Harmony had shown up at the hotel, Xander had cherished her memory next to the one of Jesse and Ampada and all the other innocents who died in Sunnydale. Okay, so Ampada hadn’t been innocent the second time around, but when she was sacrificed in some ceremony before becoming a soul-sucking demon, she’d been innocent.

He sighed. The road clipped by them, a few landmarks starting to look familiar. “She’ll remember,” Xander said quietly after a long silence.

“Good. Because I don’t know if you realize this, but I'm not actually the kind of vampire who wants to take on the slayer."

“I kinda get that,” Xander agreed. Now that his anger had left, Xander couldn’t decide why he’d wanted to hit Harmony. It would definitely be less than gentlemanly and considering that she was several times stronger them him, probably not all that bright.

“Good,” Harmony said firmly. “Because if she plans to chase me with a stake, I plan to run and leave you to deal with her. She's your friend.”

“That she is,” Xander agreed. No matter how much time or distance separated them, he and Buffy would always be friends.

“And if you’re friends, that means Spike can't get upset with me for leaving you with her because it’s not the same as abandoning you, it’s leaving you with a friend. See? It all works out perfect.” She smiled and nodded to herself. Clearly Spike had been issuing some threats.

“Since you’re going to stay at the mansion, I don't think you're going to be running into Buffy much anyway.”

Harmony did a little head nod-jerk-flip thing. “I can't stay at the mansion all the time,” she said with clear exasperation. “Do you know how many of the old cheerleading crew have ended up dead? Well, either dead or working at Walmart. But anyway,” she hurried to say, “my point is, I need to touch base with the girls before the girls have all disappeared. If I wait, they’re going to be dead or fat or wearing those funny little hats and working some place that smells bad. This might be my last chance to get together for a girls night.” Harmony looked honestly upset at the idea of missing a reunion. They were going into a battle for the fate of the universe, and she wanted to pick out matching underwear with giggling girls. Xander’s cock took a moment to remind him that bisexual and gay were not the same thing.

For hours, Xander had been dealing with these alien, powerful instincts. He'd looked at Harmony and he'd wanted to rip all her hair out, followed possibly by ripping out her heart. To be honest, he wanted the same thing with Cordelia, but no matter how many alien instincts were driving him, he was not going up against Cordelia. There was stupid, and then there was too stupid to live. Xander might be one, but he was not the other. However, right now, Xander could only feel this faint, almost amused sense of horror at the thought of a vampire Harmony being turned loose on the shopping malls of Sunnydale. He would worry about the reactions of the other cheerleaders when she showed up on their doorstep, only the cheerleaders had been more susceptible than most to Sunnydale blindness. The cheer squad had a mortality rate that rivaled certain special ops units in the military, and they never seemed to notice.

“I think you'd better clear that was Spike first,” Xander warned. If Harmony wanted a girls’ night out, Xander wasn’t stopping her.

Harmony rolled her eyes. “Spike’s going to be all busy with that hell goddess person.”

“Not too busy that he can't take time to hit you really, really hard,” Xander pointed out.

Harmony made a little huffing noise and rolled her eyes at him. “Hey!” She smiled brightly. “You're back to being kind of nerdy cool again.”

“Um, thank you?” Xander said. He wasn’t entirely sure that was a compliment, no matter how much Harmony made it sound like one.

“No, really. You aren't all being weird. Well, you are. I mean, really, you're kind of strange. But you’re not doing the demony strange thing now,” she concluded grandly.

Xander scratched his stomach and thought about it. “I think I just stopped feeling like growling.”

“Good. That might be a good look for Spike, but it totally clashes with the look you have going. You’re more of an everyman, common hunk. Like that guy on the commercial that delivers water and all the secretaries would go to the window to watch them deliver water because he was kind of a hottie, but then you knew that he was sort of a loser because he was delivering water, but it kind of didn't matter that he was a loser, because he was really cute. And that's kind of the vibe you have going.”

For a long time, Xander could only stare and try and sort out all the insults from all the compliments. Again, her tone of voice had been totally on the complimentary side, but Xander wasn’t sure the words were. In fact, he was almost positive she’d just shredded his ego, only he couldn’t quite catch the insult. “And again with the questionable thank you,” he said. “I'm starting to think that maybe you shouldn't complement me.”

“We're friends. I'll always be here to complement you,” Harmony assured him cheerfully. Then she turned her attention back to the road. They were getting close to Sunnydale, and that growling sense of fury that Xander had been carrying in the pit of his stomach gave way to a more general sense of unease. Spike always talked about the vibe on the hellmouth feeling powerful, but now that Xander had lived off I hell mouth, he realized it actually felt a little creepy. It was like someone was playing horror movie music just soft enough that you couldn't quite hear it. It was like fingernails down a chalk board shivers even though you couldn’t actually hear the screech.

“Home again,” Xander said softly. If the world was about to end, he wanted to be at Angel’s side, even if Angel was visiting the land of la-la right now. He just wished he understood why Spike had changed his mind. Fear sent her tendrils slipping through him.

“Old home, which is not quite as good as our new home, but it’s still very homey,” Harmony agreed. “I know the shopping is better in LA, but I’m so looking forward to hanging out at the old places.”

Xander looked over and frowned as Harmony took the exit for downtown Sunnydale. The sun would come up in a few hours, and all the bad little demons must have gone home because once they’d left the traffic of the highway behind, the town felt deserted, cold, seriously creepy.

“Aren't you worried little bit?” Xander asked.

“No.” The answer came so quickly and easily that it caught Xander off-guard.

“Not even a little? I mean not even the smallest tiniest crack of complete and utter despair that our world is about to end?” Xander held up to fingers to demonstrate the world’s smallest crack.

“Oh please. Angel and Spike can kill anything that threatens to end the world,” Harmony pointed out. “They're really scary.” She made a face emphasize just how scary they were, and Xander had to agree. Spike and Angel were kind of scary when they were fighting on the same side. He actually wasn't sure how the universe had avoided apocalypse back during the Scourge of Europe days. From the stories, he suspected that none of them were sane enough or organized enough to actually keep their shit together. Darla had been the only planner in the group, and her plans tended to include pissing people off and abandoning her allies. It didn’t say much about her plans. However, this Glorificus seemed to have the godly powers of good planning because she was out-maneuvering Riley. Xander suspected that wasn’t easy.

“But this is a goddess. As in, well, a goddess,” Xander pointed out.

“Oh please.” Harmony gave a huff. “I happen to be a goddess of fashion. In high school that meant lots and lots of people worshiped me. And in high school, that made me better than all of you. However it did not give me more powers. So if she wants to call herself a goddess and have lots of worshippers, that's fine. She still doesn't get it be any scarier than she would be if she called herself a pathetic god-envying demon with no followers at all.”

Xander thought about that. “Do you really think it's that simple? Do you really think that she's just a goddess because people worship her?” It seemed like there would have to be some powers attached for the Council of Watchers to go calling Glory a goddess, but he didn't actually know. The dictionary definition of god was not really helpful for these sorts of situations, and there were lots and lots of demons who called themselves godlike. Lots even had godlike powers. The guy who reanimated the dead so he could play with them and make their bodies do creepy, creepy things—that was slightly goddish. He was also so very dead. Actually, lots of god-like demons were dead after Angelus’ reign. If Angel remembered being Angelus and got over his crazy, he had all sorts of mad demon-killing skills he’d sharpened up. “I hope she’s just a demon with a good P.R. campaign,” Xander said with a sigh.

“Speaking as a former goddess myself, absolutely. And let me tell you, having goddess powers don't mean much once you don't have people following you. I mean I made one little suggestion to Spike about how all of his dark clothes overpowered his natural coloring, and he got all upset. I mean I just suggested that he give up his black or his red and get some variety like maybe a nice periwinkle. Periwinkle would be a great color with his eyes and his blond hair. But anyway. He totally overreacted. So despite all of my goddessy powers of fashion, and I am a fashion goddess,” she added firmly, “it didn't do me any good. My guess is that this Glory is the same way. She has some power, but it's not good to be enough to save her from getting a serious slap down.”

Xander thought about that. Between the mixed metaphors and weirdly personal stories, she had a point. “Harmony?”

“Yeah?”

“Have I said lately how happy I am that you’re part of the family?” Xander asked.

Harmony looked over at him, her eyes wide. “Really?” she asked softly.

“Really really,” Xander agreed. Harmony's face broke into a wide grin.

“Well of course you are. I'm Harmony,” she said in her best no-duh voice.

“That you are,” Xander agreed. She was definitely Harmony, and there wasn’t another vamp in the world that could match her. Xander just hoped that either she stayed at the mansion or that Sunnydale was ready to meet her. Vamp her. Riley might never recover.