Current mood:	relieved
Current music:	Bessie Smith - St. Louis Blues

Well, it's midnight in the Midwest
Title: O, Little Breath of Oblivion
Author: Dead Soul
Rating: NC-17 for sex and vampire high-jinks
Dedication: written for ladyoneill for the Spike/Dru ficathon
Requirements: Romance, no rape or non-con, no Drusilla longing for Angel(us), 1920s Harlem, Spike sings to Drusilla
Thanks: to automatedalice_, darling_effect, and ludditerobot who pointed me towards things Jazz Age, and to my wonderful beta-reader, ladystarlightsj

Runner-up in the Wicked category in Round Two of the Raison d'Etre Awards



O, sweep of stars over Harlem streets
O, little breath of oblivion that is night
A city building
To a mother’s song
A city dreaming
To a lullaby.
Reach up your hand, dark boy, and take a star
Out of the little breath of oblivion
That is night,
Take just
One star.

--Langston Hughes



New York City, 1925

Drusilla admired herself in the empty mirror, stroking her shiny, bobbed black hair, á la Louise Brooks. She turned to look at Spike and raised an eyebrow in inquiry.

Never in a million years, should they live that long, would Spike tell her that the way the sides swept forward under her cheekbones made her frailty seem gaunt. Nor would he tell her that the shortness of the back exposed the knobs at the nape of her neck, marching like cobblestones to disappear under the ivory silk wrapper he'd nicked for her from a Chinatown shop. He cherished her imperfections, of body, as well as mind. They were the things that made her unique and real and touchable and his.

Instead, he cranked up the Victrola and carefully placed the needle into the groove. Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong. St. Louis Blues. He swung her into his arms, inhaling her scent of stale perfume and old blood.

"I hate to see that evening sun go down," he sang, along with Bessie.

Dru slapped his shoulder playfully, "Fibber," she chided.

"Okay," he chuckled, "I love to see the evening sun go down 'cause that’s when you come out to shine."

"Like I shone last night?"

"Exactly like that, my unholy star, my black pearl, my sinful siren, my…" His fulsome endearments became muffled as he nuzzled into her neck. She laughed as he swooped her into a deep dip.

***

The wind had been cold and dry. The sky clear and the stars bright, the wind having swept away the heavy coal smoke belched out by hundreds of factories and hundreds of thousands of glowing furnaces.

A man and woman, much of a height, strolled arm-in-arm up the empty street. Their warm coats each had a deep collar of dark fur and the woman had a cloche hat pulled down snug over her ears. Her delicate silver T-strapped shoes clattered lightly on the cobblestones as they hurried along 142nd Street towards Lennox Avenue and the bright lights of the nightclub's marquee, which perched in odd contrast above the pseudo-log cabin architecture. As they passed the alley alongside the club, they could smell the marijuana smoke of the hophead musicians on a break.

Taxis pulled up to the club, one after another, to disgorge their cargoes of post-theatre debs and their escorts, drunken frat boys, and nervous suburbanites. Bouncers at the club door scanned each group to make sure that none of them were mixed. White customers only. That was the policy at the Cotton Club, only occasionally relaxed for their headliners who could sometimes reserve a table for guests of their choosing so long as none of them got too familiar with the white clientele.

Inside the air was hot, humid, and stale. The ersatz jungle greenery clashed with rough wood walls that continued the log cabin motif, but the stage was big and there was a dance floor. This stink of the living was as intoxicating to Spike and Drusilla as any bathtub gin. The women gleamed in their jewels and furs, fringe and silk; loud and exuberant, as if they had centuries of unused fun to catch up on, and the men with them looked sleek and patronizing in rich basic black.

Red-tuxedoed waiters wound around and through the tables, hoisting trays of full drinks and empty glasses while the orchestra warmed up for the floor show. In the wings, the dancers jostled each other, jockeying to be front and center. One never knew when some rich white ofay might decide to get a taste for dark meat.

Spike and Drusilla snaked through the crowd and found a small table for two at the far right of the stage, Spike’s snarled "Blow" being enough to persuade its former occupants that perhaps it was a good time for them to toddle along home.

"Couple rounds of your finest coffin varnish here," he shouted at a passing waiter. His order was acknowledged with the merest nod.

Spike pulled a chair out for Drusilla and scooted it underneath her as she sat, helping her take off her coat to drape across the back of the chair. Her dress was covered, bodice to hem, with dripping silver fringe, held up by nearly invisible silver strands rising over her slender white shoulders and descending behind her, supporting the nearly non-existent back of the dress.

Spike very much appreciated how well the new fashions became his girl. Made it well worth coming to this place, where the music, while good, would not be the wild, raucous and exciting sound he’d come to appreciate hanging out at the cutting contests where stride pianists like James P. Johnson and Willie "The Lion" Smith would battle through the night, each trying to best the other with speed, imagination and bravura. Or the rent parties where drugs and liquor and music mixed into a heady brew as hot as blood.

He'd been tolerated as long as he was by himself, but he knew that if he’d taken Dru, the party would die. Not just because of her appetite, he loved to watch her work, but because the presence of a white woman would be the mother of all dampers on the good times. Throwing a white woman into the mix was too often the key ingredient in the recipe for a lynching, a thought always in the backs of people's minds, no matter how long it had been since there'd been a lynching in New York. Too many of the musicians and party-goers had come from the South or had family still there.

Although Dru had been enchanted, Spike inwardly cringed at the floorshow, which depicted happy, if scantily-clad, times down on the plantation, and he could only imagine how the people performing it must have felt. He was glad when it was over and the orchestra struck up the dance music. He led Drusilla to the floor where they jostled with all the other couples.

After a few numbers, the band came to a stop as two new musicians came on stage. Spike recognized Louis Armstrong and wondered why he was here rather than at his regular gig at Roseland. The woman with him was unfamiliar and not particularly attractive. Although richly dressed, she did not seem comfortable in her fine clothes.

"Evening folks, I'm Louis Armstrong and this lovely lady with me is Bessie Smith. We're here to play for you a little something we just recorded for Columbia Records. It's an old W.C. Handy tune called St. Louis Blues."

The crowd applauded politely, old blues numbers not being quite their cup of hooch when they were there wanting to dance and go wild, but although he'd only been in New York for a couple of years, Armstrong was enough of a name that they'd give him a listen.

The band began to play quietly, supporting Louis' cornet intro, as Bessie seemed to take sadness from the air and wrap it around herself. When the cornet faded to muted melody, she began to sing. Spike felt the thrill run through Dru as he held her in his arms. He could feel her shiver, feel the way the song of longing and loss coursed through her veins, as life-giving and rich as the purest blood. It spoke to him too, frightening him, making him think that that was exactly how he would feel if his girl ever left him. He worried about what she might be thinking, whom she might be remembering.

But he needn't have worried, Drusilla wasn't mourning the past, she was seeing the future. She whispered to him, "This one won't be here long. She goes to teach the angels to cry."

Spike stiffened for a second then relaxed. No, she didn't mean him, she meant the literal angels. She swayed in his arms, eyes closed in ecstasy.

When the song was over, they slinked out of the club, the resounding applause deafening. On the way back to their hotel, Spike broke into a record store to get that record for her.

***

"Been to the gypsy to get my fortune told. To the gypsy, to get my fortune told…"

Still singing, but inwardly cursing himself for accidentally touching on the sensitive subject of gypsies, he turned her in his arms then shut up long enough to kiss each of the dear little cobblestones down the back of her neck, pushing the loose silk over her shoulders to fall to the floor. Under it, all she wore were sheer silk stockings, rolled just over her knees, a waist-length rope of black pearls, and the silver shoes with just enough of a heel that, if they were standing face to face, their eyes would be perfectly even.

But they weren't standing face to face, he was slowly sinking to his knees behind her, tracing her spine with his tongue, licking the lone rivulet of blood that slowly seeped from under her hairline.

She was warm, having just fed and, as an errant breeze whispered across the dampness his tongue had left, she shivered, her nipples stiffening, not entirely due to the cold. She started to turn to him, but he held her still, his hands molding her waist, cinching it even smaller, as his mouth explored the firm curves of her bottom, pausing to sing with the record, "A black-headed gal make the freight train jump the track. Said a black-headed gal make a freight train jump the track."

Mouth traveling down the back of one slim leg, he paused at the back of her knee, rolling the stocking down just far enough to expose the tender, sensitive flesh, sucking it, worrying it with his teeth until she shuddered and drew her breath in, letting it out in a long moan as he repeated his attentions to the back of her other knee. He rolled her stockings all the way down, eased off her shoes, and removed them, mouth and tongue worshipping each new inch of skin revealed.

Finally standing, he hooked his suspenders off his shoulders to hang at his sides, and removed his sleeveless white undershirt. He turned her around to kiss her properly, feasting on her mouth, feeding on her heat, feeding her his.

When the kiss ended, as even the best kisses eventually must, he spun her back around and pushed her. She fell forwards and caught herself on the edge of the dressing table, its mirror reflecting only the room behind them.

He grabbed her pearl necklace, winding it around his hand until it was drawn tight around her neck, and pulled her head back so he could lay his teeth against the fragile skin of her throat. Growling, he kicked her legs apart and tore the buttons of his trousers open to free himself. She laughed as he thrust hard into her, the tendons along her arms standing out as she held herself up, long fingers gripping the hard wood, nails scoring it with long scratches.

In her own tuneless monotone, she sang under her breath, "Blacker the berry, sweeter is the juice."

When he'd finished, roaring as he came into her, she straightened shakily and looked back into the mirror, turning her head to the left, to the right, exactly as if she could see what she wasn't reflecting.

She frowned a little and said, "I don't think I care for this after all," and with one sweep of her hand, pulled the shiny bob from her head, her own long black hair unrolling in matted clumps, thick with dried blood.

There was a knock on the door and as she went to let in the hotel porter with her hot bathwater, Spike rolled the body off the side of the bed away from the door. It fell face up, cupid’s bow mouth open in shock, as if still protesting the loss of its scalp.

Happy birthday, juliaabra (it's still Saturday here on the left coast)! Miss you, babe.