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Burning Down	By : Roseveare Category: Angel the Series > FemmeSlash - Female/Female Views: 2058 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Angel: The Series, nor any of the characters from it. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

Chapter List
- 3
- 4
- 5
See part 1 for notes and disclaimer.

4.

Lilah, being (obviously) evil, used all of the hot water, so Fred subjected herself to a brief, cold drenching under the shower head (colder in Pylea, colder hiding in the forests, exposed to the elements) that concentrated largely upon her matted hair.

She wasn't sure why it made a difference, but she didn't want to face Angelus again still so... unclean.

She walked out of the bathroom towelling her hair furiously, her stained dress back on and feeling greasy against her skin in a way that had to be psychological, as it was not nearly so begrimed as all that. She discarded the towel over a hook on the back of the door and tied her hair back again, squinting into the mirror that reflected the dingy room, the pool of the bedside lamp seeming to cast more shadows than light, the edge of the bed just visible in the corner of the glass. The string was hardly efficient. How quickly an apocalypse tore down hundreds of years' development in beauty products.

Lilah was sprawled in the double bed staring up at the ceiling, still looking vaguely shell-shocked, naked below the covers, a slice of bruised shoulder showing.

Clothes. She would have to try find them both more clothes. Lilah's were in a terrible state, torn and bloodied and otherwise stained. Her own dress was little more than a summery scrap of cloth, wholly inappropriate.

Fred could only see the whole side of Lilah's face from her current angle; nose pointed up at the ceiling, familiar haughty perfection. After her efforts of the last hour or so, she didn't want to think about the other side. How it would scar and mar that beauty. She should have done a better job... she should have done something else... there must have been a way...

When Fred picked up the crossbow from the dresser, her intent must have been clear. Lilah shifted and hitched herself up on her elbows in distinct alarm.

"You're going?"

Sharp voice full of warning bells. Scared. Lilah, scared.

"You're going back," Lilah stated into the silence, her voice harder, before Fred could respond.

"I have to. Wesley-"

"Fuck Wesley. Hell, we both have already and so has Angelus by now. The whole reason Angelus fucked the two of us up good was because of that bastard, or did you forget? To hell with Wesley." Her expression gave the lie to the harsh words, even with its restricted mobility.

"I'll bring him back," Fred said.

"You haven't a chance in hell." Raw, vulnerable edges Fred had certainly never expected to see shifted under the stretched-thin mask of 'bitch' still remaining. "Wesley's dead, or as good as. Angelus has had him for hours. Dead, turned, broken... one or the other, and it makes no difference which. We don't stand much chance of repairing any of them."

"Faith had him for hours too. Cordelia told me." Fred eyed Lilah uncertainly; the awareness of just how evil the woman was capable of being suddenly much closer to the forefront of her thoughts. "You sent her, didn't you?"

Lilah shrugged. "Okay. If Wesley's alive then maybe he's not broken. But he's still in a fucking mess. I'm still not going with you. I'm sure as hell not going to pick up those pieces. Not... right now."

"I didn't ask you to. I can't leave him, Lilah." The lawyer's name felt odd on her tongue, maybe the first time she'd called her it to her face and not spoken it like an insult. "I promise I won't leaou eou either, though. Unless - unless something happens, I'll come back. I promise."

"Sure. That's just what I was fishing for." A little of the fear in her face had allayed though. Scepticism flooded in to take its place. "Yeah. You'll be back. Like something's really not going to happen."

"I've got to try." She felt as frail as the thread of her voice. She didn't want to do this either.

But Lilah nodded slowly, and slumped back deep into the bed. She turned onto her side, offering a view of her back. "Fuck that bastard up for me," Fred heard, muffled but undeniably heartfelt.

"I'll sure as hell give it my best shot."

She realised, looking down at the crossbow, that she was going to kill Angelus. After seeing what had been done to Lilah... and if Angelus had hurt Wesley as she feared... after what had happened to Charles...

But Angelus was Angel, and she surely couldn't kill Angel... could she?

Wesley had been ready to, to save both their lives. Could she do any less?

Angel. Her friend. Her saviour. The knight who rescued her from Hell and helped her to get sane again after. She understood his dichotomy of living with so much wildness. He'd meant so much to her.

Angelus was supposed to prevent the apocalypse.

But Angelus had done unforgivable things. She understood Holtz now, too, as she never had. And so far, Angelus had proven pretty much uncontrollable and not especially motivated towards stopping apocalypses. She swallowed, and set her determination as she checked the crossbow. If it was Angelus or Wesley... she knew which she would have to choose.

She hoped she would have the strength not to hesitate.
Fred drove Gunn's truck back through the gathering darkness - real dark, rather than the eternal partial twilight-dark the world had become since the Beast first opened up the Earth and made it rain fire. Partly as a distraction, she gauged the interludes between the continuing aftershocks of the 'quake.

They were getting closer together.

She strongly suspected that the earthquake was a symptom - as all these other things were - of the imminent end of the world. Not aftershocks, but the gathering storm, the first tremor only the opening rumble of thunde
She wondered at herself for her lack of logic or reason in running off to try save someone when the world was ending anyway.

She wondered what Cordelia and Connor were doing. If they'd received her message and gotten away safe yet.

Another tremor, the longest and most fiercely felt since the initial one, shook the ground as she drew the truck up outside Wesley's apartment block. She glanced around the street nervously, and parked the vehicle clear of the view from the apartment's windows. She could only hope nobody had been looking out to witness her approach along the road.

Crossbow in hand, she jumped down from the truck and headed over into the building.

The first floor apartment's door was ajar as she hadn't noticed in their mad dash for freedom and inside Fred found the body of a thirtyish blonde woman with two holes in her neck. She did not pause to look in any other of Wesley's neighbours' homes after that, ignoring further unlocked doors to only carry on up the stairs, trying to blank her mind to the horror of it. Lilah had screamed long and loud, and nobody had complained, called the police or come to investigate. It should not surprise her that it was because they couldn't.

The whole building seemed to be frighteningly still. As if there really was nothing left inside but corpses...

No! With the violent burst of denial, Fred charged through the door with a cry much less caus ths than she had intended. Only silence greeted her on the other side.

She checked all of the rooms, methodically, quietly. She was good at this. Listening... creeping... hiding... had played this game with enough demonic hunters in Pylea.

Nothing... nothing... nothing...

Angelus had gone. Her knees began to shake.

So had Wesley. There wasn't even a body to bury. And what that might indicate... she didn't like to think about.

Fred's shoulders sagged in defeat and she backed off towards the door, blinking eyes that stung furiously. Something caught and rolled underfoot, almost tipping her balance - straps tangled her ankle, the clink of metal sounding beneath her flattened heel.

She picked up the weapon harness and ran her hands over it. The leather possessed a slight oily feel, smelled faintly of Wesley's sweat. She draped it over her shoulder and hunted for the stake that loaded the spring device. She found one of the discarded guns from the earlier fight first, and seized it up gladly. They would need weapons.

She wasn't, however, enough convinced of the urgency of that need to spend much more time trying to improve their ury,ury, or even to search the cupboards for the ammunition she knew Wesley kept somewhere. Angelus might come back and she was shaking, her throat constricting with the memory of him. She did not want to be caught again.

Lilah was right. This had been a mistake. There was little she could do against Angelus and she wasn't strong, wasn't even close. She had failed Wesley - not fast enough, not brave enough, lingering with Lilah until he was dead and lost or worse.

It was still the crossbow and not the gun that she held as she descended carefully back down the stairs and left the apartment block. The weapon that could kill him. She was too afraid for mercy, too angry for friendship.

Wesley was gone. Soon everything else would be gone. She was powerless, surely the most powerless one of them to have been chosen to remain intact in the midst of all this carnage, and it was too late... there was nothing left for her but failure, now-

The earth tremor caught her up and threw her to the sidewalk as it made the buildingong ong the street jump and waver, and started walls and trees toppling like dominoes.
Fred steered the truck faster than she ought back through a city crumbling into ruin. The world was cracking, burning. The rifts opening in the ground - they didn't just lead under the earth. There were whole other worlds down there. She'd seen the things that crawled from them.

With the world ending, she was not sure why it was she even tried, yet the panic in the back of her mind was stuck on Wesley's last words to her - his plea that she get out, that she get Lilah out. She'd seen the anger with which he reacted to what Angelus had done to Lilah. She'd been aware all too often, these past weeks, of the odd contemplative look he'd get sometimes when lay lay together after, a look that imagined the presence of another, as she now very much feared. Which one of them had he loved, in the end?

He had asked her to look after Lilah. He was dead now, or she hoped he was dead because it was surely the best thing that could have happened to him in the circumstances, but she would do as she had been asked. Maybe she could get them out yet. Maybe if it all ended with a whimper, and not a bang, they could survive a while. Maybe long enough for Angelus' abuse not to be the last thought on either of their minds.

Fred eased the truck to a halt outside the place where the motel had been. Her heart skipped a beat when she saw the pile of smoking bricks and the jagged peaks of wall that still stood precariously up from its midst. Then Lilah ran up to the passenger door, wrapped around in bed sheets, one hand clutched to gather the ends together at her breast, her clothes and shoes swinging from her other hand. She dropped most of them opening the door and cursed, the sheet slipping and sliding and coming close to absconding altogether as she bent to pick them up and tossed them one by one onto the floor of the cab.

"Are you all right?" Fred asked, as she climbed in, tripping on the ends of the sheets.

"The fucking whisky's at the bottom of the rubble," Lilah growled. She slammed the door.

Fred took this as more or less an affirmative, and let go of her concern with some ef.
ef.

"I got the hell out of there," Lilah said. Her eyes, even in the dim light, looked freaked. "I felt the first tremors and... it was like I knew. Something was screaming at the back of my brain to get the fuck out. I just grabbed my clothes and ran. I'm barely out of the door and the place falls down on my heels." Her expression cleared as she looked longer at Fred, the sight of reasoning returning. "I guess this caught you before you could get there, huh? Well, it's... it's probably just as well."

She didn't look happy.

"No." Fred forced the bitter admission past her teeth. "I got there. There wasn't anybody there." She swallowed, stopped trying to look away and made herself meet the other woman's eyes. "There was no body, Lilah. Wesley... there was no body."

Lilah swore. Her eyes closed and she rocked slightly in her seat. For a moment Fred thought she might cry. She was mistaken, of course. Lilah straightened in her seat, looking pissed, and surprised her utterly by asking, albeit hoarsely, "Do you know where he might have gone? If we can stop him - stake Wesley before-"

Fred shook her head. "You think we could find anything in this?"

"No." Quietly. "No. You're right. We can't do anything for him now. He's gone. We have to think about ourselves."

"Anyway, maybe... maybe they're crushed," Fred suggested. "I mean... over half the city is." She'd seen such terrible things on the drive back. Had not stopped, had not helped. Her instincts for personal survival steered her past them, and she was familiar enough with the principles of triage to know the injured weren't going to make it even if this end was not a final one. Hell had descended on earth and it would be hard enough for the able-bodied. Fortunate Lilah, after all, that Angelus had targeted only her face and her pride.

Assuming, of course, that the ones meeting their deaths here and now weren't the lucky ones.

A shell-shocked man stumbled in front of the truck, his chest bloodied. He raised a hand to hit the window, flattened palm leaving red streaks, desperate mouth moving but his voice impossible to hear through the fabric of the truck, amid the noise of flames and screams and the continuing falling masonry outside.

"Drive," Lilah said tersely. The dressings on the ruined half of her face reflected off the glass, overlain almost atop the man's face on the other side, overlain atop darkness and fire. "We can't afford to pick up strays. Shit, we've seen enough these last days to know we can't trust strays."

Fred didn't want to admit her agreement. Even so, the fact Lilah was saying it made her want to argue the opposing view. "Perhaps we could-"

The next, increasingly angry, slap of the man's hand birthed the smallest of cracks in the glass with the desperate strength of the doomed. Fred slammed her foot down on the pedal, straight into reverse, and backed them in a crazy zigzag across the street, then turned them out and away.

Lilah looked a fraction bemused, and all but forced a snicker. "Didn't think this heap of parts meant that much to you."

Fred pursed her lips. "It was a very expensive truck."

The nod and silence did nothing to confirm or disprove whether Lilah knew it had been Gunn's or not. But Lilah had spent three years making herself the thorn in the side of Angel and his team. She knew everything about them. She must know.

Fred eased them around cars on the road, almost empty now. Looking across at Lilah, she thought about Gunn's truck, and reluctantly reached under her seat.

"I brought this back for you. I think Wesley would have wanted you to have it, and I guess... I guess it's pretty practically useful, even so."

Lilah stared dully at the weapon harness a moment, then accepted it silently.

It rested in her lap as the minutes stretched by to the engine's hum. Her hands curled around it, two betraying fingers reflexively stroking the sweat-greased leather.
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Burning Down