---
Isolation
---
--- Part Four ---
It was the usual thing. No point in even listening, really. Most fulfilled prophecies are pretty much the same, when you think about it.
Chosen One, blah blah. Big battle, blah blah. Much striving, blah blah. Dying-and-Living, and souls and the gift of a human lifespan...
Blah. Blah.
It was when the words 'Favored of the Powers' popped up that he started contracting a severe headache.
So he'd done what's generally expected in such circumstances, and gathered his close friends and evil, clipboard weilding associates in a conference room with him, to discuss recent and intruiging events. Many of which, of course, involved declaring amazing revelations of broad scope that pretty much tore apart everything that made his existence even remotely tangible, noteworthy, or otherwise bearable.
He might have burst out laughing, in loud, crazed seizures, if he weren't as good at holding back what he really felt and thought.
He sat in his ash brown, $1,250 Aaron chair, and folded his hands neatly on the walnut table. He thought Spike would have made some sort of comment about that, if he hadn't left him at the Hyperion. This was best done out of his presence. He wouldn't have to look at him that way. And he wanted to keep him out of Wolfram and Hart's direct gaze, at least until they knew exactly what was going on. And what the firm had to gain or lose by it.
It was Fred, in her pretty little smock dress and braided hair, leaning forward attentively with bright eyes, who turned to him first with some kind of understanding.
"If this is all true... then-- then the prophcies are fulfilled now. The battle they spoke of-- is it really over...?" she said, turning to look him in the eyes, "Oh Angel, are you allright?"
He looked at her a moment blankly, that slight pause in his smooth, even voice. As if vaguely surprised by the question
"Fine," he said, "I'm fine."
"Maybe," she said, "Maybe, Angel... we should call Buffy?"
He stood up, heading toward the office door.
"No. We should wait until we know what we're dealing with before we pull her out of the hellmouth again," he responded. As he walked out the door, he continued in a calmly casual tone.
"I think we've covered everything we have at the moment. I'm going out for a while."
Fred would notice, later, that he'd taken his favorite axe along with him.
---
Fred would also notice, as she walked down the street in the sunlight, enjoying the sound of the passing cars, that she suddenly took great satisfaction in Doing for Herself, as her mother used to call it.
`A woman's got to learn to Do for Herself in this world, Winifred,' she'd say, that certain variety of domestic wisdom in her voice, `You'll be wise never to forget that.'
She'd started out cared for by loving parents. Being cared for by less than loving lawyers was starting to unsettle her in ways she was trying to avoid thinking of.
Need information on a demonic language or the history of an ancient cabal? Pick up the phone. Fancy a trip to Athens? The phone. Nice iced Chai with just enough cinnamon and not so much sugar that the ginger won't leave your tongue with that pleasant little tingle? The device you needed was sitting there, in its sleek black cradle, the line connecting to her assistants at the slightest touch.
She'd almost expected a little card on her desk,when she first stepped into her knew quarters. 'Welcome to Your Home From Home, it'd read, like Number Six in The Prisoner had recieved on his arrival. The welcoming, threatening greeting-- the perfect illusion of freedom which she was starting to wonder if didn't just hide some iron claws under the surface.
Doing for Herself, as her mother had called it, made her happy now. Yes. So today, she didn't pick up the phone to order up the particular volume of trans-dimensional theoretical physics she was interested in thumbing through. You know. For fun.
Instead she fired up her sleek little laptop and scared up the location of a copy at the library, to which she was headed. Or, she would be headed to, after her detour.
After all, she wasn't *expressly* told not to. Angel's look when he said he'd taken this Spike to the Hyperion sort of implied he was to be left alone there. But even if he'd downright ordered it, she doubted she would have viewed his conviction with authority.
She was curious. She wanted to meet this man who had been twice dead.
So she detoured down the famililar street, where she'd lived and knew the cracks in the sidewalks and the names of the shops and the particular swaying of the tree limbs. Because she was curious. And because it was oddly liberating to feel that she was going where no assistants fetched or carried, or watched her with their observant, waiting eyes.
---
Angel dropped into the sewer walkways, the famliar smells of dampness, rats, and waste washing over him like an acrid flow of water. And he began his swift and silent stalking, in the darkness that wasn't darkness to him. No, because, he was a vampire.
He could see in the dark places.
---
He was standing in her old room.
She'd had little trouble finding him. It was the only room in the empty first wing with the door open. It looked strangely hollow with all her clothes and books and the other little pieces of her life moved away. The brilliant, late summer sun glowed through the window, covering the walls and wood floors with natural light. Dust motes floated in the sunbeams, and a sense of stillness filled the air. It felt like her grandmother's attic on a Saturday afternoon when she could rifle through the old photo albums that smelled like cedar from being stored in the chest up there that was also full of quilts. It had that quiet, settled quality. And in that moment, she decided she missed her old room.
And now a handsome man stood in the middle of it-- or a man who might have been handsome under the heavy swell of bruising. His right arm was in a sling, and his sandy brown hair was falling in loose, wild ringlets over his face. He was standing there, leaning on a crutch, and looked like he hadn't really moved from the spot for hours. He was wearing some of Charles' clothes that he had left behind, and held a cloth dust-cover in his hands.
Silently, staring straight at the wall and into the full length mirror he'd removed the cover from.
She walked up behind him, and he must have known she was there, because he didn't start at her approach.
"I bet that's weird for you, isn't it?" she said kindly, a broad and somewhat nervous smile on her face, "I mean, so long without one of those reflections and now, here it is! I can't even think of it. It all must be strange for you. A lot of strange things happen around here. Well, not that I'm at all used to things like exactly like this... even though I did get pulled into another dimension once and it was strange too-- and I'm Fred, by the way-- I'm a friend of Angel's--"
And she would have continued the loosely constructed tirade, but the man had suddenly burst out laughing.
Quietly at first, his mouth curving into a sly smile and the laughter suddenly bursting out of him like it had been welling there for days. Wild gales of kind laughter that echoed slightly against the walls of the mostly empty room.
And as he tried to regain his composure, and failed, Fred took a step back. Their figures were echoed in the mirror before them. Hers looked slightly confused, and a little hurt. She wasn't trying to be funny, after all...
He seemed to read this from her, looked up at her reflection, standing there in the mirror beside his image, and spoke to her in a cadence she sensed was uniquely his own. Something he took pride in, had constructed from scratch. An accent to fit what he'd wanted to be, and now had become like some tattoo you got in a drunken spring break. Just natural, there for life.
"Don't trouble yourself, sweetness," he said, smiling broadly once more, "It's not you, it's just I used to dye my hair... seems kind of ridiculous now, can you believe it...?"
He turned to the mirror again, walked closer to it, and touched his brow with his fingers. Sunbeams streamed through the blinds, dust motes sparkling through them as his voice echoed against the bare walls and floorboards.
"And it's just this, here," he said, his tone building as if to the punchline of a joke, "I mean, the scar's still there. Why would my hair go all natural-like and the scar still remain? Doesn't make any sense..."
And he looked at her again with that bright, disarming smile. As if he found countless things in the world-- details and situations and concepts and even serious things like duties and birthrights-- like he found all those things utterly and completely funny in ways that had never occured to him that they could be funny before.
"Ah well," he continued, shrugging it off and turning from the mirror to face her, "Can't trouble with all the bleeding things that don't make sense or our brains would turn 'round backwards."
She'd been through enough to know that was true. And just like that, she decided she liked him. He had a natural warmth about him, something hinting that he knew something that no one else did. That he'd seen something so bright and amazing and complete that he couldn't help but laugh at himself out loud.
"I was going to stop by the library, it's not too far from here," she said, "If you think you can handle a little walking, maybe you'd want to get out, come with me?"
And he looked at her,a slight, kind smile on his face,his blue eyes shining in the softly filtered sunlight.
---
A spatter of blood sprayed across Angel's face in the subterannean darkness. The neck separated from the shoulders in a swift swoop, flying backwards and striking against the wet bricks.
The last of them collapsed to ash in the remnants of their nest. They lived in careless filth that reeked even in the sewerways, the skin magazines congealing on the wet floor and sticking together, forever sealed to the concrete. A single exposed bulb swung overhead, and he lowered his axe. It had become eerily quiet in this tiny, underground recess of the world. And for a moment, like when he awoke from deep slumber, he was just himself, coasting on the adrenaline and the exultant cry of violence in his heart.
And then, the moment faded, and he just felt sadness.
A wave of it that hit him full force so that it would have knocked him over if he hadn't leaned against the wall. The aching, hollow kind of loneliness that strikes sometimes when you hear the voice of a dead loved one in another room, and it's really just the weatherman on the radio and you were mistaken. You were mistaken. Or just a mistake.
A cosmic blunder. Pulled along on the wheel, because there was always an order to things. And this was his order. Kill.
And he bowed his head, looking at his dark shoes resting on top of the slimy coating of damp paper. Some airbrushed girl smiled up at him, on the back of a horse. Puffy white, children's mural clouds crowded the landscape behind her, stained a bizarre shade of rusty grey by the moisture on the floor and the remnants of the vampire's meals that tainted them.
"That's the great thing about vampires," Lilah said, stepping into the makeshift, soiled room.
Immediately he sank into the mask of calm he so commonly wore. It fell over his features like a blackout curtain.
He stood up straight and looked her in the eye.
"They don't leave anything behind. Just ash. Blows away mostly. No cleanup necessary. Makes it all easier. I mean, who's to know if you rip a few a part just because it's, well... what's the word?"
She paused for dramatic effect.
"Oh yeah, that's it-- Fun."
He turned from her, brow slightly furrowed.
"By the way," she said, eyes smiling their chilled smiles, "You got something on there..."
She gestured to his cheek, where the spatter of blood had become a spatter of ash, crumbling and already falling away from him. He reached up absently and brushed it away. He looked at his fingertips, grey and ghostly with the fine powder.
"I do so enjoy our talks," he said quietly. And she smiled at him.
"I like to think we have a special connection," she said.
---
Fred held the book in her hand, its clean, green binding shining in the light streaming through the tall, leaded glass windows. She slipped it into her bag, and pushed on the brasswork door handles, and the heavy oak swung out onto the busy downtown street, so incongruous with the quiet, three story stone building behind her. The afternoon heat washed over her like an embrace as she flitted delicately down the stairs, craning her neck all the while to see where Spike had gone to.
There were a series of fountains lining the road, here. He had wanted to watch them, watch the people sitting around them on the patches of green grass. Somewhere, across the street, a college student sat with a guitar, singing:
`I hear the soft breathing of the girl that I love, as she lies here beside me asleep with the night. And her hair in a fine mist floats on my pillow, reflecting the glow of the gentle moonlight...'
After talking to him all afternoon, hearing the things that had happened, she thought she might just call Buffy, no matter what Angel thought of it... she didn't know her well, though she'd stopped at the Hyperion for a while after their most recent apocalypse-- but she thought she'd want to be informed. And the voice floated over the noise of the crowds and the cars, distantly echoing as she walked down the stairwell.
`She is soft, she is warm but my heart remains heavy, as I watch as her breasts gently rise, gently fall. For I know at the first light of dawn I'll be leaving, and tonight will be all I have left to recall...'
She scanned with her eyes where there were larger fountains, dividing the four lane roads swelling with cars, resting on the median strips and throwing crystalline water into the air.
And she shrieked out loud as she saw the cars swerving out of the way of the lone figure, strolling up through the lanes as if it was a woodland trail. He had a pronounced limp as he moved slowly forward into traffic, as if he wanted to compound his injuries, and he was staring at something in the side of a modernist skyscraper, at the end of the stretch, where it divided into two. The building reflected the sun and the blue sky, the windows warped into a swooping curve up to the soaring hight of the tower.
She dropped her bag, and ran down the stairs, the sound of blaring horns surrounding her as she bolted across the grass, pushing through crowds of pedestrians to the street.
"Spike!" she cried out. The cars were swerving out of his path, and he ignored them. He had his head tilted to the side, his eyes intensley focused.
She paused a moment at the curb, and with a nervous wimper, darted into the oncoming traffic after him.
Dodging a bald man in a black convertable, she ran forward, her tooled leather sandles rapping against the dotted lane line. The bald man called some choice words over his shoulder, but she was too focused on reaching her companion to hear them.
"Spike!" she called out, rushing forward and grabbing his arm, "What on earth are you doing?!?!"
He turned to her as if they had met by chance in a supermarket line, and not in the middle of a busy road.
"What'd you think I was going to do?" he asked, calmly, as if he couldn't think of a reason she'd be upset, or if she was, that it must be a joke, "Die?"
"Well maybe," she said, shaken and somewhat annoyed, "That sometimes happens when we take strolls on main traffic areteries..."
"But look at it."
He gestured up at the fountain on the corner of the tall coorperate tower, to which he'd been approaching. The beads of water shot up high overhead and reflected in the convex curving of the mirrored glass.
And they were reflected there, too. The pair of them, on the road, it seemed like hundreds of times, at slightly different angles, all along the glass.
He stepped onto the curb, and she let out a breath she didn't realize she'd been holding. Now they were relatively safe from being flattened by enraged motorists.
Yet he was still staring at their images, cast in the beads of water, which threw themselves up just inches away from them and the carved granite base on which they were standing.
He was smiling into the water, once more. They could smell it, cold and fresh against the hot summer light. Always moving across the stone and falling through the air in heavy beads and delicate mist.
And to her surprise, he gently reached out and took her hand. It was a calm, almost matter-of-fact gesture. He looked at it a moment, as if it was somehow fascinating in a way Fred couldn't understand.
And then he tugged firmly on her arm, throwing his weight back, and pulled her with him into the fountain, and suddenly they were drenched with a shock of cold water.
And she wasn't sure if he was laughing, again, but she realize that she was. The sound surprised her even as she did it. The world was white frothy water and the whirling speed of headlights and the glass and the sunshine, and it was all perfect and cold with wet and hot with sun at the same time.
Even with everthing that had happened-- even through all the warped pain they had suffered, somehow, the part of herself that was really herself just rose up out of it and looked through the blazing afternoon with something like pure joy.
---
Angel turned a corner into another sewer tunnel that looked exactly like the last. But he knew where he was. And he knew he couldn't go back yet. He just had to keep going, until he could break this cycle of grief like he could break the bodies of the soulless monsters who lived in the shadow worlds below, away from men.
Dust clung to his clothes, and the stink of the sewers covered him. And as he kicked through a boarded up doorway and into another crowded nest, he thought, in some distant part of his conciousness, that he might never be able to get the stain clean.
--
--- Part Four ---
It was the usual thing. No point in even listening, really. Most fulfilled prophecies are pretty much the same, when you think about it.
Chosen One, blah blah. Big battle, blah blah. Much striving, blah blah. Dying-and-Living, and souls and the gift of a human lifespan...
Blah. Blah.
It was when the words 'Favored of the Powers' popped up that he started contracting a severe headache.
So he'd done what's generally expected in such circumstances, and gathered his close friends and evil, clipboard weilding associates in a conference room with him, to discuss recent and intruiging events. Many of which, of course, involved declaring amazing revelations of broad scope that pretty much tore apart everything that made his existence even remotely tangible, noteworthy, or otherwise bearable.
He might have burst out laughing, in loud, crazed seizures, if he weren't as good at holding back what he really felt and thought.
He sat in his ash brown, $1,250 Aaron chair, and folded his hands neatly on the walnut table. He thought Spike would have made some sort of comment about that, if he hadn't left him at the Hyperion. This was best done out of his presence. He wouldn't have to look at him that way. And he wanted to keep him out of Wolfram and Hart's direct gaze, at least until they knew exactly what was going on. And what the firm had to gain or lose by it.
It was Fred, in her pretty little smock dress and braided hair, leaning forward attentively with bright eyes, who turned to him first with some kind of understanding.
"If this is all true... then-- then the prophcies are fulfilled now. The battle they spoke of-- is it really over...?" she said, turning to look him in the eyes, "Oh Angel, are you allright?"
He looked at her a moment blankly, that slight pause in his smooth, even voice. As if vaguely surprised by the question
"Fine," he said, "I'm fine."
"Maybe," she said, "Maybe, Angel... we should call Buffy?"
He stood up, heading toward the office door.
"No. We should wait until we know what we're dealing with before we pull her out of the hellmouth again," he responded. As he walked out the door, he continued in a calmly casual tone.
"I think we've covered everything we have at the moment. I'm going out for a while."
Fred would notice, later, that he'd taken his favorite axe along with him.
---
Fred would also notice, as she walked down the street in the sunlight, enjoying the sound of the passing cars, that she suddenly took great satisfaction in Doing for Herself, as her mother used to call it.
`A woman's got to learn to Do for Herself in this world, Winifred,' she'd say, that certain variety of domestic wisdom in her voice, `You'll be wise never to forget that.'
She'd started out cared for by loving parents. Being cared for by less than loving lawyers was starting to unsettle her in ways she was trying to avoid thinking of.
Need information on a demonic language or the history of an ancient cabal? Pick up the phone. Fancy a trip to Athens? The phone. Nice iced Chai with just enough cinnamon and not so much sugar that the ginger won't leave your tongue with that pleasant little tingle? The device you needed was sitting there, in its sleek black cradle, the line connecting to her assistants at the slightest touch.
She'd almost expected a little card on her desk,when she first stepped into her knew quarters. 'Welcome to Your Home From Home, it'd read, like Number Six in The Prisoner had recieved on his arrival. The welcoming, threatening greeting-- the perfect illusion of freedom which she was starting to wonder if didn't just hide some iron claws under the surface.
Doing for Herself, as her mother had called it, made her happy now. Yes. So today, she didn't pick up the phone to order up the particular volume of trans-dimensional theoretical physics she was interested in thumbing through. You know. For fun.
Instead she fired up her sleek little laptop and scared up the location of a copy at the library, to which she was headed. Or, she would be headed to, after her detour.
After all, she wasn't *expressly* told not to. Angel's look when he said he'd taken this Spike to the Hyperion sort of implied he was to be left alone there. But even if he'd downright ordered it, she doubted she would have viewed his conviction with authority.
She was curious. She wanted to meet this man who had been twice dead.
So she detoured down the famililar street, where she'd lived and knew the cracks in the sidewalks and the names of the shops and the particular swaying of the tree limbs. Because she was curious. And because it was oddly liberating to feel that she was going where no assistants fetched or carried, or watched her with their observant, waiting eyes.
---
Angel dropped into the sewer walkways, the famliar smells of dampness, rats, and waste washing over him like an acrid flow of water. And he began his swift and silent stalking, in the darkness that wasn't darkness to him. No, because, he was a vampire.
He could see in the dark places.
---
He was standing in her old room.
She'd had little trouble finding him. It was the only room in the empty first wing with the door open. It looked strangely hollow with all her clothes and books and the other little pieces of her life moved away. The brilliant, late summer sun glowed through the window, covering the walls and wood floors with natural light. Dust motes floated in the sunbeams, and a sense of stillness filled the air. It felt like her grandmother's attic on a Saturday afternoon when she could rifle through the old photo albums that smelled like cedar from being stored in the chest up there that was also full of quilts. It had that quiet, settled quality. And in that moment, she decided she missed her old room.
And now a handsome man stood in the middle of it-- or a man who might have been handsome under the heavy swell of bruising. His right arm was in a sling, and his sandy brown hair was falling in loose, wild ringlets over his face. He was standing there, leaning on a crutch, and looked like he hadn't really moved from the spot for hours. He was wearing some of Charles' clothes that he had left behind, and held a cloth dust-cover in his hands.
Silently, staring straight at the wall and into the full length mirror he'd removed the cover from.
She walked up behind him, and he must have known she was there, because he didn't start at her approach.
"I bet that's weird for you, isn't it?" she said kindly, a broad and somewhat nervous smile on her face, "I mean, so long without one of those reflections and now, here it is! I can't even think of it. It all must be strange for you. A lot of strange things happen around here. Well, not that I'm at all used to things like exactly like this... even though I did get pulled into another dimension once and it was strange too-- and I'm Fred, by the way-- I'm a friend of Angel's--"
And she would have continued the loosely constructed tirade, but the man had suddenly burst out laughing.
Quietly at first, his mouth curving into a sly smile and the laughter suddenly bursting out of him like it had been welling there for days. Wild gales of kind laughter that echoed slightly against the walls of the mostly empty room.
And as he tried to regain his composure, and failed, Fred took a step back. Their figures were echoed in the mirror before them. Hers looked slightly confused, and a little hurt. She wasn't trying to be funny, after all...
He seemed to read this from her, looked up at her reflection, standing there in the mirror beside his image, and spoke to her in a cadence she sensed was uniquely his own. Something he took pride in, had constructed from scratch. An accent to fit what he'd wanted to be, and now had become like some tattoo you got in a drunken spring break. Just natural, there for life.
"Don't trouble yourself, sweetness," he said, smiling broadly once more, "It's not you, it's just I used to dye my hair... seems kind of ridiculous now, can you believe it...?"
He turned to the mirror again, walked closer to it, and touched his brow with his fingers. Sunbeams streamed through the blinds, dust motes sparkling through them as his voice echoed against the bare walls and floorboards.
"And it's just this, here," he said, his tone building as if to the punchline of a joke, "I mean, the scar's still there. Why would my hair go all natural-like and the scar still remain? Doesn't make any sense..."
And he looked at her again with that bright, disarming smile. As if he found countless things in the world-- details and situations and concepts and even serious things like duties and birthrights-- like he found all those things utterly and completely funny in ways that had never occured to him that they could be funny before.
"Ah well," he continued, shrugging it off and turning from the mirror to face her, "Can't trouble with all the bleeding things that don't make sense or our brains would turn 'round backwards."
She'd been through enough to know that was true. And just like that, she decided she liked him. He had a natural warmth about him, something hinting that he knew something that no one else did. That he'd seen something so bright and amazing and complete that he couldn't help but laugh at himself out loud.
"I was going to stop by the library, it's not too far from here," she said, "If you think you can handle a little walking, maybe you'd want to get out, come with me?"
And he looked at her,a slight, kind smile on his face,his blue eyes shining in the softly filtered sunlight.
---
A spatter of blood sprayed across Angel's face in the subterannean darkness. The neck separated from the shoulders in a swift swoop, flying backwards and striking against the wet bricks.
The last of them collapsed to ash in the remnants of their nest. They lived in careless filth that reeked even in the sewerways, the skin magazines congealing on the wet floor and sticking together, forever sealed to the concrete. A single exposed bulb swung overhead, and he lowered his axe. It had become eerily quiet in this tiny, underground recess of the world. And for a moment, like when he awoke from deep slumber, he was just himself, coasting on the adrenaline and the exultant cry of violence in his heart.
And then, the moment faded, and he just felt sadness.
A wave of it that hit him full force so that it would have knocked him over if he hadn't leaned against the wall. The aching, hollow kind of loneliness that strikes sometimes when you hear the voice of a dead loved one in another room, and it's really just the weatherman on the radio and you were mistaken. You were mistaken. Or just a mistake.
A cosmic blunder. Pulled along on the wheel, because there was always an order to things. And this was his order. Kill.
And he bowed his head, looking at his dark shoes resting on top of the slimy coating of damp paper. Some airbrushed girl smiled up at him, on the back of a horse. Puffy white, children's mural clouds crowded the landscape behind her, stained a bizarre shade of rusty grey by the moisture on the floor and the remnants of the vampire's meals that tainted them.
"That's the great thing about vampires," Lilah said, stepping into the makeshift, soiled room.
Immediately he sank into the mask of calm he so commonly wore. It fell over his features like a blackout curtain.
He stood up straight and looked her in the eye.
"They don't leave anything behind. Just ash. Blows away mostly. No cleanup necessary. Makes it all easier. I mean, who's to know if you rip a few a part just because it's, well... what's the word?"
She paused for dramatic effect.
"Oh yeah, that's it-- Fun."
He turned from her, brow slightly furrowed.
"By the way," she said, eyes smiling their chilled smiles, "You got something on there..."
She gestured to his cheek, where the spatter of blood had become a spatter of ash, crumbling and already falling away from him. He reached up absently and brushed it away. He looked at his fingertips, grey and ghostly with the fine powder.
"I do so enjoy our talks," he said quietly. And she smiled at him.
"I like to think we have a special connection," she said.
---
Fred held the book in her hand, its clean, green binding shining in the light streaming through the tall, leaded glass windows. She slipped it into her bag, and pushed on the brasswork door handles, and the heavy oak swung out onto the busy downtown street, so incongruous with the quiet, three story stone building behind her. The afternoon heat washed over her like an embrace as she flitted delicately down the stairs, craning her neck all the while to see where Spike had gone to.
There were a series of fountains lining the road, here. He had wanted to watch them, watch the people sitting around them on the patches of green grass. Somewhere, across the street, a college student sat with a guitar, singing:
`I hear the soft breathing of the girl that I love, as she lies here beside me asleep with the night. And her hair in a fine mist floats on my pillow, reflecting the glow of the gentle moonlight...'
After talking to him all afternoon, hearing the things that had happened, she thought she might just call Buffy, no matter what Angel thought of it... she didn't know her well, though she'd stopped at the Hyperion for a while after their most recent apocalypse-- but she thought she'd want to be informed. And the voice floated over the noise of the crowds and the cars, distantly echoing as she walked down the stairwell.
`She is soft, she is warm but my heart remains heavy, as I watch as her breasts gently rise, gently fall. For I know at the first light of dawn I'll be leaving, and tonight will be all I have left to recall...'
She scanned with her eyes where there were larger fountains, dividing the four lane roads swelling with cars, resting on the median strips and throwing crystalline water into the air.
And she shrieked out loud as she saw the cars swerving out of the way of the lone figure, strolling up through the lanes as if it was a woodland trail. He had a pronounced limp as he moved slowly forward into traffic, as if he wanted to compound his injuries, and he was staring at something in the side of a modernist skyscraper, at the end of the stretch, where it divided into two. The building reflected the sun and the blue sky, the windows warped into a swooping curve up to the soaring hight of the tower.
She dropped her bag, and ran down the stairs, the sound of blaring horns surrounding her as she bolted across the grass, pushing through crowds of pedestrians to the street.
"Spike!" she cried out. The cars were swerving out of his path, and he ignored them. He had his head tilted to the side, his eyes intensley focused.
She paused a moment at the curb, and with a nervous wimper, darted into the oncoming traffic after him.
Dodging a bald man in a black convertable, she ran forward, her tooled leather sandles rapping against the dotted lane line. The bald man called some choice words over his shoulder, but she was too focused on reaching her companion to hear them.
"Spike!" she called out, rushing forward and grabbing his arm, "What on earth are you doing?!?!"
He turned to her as if they had met by chance in a supermarket line, and not in the middle of a busy road.
"What'd you think I was going to do?" he asked, calmly, as if he couldn't think of a reason she'd be upset, or if she was, that it must be a joke, "Die?"
"Well maybe," she said, shaken and somewhat annoyed, "That sometimes happens when we take strolls on main traffic areteries..."
"But look at it."
He gestured up at the fountain on the corner of the tall coorperate tower, to which he'd been approaching. The beads of water shot up high overhead and reflected in the convex curving of the mirrored glass.
And they were reflected there, too. The pair of them, on the road, it seemed like hundreds of times, at slightly different angles, all along the glass.
He stepped onto the curb, and she let out a breath she didn't realize she'd been holding. Now they were relatively safe from being flattened by enraged motorists.
Yet he was still staring at their images, cast in the beads of water, which threw themselves up just inches away from them and the carved granite base on which they were standing.
He was smiling into the water, once more. They could smell it, cold and fresh against the hot summer light. Always moving across the stone and falling through the air in heavy beads and delicate mist.
And to her surprise, he gently reached out and took her hand. It was a calm, almost matter-of-fact gesture. He looked at it a moment, as if it was somehow fascinating in a way Fred couldn't understand.
And then he tugged firmly on her arm, throwing his weight back, and pulled her with him into the fountain, and suddenly they were drenched with a shock of cold water.
And she wasn't sure if he was laughing, again, but she realize that she was. The sound surprised her even as she did it. The world was white frothy water and the whirling speed of headlights and the glass and the sunshine, and it was all perfect and cold with wet and hot with sun at the same time.
Even with everthing that had happened-- even through all the warped pain they had suffered, somehow, the part of herself that was really herself just rose up out of it and looked through the blazing afternoon with something like pure joy.
---
Angel turned a corner into another sewer tunnel that looked exactly like the last. But he knew where he was. And he knew he couldn't go back yet. He just had to keep going, until he could break this cycle of grief like he could break the bodies of the soulless monsters who lived in the shadow worlds below, away from men.
Dust clung to his clothes, and the stink of the sewers covered him. And as he kicked through a boarded up doorway and into another crowded nest, he thought, in some distant part of his conciousness, that he might never be able to get the stain clean.
--