A/N: This story is set after the end of Angel, based on the After the Fall comics. If you have any questions, PM me and I can fill you in with whatever you need to know.

"The rain is back," a woman said, waking William up when she pulled him into her arms. A roll of thunder made the house shudder. She pulled him close against her breast. "Don't be frightened," she whispered, but the words were mimicry. William had not been afraid of storms for a long time, though he had to admit the particularly wild ones could still startle him or put him on edge. He heard terrible stories of men struck by lightning. That sinners were struck down by the hand of God. Heard rumors that it could burn a person from the inside out. But this storm was mild. He had not even woken up, and certainly hadn't called for his maid.

"In my time, the storms were the howling of tempests and air-born demons," his maid said in a strangely dark voice - one that he was not altogether unfamiliar with. "But... perhaps that wasn't this world."

The talk made him shudder. As much as his mother tried to soothe his 'fretful imagination,' he still had nightmares. Visions of death and brutality with such vivid clarity that he could not be convinced it wasn't real. Visions of a beautiful girl with amazing strength, and of a blue woman who crushed him with her power, and a brown haired girl who looked like his maid but wore clothes he couldn't fathom on a modest lady. But nothing in his head was modest and most nights he woke in a tangle of damp sheets. Then there were the dreams of monsters. Vampires, werewolves, and demons of unimaginable variety.

The dreams were hazier each time he woke up, and harder to remember. He was still young, he felt, but almost a man. He remembered his maid being with him since he was very young at his cousin's summer home, yet there were great spans of time when she wasn't in his life at all. He remembered living in strange places and many people dying. Those dreams felt as if they lasted a short eternity and then he would be back in the soft embrace of his maid, who called herself Fred and was dearly loved by his mother. Everything about her made him so confused.

"Mother says the monsters aren't real," he murmured to her. "Don't let her catch you talking about those things." He'd asked her that many times before, he felt.

Fred stroked his hair and pressed her cool hand to his forehead as if he had a fever. Sometimes he thought he did. "Do you think I'll catch the sickness?"

"You're human," she responded, and he felt as if he had already caught his death, and an overwhelming fear of mortality crept into him.

Fred winced slightly, clutching at her bodice as if for at a loss for air. Before he could ask her what was wrong, the world around him seemed to blur and melt all at once, turning and shifting around them. He fell to the floor, as if the bed underneath him had vanished, and it had.

William found himself lying on concrete, in what looked like a parking garage. Only he wasn't a boy in England anymore. His head aches and he lay in shock for a while, his mind reeling from blurred memories.

"You did not die of plague," Fred observed, kneeling down next to him. Her hair was blue, as well as her lips, and she was encased in tight leather armor. He remembered her now - she was not Fred. Fred had died and Illyria was in her shell. Illyria, whose power was still so strong that she was prone to making them both skip through time and space.

There was a sense of loss from being in the past for so long. He could remember his boyhood as it had been before – just him and his mother – but now there were new memories of Illyria being beside him and caring for him. Although the new memories were fabricated he knew that they were now what 'really' happened. Illyria had been written into his life permanently.

"How - how long was that?" Spike asked.

"Three years."

"Fuck! Fucking hell!" Spike cursed, burying his face in his hands. "I can't keep doing this, Blue. We need to make it stop. I can't get stuck as some 14-year-old boy again. What if we never come back next time? I can't go through my entire life again. It was hard as hell that first time through, but it worked out okay. We're going to risk fucking something up. If there's anything that Back to the Future taught me, it's that."

"I don't understand," Illyria said. "I enjoyed the experience. It was not unpleasant."

Spike would have blushed if it were possible, mortified by the fact that for three years, Illyria had shared in his awkward preteen years. Worse, he had forgotten over time who she was. Every day it was harder to believe that monsters could exist or that the lifetime he remembered was anything other than a frenzied fantasy. Which life was the dream? He had fallen asleep in her arms, listened to her strange lullabies, shed tears into her skirts and held a schoolboy crush for her. Now those long years were fading like a bad dream he had finally woken up from, when they had been so real.

"I've learned so much from you," Illyria said in a quiet voice, cupping his face with her hand. The leather gloves felt rough and horrible – nothing like the soft touches she had given him before. It only helped to remind him that she was not the beautiful maiden he would sometimes prefer to imagine. She was demon, plain as him.

"Blue, pet," Spike whispered. "I like that you're learning, but I can't keep going through this. My personal life is for me to know about and choose to never ever share."

"I have lived it with you," Illyria said.

Spike sighed and rose up to his knees. "We need to find a place to stay."

Illyria grabbed his arm and assisted Spike to his feet – by nearly lifting him off the ground.

"Thanks." Spike brushed at his coat. When he looked up again, he was dismayed to find that in that short moment, she had transformed back into Fred. "Okay. Just don't do the voice, love."

"As you wish," she responded, her darker voice seemingly out of place coming from that small southern belle. She hooked her arm around Spike's and the two headed towards the nearest exit.