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doyleTitle: Return
Author: Doyle
Pairing: none
Rating: PG
Notes: For![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
nwhepcat for the Faith ficathon - request was for Faith, Wes and Lorne, Faith singing for Lorne, some time after Origin, no character bashing or non-con. Picks up immediately after the final scene in Origin.
Fred had a dead person's eyes. Faith had her arm back, knife ready to sweep down in a blow that would slash across the demon's throat - but even though she knew it wasn't Fred, couldn't be, she looked into those clouded-over neon blue eyes and hesitated.
Someone caught her arm from behind. Strong grip, but human, and before she could pull her arm away a thumb dug painfully into the pressure point at the front of her wrist. "Drop it," Wes said. She could have pulled free without trying, but that quiet, take-no-shit voice of his made her hesitate.
She dropped the knife; let out a "hey!" when the Fred-demon brought her heel down onto the blade, shattering it to pieces. Robin'd given it to her, all wrapped up in a box, the week when she wouldn't tell him when her birthday was. Had a bow and everything.
"You would seek to injure me," Fred said. "This is unacceptable." Her voice had changed along with the hair and the crazy-eyes - lost the drawl, gone deeper, harder.
"Tell it to somebody you didn't hit first," Faith complained. "What the hell, Fred…" But Wesley wrenched her arm high behind her back. She staggered forward, hissing through clenched teeth at the pain. "Fuck, Wes!"
"Don't call her that." He let her go, stalked to the lab doors. "Don't ever call her by that name." The demon - what was she supposed to call her, if she wasn't Fred? - gave Faith a cold look, and followed him.
Faith rubbed her shoulder and thought that maybe Giles had been right on the money about Wolfram & Hart being a bad, bad thing.
**
Wes and Whoever were gone when she got out into the hallway. She looked down to the elevator, back the other way to the long stretch of white walls and closed doors. Place like this, you could walk for days and not find the way out. Getting down here she'd followed every one of that ditzy front-desk vamp's directions, and she'd still gotten into two dead ends and one employee cafeteria.
Angel's new crib was a freaking maze. All the hallways looked the same. Like being back in jail, just with better lighting and minus the smell of prison food.
She took herself back to the elevator. There was a map bolted on the wall, one of those plastic ones, made to be impossible to vandalize. Just like in jail. Faith followed with her finger the route she'd have to take out, and then she backtracked, moving away from the lobby, tracing a line to a floor marked in purple. Entertainment Division.
Angel was MIA, Wes was bugshit psycho, Fred wasn't Fred any more and she couldn't figure where the hell Gunn would be hanging - Security, maybe - but dollars to dimes said the purple floor belonged to Lorne. Least one guy might be happy to see her.
**
"Not that I'm not thrilled to see you, sweetcake," Lorne said, pointing her at a chair and moving to the minibar - booze in the office, sweet setup, Faith thought - "but your timing's worse than Orlando's in Troy. Drink?"
"Nah, I'm good." She sat, stroking the gold velour arm. "Jeez, you kill Captain Kirk to make this thing? And what's up with everybody? What happened to Fred?"
When he didn't answer she looked up, wondering if maybe he hadn't heard her. Shoulders hunched and his head down, it was a full minute before he moved to pour his drink, and when he turned back to her she couldn't guess what he was thinking at all. And for all she'd only met him the one time, that was creepier than Wes's crazy, Fred's empty eyes.
"Oh, you've met Illyria."
"That her name? Fred's whacked-out identical twin? Yeah." This was gonna get her yelled at back at base camp, but that had never bothered her before, and dark side of the force or not, they were the good guys, right? "Hey, I guess Angel's got guys on it, but maybe Giles and Willow know some people that know about demon possession. If Angel hasn't called them, I could…"
He was already shaking his head. "Believe me, if I thought there was any way - well, I'd be the first name on the walk-through-fire sign up sheet. But Fred's gone. And apparently, we all just have to live with it."
"Gone," Faith repeated, because that just didn't make sense. Fred was walking around somewhere in an S&M suit. She wasn't gone the way Xander's chick or Spike or Buffy's mom were gone.
Then she remembered her eyes, filmed over like a corpse's. Fred hadn't been anywhere in there.
"Maybe we should save the social visit for another time," Lorne said. "If you need a screen-test or a seabreeze, I'm the green guy to see." He looked down into his drink with a twist of a smile that didn't touch his red eyes. "Anything more, 'fraid you're out of luck. I passed running on empty a long while back. These days I'm not even sure I still have a tank."
**
Fred was gone. Cordelia, too, only Faith didn't know that till she tried at small talk on the way back to the lobby, asked if Queen C had gone back to that acting career Angel used to tell her about. Lorne didn't look at her while he talked about mystical pregnancies and comas and funerals.
Nobody'd told her Cordelia had died. She wondered if B knew, or Giles. Xander dated her back in the day, didn't he? Angel would've called him.
She'd made sure to arrive an hour before sunset, thinking she'd catch Angel before he went out to do his Batman thing. Figured she'd let him know how Dana was doing, rag on him about running a law firm, ask when he was gonna put a wicked big-ass statue of himself outside. Let him know she didn't buy into him being suddenly evil, but without turning it into a Lifetime movie.
His secretary had told her the boss was in his penthouse and didn't want disturbed for less than an apocalypse. And no, Faith couldn't go up to say hi. Time was she would have popped her one and gone up anyway, but she was all redeemed now.
"Here we are," Lorne said, the doors sliding open. "Listen, I'm sorry this didn't work out." He smiled, touching her shoulder, and both things looked like an effort. "It's been a bad couple of months. Maybe you could drop by when your guys and ours have stopped with the Montague-Capuleting."
Faith was going to say that she didn't think that'd be any time that century, but Angel's secretary was hovering right outside the doors, and Lorne got ambushed.
"Lorney-tunes, help," she said, pointing across the lobby at where Fred - Illyria - was looking at a fern, head to one side as if she was listening. "She had some big fight with Wes, and then he left, only he yelled at her and said she couldn't go with, and she's freaking everyone out and she says the plants don't like me."
He held up his hands. "Okay. I'll talk to her. You just… go see if Angel needs anything." She thanked him and trotted away. "This could be fun. Illyria, not one to take suggestions on what to do with her time."
Wes had told her to stay, though, and here she was. She'd gutted his friend and worn her body like a Halloween costume, but he'd stopped Faith from taking her down. "What's the deal with her and Wes?"
"Talk about your sixty-four thousand dollar questions." They'd reached her, now, but she took her own sweet time turning away from her plant. "Illyria," Lorne said, his voice all fake cheer. "How're you doing? Making new friends?"
"These plants are unhealthy," she announced. "They dislike this artificial sunlight. They were once masters of this world, yet they are confined to tiny containers with nowhere to put out roots."
"Lot of that going around," he said.
"Hey," Faith said, keeping herself alert, ready to hit back if Illyria started throwing punches again. "Heard Wes left. Thought I'd go say goodbye. You know where he went?"
Her eyes went very narrow. "He did not share his plans with me."
Starting to sound more like his girlfriend every minute. "You and him had a fight, whatever. I'm just looking for where he went."
Illyria stared at her, twitching her head like a caffeine junkie on two-day cold turkey. "I recall the earliest of your kind, Slayer. Humanity's pitiful attempt to hold back the dark. Children cloaked in fragile magics, barely strong enough to kill anything more capable than the vampire half-breeds."
Okay, that was enough. "You wanna take this outside, Baby Blue?" she challenged.
"Ladies!" Lorne was suddenly between them. "I think these jets need a-coolin', hmm? Illyria, Faith's an old friend of Wesley's. She just wants to see him. Can you find where he went?"
"Of course," she said, after another long, hard look at Faith. "Your kind trail filth in your wake, choking as the stench of rotting carrion."
"Good," Faith said. "All I'm asking." To Lorne she said, "Coming with?"
**
Finding out that Illyria could track Wes was easier than getting her to do it. Faith finally offered to stick around bugging her for the rest of the week, and she snapped that she was going to find Wesley, and that if they wanted to follow her then she wouldn't stop them.
They walked most of the way in silence, Illyria only stopping at intersections to sniff the air and pick a direction.
"That's funny," Lorne said.
"Laugh-riot funny or 'I got a bad feeling about this' funny? 'Cause Illyria already smashed my knife."
"Probably nothing. Caritas - my old bar - it was in this neighbourhood."
Made sense to her. "Wes could've gone to get a drink."
He shook his head. "I never sold the site. Always meant to open again, just never seemed to get the time between crises. It's been a dump since Holtz…" He frowned, looking lost in thought. She had to prompt him before he said, "Holtz, vampire hunter, hated Angel, got a demon to send him through time. He blew up the bar. But there was something else, out in the alley. Something big happened, but I can't put my finger on it."
Illyria was striding purposefully ahead of them, towards a space between buildings.
"Wait a second," Lorne said, "forget neighbourhood, that's my building. That's Caritas."
Faith said, "That alley you were talking about, was it that one? Right where Wes is standing?"
**
She wasn't supposed to be the one who fixed things.
She glanced back at the street, Lorne and Illyria waiting for her to go get Wes. He hadn't looked at them at all, hadn't reacted when she'd said his name. He was turned away from her, staring down at a place on the ground. Looking at nothing, as far as Faith could see.
"Wesley," she said, not wanting to sneak up on him if she could help it. "Wes."
He finally looked at her. "Faith," he said, sounding surprised, like he hadn't seen her an hour ago when he was twisting her arm and telling her to drop Robin's knife.
Angel was supposed to deal with stuff like this. Hell, Wes was supposed to deal with stuff like this. Helping the helpless, hopeless, something like that. Her job was to hit the bad guys and try not to screw up too bad.
Too bad nobody but her'd got that memo.
Edging around the piles of newspapers and rustling garbage, she moved beside him. "Whatcha lookin' at?"
"He was born here," he said. "I didn't see, Fred had to tell me about it later - Gunn and I, we were bringing the car around. It was raining. Bucketing down. We could barely see anything, and then he started to wail…"
"Who, Gunn?" she asked, confused.
He rubbed his throat. "Connor."
There was a spark, a moment when she thought she might know the name - some kid from her grade school, or a guy she'd banged once - but then it was gone. "Don't think I ever met the dude."
"No," Wesley said, "you would have been outside the Orlon Window's range. I'd forgotten that. I suppose Lorne doesn't remember either." No tone to the statement at all. Just the facts, ma'am, and she wondered who Connor was and why Wes seemed to think she should remember him. Someone messing with her memories, that wasn't a good thought.
Behind them, someone loudly cleared their throat. She was losing her edge if even Lorne could sneak up on her.
"What do you know, my key still fits the lock," he said. "Maybe we should take this inside. Warmer and not so filled with rats. I hope."
"C'mon," Faith said, stopping herself from actually reaching out to Wes. "If we're real lucky, the booze didn't blow up."
**
They were real lucky. Some of the upstairs had survived the damage from the fire and the firefighting. The carpet was burned off the floor in patches, and the room smelled like rotting wood and old smoke, but there was some alcohol left. Faith sat with her back against the door, drinking something pink and nasty straight from the bottle and waiting for somebody to speak.
"Was this a karaoke bar?" she said suddenly, remembering an old story of Angel's. "Damn, was this where Angel sang Manilow?"
"To its lasting infamy," Lorne said. "You should've seen it in those days. Not trying to blow my own, but it was quite the hotspot."
"Magically speaking, if nothing else," Wesley said, picking at the singed label on his vodka bottle. "The Beast arose outside here. Connor was born in the same spot. The portal to Pylea was downstairs."
Illyria wasn't drinking. Faith wasn't sure if she had to eat or drink. She'd realized, while they walked, that she didn't breathe. "Pylea," she said in that not-Fred voice, "I know of this place. The shell spent some years there."
Faith hadn't known Fred hardly at all, and even she flinched. Just like that, the conversation was dead. Wes was back to looking at some kind of nothing on the floor. Lorne was finishing his drink and starting onto another one.
"I also visited there myself, aeons ago," Illyria added. "But this was before your race evolved."
"I'm sure we felt blessed by your almighty presence," Lorne said.
If Illyria caught the sarcasm, she didn't show it. But she didn't say anything else, either.
"So what do we do now?" Faith asked, when the silence got to be a fifth person in the room. "Love and hug and grow and share? Sing Copacabana? 'Cause I've seen your stash, no way do you have enough to drink ourselves stupid."
Lorne said, "I haven't been in a musical mood for a while, honey. If you want to loosen your pipes, knock yourself out, but don't expect some profound revelation in your reading. I must've heard Fred sing a thousand times, and I couldn't even tell she was going to die till it was too late."
Faith waited for Illyria to say something about the girl she'd killed, but nothing came. She was in the corner, legs in front of her as stiff as a doll's, and she kept her unblinking stare on Wesley. He didn't look at her. Lorne was starting onto another bottle.
Said something for a room when Faith was the most stable person in it.
"Her name was Lola," she sang, mostly to herself, "she was a showgirl, with yellow flowers in her hair and a dress cut down to there." Then she stopped, because even quiet as she'd made it her voice sounded too big in the silence, and because she didn't know any more of the words.
A corner of Lorne's mouth lifted. "That guy you're with. He's a keeper."
"You're just a big, green Dear Abby, you know that? Gimme another one of these pink things."
He reached it over. "So, are you still leaving us?"
She passed the bottle top between her fingers, fumbling the move. She'd practised coin tricks in prison. Never had the patience to make them work. "Supposed to be back in Cleveland at eight."
"You're based on the Hellmouth," Wesley said. "That's wise, with Sunnydale gone." He sounded more normal, she thought, more like the real Wes; then she remembered the uptight princess she'd first met, and the man she'd tied to a chair and tortured, and the cold guy she'd watched stab a girl in the shoulder, and she couldn't decide which of them was meant to be the real Wesley Wyndam-Pryce. Could be all of them. Could be none.
She couldn't fix this. Wouldn't even know where to start. There was Cordelia, there was Fred, there was the demon in the corner that was looking at Wes like she didn't understand why he wasn't looking back at her. There was a bunch of other stuff she'd missed, that she didn't understand.
But one thing, maybe, she could help with. "Wes," she said. "Tell me about Connor." And as he took a breath and started to speak, she settled down to just listen.
Author: Doyle
Pairing: none
Rating: PG
Notes: For
nwhepcat for the Faith ficathon - request was for Faith, Wes and Lorne, Faith singing for Lorne, some time after Origin, no character bashing or non-con. Picks up immediately after the final scene in Origin.Fred had a dead person's eyes. Faith had her arm back, knife ready to sweep down in a blow that would slash across the demon's throat - but even though she knew it wasn't Fred, couldn't be, she looked into those clouded-over neon blue eyes and hesitated.
Someone caught her arm from behind. Strong grip, but human, and before she could pull her arm away a thumb dug painfully into the pressure point at the front of her wrist. "Drop it," Wes said. She could have pulled free without trying, but that quiet, take-no-shit voice of his made her hesitate.
She dropped the knife; let out a "hey!" when the Fred-demon brought her heel down onto the blade, shattering it to pieces. Robin'd given it to her, all wrapped up in a box, the week when she wouldn't tell him when her birthday was. Had a bow and everything.
"You would seek to injure me," Fred said. "This is unacceptable." Her voice had changed along with the hair and the crazy-eyes - lost the drawl, gone deeper, harder.
"Tell it to somebody you didn't hit first," Faith complained. "What the hell, Fred…" But Wesley wrenched her arm high behind her back. She staggered forward, hissing through clenched teeth at the pain. "Fuck, Wes!"
"Don't call her that." He let her go, stalked to the lab doors. "Don't ever call her by that name." The demon - what was she supposed to call her, if she wasn't Fred? - gave Faith a cold look, and followed him.
Faith rubbed her shoulder and thought that maybe Giles had been right on the money about Wolfram & Hart being a bad, bad thing.
**
Wes and Whoever were gone when she got out into the hallway. She looked down to the elevator, back the other way to the long stretch of white walls and closed doors. Place like this, you could walk for days and not find the way out. Getting down here she'd followed every one of that ditzy front-desk vamp's directions, and she'd still gotten into two dead ends and one employee cafeteria.
Angel's new crib was a freaking maze. All the hallways looked the same. Like being back in jail, just with better lighting and minus the smell of prison food.
She took herself back to the elevator. There was a map bolted on the wall, one of those plastic ones, made to be impossible to vandalize. Just like in jail. Faith followed with her finger the route she'd have to take out, and then she backtracked, moving away from the lobby, tracing a line to a floor marked in purple. Entertainment Division.
Angel was MIA, Wes was bugshit psycho, Fred wasn't Fred any more and she couldn't figure where the hell Gunn would be hanging - Security, maybe - but dollars to dimes said the purple floor belonged to Lorne. Least one guy might be happy to see her.
**
"Not that I'm not thrilled to see you, sweetcake," Lorne said, pointing her at a chair and moving to the minibar - booze in the office, sweet setup, Faith thought - "but your timing's worse than Orlando's in Troy. Drink?"
"Nah, I'm good." She sat, stroking the gold velour arm. "Jeez, you kill Captain Kirk to make this thing? And what's up with everybody? What happened to Fred?"
When he didn't answer she looked up, wondering if maybe he hadn't heard her. Shoulders hunched and his head down, it was a full minute before he moved to pour his drink, and when he turned back to her she couldn't guess what he was thinking at all. And for all she'd only met him the one time, that was creepier than Wes's crazy, Fred's empty eyes.
"Oh, you've met Illyria."
"That her name? Fred's whacked-out identical twin? Yeah." This was gonna get her yelled at back at base camp, but that had never bothered her before, and dark side of the force or not, they were the good guys, right? "Hey, I guess Angel's got guys on it, but maybe Giles and Willow know some people that know about demon possession. If Angel hasn't called them, I could…"
He was already shaking his head. "Believe me, if I thought there was any way - well, I'd be the first name on the walk-through-fire sign up sheet. But Fred's gone. And apparently, we all just have to live with it."
"Gone," Faith repeated, because that just didn't make sense. Fred was walking around somewhere in an S&M suit. She wasn't gone the way Xander's chick or Spike or Buffy's mom were gone.
Then she remembered her eyes, filmed over like a corpse's. Fred hadn't been anywhere in there.
"Maybe we should save the social visit for another time," Lorne said. "If you need a screen-test or a seabreeze, I'm the green guy to see." He looked down into his drink with a twist of a smile that didn't touch his red eyes. "Anything more, 'fraid you're out of luck. I passed running on empty a long while back. These days I'm not even sure I still have a tank."
**
Fred was gone. Cordelia, too, only Faith didn't know that till she tried at small talk on the way back to the lobby, asked if Queen C had gone back to that acting career Angel used to tell her about. Lorne didn't look at her while he talked about mystical pregnancies and comas and funerals.
Nobody'd told her Cordelia had died. She wondered if B knew, or Giles. Xander dated her back in the day, didn't he? Angel would've called him.
She'd made sure to arrive an hour before sunset, thinking she'd catch Angel before he went out to do his Batman thing. Figured she'd let him know how Dana was doing, rag on him about running a law firm, ask when he was gonna put a wicked big-ass statue of himself outside. Let him know she didn't buy into him being suddenly evil, but without turning it into a Lifetime movie.
His secretary had told her the boss was in his penthouse and didn't want disturbed for less than an apocalypse. And no, Faith couldn't go up to say hi. Time was she would have popped her one and gone up anyway, but she was all redeemed now.
"Here we are," Lorne said, the doors sliding open. "Listen, I'm sorry this didn't work out." He smiled, touching her shoulder, and both things looked like an effort. "It's been a bad couple of months. Maybe you could drop by when your guys and ours have stopped with the Montague-Capuleting."
Faith was going to say that she didn't think that'd be any time that century, but Angel's secretary was hovering right outside the doors, and Lorne got ambushed.
"Lorney-tunes, help," she said, pointing across the lobby at where Fred - Illyria - was looking at a fern, head to one side as if she was listening. "She had some big fight with Wes, and then he left, only he yelled at her and said she couldn't go with, and she's freaking everyone out and she says the plants don't like me."
He held up his hands. "Okay. I'll talk to her. You just… go see if Angel needs anything." She thanked him and trotted away. "This could be fun. Illyria, not one to take suggestions on what to do with her time."
Wes had told her to stay, though, and here she was. She'd gutted his friend and worn her body like a Halloween costume, but he'd stopped Faith from taking her down. "What's the deal with her and Wes?"
"Talk about your sixty-four thousand dollar questions." They'd reached her, now, but she took her own sweet time turning away from her plant. "Illyria," Lorne said, his voice all fake cheer. "How're you doing? Making new friends?"
"These plants are unhealthy," she announced. "They dislike this artificial sunlight. They were once masters of this world, yet they are confined to tiny containers with nowhere to put out roots."
"Lot of that going around," he said.
"Hey," Faith said, keeping herself alert, ready to hit back if Illyria started throwing punches again. "Heard Wes left. Thought I'd go say goodbye. You know where he went?"
Her eyes went very narrow. "He did not share his plans with me."
Starting to sound more like his girlfriend every minute. "You and him had a fight, whatever. I'm just looking for where he went."
Illyria stared at her, twitching her head like a caffeine junkie on two-day cold turkey. "I recall the earliest of your kind, Slayer. Humanity's pitiful attempt to hold back the dark. Children cloaked in fragile magics, barely strong enough to kill anything more capable than the vampire half-breeds."
Okay, that was enough. "You wanna take this outside, Baby Blue?" she challenged.
"Ladies!" Lorne was suddenly between them. "I think these jets need a-coolin', hmm? Illyria, Faith's an old friend of Wesley's. She just wants to see him. Can you find where he went?"
"Of course," she said, after another long, hard look at Faith. "Your kind trail filth in your wake, choking as the stench of rotting carrion."
"Good," Faith said. "All I'm asking." To Lorne she said, "Coming with?"
**
Finding out that Illyria could track Wes was easier than getting her to do it. Faith finally offered to stick around bugging her for the rest of the week, and she snapped that she was going to find Wesley, and that if they wanted to follow her then she wouldn't stop them.
They walked most of the way in silence, Illyria only stopping at intersections to sniff the air and pick a direction.
"That's funny," Lorne said.
"Laugh-riot funny or 'I got a bad feeling about this' funny? 'Cause Illyria already smashed my knife."
"Probably nothing. Caritas - my old bar - it was in this neighbourhood."
Made sense to her. "Wes could've gone to get a drink."
He shook his head. "I never sold the site. Always meant to open again, just never seemed to get the time between crises. It's been a dump since Holtz…" He frowned, looking lost in thought. She had to prompt him before he said, "Holtz, vampire hunter, hated Angel, got a demon to send him through time. He blew up the bar. But there was something else, out in the alley. Something big happened, but I can't put my finger on it."
Illyria was striding purposefully ahead of them, towards a space between buildings.
"Wait a second," Lorne said, "forget neighbourhood, that's my building. That's Caritas."
Faith said, "That alley you were talking about, was it that one? Right where Wes is standing?"
**
She wasn't supposed to be the one who fixed things.
She glanced back at the street, Lorne and Illyria waiting for her to go get Wes. He hadn't looked at them at all, hadn't reacted when she'd said his name. He was turned away from her, staring down at a place on the ground. Looking at nothing, as far as Faith could see.
"Wesley," she said, not wanting to sneak up on him if she could help it. "Wes."
He finally looked at her. "Faith," he said, sounding surprised, like he hadn't seen her an hour ago when he was twisting her arm and telling her to drop Robin's knife.
Angel was supposed to deal with stuff like this. Hell, Wes was supposed to deal with stuff like this. Helping the helpless, hopeless, something like that. Her job was to hit the bad guys and try not to screw up too bad.
Too bad nobody but her'd got that memo.
Edging around the piles of newspapers and rustling garbage, she moved beside him. "Whatcha lookin' at?"
"He was born here," he said. "I didn't see, Fred had to tell me about it later - Gunn and I, we were bringing the car around. It was raining. Bucketing down. We could barely see anything, and then he started to wail…"
"Who, Gunn?" she asked, confused.
He rubbed his throat. "Connor."
There was a spark, a moment when she thought she might know the name - some kid from her grade school, or a guy she'd banged once - but then it was gone. "Don't think I ever met the dude."
"No," Wesley said, "you would have been outside the Orlon Window's range. I'd forgotten that. I suppose Lorne doesn't remember either." No tone to the statement at all. Just the facts, ma'am, and she wondered who Connor was and why Wes seemed to think she should remember him. Someone messing with her memories, that wasn't a good thought.
Behind them, someone loudly cleared their throat. She was losing her edge if even Lorne could sneak up on her.
"What do you know, my key still fits the lock," he said. "Maybe we should take this inside. Warmer and not so filled with rats. I hope."
"C'mon," Faith said, stopping herself from actually reaching out to Wes. "If we're real lucky, the booze didn't blow up."
**
They were real lucky. Some of the upstairs had survived the damage from the fire and the firefighting. The carpet was burned off the floor in patches, and the room smelled like rotting wood and old smoke, but there was some alcohol left. Faith sat with her back against the door, drinking something pink and nasty straight from the bottle and waiting for somebody to speak.
"Was this a karaoke bar?" she said suddenly, remembering an old story of Angel's. "Damn, was this where Angel sang Manilow?"
"To its lasting infamy," Lorne said. "You should've seen it in those days. Not trying to blow my own, but it was quite the hotspot."
"Magically speaking, if nothing else," Wesley said, picking at the singed label on his vodka bottle. "The Beast arose outside here. Connor was born in the same spot. The portal to Pylea was downstairs."
Illyria wasn't drinking. Faith wasn't sure if she had to eat or drink. She'd realized, while they walked, that she didn't breathe. "Pylea," she said in that not-Fred voice, "I know of this place. The shell spent some years there."
Faith hadn't known Fred hardly at all, and even she flinched. Just like that, the conversation was dead. Wes was back to looking at some kind of nothing on the floor. Lorne was finishing his drink and starting onto another one.
"I also visited there myself, aeons ago," Illyria added. "But this was before your race evolved."
"I'm sure we felt blessed by your almighty presence," Lorne said.
If Illyria caught the sarcasm, she didn't show it. But she didn't say anything else, either.
"So what do we do now?" Faith asked, when the silence got to be a fifth person in the room. "Love and hug and grow and share? Sing Copacabana? 'Cause I've seen your stash, no way do you have enough to drink ourselves stupid."
Lorne said, "I haven't been in a musical mood for a while, honey. If you want to loosen your pipes, knock yourself out, but don't expect some profound revelation in your reading. I must've heard Fred sing a thousand times, and I couldn't even tell she was going to die till it was too late."
Faith waited for Illyria to say something about the girl she'd killed, but nothing came. She was in the corner, legs in front of her as stiff as a doll's, and she kept her unblinking stare on Wesley. He didn't look at her. Lorne was starting onto another bottle.
Said something for a room when Faith was the most stable person in it.
"Her name was Lola," she sang, mostly to herself, "she was a showgirl, with yellow flowers in her hair and a dress cut down to there." Then she stopped, because even quiet as she'd made it her voice sounded too big in the silence, and because she didn't know any more of the words.
A corner of Lorne's mouth lifted. "That guy you're with. He's a keeper."
"You're just a big, green Dear Abby, you know that? Gimme another one of these pink things."
He reached it over. "So, are you still leaving us?"
She passed the bottle top between her fingers, fumbling the move. She'd practised coin tricks in prison. Never had the patience to make them work. "Supposed to be back in Cleveland at eight."
"You're based on the Hellmouth," Wesley said. "That's wise, with Sunnydale gone." He sounded more normal, she thought, more like the real Wes; then she remembered the uptight princess she'd first met, and the man she'd tied to a chair and tortured, and the cold guy she'd watched stab a girl in the shoulder, and she couldn't decide which of them was meant to be the real Wesley Wyndam-Pryce. Could be all of them. Could be none.
She couldn't fix this. Wouldn't even know where to start. There was Cordelia, there was Fred, there was the demon in the corner that was looking at Wes like she didn't understand why he wasn't looking back at her. There was a bunch of other stuff she'd missed, that she didn't understand.
But one thing, maybe, she could help with. "Wes," she said. "Tell me about Connor." And as he took a breath and started to speak, she settled down to just listen.
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no subject
on 2004-07-24 05:18 pm (UTC)