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Title: Words
Author: Estepheia
Rating: R
Pairing: Angel/Fred

When it comes to distorting the truth no one can hold a candle to Angelus. In his calculating mind lies and truths are forged and sharpened until they cut to the bone. Not like a scalpel – those cuts are too clean and surgical. More like a jagged saw that tears flesh beyond repair, so that even when the words themselves are dismissed as mind games, their malevolence continues to spread like gangrene.

“Ah, Fred. You look all fresh and sweet, but I hear you at night in your room with Gunn.”

The next time Fred spreads her legs under the roof of the Hyperion she’ll listen to herself, wondering if her moans and breathless pleas travel down the hall or through the walls, into his ear and straight to his cock.

“The things you say. I'm lying there, listening, hands under the covers.”

Will she imagine Angel’s hand bunching the covers in regular intervals as he slowly pulls on his erection? Next time, when Gunn’s tongue works her clit and makes her squeal and talk dirty, will she close her eyes and see Angel gripping his cock, pumping and jerking? Or will she imagine it’s Angel’s tongue that’s eating her? Maybe she’ll press the back of her hand against her mouth to stifle her moans.

Angelus may be back where he belongs, chained and gagged, locked up and buried, but Angel remembers. Everything.

Lives snuffed, bodies violated, blood quaffed, words spoken.

Every. Single. Word.

“... I can't help myself. It's so... gripping.”

The words still taste like bile in his mouth. Truths, wrapped in lies, wrapped in truths, like Russian Matrushka dolls. Only less pretty.

He can’t just step up to her and say, “Hey Fred, remember all that stuff I said when I was in that cage? About me listening and touching myself? Forget it. Never happened.”

Because it’s true, Angel could hear them, their groaning and panting, the whispered endearments, the fuck me’s and cries for more, could always smell their need and want for each other and no shower could take away the smell of their mingled juices when that need got sated – stop it from seeping out of her warmth.

And yes, it would make him hard, Tibetan meditation technique or no.

It’s true and at the same time it’s not.

Because champions don’t jerk off thinking about friends, not when they have total recall of every single good fuck they ever had.

When Angel lay there at night, body thrumming with need, listening without wanting to, he’d think of Darla, both deathly cold and warm with life, or Dru, or even Spike. Never Buffy and the way they’d made love on the day-that-never-happened – because that memory was too good for anything that base.

But now?

It’s like coming back from a trip and finding one’s home burgled, the furniture smashed, the bed slept in, the walls defaced with graffiti and the whole place smelling of liquor and smoke and sex. Tainted. As if part of Angelus never left.

Angel listens, but the hotel is quiet. His hand glides underneath the covers to grip his straining erection. He doesn’t need the sound of lovemaking to bring himself off. Imagining Fred works just fine.

END