Title: Complication
Authors: walkwithheros and Iris
Spoilers: Up to Season 4, Episode 12 Calvary.
Rated: PG13
Main Pairing: Wes/Lilah

Setting: This fic opens approximately two weeks after Angelus's escape and Lilah's death. Angelus and the Beast are both still at large, the sun is still out, and general chaos still reigns in LA. Angelus and the Beast are still the main Bads, but we're rewriting the plot from there.

Disclaimer: Not ours, wish they were, ect.

Chapter 1
by walkwithheros

It was complicated, intricate.

Over four dozen tea lights were arranged in a symmetric pattern on the tile, and moonlight leaked in casually through the windows as it had without reprieve since the Beast snuffed out the sun. Fred and Lorne stood on the balcony of the second floor, comparing the sketch in their hands to the candles below. Connor hovered behind Cordelia as she sat staring into the depths of a marked up notebook page. Gunn moved silently by, pacing along the hotel's main entryway, axe in hand as he kept watch.

They had performed enough spells on the hotel to keep ten Angelus's out, but rightfully, they were still on edge. Connor trailed protectively after Cordelia, shooting glares at anyone who so much as looked at her wrong, Lorne and Fred had spent a good portion of the evening huddled shoulder to shoulder, muttering comforting words of friendship to one another, and Gunn had his axe, his axe and the idle threats he uttered under his breath.

Then Wesley had his thoughts. He had his loss. He had the space where she used to be, the part of him that she occupied before Angelus killed her.

If the now empty space were symbolically located inside him, he doubted the gap would be in his heart. Maybe it was from his side that she had been taken, like Eve was from Adam. She was not unlike Eve when he thought about it, Eve and the apple. Eve and temptation.

Lilah had been a temptation. She had helped lead him astray, led him away from goodness. Being with her, it had been wrong.

Yet as her presence so often had, her memory blurred his perception of right and wrong. By past acts and by occupation, she had undeniable been on the side of evil. The face she showed the world was cold, cruel and merciless.

But even so, it was the few unshakable moments that he remembered vividly; the rare moments when the secretive hush of night fell over them and fatigue and familiarity temporarily thinned their walls. It was in these moments that she was gentle and he was warm, and they held each other wordlessly. It was in these moments that if he hadn't known better, if he had been an observer or a child, he might have called it love.

"A little to the left, Hunnybun." A green hand pointed over the balcony above him and a hint of wax dribbled onto the floor as Wesley moved a lit candle as directed. Lorne's pet names always tempted a smile on his face, but today it was only a temptation.

"I think I've got it, Wes." Cordelia's voice drew him to her side, lifting his glasses from his pocket. His eyes strained to see her handy-work by candlelight, doing his best to ignore Connor's breath on the back of his neck. She'd been making last-minute corrections to the symbols she'd drawn out, comparing the still vivid image from her vision to what she'd etched on the page.

It was three, no, four times that she had gotten the same vision in the past week. An arrangement of candles, all lit and organized into a symmetric, eight-pointed star; a shape most of Wesley's reference books recognized as the Chaos symbol. Then in a second flash Cordelia would see rows of symbols that to her were only gibberish, but to Wesley, when she drew them out, were sentences of a dead, archaic language, a language they could only assume he was to read out loud.

"Circle, or octagon?" He gestured to one of her sloppier symbols.

"Circle." Big, brown eyes lifted to him, and her features flickered with the dim light. As he lifted the page from her hands to make a few last specifications he was keenly aware of Connor, who now took form in his mind's eye as a frightfully protective guard dog, fuming behind him over what he could only assume to be his close proximity to Cordelia.

"I think we're ready, Fred, Lorne," Without looking up from the page, he called up to them, and then added as an afterthought, "..Gunn."

The group closed in around the ensemble, and at the edge of his vision he glimpsed Fred, small hands tense and lips thinning anxiously, and without speaking she had told him that what was on his mind was on theirs too.

The last vision Cordelia had received had given them the spell they presumed would return Angel's soul, an assumption Angelus took advantage of to escape. That was why he was loose, that was why he was free. What were the Powers playing at, sending them spells that didn't work? They had no reason to believe that this spell would end any better.

This was one of the many disadvantages to the Powers-That-Screw-You. It was hardly a two-way phone line, and filing an employee complaint-form was rather out of the question.

Still they had discussed it-the ups and downs of performing a spell that could to anything. It could save the day or it could blow their little heads off, whichever suited the powers today, and in the end they had reached a shaky consensus. What did they have to lose?

Besides their lives and each other.

"Right." Wesley let one last, sweeping look move over the other's dimly lit faces, before lowering his eyes to the writing in front of him. Capturing a breath, he read. "Detant lemay tecnalante, relagmay petantey secto." Wesley's pronunciation was flawed at best, but for a thousand year old language it wasn't entirely unimpressive. Still it was more than a little infuriating that pronouncing it was all he could do, the original meaning of the symbols lost in centuries past. "Relie chantanteles ricto shulay, ubtecnay dita." The candles in the center of the room brightened with a steadily increasing glow, illuminating the faces around him and as a fortunate side effect, the page he was reading from. "Ridante sectrat secto, shulay. Shulay. Shulay."

The tiny flames grew until they felt the heat on their faces and the whole room was illuminated, the little tongues of fire unifying into a great, flashing blaze. "Hectante rida shutka. Shulay. Shulay. Shulay." His voice strained as the heat rose, and his fellows took several cautious steps back. The fire cracked and hissed, one large, swaying flame engulfing all fifty candles and the floor between them.

"Teclante caldra destrito. Helita shutka shulay. Shulay..SHULAY!" As he read from the last line the blaze became unbearably bright and hot, and pressing his eyes closed he stumbled back against the wall with a heavy thud, glasses toppling from his face as he buried it in his arms. The heat felt unbearable, and even through his eyelids the brightness seemed to burn.

Then slowly the air cooled and the light dimmed, and choking in a chest-full of air he strained to see.

The floor was singed black, puddles of melted wax littering the uniform scorch-marks, and in the center of the scarred floor a light patch stood out.

Pale and unblemished, an uncannily familiar form lay sprawled face down against the tile, the woman's motionless figure naked for all to see.

And before anyone else had the slightest inkling of who she was, he knew.

He knew those legs, slender and soft; flawless but for the freckles that spread like a constellation up her left thigh. He knew those hands almost as well as they knew him, all smooth fingertips and nails that he remembered days later by the moon-shaped nicks on his shoulders. He knew that body from head to foot, a body that had on so many occasions pressed her name from him like music.

Lilah.