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Reconstruction	By : Roseveare Category: Angel the Series > FemmeSlash - Female/Female Views: 1506 -:- 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
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TITLE: Reconstruction

AUTHOR: Roseveare, t.l.green@talk21.com

RATING: R

WARNINGS: f/f slash, references to m/f non-consensual

SUMMARY: Fred negotiates the perils of responsibility; Lilah discovers her inner Xena.

SPOILERS: Nothing solid beyond 4.7/7.7(ish), but based on spoilers for mid-season events.

NOTES: Part 2 of the story and series begun in Burning Down. To repeat the warnings from Part 1, the germ of this idea was a reaction against the spoilers around the time 'Spin the Bottle' and 'Apocalypse Nowish' were airing, a lot of which turned out to be inaccurate or misleading. It's therefore set a handful of episodes in the future from that point, with the assumption of various events having occurred. Additionally, with part 2 I was a little behind on and largely unspoiled for BtVS at the time, so this extrapolates from what was going on around episode 7.6. In other words, AU with a cherry and a paper parasol on top.

THANKS: To Katta for beta-reading, and to the other folks who read this before posting and encouraged me to send it out.

DISCLAIMER: Not mine, never will be, and after this one they're probably very glad of it, poor things.

Reconstruction
1.
A desert of scorched earth stretched as far as view around them, a reality of brown-beige colourlessness reflected into orange-red by the sky. A half-assed breeze tossed the dust around, carrying a noise like snakes through the air.
The bang of the truck's hood slamming closed cut through the hiss, the suddenness of the noise jolting Lilah from her daze. Her eyes shot to front, where the hood's closing revealed Winifred Burkle's skinny figure, and they followed the Twig as she stomped back around to the driver's door, arms wrapped across her chest, shoulders hunched.
She climbed back inside, the cab door banging after her, and sat and hugged herself and shivered in her stupid little goody-goody girl dress (it looked like innocence and summer, things Lilah could barely remember; pale flesh of thin exposed arms that really could have belonged to a girl and not a woman late in her twenties) before she finally looked over at Lilah and said, "It's no good. It's dead."
Which was, of course, the perfect cap to being stuck at the end of the world with the Texas Twig and a body that, thanks to Angelus, ached and chafed and grated with every fucking movement.
"If I had the tools and the parts, I could find out what was wrong and do the repairs. I mean, it probably just needs a new-"
"I think it probably needs a new truck," Lilah interrupted rudely. Talking hurt, pulling at the mutilated half of her face, which didn't improve her temper any.
Fred's nose scrunched up like she'd caught a bad smell instead of verbal snark, and she turned her head away. Yeah. The girl had truck issues; don't fuck with the truck. Lilah quashed a snigger. Or maybe the world did it for her. It had been one hell of a day and the muscles of her face objected to laughing for more reasons than just the pain.
"I have to tell you, I'm loving this plan so far," she said. "Sure. 'Let's go find the Slayer. Maybe it's not too late to stop this. She'll know what to do. I mean, according to Angel, she's saved the world from half a dozen apocalypses already. One more shouldn't be any big deal.' Sure, except for the part where we die here in the middle of nowhere or else, knowing my luck, get 'rescued' by a gang of demons out for Angelus' kind of fun."
"I don't whine like th-" Fred broke off her whine of protest and sourly snatched something up from the floor of the truck. She slapped it into Lilah's hands, and turned back to seize the gun from the dashboard. "We're not helpless. We can take care of ourselves."
Lilah looked down at the harness, weighed down by its various attachments and the memory of Wesley. "I don't want it. I told you, I can't use it."
"Well..." the Twig faltered and stuttered amusingly for several seconds before she finally gulped, drew a breath and snapped in a cold little voice that didn't sound much like Wesley's sweet little Fred, "learn. I'm not giving you the gun." She stared through the windscreen with narrow-eyed contemplation. "We can't be far now anyway. We can walk the last few miles. And there ought to be a garage around somewhere - even if its owners aren't anymore."
Much as Lilah didn't feel like walking a few miles anywhere, and particularly not in stained clothes and expensive heels through fire-blasted apocalyptic wasteland that might've been a fucking forest just days ago for all they knew, she certainly didn't feel like voicing that apprehension to Fred.
Who was still looking at her expectantly, and with steely determination setting her small face.
"Yeah. Sure. Whatever," Lilah said. She ran a finger down her shirt to pop open the buttons, and shrugged it off her shoulders to replace the uncomfortable straps of the harness.
It almost made her smirk to see how Fred flinched away from her nudity. Until she realised it might as easily be the bruising, and not modesty, that prompted the flinch.

The sift of dusty fire-blasted earth underfoot, its 'shussh, shussh' in time to her steps, her heels sinking and straining her ankles, the effort that seemed to increase anew each time she pushed off from her toes...
Lilah really missed the Twig's stupid damn truck.
Shussh, shussh...
She'd never been so aware of her nervous system. She'd fucking tortured people she was sure must have had more of a party of it than this.
"You okay?" Fred sounded a little breathless.
Lilah couldn't be bothered looking up. "Sure."
Like she was going to admit anything else. She'd already exposed far too much of herself to Winifred Burkle in the past twenty-four hours. It figured that she'd have to be saved from torture and turning by potentially the most irritating person in the world, and the one she would least want to see her so reduced.
And by Wesley. Except she wasn't thinking about Wesley.
The dust on the wind stung her eyes.
Shussh, shussh.
Not that the Twig hadn't provided a few surprises. Snapshots of Fred flashed through her brain as she walked. The concentration in her expression as she tried to sew Lilah's face back together. Scared as a rabbit running back to rescue Wesley from Angelus. Curled up in darkness (a patch of human warmth in the cradle of Lilah's arms) with a furrow of thought marking her brow even as she slept. ...Throwing out the admission that what happened to Lilah had happened to her. Not just once, but again and again.
A shudder ran through her and she blinked her eyes. There were too many things she could not afford to think about right now, and not enough safe distractions to prevent the thinking.
"Lilah-"
Angelus' hands on her. The violence of his invasion. The way he'd turned it into a joke. Her view of the serrated edge of the knife inches from her eyes as he made his untidy incisions. Her last sight of Wesley in Angelus' clutches. Fred telling her, there wasn't a body. Los Angeles in crumbling, burning ruins. The carnage on the road out of town. A world in ashes-
"Lilah-"
Hard ground grated underfoot, unbalancing her heel, sending her stumbling. Small fingers curled around her arm and held her up. A fearful voice threaded its journey through the wind to her ears.
"I think we've reached Sunnydale, Lilah," Fred said, and she looked up to see the Twig peering big-eyed at the reddish dust and fuck-all stretched around them. "I... I think we reached it quite a while back."

There were the remnants of foundations under the top layer of dry dirt - burned and blackened brickwork, a maze of modern archaeology. Lilah wasn't about to get on her hands and knees and start digging.
Fred was on her knees already, small hands scraping in the dust, carving out a hole maybe a foot in diameter, seeming oblivious of the way the action abraded her skin.
She stopped abruptly, pulled back with a gasp, her mouth falling open. She blinked up at Lilah as though dazzled by the dulled sun, then straightened and extended her hand. Little white shards rested sedately on her palm. Lilah regarded them with suspicion.
"It's bone," Fred said after a moment. "It's been... pulverised, I guess would be the word."
"So we're talking about something reducing everything in the vicinity to blasted foundations and pulverised bone?"
"I... yes." The Twig's face twisted up and she tipped her hands, releasing the bone fragments with a flicker of revulsion. She brushed her palms together slowly, shedding clinging dust.
"Then I'd say we're headed in the wrong damn direction. There's no Slayer here. We're too late. Everything here's already dead."
"We don't know that." Fred wasn't even looking at her, already turned aside and drawn onward by whatever paragraph in the good-and-plenty handbook stipulated the need to always head toward the gruesome and undignified death. "We don't know how far it stretches. We should at least go to the top of the next rise."
Lilah trailed after, unable to raise much concern one way or another. 'End of the world' struck her as a pretty fucking final category. No matter how much they battered away at fate's cage, those were bars they weren't ever going to break.
Her raw thighs chafed as she slogged up the slope. There were handprints on her skin, under her skin. When she closed her eyes unwarily, she could still feel the hands.
In front, Fred had drawn her crossbow and held it ready now as she walked, despite the emptiness around them. It was, unsurprisingly, she who reached the top of the rise first. She pointed excitedly, whipping her head around to shout, "There are structures over there, still standing! Maybe there are some survivors who could tell us what happened."
Lilah reached the crest several seconds of increased effort after and sank down in the dust at the level of the Twig's bare knees, to catch her breath and peer at the distant skeletons of what had been houses. They looked, now, as though they had been left to rot for centuries. She could see no sign of movement among the walls, but some of the structures over at the furthest side looked to be relatively intact, possibly even whole. Possibly, as Fred suggested, sheltering people within.
"I suppose someone down there might have a bunch of spare parts in their garage, or a car we can rip what we need out of."
"Or be able to tell us what happened here," Fred insisted stubbornly.
Lilah expelled breath sharply through her nose. "Whatever."
"I don't-" Breaking off, Fred raised a hand to shield her eyes as she glared intently across the ruined houses.
"What is it?"
"Movement. Over there-" Fred pointed far too vaguely and quickly for it to be possible to get an actual fix on the subject. "In fact..." Then, she was gone, running and sliding down the slope towards whatever she had spied, the skirt of her dress flaring up to flash her thighs in time with her running steps.
Lilah watched her; a bright blur of life and energy in stark contrast to the desolation surrounding. Her hesitation to follow was broken by the gritty texture of the coarse ground beneath her knees steadily increasing its discomfort until standing was less of a chore than staying where she was.
She dragged heavy feet in pursuit of the running form, but then something jarred Fred's progress, faltered her steps. The Twig turned around to deliver an unheard shout back, then sped her progress across the wasteland, crossbow held in a manner indicative of preparation for action.
She vanished from sight among the ruins.
Lilah drew to a halt, frozen with disbelief, and swore loudly at the air.
Fred might not have been her ideal choice for a comrade-in-arms at the end of the world, but certainly she was better than nobody at all. Her sudden absence now, as it had back at the motel before LA disintegrated in flame, made Lilah's chest ache.
The Twig had no doubt run off to help some needy helpless and get herself killed, leaving Lilah alone in this place with who knew what demons and a fucked-up wreck of a truck she hadn't the first clue how to repair.
With a curse, Lilah managed to increase her pace to a run - rhythmic chafing between her aching thighs, a burn starting low in her chest and rasping up through her throat to interfere when she breathed, feet twisting with her heels' dubious purchase in the dust.
Three sharp, pointed sounds hit the air. Gunshots. She kicked off her heels and let the grit eat at her bare feet, sacrificing skin for speed.
She rounded a wall fragment once part of a house to see figures - too many of them - and in time to see Fred toss the empty gun aside and point the loaded crossbow at a demon. Firing effectively disarmed her, leaving her to be jumped by another.
Lilah skidded to a painful halt, catching the edge of the wall to destroy her momentum, huddling into its shadow in an effort to stay out of sight.
She could see two demons of indeterminate type reduced by gunshot wounds to corpses on the ground. A third, injured by the crossbow bolt, moaned nearby. Also on the ground, one human male, presumably the reason Little Miss White Knight Complex had seen fit to leap in to the rescue.
One of the two demons still standing held a kicking and struggling Fred, its strength easily overwhelming her thin body. As Lilah watched, the creature laughed and pawed at the Twig's breasts.
She was moving before she even realised it, rage swamping thought.
"Get the fuck off of her!" The yell, raw in the back of her throat, didn't sound much like her voice.
Retracting the sword from its harness, she threw herself at the demon, sweeping her arm around in an arc that held the confidence and power of blind rage. Fred cringed and ducked her head, and the sword sliced smoothly through the demon's neck.
Fred shoved the corpse away and sprang back, with a small cry, from the rolling head as the line of its severance splattered green gore.
Lilah turned on the remaining demon. It backed away before her with its hands extended in supplication. "Hey... no hard feelings... you can have the bastard if you really want him..." It turned tail and fled, stumbling in its fear. Lilah had only taken two steps before Fred's protest broke through the haze and her own abused body betrayed her, letting her know by way of a wave of dizzying weakness that it would not stand the exertion of further pursuit.
She sagged, almost crumpling where she stood, barely managing to catch herself. To hide the stumble, she stabbed the tip of the sword down through the chest of the injured demon, silencing its distracting moans. The momentary support helped her catch her balance.
The, she wrenched the sword out, and realisation and reaction flooded in as she stared at the weapon in her hand.
"Oh, my-" She heard Fred's gulp, interrupting the breathy whisper of her voice. "That was just-"
Lilah couldn't tear her eyes from the blade. A ball of air caught in her own throat. "No," she said. "No. That wasn't - I couldn't-"
But words had failed them both, not a thing to occur often in either case. She could only raise her head to meet Fred's wide, astonished eyes, still speechless as the contact stretched.
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Reconstruction