Title: The Neutral Zone
Author: Anna
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Warren/Andrew
Disclaimer: Not mine la la la.
Feedback: Please! Constructive is cool, I never know if I've got the tone quite right.
Summary: Warren and Andrew leave Sunnydale.
Notes: Warren same but different. New. Not shiny, but new. Hope you like. AU in the middle of Seeing Red - after they steal the orbs, but before the heist.
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Warren stood at the counter in the Circle K. He didn't know where they were. The lights buzzed. The guy's hands moved too fast and handed him his change before he was ready. It took an age to reach out and take it. Everything was too white. Too bright and too fast and too loud.

He turned and pushed open the door. He had to get back to the car. He felt a headache coming. At least the nosebleeds had stopped, for now.

Andrew was driving. He had learned when they took the car, when Warren, dazed, showed him how to hotwire it and then, in a shaky voice, gave him basic instructions on how to make it go. Put it in drive. Press the accelerator. When you want to stop, press the brake.

Andrew had learned slowly, but Warren hardly noticed. All night and the sun rose over somewhere not Sunnydale. That was all that mattered.

But where were they now? He heard crickets in the dark, and the neon sign buzzing and clicking overhead. The light flickered and his eyes shut in self defence. He opened the car and sat inside, every movement dulled and fragile. Andrew wasn't there. He must be still in the Circle K. Warren couldn't see to check. He unwrapped his sandwich. It smelled of yesterday and too long on she shelf. He didn't care.

Andrew had found him on the floor after Jonathan had taken the van and gone to the slayer. He couldn't remember falling, and he couldn't remember his nose bleeding, but his face had been covered in drying blood and his head was pounding so badly he wished someone would cut it off. It seemed unreal to be in so much pain and still to be alive. The headaches had been getting worse, but the orbs, he had said to himself, one fun night with the orbs, and then he'd get out of there. He'd take the equipment, lose the redshirts and then everything would be okay.

Andrew stood in the angular pool of light by the door to the Circle K. His hair was a mess. He looked around, anxious, then saw Warren in the car and sighed. Warren wondered if he should try a smile, but Andrew was already walking quickly with his short, effeminate steps before he could decide. Warren opened his coke instead.

It wasn't planning the heist that had given him the headaches. It wasn't any of that stuff, those games he was playing with Andrew and Jonathan. Slayer baiting. That was just for fun.

The real project was the neural net he had built in a corner of the lair. It looked like a junkyard for old computers. It clicked and turned over and the ticker on the TV screen only stopped when the Dow Jones did.

The numbers brought on the headaches, or maybe the headaches concentrated the numbers, he wasn't sure. All night he would watch a tape of the day's numbers and go over the computer's predictions, over and over. There was a pattern in the ticker, he knew there was, there had to be, some kind of picture in the apparent chaos, and he was going to find it. And when he found it, he'd use it, and he'd go away somewhere nice, all by himself. Maybe St. Tropez. It always sounded pleasant. His nose would stop bleeding in St. Tropez.

Andrew got into the car, slurping something far too orange through a straw.

"You okay?" he asked. He always asked that. Warren didn't mind.

"Yeah," he replied, after a pause. He drank some coke, slowly and shaking. "Where are we?"

Andrew looked around. The Circle K seemed to be the only light for miles.

"I don't know," he said. He shrugged. "Somewhere in the middle. The Neutral Zone."

"Oh." Warren nodded slowly. To his relief it didn't send bolts of pain through his skull. "Where are we going?"

"New York," said Andrew promptly. He was smiling a little. "I've always wanted to go to New York."

"Yeah?" said Warren. His voice was still weak. "Me too, I guess."

Andrew smiled again. Warren tried it. It seemed to work. Then he kept eating.

"The slayer will never find us," said Andrew quietly and confidently.

"Nah," agreed Warren.

"We'll blend in, we'll find a place to live, and no one will ever know we used to be supervillains." Andrew had nearly finished whatever he was drinking. His straw made an irritating sound in the silence.

"No one," said Warren quietly. Like anyone would ever care. He looked in the back.

There she was. There was his baby. In pieces of course, but still perfectly operable once he put her together again. In New York, if they ever got there. He tried to imagine rebuilding his sprawling mess of chips and wires and monitors in some nice place in New York.

Yeah. That could work.

Andrew frowned, turning the key in the ignition, and carefully steered back onto the road. He stopped at the exit to the car park even though there wasn't another set of headlights for miles in either direction. He took a last, sullen slurp of orange.

In the flickering lair, Andrew leaned over him on the floor and told him, holding a cold, wet towel to his nose, that Jonathan had gone to Buffy. Had told her everything, about Katrina, about the orbs, about the planned heist.

"Why?" croaked Warren through the thickly padded towel.

"When you pushed him through the demon barrier and said you didn't know if it would work?" said Andrew. Warren remembered saying that. He remembered feeling high. "He didn't like that much." Andrew looked apologetic, his voice hushed and fast.

Warren pushed the towel away.

"We gotta leave," he said, trying to get up. He was dizzy. Andrew held his arms as he staggered to his feet. "I can't fight her like this. Is she coming? Is Buffy coming?"

Andrew just nodded, the bloody cloth still in his hands.

"We have to take the computer," said Warren.

"No, there isn't time! Come on, Warren, we have to go!" Andrew sounded panicky.

Warren put his face in Andrew's, and a hand on his bony shoulder. He must have looked like hell. Andrew nearly winced.

"We're taking her," he said quietly, his voice grating in his throat.

They found a car on the street and piled the parts in, carefully padded on the bean bag. Andrew threw in some t-shirts. Warren took the money. They saw Buffy arrive in the rear view mirror as they pulled away.

"You know," said Warren in a half-whisper, holding a hand to his nose and looking behind. "She could really do with a car." His hand was covered in blood again. Andrew passed him the towel.

Now it was like they were driving in a black void, the road appearing when the headlights hit it. Warren's headache hadn't come full on yet, it was still just a dullish throb over his cranium and twisted tension across the back of his neck. But he hadn't had a nosebleed since they left… where was it? Maybe Santa Fe? Had they been driving that long? Where were they?

Didn't matter.

No way his nose would bleed in New York.

He should have bought painkillers in the Circle K. They did nothing, but they made him feel psychosomatically better. The sound of the road was blurring into the throb in his head. He closed his eyes. It didn't help.

"When we get to New York, I'm taking you to a doctor." Andrew glanced at him, daring, now, to take his eyes off the road for seconds at a time.

Warren shook his head, his eyes still closed.

"I'll be fine," he said, trying to keep his voice steady. He cleared his throat. "I just need to chill out." He held a hand to his right temple and rubbed it a little. That never helped the pain, but at least it was something else to feel.

Andrew said nothing.

The headaches had begun after he killed Katrina. He didn't know if it was related. Two days after that, in those clear, crystalline days when he seemed to live on the euphoria of getting away with murder and nothing else, he had made a breakthrough with his neural net. The math was so close, he was so close to knowing the formula, to seeing the pattern. He knew that soon, any day, he would predict with perfect accuracy how the markets would close, at least a day in advance.

Warren was doing it. Warren was cracking the New York Stock Exchange.

And Warren was in pain, the heel of his hand to the side of his head, and suddenly there was no crystal anymore, just a buzzing and whining in his brain and he couldn't concentrate. But he had to. So he sat in front of the ticker till the buzzing went away, and he planned the heist with Andrew and Jonathan, and he worked all night on his net. The painkillers always got him to somewhere around three or four in the morning and then he would have to lie down till the pain ebbed a little in his head.

Then he'd start again.

And then he had it. He had it, then he woke up and found Andrew over him with a bloodstained towel.

And now he had to wait till they got to New York to boot her up again.

It sometimes seemed like too much, till he remembered the payoff. He didn't want the headaches and the nosebleeds and the blackouts, and he wished they would go away, and they would, in New York, with Andrew and his baby booted up and ready to make him some serious money. Then his head would be fine, it would have that feeling he dimly remembered, the lightness after a headache went away, the silence after hours of buzzing and whining. He was really looking forward to that silence.

And Andrew was taking him there. He had always liked Andrew best.

Andrew was singing some song to himself. Some stupid song on the radio.

A few miles down the black road, Warren finally fell asleep.