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Apr. 4th, 2007 06:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jmatonakMore fic. I'm as surprised as you are. This part has cursing.
Chapter Three: Outside the Hyperion
There was something in the set of Anya's shoulders that Spike didn't like. If he had to put a word to it that word would be resigned.
"Hello, Spike. Hello, Angel. Hello, handsome man who I don't know and blue demon woman," she said.
"Gunn."
"Illyria."
"Anya. I'm not pleased to meet you, but that has nothing to do with you. I'm sure you're very pleasant company. I'm looking for someone called Winifred Burkle."
Illyria tilted her head. She became less blue and in some imperceptible way seemed a little smaller, and Fred was standing in her place. "I guess I'm Fred Burkle if anyone is," she said softly, with a trace of Texas twang.
"A man named Ambrose is coming to get you. When he does, he'll do unpleasant things to you. I'm sorry. The rest of you..." Anya turned her head slightly to survey the entire group, "The rest he'll probably just kill."
Spike cocked his head. "And how exactly is he gonna do that? We just chewed through an army."
Anya's voice continued to be flat.
"He's a magician. I assume he'll use magic. For a mortal man, he's pretty good at it- not Willow good, I think, but much better than I was in my first life. He'll probably set you on fire. You too, Angel. I'm not sure about you, handsome man."
"Gunn."
"Oh, yes, you said. I'll try to remember."
The woman may have looked like Fred, but the head-tilt was pure Illyria. "Won't he have to find us?"
"I'll tell him where you are-"
Even with Fred's hand cutting off her air, Anya still seemed listless. Then the hand was Illyria's, and there was a cracking sound. Illyria let go and Anya slumped to the ground.
"Ouch," Anya said, a bit thickly.
"Thank God! You tried to kill her," said Angel. "What the hell are you doing?"
"Kinda like to know the answer to that myself, Blue. Demon girl's a friend of mine," said Spike.
"You heard her," Illyria said, in her measured tones. "She will reveal our whereabouts to an enemy who desires your destruction. She is a spy, whom I have captured and intend to execute."
Anya climbed to her feet. By the time she was finished, there was no sign of any injury.
"You can't. I'm already dead. In the real world, I'm dead-dead, not walking-around dead like the vampires here. What's left of me is stuck in what's left of a glass window from Sunnydale High, and I'm forced to run errands for Ambrose, who is an asshole," said Anya.
Gunn stopped watching and stepped forward. "The real world? As opposed to here?"
"Yes. I don't know where here is, but I have a body, of a sort, so it can't be the real world."
"It looks a lot like it," said Angel hotly.
"Not really," Gunn said. "Look around, Angel. No cars. No pedestrians. Sun's starting to come up on an L.A. neighborhood and I don't hear a damn thing. Do you?"
It was true. Apart from the little knot of people in front of the hotel, everything was still and oppressively quiet.
Illyria seemed to inhale but didn't actually move. "The woman is right. This does not taste like our world. I believe the sun will not burn you here, Angel, which is fortunate for us."
Gunn looked at Anya. "You said you'd tell him where we were, not that you already had. When are you planning to tell him?"
"When he asks, I'll have to tell him. He said he'd be back in an hour, and it's been about twenty minutes."
Angel shook his head. "Even for Wolfram and Hart, that's quick work. We beat their dragon, what, six hours ago at most, and they've already got some jackass out looking for us."
Anya and Illyria, simultaneously: "The time flow is differen-" Illyria tilted her head and regarded the other woman. Anya said, "I believe it's been about six weeks since Ambrose was hired to find you. Time doesn't always match up in the obvious way- I can feel it passing where I am in the mirror, and this conversation hasn't taken long at all- less than a second, I think."
Spike stepped forward and looked at Anya. "I'm gettin' the impression, what with the use of words like 'asshole', that you'd rather not be working as this Ambrose pillock's golden retriever. Want us to spring you?"
"Yes. I don't think you can."
"I don't know, Saint George over there seems to be havin' an on day. How about it, Angel? Ghost trapped in a mirror in some warlock lawyer's office-"
"In his closet."
"-even worse. Old friend, prisoner of a vile fiend, and damsel in distress- unless I miss my guess, Anya here has hit the helping-the-helpless trifecta."
Angel nodded. "Fair enough, but we have to get to her first."
Spike said, "Lacking a more original idea, I say we wait for this prick to show up, beat the living shite out of him, and force him to take us back home."
Gunn said, "So... our usual."
Spike said, "In a situation like this, you wanna play to your strengths, Charlie-boy."
Angel said, "Come on. Let's get the lay of the land and get ready."
Chapter Four: Hyperion Room 114
Spike watched Illyria play Crash Bandicoot and fought to keep from tapping his foot. Getting the lay of the land had involved maybe an hour at most, and revealed that their world consisted, now, of a few blocks around the Hyperion, and that any attempt to go further would quickly and quietly fail, sending whoever tried it somewhere about, seemingly at random.
At the end of that first day, they'd ventured out for supplies. Strictly speaking, Gunn was the only one who needed to eat. Anya had explained, flatly, that she didn't really feel much of anything and didn't require food. Spike had grabbed some food for himself from the little 'stop-n-rob' market they found, just because he could. He was aware, as was Angel, that there was no blood to be had anywhere outside of Gunn's veins, but so far that wasn't an issue.
The sun kept their minds off their appetites.
The days- five of them so far- were a constant seesaw between the tactical necessity of staying prepared and the irresistible urge to go play outside. Using various excuses like "patrol" and "scouting the perimeter", the vampires enjoyed their little world and moved to and fro in it. As usual, they annoyed each other, but somehow stayed within sarcasm distance anyway.
There was only one topic both of them avoided, by mutual unspoken agreement. Buffy's name somehow never came up. Almost everything else in their long and convoluted history did. Witness the afternoon of day two:
"I haven't done this since I had the Gem of Amara. Why the hell did you smash that, anyway? Could have been bloody brilliant to have around."
"I don't really know anymore. I told Doyle- that's actual Doyle, not Lindsey, in case you're confused-"
"Har de fucking har."
"- that it would be a distraction, that it would dilute my focus in a way that would make everything mean less. To be honest with you, I have no idea what the hell I was thinking."
"You really are a wanker, you know that?"
"Yeah."
"-- what?"
"Let's get back."
But now, it was night, either the fifth or sixth one depending on how you counted. Anya reported that it had been just about an hour now, so they all sat and waited. Spike thought idly about Illyria and Anya. They were a natural pair in some ways, he reckoned- both with a demonic history, both in human female bodies, more or less, and both feeling isolated and cut off. They certainly talked more to each other than either of them did to anyone else.
Spike wasn't sure what Gunn was doing during the day, but at night he and Angel would go over what they knew about Wolfram and Hart, over and over again, trying to figure out more about the situation. They had long since run out of useful topics and ranged far, far afield of anything germane.
Out of nowhere, Gunn asked, "Angel, when you signed away your shanshu, what did you get in return?"
"Nothing. No one in that room was doing me any favors."
Gunn shook his head. "That's impossible, man. A contract has to enrich both parties, even under California law, and demon law is a lot more strict about it."
Anya spoke up from her place in front of the game console. "He's right. They'd have to give you something at least as mystically significant as what they were asking you to give up. Then they'd do some cheap ironic trick to make sure you couldn't enjoy it."
"Zombie turkeys," Illyria said.
Anya said, "He always liked that episode." By this time, even Illyria knew that "he" must be Xander Harris.
Abruptly, Illyria stood up. "I will return shortly." She headed for the door. On the way out, she looked at Anya, blue gaze expressionless. "I am sorry for your loss," she said.
Chapter Five: Hyperion Roof
Illyria stood on the roof, profoundly unsettled.
When Anya first arrived, asking for Fred, Illyria had assumed Fred's shape without consciously deciding to do so. Disturbed by this, Illyria had avoided becoming Fred- assuming the appearance of Fred, she corrected herself angrily- ever since.
The first words she spoke to Anya hadn't been consciously chosen either. Illyria repeated them softly to herself, now. "I guess I'm Fred Burkle if anyone is."
The reference to zombie turkeys was from television, a program Fred had enjoyed. When Anya pointed out that Xander had liked the episode in question, Illyria almost replied I do
too.
When first incarnated into Fred's body, "the shell", Illyria had seen all of Fred's memories as separate from herself, discrete tracks of knowledge she could consult as though reading a book- although she never would have used that metaphor at the time. Illyria would never have called itself "she", for that matter. But the boundaries between Illyria's own memories and Fred's had been softening ever since, and the process had only accelerated after Wesley-
"Take your best shot", Cyvus Vail said, and Illyria let her bleak rage (that had nothing in it of the savage joy of battle) carry her fist forward and through Vail's smug, overconfident grin and out the back of his shattered skull. All her attention remained focused on the corpse for a long moment, making sure that none of Vail's wizard tricks had helped him escape death. If he somehow had, Illyria knew, she would kill him over and over again.
When she looked around, Wesley's body was gone. Illyria was glad Vail's spell had disposed of it- or so she assumed- because the thought of dealing with the corpse herself was intolerable. She set off for the Hyperion, barely marking all that she passed, as memories of Wesley rose in crowds before her mind's eye...
The process had only accelerated after Wesley. Even the means of saving Gunn came from Fred's hazy memories of the Ring Cycle- Siegfried eating the heart of Fafnir- and extensive readings in the Wolfram and Hart Science Section archives. Dragons regenerated. Fred had known that.
Fred knew so many, many things. And Illyria's life as God-King of the Primordium already seemed more like Fred's childhood nightmares than it did anything that had ever actually happened.
Silently, not even breathing, Illyria began to cry.
Chapter Six: Hyperion Room 114
Gunn was on the track of something important, he was sure of it. There was a thought, hovering just out of reach, tantalizing.
"Angel, your visual recall is just about perfect, right?"
"Yeah."
"Did you at least look at the thing before you signed it, or are we gonna have to have another talk about that?"
Angel, annoyed: "It said 'shall receive membership in the Circle of the Black Thorn and all rights, privileges and powers thereof.' Fat lot of good that does, considering we killed off all the other members."
Anya looked up. "You did?"
Spike said, "Yep. Cocked 'em up good and proper."
"And they had an agreement with these 'Senior Partners'? As a group?"
"Well, this all came to me in a dream, but I think so," Angel said. "But wouldn't killing all of my colleagues kind of void all that?"
Illyria re-entered, impassive and almost unnoticed.
"At Wolfram and Hart? You have to be kidding," Gunn said.
Anya piped up again: "Yes. In fact, you probab- he's coming. Get ready."
Spike sprang off the coach.
There was a horrible grinding noise, and suddenly the room was open to the sky.
to be continued
I crave attention, no matter how negative. If you have anything to say, please, please do.
Chapter Three: Outside the Hyperion
There was something in the set of Anya's shoulders that Spike didn't like. If he had to put a word to it that word would be resigned.
"Hello, Spike. Hello, Angel. Hello, handsome man who I don't know and blue demon woman," she said.
"Gunn."
"Illyria."
"Anya. I'm not pleased to meet you, but that has nothing to do with you. I'm sure you're very pleasant company. I'm looking for someone called Winifred Burkle."
Illyria tilted her head. She became less blue and in some imperceptible way seemed a little smaller, and Fred was standing in her place. "I guess I'm Fred Burkle if anyone is," she said softly, with a trace of Texas twang.
"A man named Ambrose is coming to get you. When he does, he'll do unpleasant things to you. I'm sorry. The rest of you..." Anya turned her head slightly to survey the entire group, "The rest he'll probably just kill."
Spike cocked his head. "And how exactly is he gonna do that? We just chewed through an army."
Anya's voice continued to be flat.
"He's a magician. I assume he'll use magic. For a mortal man, he's pretty good at it- not Willow good, I think, but much better than I was in my first life. He'll probably set you on fire. You too, Angel. I'm not sure about you, handsome man."
"Gunn."
"Oh, yes, you said. I'll try to remember."
The woman may have looked like Fred, but the head-tilt was pure Illyria. "Won't he have to find us?"
"I'll tell him where you are-"
Even with Fred's hand cutting off her air, Anya still seemed listless. Then the hand was Illyria's, and there was a cracking sound. Illyria let go and Anya slumped to the ground.
"Ouch," Anya said, a bit thickly.
"Thank God! You tried to kill her," said Angel. "What the hell are you doing?"
"Kinda like to know the answer to that myself, Blue. Demon girl's a friend of mine," said Spike.
"You heard her," Illyria said, in her measured tones. "She will reveal our whereabouts to an enemy who desires your destruction. She is a spy, whom I have captured and intend to execute."
Anya climbed to her feet. By the time she was finished, there was no sign of any injury.
"You can't. I'm already dead. In the real world, I'm dead-dead, not walking-around dead like the vampires here. What's left of me is stuck in what's left of a glass window from Sunnydale High, and I'm forced to run errands for Ambrose, who is an asshole," said Anya.
Gunn stopped watching and stepped forward. "The real world? As opposed to here?"
"Yes. I don't know where here is, but I have a body, of a sort, so it can't be the real world."
"It looks a lot like it," said Angel hotly.
"Not really," Gunn said. "Look around, Angel. No cars. No pedestrians. Sun's starting to come up on an L.A. neighborhood and I don't hear a damn thing. Do you?"
It was true. Apart from the little knot of people in front of the hotel, everything was still and oppressively quiet.
Illyria seemed to inhale but didn't actually move. "The woman is right. This does not taste like our world. I believe the sun will not burn you here, Angel, which is fortunate for us."
Gunn looked at Anya. "You said you'd tell him where we were, not that you already had. When are you planning to tell him?"
"When he asks, I'll have to tell him. He said he'd be back in an hour, and it's been about twenty minutes."
Angel shook his head. "Even for Wolfram and Hart, that's quick work. We beat their dragon, what, six hours ago at most, and they've already got some jackass out looking for us."
Anya and Illyria, simultaneously: "The time flow is differen-" Illyria tilted her head and regarded the other woman. Anya said, "I believe it's been about six weeks since Ambrose was hired to find you. Time doesn't always match up in the obvious way- I can feel it passing where I am in the mirror, and this conversation hasn't taken long at all- less than a second, I think."
Spike stepped forward and looked at Anya. "I'm gettin' the impression, what with the use of words like 'asshole', that you'd rather not be working as this Ambrose pillock's golden retriever. Want us to spring you?"
"Yes. I don't think you can."
"I don't know, Saint George over there seems to be havin' an on day. How about it, Angel? Ghost trapped in a mirror in some warlock lawyer's office-"
"In his closet."
"-even worse. Old friend, prisoner of a vile fiend, and damsel in distress- unless I miss my guess, Anya here has hit the helping-the-helpless trifecta."
Angel nodded. "Fair enough, but we have to get to her first."
Spike said, "Lacking a more original idea, I say we wait for this prick to show up, beat the living shite out of him, and force him to take us back home."
Gunn said, "So... our usual."
Spike said, "In a situation like this, you wanna play to your strengths, Charlie-boy."
Angel said, "Come on. Let's get the lay of the land and get ready."
Chapter Four: Hyperion Room 114
Spike watched Illyria play Crash Bandicoot and fought to keep from tapping his foot. Getting the lay of the land had involved maybe an hour at most, and revealed that their world consisted, now, of a few blocks around the Hyperion, and that any attempt to go further would quickly and quietly fail, sending whoever tried it somewhere about, seemingly at random.
At the end of that first day, they'd ventured out for supplies. Strictly speaking, Gunn was the only one who needed to eat. Anya had explained, flatly, that she didn't really feel much of anything and didn't require food. Spike had grabbed some food for himself from the little 'stop-n-rob' market they found, just because he could. He was aware, as was Angel, that there was no blood to be had anywhere outside of Gunn's veins, but so far that wasn't an issue.
The sun kept their minds off their appetites.
The days- five of them so far- were a constant seesaw between the tactical necessity of staying prepared and the irresistible urge to go play outside. Using various excuses like "patrol" and "scouting the perimeter", the vampires enjoyed their little world and moved to and fro in it. As usual, they annoyed each other, but somehow stayed within sarcasm distance anyway.
There was only one topic both of them avoided, by mutual unspoken agreement. Buffy's name somehow never came up. Almost everything else in their long and convoluted history did. Witness the afternoon of day two:
"I haven't done this since I had the Gem of Amara. Why the hell did you smash that, anyway? Could have been bloody brilliant to have around."
"I don't really know anymore. I told Doyle- that's actual Doyle, not Lindsey, in case you're confused-"
"Har de fucking har."
"- that it would be a distraction, that it would dilute my focus in a way that would make everything mean less. To be honest with you, I have no idea what the hell I was thinking."
"You really are a wanker, you know that?"
"Yeah."
"-- what?"
"Let's get back."
But now, it was night, either the fifth or sixth one depending on how you counted. Anya reported that it had been just about an hour now, so they all sat and waited. Spike thought idly about Illyria and Anya. They were a natural pair in some ways, he reckoned- both with a demonic history, both in human female bodies, more or less, and both feeling isolated and cut off. They certainly talked more to each other than either of them did to anyone else.
Spike wasn't sure what Gunn was doing during the day, but at night he and Angel would go over what they knew about Wolfram and Hart, over and over again, trying to figure out more about the situation. They had long since run out of useful topics and ranged far, far afield of anything germane.
Out of nowhere, Gunn asked, "Angel, when you signed away your shanshu, what did you get in return?"
"Nothing. No one in that room was doing me any favors."
Gunn shook his head. "That's impossible, man. A contract has to enrich both parties, even under California law, and demon law is a lot more strict about it."
Anya spoke up from her place in front of the game console. "He's right. They'd have to give you something at least as mystically significant as what they were asking you to give up. Then they'd do some cheap ironic trick to make sure you couldn't enjoy it."
"Zombie turkeys," Illyria said.
Anya said, "He always liked that episode." By this time, even Illyria knew that "he" must be Xander Harris.
Abruptly, Illyria stood up. "I will return shortly." She headed for the door. On the way out, she looked at Anya, blue gaze expressionless. "I am sorry for your loss," she said.
Chapter Five: Hyperion Roof
Illyria stood on the roof, profoundly unsettled.
When Anya first arrived, asking for Fred, Illyria had assumed Fred's shape without consciously deciding to do so. Disturbed by this, Illyria had avoided becoming Fred- assuming the appearance of Fred, she corrected herself angrily- ever since.
The first words she spoke to Anya hadn't been consciously chosen either. Illyria repeated them softly to herself, now. "I guess I'm Fred Burkle if anyone is."
The reference to zombie turkeys was from television, a program Fred had enjoyed. When Anya pointed out that Xander had liked the episode in question, Illyria almost replied I do
too.
When first incarnated into Fred's body, "the shell", Illyria had seen all of Fred's memories as separate from herself, discrete tracks of knowledge she could consult as though reading a book- although she never would have used that metaphor at the time. Illyria would never have called itself "she", for that matter. But the boundaries between Illyria's own memories and Fred's had been softening ever since, and the process had only accelerated after Wesley-
"Take your best shot", Cyvus Vail said, and Illyria let her bleak rage (that had nothing in it of the savage joy of battle) carry her fist forward and through Vail's smug, overconfident grin and out the back of his shattered skull. All her attention remained focused on the corpse for a long moment, making sure that none of Vail's wizard tricks had helped him escape death. If he somehow had, Illyria knew, she would kill him over and over again.
When she looked around, Wesley's body was gone. Illyria was glad Vail's spell had disposed of it- or so she assumed- because the thought of dealing with the corpse herself was intolerable. She set off for the Hyperion, barely marking all that she passed, as memories of Wesley rose in crowds before her mind's eye...
The process had only accelerated after Wesley. Even the means of saving Gunn came from Fred's hazy memories of the Ring Cycle- Siegfried eating the heart of Fafnir- and extensive readings in the Wolfram and Hart Science Section archives. Dragons regenerated. Fred had known that.
Fred knew so many, many things. And Illyria's life as God-King of the Primordium already seemed more like Fred's childhood nightmares than it did anything that had ever actually happened.
Silently, not even breathing, Illyria began to cry.
Chapter Six: Hyperion Room 114
Gunn was on the track of something important, he was sure of it. There was a thought, hovering just out of reach, tantalizing.
"Angel, your visual recall is just about perfect, right?"
"Yeah."
"Did you at least look at the thing before you signed it, or are we gonna have to have another talk about that?"
Angel, annoyed: "It said 'shall receive membership in the Circle of the Black Thorn and all rights, privileges and powers thereof.' Fat lot of good that does, considering we killed off all the other members."
Anya looked up. "You did?"
Spike said, "Yep. Cocked 'em up good and proper."
"And they had an agreement with these 'Senior Partners'? As a group?"
"Well, this all came to me in a dream, but I think so," Angel said. "But wouldn't killing all of my colleagues kind of void all that?"
Illyria re-entered, impassive and almost unnoticed.
"At Wolfram and Hart? You have to be kidding," Gunn said.
Anya piped up again: "Yes. In fact, you probab- he's coming. Get ready."
Spike sprang off the coach.
There was a horrible grinding noise, and suddenly the room was open to the sky.
to be continued
I crave attention, no matter how negative. If you have anything to say, please, please do.
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