Title: An Unlikely Pair
Author: walkwithheros
Spoilers: Up to Season 4, Episode 12 Calvary.
Rated:
PG13
Main Characters: Fred, Lilah
Other: Angelus
Reviews/Critiques: Make my day. :)

Disclaimer: In the big picture, not mine.

Chapter One


Angelus had walked right out the front door, without even blinking.

Moments ago they had let him loose on the world, not knowing that the spell they had cast had gone wrong, not knowing that Angel's soul, wherever it was, was not in his bloodthirsty body.

Fred watched them rush out the door after him, Wesley, Gunn, Cordelia and Connor, not knowing if they were going to come back in little tiny pieces. The hero part of her, a part recently cultivated into existence at Angel Investigations, wanted to go with them. She wanted to help.

But Lilah was bleeding through her shirt again, and needed bandaging badly. Wesley had told - not asked, because there was that desperate strain to his voice - told Fred to stay behind and look after her. Fred was the one with a science background, she was the closest thing to a doctor they had. The sunless streets outside were in a state of anarchy, the lower legions of the city making themselves known, and risking the journey to the hospital was completely out of the question.

So leaving Lorne, who had volunteered to hold down the fort on the account of having no fighting skills what-so-ever, to anxiously fix himself the third seabreeze of the day, Fred tramped off into the back office to dig out their extensive supply of first-aid materials.

The door swung shut behind her and she fumbled through the cupboard on autopilot. She should be out there with them. It wasn't as if the bitch-queen-of-lawyerville was going to bleed her guts out all at once, but Charles, Wesley, Cordy and Connor, their guts were the ones in real danger. They were chasing Angelus.

Click.

The office door swung open, and Fred, bent over with her head inside the cupboard and her ass in the air, craned her neck to see behind her. "What is it Lor-"

Across the room Lilah hovered silently near the door, pale lips arched downward in a frown. She held one hand across her stomach, palm pressed over the freshly moistened blood-stain.

"Oh." Suddenly feeling keenly self-conscious, Fred turned back to the cupboard only long enough to pull out what she needed and quickly straighten up.

The discomfort in the air was tangible, at least on her half of the room. As she gestured to the chair beside her she forced her eyes onto the first aid kit in front of her face, reading labels on bottles she already knew by heart.

Wesley and Lilah. Together. Together in the down and dirty, bend her over the kitchen-counter sense. Or is that what Angelus said Wesley was going to do to Fred? She couldn't remember.

Angelus' words were fresh in her mind; they rubbed raw at her insides and grated at her, grated away at the Wesley she knew. The Wesley she thought she knew.

"If you're going to play doctor, you might as well have me where you can reach." Brushing a few papers aside, Lilah lifted herself gingerly onto the desk, long legs crossing gracefully. Even with a hole in her gut, Office Bitch had more poise than Fred ever had. More poise, and more authority.

Wetting down a few cotton balls with chemicals she knew were going to sting, she stole a quick glance and found Lilah staring wordlessly out the office window towards the front door, the door Wesley had walked through minutes ago.

Fred cleared her throat. "Your, er, shirt."

Lilah grunted, lifting her shirt clear over her head to offer access to her bleeding stomach. Fred's eyes caught on a black bra and, she couldn't help but notice, a rather impressive bust, accented by a tasteful hint of lace. With an awkward swiftness, her eyes shied away.

Of course, Fred thought uneasily as she leaned in towards the woman perched in font of her, she could have just lifted it over her stomach; she didn't have to take it all the way off... What kind of a moron wore a lacy bra to the office anyway?

The evil kind, naturally. Evil, vain, busty, beautifully shaped Lilah. Fred hated her for all that, and more.

Pressing a moist cotton ball to the edge of the bloody wound gingerly; Fred felt the skin beneath shudder. The red wound fizzed a sickly white as she pressed the chemicals to its edges, dabbing and tidying up crusted blood marks; tossing stained cotton ball after stained cotton ball into the trash bin.

The body before her flinched, skin crawling at the more direct touches, and once or twice she thought she glanced Lilah's face caught in a grimace.

She couldn't stitch it; the wound was shaped all wrong for that. The best she could do was wrap it up and prevent it from bleeding. "It'll need to be changed…daily." Gently pressing the protective bandaging to the marred skin, she stole another look at Lilah's pained expression. It was the first time Fred had seen her without make up, and her eyes looked oddly lighter, void of their usual mascara and eye shadow. They looked lighter, and much more human; though it might have been the look of affliction that humanized them. "If we had antibiotics, there'd be less chance of infection-"

"And if I had painkillers, I'd sleep like a baby." Lilah's lips twitched upward in a shadow of a smirk as Fred circled the gauze around her stomach, the smaller woman leaning with visible discomfort between the lawyer's thighs. "If wishes were horses."

Crash!

Both women froze. A series of thuds followed the original sound, fading out with each repetition. There was a moment of silence, and Fred's breath caught.

Lorne.

Pausing only to snatch the pistol from the table, Fred was out the office door before Lilah could bat an eye.

Fred skidded around the corner outside the office and no sooner had she instinctively reached for the dagger on the counter then an iron grip from behind caught her by the wrist, jerking her body back into a solid chest; Angelus' chest.

"Fred." He purred her name like a favorite pet, pressing her front to him with one hand on the small of her back, the other squeezing her wrist till her hand fell limp and the pistol clattered to the floor.

"Miss me, kitten?" His hand ran smoothly up her arm to trace lightly over her throat, leaning close till his breath hit her ear. Long after his words left the air she felt his voice reverberating through her body like a ripple. That, or she'd begun to shake.

Over his shoulder she caught sight of Lorne's motionless frame, crumpled at the bottom of the staircase. Angelus' hand muffled her gasp. "Tisk tisk, it's not fair to peek." Bringing her face in front of his so their noses were almost touching, he forcefully pressed her still tighter against him, his palm sliding up and down her back in a stroking motion that made the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. "Now, now little one, he's only resting." A cold finger trailed down the crook of her neck to her breastbone; tracing little shapes over the place she knew he felt her frantically pumping heart. "He'll get his turn later."

Then out of the corner of her eye, Fred glimpsed Lilah creeping up soundlessly behind Angelus, reaching out for the dagger on the counter. Lilah…to the rescue?

Hardly. There was no other way out of the office.

Still an ally was an ally, and in an immediate and rash attempt to provide a distraction Fred pressed her lips to Angelus'. They were cold and motionless, and on them she tasted the very essence of death. He had been feeding.

She felt curiosity relax his grip on her as her lips worked furiously against his, her hands slithering up his chest. Her eyes closed tightly as she quickly stifled the urge to be sick. Pain, blood and death; they were all on his lips and she was taking them in.

Then leisurely, he pulled away. Smirking he held her straining face at bay with a hand against her collarbone, eyebrows raised in mock astonishment. "Fred! Now Fred, if Angel had only known that you wanted him that badly, he might have-" His cold eyes danced over her body critically, "No..no, actually he wouldn't."

And dagger in hand, Lilah made a dash towards Angelus' back.

She wasn't fast enough. Sidestepping gracefully he knocked the blade out of Lilah's hand, and with what looked like a gentle nudge sent her tumbling into Fred. The two women toppled to the ground in a tangle of limbs.

Lilah swore brutally under her breath, clutching at her stomach as Fred wriggled out from underneath her. "Lilah.." Wagging a finger lazily at her, Angelus clicked his tongue, reaching down to grab the lawyer's slender ankle. "Not. Nice." With one smooth motion he lifted her lower body into the air by her leg, fingers digging into her calf roughly. Lilah's body bent into an awkward L-shape, head and shoulders crumpled against the tile, face contorted in an expression of pain as he held her up like a rag doll.

Fred darted towards the dropped pistol, but Angelus's foot caught her forcefully in the side and sent her light body skidding along the floor.

"What is it with you women?!" Fred's eyes flickered open long enough to see Lilah's body hurdling toward her again, and with a preface of mild collision pain they found themselves for the second time a jumble of wrongly bent limbs. "Didn't your men ever teach you," Angelus scooped up the discarded pistol, pointing it leisurely in their direction as he fired a loud warning shot that punctured the wall directly over them, "To lie still?"

Neither of them moved. Fred lay half on her back, half on her side, with the lawyer's upper body facedown on top of her. Lilah's legs spread out gracelessly behind her, one arm looped over Fred's stomach and face held rigidly over the thinner woman's chest. Lilah's breath hit the crook of Fred's neck in quick, unsteady bursts, and there was no mistaking that Lilah Morgan was shaking; though whether it was from fear or pain was still up for debate.

"Now then, Fred," He said her name like a scolding, and over Lilah's head Fred could see one hand reaching into his jacket pocket, "I brought you a present. I was going to give it to you later, after a bit of violence and inappropriate touching, but.." He smiled casually, as casually as if they had been discussing what was for dinner, "I figure Lilah's a more qualified whore anyway." His hand reappeared, this time brandishing a book. "That, and I'm impatient."

The book was brown with a ridged binding, its corner was bent on the left side, and a stamp marked it as property of the university library. Even without her glasses, which lay forgotten on the office table, she recognized it. And if she didn't know better, she might have thought her heart had stopped.

All at once Fred was writhing in a crazed attempt to free herself, dead to reason as blinding fear seared her. She had to get out, had to get away. She couldn't go back. Seven years ago, that book had sent her to Pylea.

But Lilah was not budging. The lawyer's face contorted in pain as a particularly zealous flail caught her in the gut, manicured hands finding Fred's quickly and pinning them to the tile. In the background, Angelus was laughing.

"Don't be a moron," Lilah growled into Fred's ear, pressing her weight down firmly on top of the smaller woman, "You run, he'll shoot you."

Fred's initial thought was that getting shot would be the favorable option, but that was assuming the shot resulted in death. Knowing Angelus, he would not shoot to kill; people were not nearly as much fun dead. It was far more likely that he would send her to Pylea wounded, vulnerable. Fred's struggle faded, and died.

And somewhere between suppressing her panic and trying, unsuccessfully, to think up the world's fastest escape plan, she forgot to wonder why Lilah had stopped her.

"And its times like these I wish I had a camera." Angelus held up his hands as if he were taking a picture, stepping casually to the right as if to get a better angle. "I would call it, 'Girl Romp, a Wesley's Paradise.'" He smiled appreciatively at his own joke, fangs glinting in the light. "Well ladies, I've got places to go and people to torture. Let's get this show on the road, break it up."

Scowling, presumably at either the innuendo or the discomfort motion caused, Lilah rolled onto her side and off of Fred. "Angelus, surely we can-"

"What, negotiate? Lilah, don't make me laugh." One hand still aiming the gun idly, he began to flip through the book, licking his fingers periodically. "You've no job and no connections. All you've got to offer me now is that battered body of yours, and since I'm going to take it anyway…" His eyes flashed up to move over her hungrily, and Fred felt the foreign pang of Lilah-bound sympathy as against her, she felt the lawyer shiver.

"As for you, Fred." Instinctively she twitched at the sound of her name, and in response Angelus fired another warning shot into the wall behind her, his eyes wandering back to the page. "Well, some nightmares just can't be improved upon."

Any second now Fred was sure that they - Wes, Gunn, Cordelia and Connor - would all come crashing in to save them in just the nick of time. They would save the day, just like they always did.

But the seconds ticked past, and no one came.

And suddenly Angelus was crossing the room, book and gun in hand, and gripping a clump of Fred's hair as he dragged her to her feet. The cold barrel of the pistol pressed against her throat as he read the magic words.

The space in front of them swirled brightly in a blur of light and color as the portal opened. Fred whimpered, clenched hands trembling against her thighs as her shaking became almost violent.

"Pleasure knowing you," his cold lips brushed a kiss onto her forehead, and smiling brutally, he shoved her forward. "Cow-bitch."

And as Fred fell into the portal, she heard behind her an exclamation of pain. Seconds later she felt something warm bump against her back. She strained to see as her body was flung through dimensions, and realized with a half believing stare that Lilah had fallen too.