Disclaimer: All these characters belong to Joss Whedon and 20th Century Fox. I claim no ownership and do not profit from this stroll through someone else's world. Thank you.
Author's note: This is my first attempt at fanfiction. Be kind but honest.
"Locked Away"
When he came to the hotel that evening he discovered Cordy and Wesley bent
over opposite sides of the reception desk. They weren't busy at work. Even without the proverbial water cooler, Angel could tell that they were gossiping.
The most tell-tale sign of this was their reaction to his entrance. Their heads sprang up and away from each other so forcibly to the sound of his footsteps, he would have thought they had heard an explosion.
"Hi Angel!" Cordy beamed more loudly than necessary.
"What's going on?" he asked softly obviously indicating their curious behavior. He had hoped that by now they would be less obsessed with his mourning.
Wesley turned away and tried to appear productive by picking up some of
Cordy's invoices. "Nothing unusual," he muttered.
Whether she had crumpled under his scrutiny or she just couldn't stand the idea of not talking about it anymore, Angel didn't know. "It's Fred," Cordy suddenly blurted out.
"Is there something wrong with her?" he asked with sudden concern.
Cordy couldn't fight back the sarcasm. "You mean besides the fact that she hasn't left her room in three months and her diet subsists solely of tacos?"
Angel replied with an appropriate stare causing the corner of her mouth to spasm upwards in a smirk.
Wesley abandoned the pretense of the invoices and rejoined them. "She seems to be spending an inordinate amount of time in her bathroom," he said with a sigh to indicate that he thought they were probably making a big deal out of nothing.
Angel shrugged. He felt relief to know that for once the whispering wasn't about him. "That's it?" he asked. "She was running out of wall space. Maybe she's started writing in there."
Wesley shook his head. "She can't."
"Remember about how she was griping about the ceramic tiles?" Cordy
elaborated. "They don't hold the ink."
"Yeah," Angel nodded, remembering vaguely an earlier discussion concerning
Fred's dislike of the tiles. "That's why I got her the notebooks. I was hoping she'd start writing in those."
"And she has," Wesley added.
"Only now she tapes the pages up on the walls when she's done," Cordy
continued. "I guess it's still an improvement."
"Lately though whenever any of us have gone up to her room she always seems to be busy in her bathroom," Wesley explained.
Cordy's brow furrowed and her lips curved into a frown. " You'd think with all the time she spends in there she'd come out looking cleaner."
Angel shot her another look which she didn't catch. "Alright," he sighed. "I'll go up there and see what 's going on."
"That's just what we were discussing," Wesley began but Angel had already
bounded up the stairs. Anymore talk of Fred's bathroom habits and he was going to feel too much like one of the girls.
He made his way to Fred's room. He had tried to coax her out of it many times only to have her laugh nervously and promise that next time she really would come out. Letting the others in was definitely an improvement.
As he came nearer, the familiar aroma of taco sauce met his nose. Yet another of the many things he needed to work on with her.
Much to his surprise, Fred's door was open. Angel poked his head in. She was nowhere to be seen. The door to her bathroom was closed.
"Fred?" he called out to her.
"Angel?" came her muffled reply from behind the bathroom door.
He came in, stepping over discarded taco boxes. "What's going on in there? You've been in there a long time."
Before he could reach her bathroom Fred popped out and placed herself between him and the door. "Why? What have you heard?" she asked breathlessly with a smile that told him what the rest of her body language said: She was hiding something.
"Only that you've been spending a lot of time in there," he said with a concern that caused her face to melt with guilt. "What are you doing in there?"
For a moment an emotional battle began to take place inside Fred. She had a great desire to say that she wasn't doing anything but that feeling was losing the fight. Her gratitude towards him as her rescuer (among many other unforeseen feelings she had for him) made the prospect of lying to him actually painful. Finally honesty won out. She bit her bottom lip and looked up at him with eyes that threatened to fill with tears. "Promise you won't get mad?" she asked in a tiny voice.
"Promise," he replied automatically.
The worst thing he could imagine involved her dismantling the bathroom tile by accursed tile. She had already established her dislike for them and he supposed that they held tape about as well as they held ink. They had no use for her besides looking pretty and Fred probably cared little for aesthetics.
"Okay," she answered, pushing her glasses back up on her nose. She looked back down as she took a side step away from the door. Her glasses slid down again. "I guess I can show you."
As Angel stepped towards it, she flung herself in front of it again. "There's something I should tell you first," she said hastily.
"What is it?" he asked summoning a store of patience he had reserved only for her.
Fred became unusually serious. She looked down at a spot on her floor only she could see. "Before I ended up in Pylea, I was really smart."
"You still are," Angel interrupted.
She glanced up at him briefly with a nervous smile. "Thanks," she said sweetly, "but in Pylea so much of it got...."
"Lost?" he offered.
"Locked away," she decided.
These words satisfied her. They described her situation so perfectly that she fell silent for a moment. Both of them were quiet.
Finally she looked up at him again with seriousness, with honesty and with a plea. "I want it back," she whispered. "I made something that I thought would help me."
This time she didn't step aside. She opened the door herself.
As Angel entered the bathroom he found that the ceramic tiles were surprisingly untouched. The room seemed to be lit with a warm pinkish glow that came from the bathtub. He assumed that she had lit candles but as he looked closer he saw there were no candles.
No candles.
The light came from the water within the tub itself.
"What have you done?" he heard himself ask.
Fred crouched down on the floor next to the tub. "I made a perflecting pool," she said softly. She blew softly across the top of the water. It shimmered at the touch of her breath and images began forming just beneath its surface.
Angel stepped forward to see the images but they moved quickly. Just as he would begin to make out Pylea, the water would ripple and the scene would be replaced by something else and then less than a moment later something different.
Fred looked up at him with worry. "You promised you wouldn't get mad."
"I'm not mad. I just don't know--" he began. He lost track of his thoughts. The shifting images of Fred's pool mesmerized him. "How did you do this?"
She stuck out her arm and pointed at the sink. The tiles may not have held ink but she had found a way to write on the mirrors. The words she had written looked familiar. Like the ones they had used to open the portal home from Pylea, these words had no vowels. Angel knew immediately they had the same source.
Fred guessed what he was thinking. "I had heard of perflecting pools in Pylea. I knew what they could do, so when we had the books I saw how to make them."
Angel understood at once what she meant by 'locked away'. "You memorized this?" he marveled.
She nodded without her usual smile. "They work very much like the portals, except they're not a door...or a window," she added with a nervous tremor to her voice. "They're more like a television, a transmission from another place, maybe even another time. Showing us things we can't see. Like the insides of people's heads. At first I thought I could use it to sort things out. You know," she smacked her hand lightly on her forehead, "up here."
She pulled herself up to sit on the tub's edge. She raked her fingers gently across the surface of the water. The images flickered away and the water became still once more. "Then I realized that it could help more than just me."
Angel moved closer to her. The water spooked him but the idea that Fred made this by herself spooked him more. He had thought of her as fragile, a harmless victim of a cruel world but now he saw a Fred that no one saw before. A Fred that could wield unimaginable power.
What else was locked away inside her?
"Who were you thinking of?" he asked.
"At first I thought of your friend Cordelia. You're always worried about her visions and what happens to her. I thought maybe I could transfer them to the pool." She suddenly fell silent again.
"I'm sensing a 'but' here," he said quietly, prompting her.
"I forgot that these things often have a mind of their own," she told him.
"What are you saying?" he asked, hoping he wouldn't regret the answer.
Fred looked up at him finally and this time she did have tears in her eyes. "It's you, Angel," she said softly, taking hold of his hand. "It wants to help you." She pulled his hand gently to bring him closer to the pool. "Just blow on the water. It'll show you."
Angel looked to her for guidance. She seemed inexplicably sad which made him hesitate but somewhere behind that was hope. She said that it would help him. Fred trusted it and he trusted her.
Still holding her hand, he blew on the water.
As with her breath, its surface reacted instantly to his subtle touch. It shimmered with distorted reflections like a mirror being carried through a house. Unlike Fred's images, the water began to settle on one significant picture of a place.
Before him materialized a place of shadows and darkness with a singular source of white light coming from above to rain down on a mass of people. The people wandered without purpose, without direction. Some bumped into each other without notice or acknowledgement. Angel thought they looked like sleepwalkers. Their minds somewhere else while their bodies walked alone.
No, that wasn't quite right. In fact, the opposite was true.
Fred had slipped away from him, stepping back to leave him alone with his visions.
Angel's mouth opened to ask her about what he was seeing but the words never found their way out. He spotted someone in the mass of people, a hint of something deeply familiar locked his eyes and his thoughts on the solitary figure.
"Buffy," he whispered.
Standing against the wall with her arms wrapped tightly around herself for comfort, Fred nodded unseen.
She didn't want to hide the pool from them. She hid this. This sighting. This revelation. Pools were tricky emotional creatures. When she first saw this, it took her three days just to make sure that the intentions were honorable. She used another seven simply trying to figure out what it meant. She had wanted more time before she told anyone. She didn't yet know why or how but with trembling words she said what she did know.
"I know where she is, Angel," she told him. "If you give me some time. I think I can bring her back."
End of chapter one.
Chapter two will bring a small contingency from Sunnydale and some revelations that Angel won't want to hear.
Author's note: This is my first attempt at fanfiction. Be kind but honest.
"Locked Away"
When he came to the hotel that evening he discovered Cordy and Wesley bent
over opposite sides of the reception desk. They weren't busy at work. Even without the proverbial water cooler, Angel could tell that they were gossiping.
The most tell-tale sign of this was their reaction to his entrance. Their heads sprang up and away from each other so forcibly to the sound of his footsteps, he would have thought they had heard an explosion.
"Hi Angel!" Cordy beamed more loudly than necessary.
"What's going on?" he asked softly obviously indicating their curious behavior. He had hoped that by now they would be less obsessed with his mourning.
Wesley turned away and tried to appear productive by picking up some of
Cordy's invoices. "Nothing unusual," he muttered.
Whether she had crumpled under his scrutiny or she just couldn't stand the idea of not talking about it anymore, Angel didn't know. "It's Fred," Cordy suddenly blurted out.
"Is there something wrong with her?" he asked with sudden concern.
Cordy couldn't fight back the sarcasm. "You mean besides the fact that she hasn't left her room in three months and her diet subsists solely of tacos?"
Angel replied with an appropriate stare causing the corner of her mouth to spasm upwards in a smirk.
Wesley abandoned the pretense of the invoices and rejoined them. "She seems to be spending an inordinate amount of time in her bathroom," he said with a sigh to indicate that he thought they were probably making a big deal out of nothing.
Angel shrugged. He felt relief to know that for once the whispering wasn't about him. "That's it?" he asked. "She was running out of wall space. Maybe she's started writing in there."
Wesley shook his head. "She can't."
"Remember about how she was griping about the ceramic tiles?" Cordy
elaborated. "They don't hold the ink."
"Yeah," Angel nodded, remembering vaguely an earlier discussion concerning
Fred's dislike of the tiles. "That's why I got her the notebooks. I was hoping she'd start writing in those."
"And she has," Wesley added.
"Only now she tapes the pages up on the walls when she's done," Cordy
continued. "I guess it's still an improvement."
"Lately though whenever any of us have gone up to her room she always seems to be busy in her bathroom," Wesley explained.
Cordy's brow furrowed and her lips curved into a frown. " You'd think with all the time she spends in there she'd come out looking cleaner."
Angel shot her another look which she didn't catch. "Alright," he sighed. "I'll go up there and see what 's going on."
"That's just what we were discussing," Wesley began but Angel had already
bounded up the stairs. Anymore talk of Fred's bathroom habits and he was going to feel too much like one of the girls.
He made his way to Fred's room. He had tried to coax her out of it many times only to have her laugh nervously and promise that next time she really would come out. Letting the others in was definitely an improvement.
As he came nearer, the familiar aroma of taco sauce met his nose. Yet another of the many things he needed to work on with her.
Much to his surprise, Fred's door was open. Angel poked his head in. She was nowhere to be seen. The door to her bathroom was closed.
"Fred?" he called out to her.
"Angel?" came her muffled reply from behind the bathroom door.
He came in, stepping over discarded taco boxes. "What's going on in there? You've been in there a long time."
Before he could reach her bathroom Fred popped out and placed herself between him and the door. "Why? What have you heard?" she asked breathlessly with a smile that told him what the rest of her body language said: She was hiding something.
"Only that you've been spending a lot of time in there," he said with a concern that caused her face to melt with guilt. "What are you doing in there?"
For a moment an emotional battle began to take place inside Fred. She had a great desire to say that she wasn't doing anything but that feeling was losing the fight. Her gratitude towards him as her rescuer (among many other unforeseen feelings she had for him) made the prospect of lying to him actually painful. Finally honesty won out. She bit her bottom lip and looked up at him with eyes that threatened to fill with tears. "Promise you won't get mad?" she asked in a tiny voice.
"Promise," he replied automatically.
The worst thing he could imagine involved her dismantling the bathroom tile by accursed tile. She had already established her dislike for them and he supposed that they held tape about as well as they held ink. They had no use for her besides looking pretty and Fred probably cared little for aesthetics.
"Okay," she answered, pushing her glasses back up on her nose. She looked back down as she took a side step away from the door. Her glasses slid down again. "I guess I can show you."
As Angel stepped towards it, she flung herself in front of it again. "There's something I should tell you first," she said hastily.
"What is it?" he asked summoning a store of patience he had reserved only for her.
Fred became unusually serious. She looked down at a spot on her floor only she could see. "Before I ended up in Pylea, I was really smart."
"You still are," Angel interrupted.
She glanced up at him briefly with a nervous smile. "Thanks," she said sweetly, "but in Pylea so much of it got...."
"Lost?" he offered.
"Locked away," she decided.
These words satisfied her. They described her situation so perfectly that she fell silent for a moment. Both of them were quiet.
Finally she looked up at him again with seriousness, with honesty and with a plea. "I want it back," she whispered. "I made something that I thought would help me."
This time she didn't step aside. She opened the door herself.
As Angel entered the bathroom he found that the ceramic tiles were surprisingly untouched. The room seemed to be lit with a warm pinkish glow that came from the bathtub. He assumed that she had lit candles but as he looked closer he saw there were no candles.
No candles.
The light came from the water within the tub itself.
"What have you done?" he heard himself ask.
Fred crouched down on the floor next to the tub. "I made a perflecting pool," she said softly. She blew softly across the top of the water. It shimmered at the touch of her breath and images began forming just beneath its surface.
Angel stepped forward to see the images but they moved quickly. Just as he would begin to make out Pylea, the water would ripple and the scene would be replaced by something else and then less than a moment later something different.
Fred looked up at him with worry. "You promised you wouldn't get mad."
"I'm not mad. I just don't know--" he began. He lost track of his thoughts. The shifting images of Fred's pool mesmerized him. "How did you do this?"
She stuck out her arm and pointed at the sink. The tiles may not have held ink but she had found a way to write on the mirrors. The words she had written looked familiar. Like the ones they had used to open the portal home from Pylea, these words had no vowels. Angel knew immediately they had the same source.
Fred guessed what he was thinking. "I had heard of perflecting pools in Pylea. I knew what they could do, so when we had the books I saw how to make them."
Angel understood at once what she meant by 'locked away'. "You memorized this?" he marveled.
She nodded without her usual smile. "They work very much like the portals, except they're not a door...or a window," she added with a nervous tremor to her voice. "They're more like a television, a transmission from another place, maybe even another time. Showing us things we can't see. Like the insides of people's heads. At first I thought I could use it to sort things out. You know," she smacked her hand lightly on her forehead, "up here."
She pulled herself up to sit on the tub's edge. She raked her fingers gently across the surface of the water. The images flickered away and the water became still once more. "Then I realized that it could help more than just me."
Angel moved closer to her. The water spooked him but the idea that Fred made this by herself spooked him more. He had thought of her as fragile, a harmless victim of a cruel world but now he saw a Fred that no one saw before. A Fred that could wield unimaginable power.
What else was locked away inside her?
"Who were you thinking of?" he asked.
"At first I thought of your friend Cordelia. You're always worried about her visions and what happens to her. I thought maybe I could transfer them to the pool." She suddenly fell silent again.
"I'm sensing a 'but' here," he said quietly, prompting her.
"I forgot that these things often have a mind of their own," she told him.
"What are you saying?" he asked, hoping he wouldn't regret the answer.
Fred looked up at him finally and this time she did have tears in her eyes. "It's you, Angel," she said softly, taking hold of his hand. "It wants to help you." She pulled his hand gently to bring him closer to the pool. "Just blow on the water. It'll show you."
Angel looked to her for guidance. She seemed inexplicably sad which made him hesitate but somewhere behind that was hope. She said that it would help him. Fred trusted it and he trusted her.
Still holding her hand, he blew on the water.
As with her breath, its surface reacted instantly to his subtle touch. It shimmered with distorted reflections like a mirror being carried through a house. Unlike Fred's images, the water began to settle on one significant picture of a place.
Before him materialized a place of shadows and darkness with a singular source of white light coming from above to rain down on a mass of people. The people wandered without purpose, without direction. Some bumped into each other without notice or acknowledgement. Angel thought they looked like sleepwalkers. Their minds somewhere else while their bodies walked alone.
No, that wasn't quite right. In fact, the opposite was true.
Fred had slipped away from him, stepping back to leave him alone with his visions.
Angel's mouth opened to ask her about what he was seeing but the words never found their way out. He spotted someone in the mass of people, a hint of something deeply familiar locked his eyes and his thoughts on the solitary figure.
"Buffy," he whispered.
Standing against the wall with her arms wrapped tightly around herself for comfort, Fred nodded unseen.
She didn't want to hide the pool from them. She hid this. This sighting. This revelation. Pools were tricky emotional creatures. When she first saw this, it took her three days just to make sure that the intentions were honorable. She used another seven simply trying to figure out what it meant. She had wanted more time before she told anyone. She didn't yet know why or how but with trembling words she said what she did know.
"I know where she is, Angel," she told him. "If you give me some time. I think I can bring her back."
End of chapter one.
Chapter two will bring a small contingency from Sunnydale and some revelations that Angel won't want to hear.
