TITLE: I Can Hear the Mermaids Singing

AUTHOR: Firerose

AUTHOR'S E-MAIL: firerose@btinternet.com

RATING: PG-13

DISCLAIMER: Characters are owned by Joss Whedon, David Greenwalt and
the usual corporate suspects

SPOILERS: Up to AtS 'Epiphany'

SYNOPSIS: Sunlight isn't the only thing that Angel misses. Set after
'Disharmony'

ARCHIVE: Yes to list archive; otherwise, please do not archive or
distribute without prior permission

NOTES: Feedback is very welcome, and should be sent to
firerose@btinternet.com. My fanfiction archive resides at
http://www.viragene.com/firerose.htm. Original material is copyright
the author 2001



"I Can Hear the Mermaids Singing"
by Firerose



I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.

From 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock' by T.S. Eliot



(1)

'A date,' she'd said, as we sat side by side in the Hyperion's
courtyard garden. Then, 'Okay, humour me.'

Remembering the last time I'd seen her -- holding her face under the
shower-head while she choked back into consciousness -- humour had
suddenly seemed like a good idea. Not to mention the fact that a flat
refusal just then would have seemed a little, well, churlish. (The
smallest act of kindness is the greatest thing in the world ... had I
really come out with that pretentious crap?)

A date, then. One more step in the fragile Kate--Angel truce. 

I'd vowed once never to go on another date, but then I'd vowed to stake
Darla and burn Wolfram & Hart to the ground. Maybe this epiphany thing
of mine means that some vows should be quietly shoved under the carpet?

Thirteen minutes to seven. I couldn't have written the address down
wrong, could I? The way she'd talked it had sounded like she was
suggesting some kind of restaurant, but... 

I scour the quiet back street, anonymous in the gentle twilight. A
second-hand bookstore, opposite. Closed. Dingy books heaped up
untidily, mainly hardback novels, the kind that public libraries throw
out each month when the new stock comes in. Not even Wesley would've
been interested in any of these. An antique-cum-junk shop next door.
Also closed. That walnut Louis Quinze writing desk framed in the window
is reproduction, of course; something too regular, too mechanical about
the scrolled decoration on those slender curved legs. 

My careful survey confirms what I already knew. No restaurants. No Kate
either, but then I'd arrived about twenty minutes early, wanting to
give the sewer odour plenty of time to wear off my clothes. I'm not
sure it ever really disappears, that and the stale stench of blood that
hangs on my breath no matter how often I gargle with Listerine.

The fragile Angel--Cordy truce had extended to her insisting on
choosing my clothes for this date. 'No more Mr-Broody-Vampire look,'
she'd said, picking out a sea-blue silk shirt from the wreck that had
been my wardrobe minutes earlier. I'd steepled my fingers, said 'Okay,
Cordelia,' and refrained from telling her that that particular shirt
had originated in what she insisted on calling my 'Angelus phase'.
(Makes me sound like an artist, for Christ's sake.)

I expect it had also extended to her telling Kate about the curse.
Cordy seems to take a perverse pleasure in spilling the intimate
details of my sordid unlife to every woman I ever meet. (Especially the
blonde ones.)

I turn back to the illuminated noticeboard behind me. Two hundred and
forty-seven years of existence had turned me into an insatiable
consumer of the written word, however prosaic. Those oh-so-familiar
words from my childhood, matins and evensong, feast days and holy days,
sacraments and devotions. The proud boast that mass is celebrated at
the Church of the Immaculate Conception every hour from seven a.m. to
nine p.m., with services in Spanish at eleven a.m., three p.m. and
eight p.m. on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. Meeting times for the
Mothers' Union, confirmation classes, choir practices, Sunday school:
tots, sevens-to-elevens and teens. (Teens has an entirely unnecessary
apostrophe, 'teens.) Telephone numbers for the Father, the two
Assistant Fathers, the parish office. The last has e-mail, fax and web
address listed, too. 

God on the Internet. Cordy would like that idea. 

I wonder whether He listens to e-mail. (He's probably got some sort of
heavenly autofilter set up to delete messages from the damned.)

Quotation for the week: 'For God so loved the world that he gave his
only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in Him should not perish but
have eternal life.' 

Newsflash. Eternal life ain't all it's cracked up to be.

Eight minutes to seven. Sure enough, faint organ music is beginning to
emanate from the velvet darkness beyond that half-open door, its
imposing expanse of studded oak as fake as the Louis Quinze desk. (Why
do churches always feel the need to look ancient? LA has so little real
history. Christ, the whole city's younger than I am.) Scent of candle
smoke and incense winding out tendrils from the doorway, mingling with
the fragrance of black roses out here on the sidewalk. (They're black
under the sodium lamps, anyway.) Trickle of quiet people entering;
mainly pensioners, couple of student types. All women.

'Come on, Kate,' I murmur. The gold embossed cross after the word
'Conception' on the board above my head is beginning to make my flesh
creep. (Hope she's taking me somewhere nice.)

Ironic really. Warrior for the Lord, and all, whose skin burns at the
touch of the universal symbol of Christianity. (No matter how good a
boy you are, God doesn't want you.) Catch myself absently scratching my
right hand; that burn had never quite healed. Shove my hands deep into
my coat pockets. The Virgin Mary looks down on me from the stained
glass beside the door, her robe the exact same shade of blue as my
shirt. (I wonder if she can see the blood on my hands.)

And it isn't until Kate is walking towards me -- long skirt flapping
round her knees, fingering the cross around her neck in that nervous
gesture which has become a habit of hers around me -- that I finally
realise.

'Coming in?' she says.

I could swear she's smiling at me. The Virgin I mean, not Kate. Though
she's smiling too, as I grit my teeth and bow my head and follow her
through that wannabe Chartres archway.

After all, it won't be the first meal with friends I haven't been able
to share.

***

Inside, the aura of that huge bronze crucifix above the altar hits me
like Lindsay's sledgehammer. I look down at the terracotta tiles of the
floor and follow Kate's tan leather boots as they click click click to
the right. 

'Here okay?' she whispers, and I shuffle after her into a pew near the
wall, behind a huge stone pillar. 

'Fine,' I say. Better now I'm sitting down, anyway, and I'm partially
shielded from the altar. The air is solid with smoke, but that isn't
what's making my eyes water, my skin itch and my head throb. Darla told
me once that the Master used to keep a big wooden crucifix hanging in
the anteroom to his bedchamber, and look on it every morning and
evening, so that he would become habituated to the pain, cease to feel
that instinctive fear that we all suffer. (She didn't say whether or
not it had worked.)

Strange. The Master was almost certainly old enough to have been there
at the original.

'There,' Kate says, rapidly swapping over the hassocks at our feet so
that she gets the one with the embroidered cross and I get a Tudor
rose. I realise that she must have checked the details out in advance,
and thank something that most definitely isn't God for her
anally-retentive police procedural habits.

She picks up the maroon cardboard-bound prayer book, opens it and holds
it up between us. I fail to suppress a laugh: it's at her chest height
and only just above my navel. 

'Never mind,' I say, 'I couldn't read from it anyway.'

I remember the gold-tooled, black calf leather prayer book that my
grandfather gave me for my first communion, the marbled flyleaf dated
the twelfth of March, year of Our Lord seventeen hundred and
thirty-six, in his large angular hand. I used to stick the leather
cover under my nose and breathe deep like some glue-sniffer, it felt
like Heaven. Remember getting cuffed for 'showing disrespect' when my
grandfather caught me at it. Remember our family Bible, its flyleaf
crammed with the dates of my grandparents' and parents' marriages, the
births of my parents, and of Liam Fergus and Katherine Jane, and the
only remnants of that other little sister who had died of scarlet fever
before she reached two years. Last of all, in my father's smaller
handwriting, are the dates of my grandparents' deaths. 

I guess that Liam Fergus was the last family death to be recorded on
that flyleaf, though I never thought to check at the time. It's perhaps
appropriate, then, that that Bible is the last his flesh has touched
without pain. 

I remember too those other deaths, Katherine Jane and her mother and
her father, and Anna, their maidservant.

I only realise that I'm compulsively scratching at my right hand to the
point of drawing blood when Kate pulls my fingers away, encloses my
large cold hand in her small warm one. I surreptitiously replace the
bloodied hand in my coat pocket. The service hasn't even started yet. 

'What's wrong with your hand?' she whispers.

'Nothing.'

And then the choir start to sing the *Gloria*. 'Glory to God in the
highest, and peace to His people on earth.' I can feel the pure sweet
notes like a dentist's drill in my teeth, my jaw, my skull. 

'Are you okay?' Kate whispers, squeezing my hand. 'What's wrong?' But I
can't tell her that what I'm really afraid of is not the growing
headache nor the itching burning of my skin, but the telltale tightness
in my forehead, around my eyes, that tickly trembly ache in my gums,
the swirly redness at the very periphery of my vision, the increased
sensitivity to her heartbeat, to the rushing eddying schwooshing noise
that is the blood in her veins. Can't even say a word when I don't
trust my voice not to snarl or growl.

I stare down at the terracotta tiles beneath my shiny black boots,
count them furiously, add up rows and columns, divide by three. How can
I explain to her that once the painful stimulus goes beyond a certain
threshold, the transformation is no longer under any kind of conscious
control? It's like an erection -- train yourself all you like, sooner
or later it's just going to pop out. (Except of course she doesn't get
those either.)

The priest is speaking now, and even in this state I can recognise
cosmic jokes when I hear them as he announces the reading from chapter
fifteen of the Gospel according to Saint Luke, and starts:

'There was a man who had two sons; and the younger of them said to his
father, "Father, give me the share of property that falls to me." And
he divided his living between them. Not many days later, the younger
son gathered all he had and took his journey into a far country, and
there he squandered his property in loose living.'

And now Kate's stifling laughter too, and I can concentrate on her
laugh, on the pressure and warmth of her hand on mine, and not on the
siren call of those rushing eddying schwooshing sounds.

'Seems kind of appropriate, somehow,' she whispers close to my ear, her
soft hair lightly brushing at my cheek. (The monster that is me could
snap her neck in a fraction of a second.)

'I tell you that in the same way there will be more rejoicing in heaven
over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who
do not need to repent.'

For a minute -- the words echoing round in my head, the memory of
Kate's hair against my cheek -- I feel almost like I felt that
Christmas day when it snowed in Sunnydale and took all the pain and
fear and failure away. (Though it came back, of course.)

Even after the minute's over, it's better somehow: not so difficult to
control the tightness and the ache in my gums, and the headache and the
itching burning sensations aren't getting any worse. I can survive
this, I think. 

Even when the priest is saying, 'Take, eat, this is my body which is
given for you,' and I'm remembering the rumours that eating those
consecrated white wafers is the most excruciatingly painful death
possible for my kind, even then I can survive my fear.

Even when we reach, 'Drink this, all of ye; this is my blood of the new
covenant,' and Kate is rubbing at my mark on the side of her neck and I
know that we're both thinking of the same moment, months ago now, even
then somehow it's still okay.



(2)

Outside in the street, Kate touches my arm. 'There's this great little
espresso place I found a couple of blocks from here ... Let me buy you
a coffee. You do ... um ... drink coffee, don't you?'

'Yeah, coffee's certainly on this Not-So-Evil Evil Thing's menu,' I
say, simultaneously wondering why on Earth Cordelia's little chats seem
to tackle the more embarrassing bits of my unlife head on, whilst
entirely omitting the relatively salubrious aspects. The brisk walk in
the cooler evening air starts to clear my headache, soothe the itching
sensation.

The coffee bar is the type sporting small round wicker-topped tables
and home-baked chocolate cakes that's still owned by a little Italian
family, though the traditional dusty potted plants have been replaced
by brand-new PCs and the sign announces 'Internet Café'. It comes
complete with a grey-haired father who looks like an operatic tenor and
greets Kate by name, and a dark beauty of a daughter who reminds me
uncannily of a plumper, pinker version of Drusilla, an illusion
fostered by the sleek black cat lounging proprietarily behind the
counter. It's warm and dark and smoky and the entire clientele, apart
from us, seems to be under twenty-one and, moreover, to be conversing
volubly in a variety of languages among which English is prominent by
its absence. I'm not really convinced that it's any closer to Kate's
natural environment than D'Oblique's, but she's heading for a secluded
corner spot by the window, and I follow her.

'I had you figured as an espresso guy,' she says, stirring in the foam
on her own small dark coffee. 'Kind of goes with your usual
black-on-black look.'

'I must admit, I didn't have you figured as a Catholic gal, Katie,' I
say, flashing her my best Liam smile.

'Lapsed Catholic gal,' she says. 'I thought I'd give it another try.'
She pauses and looks a bit embarrassed. 'To be honest, at the
complimentary Employment Reassessment Session included in my LAPD
"fuck-off" package, one of the saner things that the computer came up
with for an ex-cop with a sociology degree, leanings towards mental
instability and no life whatsoever was charity co-ordination. The guy
suggested that a "religious background" might be an asset on my resumé.'

I don't for a minute believe that's the only reason, but I don't get a
chance to respond. With conversational gears audibly clunking,
reminding me that her small-talk skills are not much more developed
than my own, she says, as calmly as if she's asking me to name my
favourite movie: 'How many people have you killed, Angel?'

There's a clattering noise, and I realise that I've dropped the spoon
into my saucer. She's still stirring her espresso, but her face shows
none of that prurient curiosity I've seen in others asking such
questions. She's a cop, remember. She's attended murder scenes,
comforted rape victims while the semen's still trickling down the
inside of their leg. 

Perhaps this is part of what 'friends' means? Suddenly I'm slightly
hurt that I've known Cordy for, oh, four and a half years now, and
she's never asked anything of the sort. (Wes, I guess, already knows
the answer, near enough.)

'Lots,' I say, looking down at the large hands nursing my cappuccino.

'How many?'

I consider saying 'I don't remember' or 'I lost count,' but neither is
true. Anyway, they almost sound worse than the truth. Almost. 

I swallow. I know Kate's already done her homework.

'Forty-five thousand,' I say quickly, looking up into her face, hearing
the words out of my mouth solidify, like a black granite headstone. I
catch the widening of those grey eyes, the rapid intake of breath and
acceleration of pulse, but she recovers her composure quickly -- at
least on the surface.

It's actually forty-four thousand six hundred and two, give or take a
few (sometimes I didn't hang around to work out whether they lived or
died), but I don't think the precise total will help. (About twenty
percent of the number who died in Hiroshima after the sixth of August,
1945. Less than five percent of those who starved in Ireland during the
potato famines in the 1840s. A tenth of a percent of those who perished
in the Spanish influenza pandemic of 1919.) 

I can't help but wonder how many hours in the confessional it would
take to go through the complete list. Hours? The priest would probably
die of old age -- if he hadn't already died of shock.

'I've killed six people; seven counting your friend,' she says. 'All in
self-defence, of course.' 

'And how many did you enjoy killing?'

For a moment her face flashes with anger, the old Kate back. Then she
says slowly, 'I see what you mean.'

'The one thing I've learned in the past few months is that this isn't a
numbers game.'

'Do you...' She stops. 'Do you remember...?'

'Not all the names, but... yes, I remember the faces.' 

Every single one. Sometimes when I can't sleep they parade past me, one
by one. They never say anything, they don't scream or cry or beg or
plead, they just walk past and look at me. I've never got to the end of
the line. I'm not sure that I ever will. 

'There was one guy, maybe two, two and a half years ago now. A drug
dealer who pulled a gun when we tried to talk to him. His wife was
nineteen.' She pauses, looks up at me. 'And twenty-eight weeks'
pregnant. She got hold of my address somehow, followed me round in the
mall one Saturday morning, screaming "murderer", and "racist pig".
Saying I'd orphaned her son before he was even born. She sent me a
picture of the baby from the maternity ward. My boss advised me to file
for harassment.'

Her eyes are wet with tears, and she downs her coffee in one gulp. I
don't know what to say, so I get up and order another double for her
and a cappuccino for me and get a plate of little Italian iced
biscuits, cremini they're called, a mixture of chocolate and vanilla
ones, and when I sit down again Kate's wiped her eyes and stopped
sniffling. 

'Thanks,' she says. Starts nibbling at one of the biscuits. 'How did
you know that I just *love* these biscuits?'

I pick one from the plate, a chocolate one, take a bite. It tastes like
ashes. I put it down in my saucer. 

We sit in silence for a while.

'Forty-five thousand,' she says eventually. 'Christ. Forty-five
thousand. That's a heck of a lot of atonement.'

'Sometimes I think nothing can ever be enough.'

'And other times?'

'The other times are worse.'

The other times, the really black times, those are when I really don't
give a fuck anymore. But I don't say that to Kate, and she's much too
shrewd an ex-cop to ask a question that she really doesn't want to know
the answer to.

'So you can't buy your way out of it,' she says instead. 'But I'm not
sure that's the deal.'

'God doesn't deal with vampires.' But even as the words are leaving my
mouth I think, but what about the visions? Sunnydale's first-ever snow
at Christmas? (There will be more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner
who repents.)

'I thought you were always a Special Case?' she says, her emphasis
making the capital letters clear.

I shake my head, but she's looking at her watch. 'Sorry. No time to
argue with the most stubborn vampire in LA,' she says. 'Gotta go and
pick up my dry-cleaning -- interview tomorrow morning.' She's already
standing up, putting on her jacket.

'You could try Anne Steele, runs a teen shelter out on Crenshaw.' I
realise my words are more an attempt to keep her here than anything
else. 'Cordy should have her details in the office database. I hear
she's looking for someone to help set up a new drop-in advice centre.
Just ... well, don't mention that it was me that sent you.'

'Another of your fans, Angel?' she says with a smile and a half-wave,
then disappears through the door, melts into the endless stream of
people in this city that never really sleeps. 

An endless parade of people that I *haven't* killed. Some of whom I've
probably helped, saved even.

And I'm left alone with a lingering headache, half a mug of cooling
cappuccino and a plate of biscuits that I still can't eat.

END