From the Depths
by Jaclyn // musicnotej@aol.com
11.23.03
Disclaimer: Not mine. Whedon's.
Timeline: Takes off from the middle of Cavalry. Sort of.
A/N: Hugs to Becky for the beta job. Shameless plug: visit her new Lilah/Stephanie Romanov message board at siren.smurl.net.
Feedback/constructive criticism is much appreciated.
*
Prologue
darkness, and the sound of a [thing] scampering around her ((her? what is 'her'? indistinct haze of pain, each cut on her body like alcohol: a slippery burn)) and[thing]knifeabdomenSTOPSTOPNO--
and she pushes up up up, forcing the knife in deeper, and the pain is so intense that she can finally, finally black out--
but [thing] squirms inside of her, whatever [thing] it is, and it's like every pore on her body is being violated from the inside out; even in unconsciousness there is no reprieve and it hurt hurt hurts
overload
*
we are bored
with
you,
[thing] tells her, and she is free.
*
Part I
They ignore her because when an unconscious woman is seen halfway under a dilapidated bench in a park with a shady reputation, the assumption is that she's either homeless or on crack. Given that the kind citizens of LA aren't particularly moved by either scenario, Lilah decides that her first lucid moment since Cordelia plunged her into a hell dimension shouldn't be wasted by trying to figure out exactly how long she's been lying here.
With that issue out of the way, all that's left to think about is how damn much everything aches. Her skin is flaming over insides that have been strained to the limit, and her throat is almost too raw to swallow past.
On second thought, lucidity? Not so appealing right now.
Lilah slips out of consciousness again, stumbling into a place where fear is as sharp and deadly as any other weapon. She is blind in the dream, and the fear slices her to shreds.
*
This time when she wakes up, she's on her stomach in a hospital bed, and there's a cord across her throat, suffocating her.
She does not know where she is, who she is, or why why why. Hands are rolling her over and oxygen rushes in--
Oxygen rushes in, and with it comes a distant clarity to everything that has happened. She stills.
"Oh," Lilah says, and brushes away the nurse's hands.
"How are you feeling, dear?"
Do not cry, Lilah tells herself. And she doesn't. "I need to go now."
"But, dear--"
"Thank you for everything!" she says, her voice sounding harsh from rushing. But she means it, means it with everything she has left, even as she's yanking the IV out of her arm and running like hell.
*
The pay phone looks sleeker than Lilah remembers. Like some municipal leader decided to upgrade to the corny tech-y look so many multimedia players favor.
Actually, a lot of things look sleeker. The hospital had possessed a kind of alien-space-race vibe too, come to think of it. But then she doesn't usually spend much time in this part of LA, so who knows.
She dials Wesley's number, and the small knot of fear [of denial] grows in her belly at the operator's clinical voice. "Your call cannot be completed. [beep] You have reached a number that no longer exists. [beep] Please try again."
Lightheaded, Lilah closes her eyes and scans her memory for another option, but all she comes up with is a telephone book full of people she can't call. Wolfram & Hart are out of the question. For all she knows, Gavin or some other good-for-nothing upstart has seized her position in Lilah's absence: stepped into her Pradas, for lack of a better metaphor. She does not particularly relish finding out how Gavin will repay her for years of belittling remarks and largely sincere threats.
Not to mention the not-so-unlikely possibility that the firm was behind her stint in hell from the beginning.
Lilah looks at the shiny new lines of the telephone and swallows hard. (The-- no, no, don't think about that now.) What she is about to do defies logic, but she dials.
There is a shakiness in her voice, which she hates but cannot eliminate when she whispers "Angel..." into the silver mouthpiece. There is still so much pain, so much fear, and it takes so much effort to repress what she refuses to--
"Hello? ...Hello?"
It does not sound like Angelus, gleeful and wickedly charming. Though it should be Angelus. But...but they re-ensouled him. Of course. The witch from Sunnydale, that little stick of a thing: she was supposed to be very capable--
"Hello? Listen, I can hear you breathing, I know you're still there. Just try not to move. I'm coming."
So much pain. So much fear. So much much much and she's not out of the woods yet--
"Angel," Lilah sighs; and passes out before she can give in the inevitable.
*
Angel managed to teach himself a few things after Cordelia-- well. No need to go there; there's nothing to be done now. But needless to say, he found Kate again, tentatively mended a few bridges, and talked her into giving him a few of the handier police gadgets. Like a signal tracker. The call originated a few blocks away from Mercy Hospital, which he drove by a moment ago. Almost there, he thinks to the nameless, faceless innocent (just like so many others whose meaningless lives he has restored, like a robot). Just hang on.
Something is nudging at him, some little detail niggling at his brain, saying that perhaps this case is different. That voice. It seemed so...familiar, once he peeled away all that broken emotion. A harder version of that voice--
Angel mentally shakes himself. He's gone over this a hundred times in his head and come to only one conclusion: this is pointless. But what else can he do? So he tracks and he drives and he saves and he unlives another day.
It's all very distant. He broods, but his heart's not in it. His soul's not really so into it anymore, either. He almost wants-- (does not really want anything, and that's the problem) wants to--
There. Mechanically, Angel steps out of the car. "Ma'am? Can you hear me? It's going to be all right..."
The heap on the floor half-wakes and says, voice very high and clear, some obscure quote about Angels rescuing her from Hell.
He is almost curious now. How did this woman know his name, anyway? And it feels nice, this moment of finally having some interest in his own actions. Kneeling by the bloodied body, he takes in the shredded clothes, the unnatural angles of bone, the fine spiderweb of tiny cuts like little explosions spread across every inch of her skin. Carefully reaches out a hand to brush matted, light brown hair away from even lighter eyes. Blinks.
And recognizes darkness.
"Lilah?!" Angel exclaims incredulously.
He is about to recoil in remembered disgust, but there is no more lucidity in her as she frets, shifting and twisting weakly on the pavement. Without her trademark cold calculation, there is no evil left in her either.
Still, it wasn't so long ago that she was feeding him his own child's blood, and of course there's that whole Wesley situation. In general, Lilah Morgan had done nothing but make his life even more hellish than it already was.
And now she is groaning mostly incoherently, probably abrading her back even further on the rough cement. "It burns," Lilah mumbles, and passes out again.
Burning. Angel knows how that feels. So even though it's Lilah, even though he should probably just leave her there to die, he moves her limp body carefully into the car and takes her home.
He misses his old life. And she is all that is left.
*
"Why are you doing this?" Lilah asks, apropos of nothing. Her eyes follow him warily as he roots through the closet, looking for a suitable replacement for the scraps of cloth that used to be Lilah's Italian business suit. "I just-- need to know. Is it that you want me cognizant when you drink from me? Or are you thinking I can maybe talk you up to Wes or something?"
Angel turns to her, and the expression in his eyes is truly eerie. It's at once deadened and sympathetic. "Wesley's dead, Lilah."
She rolls her eyes, feeling a wall come down in her mind, neatly dividing rationality from groundless belief. "No, he's not. Look." Lilah holds up her hand. "My manicure's barely grown out." And sure enough, only the faintest sliver of unpolished nail is visible beneath the dark red enamel. "I've only been gone a few days. Not enough time's passed for Wesley to--"
"You don't need me to explain this to you, Lilah," Angel says wearily, depositing the more conservative of Cordelia's pre-maternity outfits on the foot of the bed and indicating that she should choose. "You already know."
"Know what?" she retorts stubbornly, making no move toward the clothing. And it's amazing what the mind can do: amazing how she's known all along that this is not the world she left, amazing how she refused to go out into it, how she stayed here with Angel in the unusually silent hotel, just the two of them, and amazing how she found excuses for it all--"
"Lilah," he sighs.
She shakes her head resolutely. "We have a file this big on you, buster. Every psychological torture you've ever devised-- a detailed account of how you broke Drusilla-- I'm familiar with all of it. Don't think I don't know what you're doing!"
"I'm sorry, Lilah." He looks like he means it, which earns him a panicked glance from Lilah. "I haven't been able to really get over them either."
"Stop it," she says desperately. She cannot rebuild. Not again. Not after all she went through as a child, all she gave up as an adult, all she's fucking done to ensure--
Angel's shoulders curl in on himself. "You have to accept it, Lilah." But it's clear he hasn't. Angel hasn't been able to move on either. His own son is-- And Fred was unable to carry a pregnancy to term (though she and Wesley tried everything, the best doctors that money could buy), and Cordelia's brain shut down after twenty years in a coma. There are no children. They are all dead, and they've left nothing behind to sustain him.
"Get the hell away from me, you filthy, lying, demon bastard!" Lilah suddenly shouts, sitting bolt upright and trying to push him away. "You think you can break me? You think you can just--" But all this struggling is only reopening her wounds, and Angel wants so badly to just give up, to lap the blood from her body, to gnash his teeth and dig in deeper...
But he does not fight her, and as quickly as the fit began, it ends. Lilah sinks down into herself, curling the blanket around her shoulders, and tells him to get out. This time, wordlessly, he listens.
*
It's three more days before she opens her eyes in his presence. He leaves food by her bed twice a day -- though she rarely touches it -- and with his heightened senses, Angel knows her modulated breathing is just for show. But he doesn't call her on it.
She probably wishes she were sleeping, anyway. But all that pain comes at a price, and he imagines it must make it difficult for her to drift off. Angel starts leaving sleeping pills with the food, and those disappear, though the soup and bread that accompanied the drugs remain untouched.
It occurs to Angel that she could be hoarding them, waiting until there are enough to ensure a successful suicide.
He does not stop leaving the pills. Some days, he can only care so much.
*
But on the third day, she's sitting primly, fully dressed, on the edge of the bed. Waiting for him. When Angel opens the door, she stands up and asks him to tell her how he died.
*
Part II
Angel briefly thinks about lying, but what's the point, really? Wesley liked facts, straight and clean. He would not have wanted his final moments blotted and stained with lies.
"Slowly," Angel says finally, still caught in the doorway. "There was no one there. To...end it."
"Blood loss?" Lilah questions shortly, white-lipped.
"Yes."
"And alone."
"Yes."
"That's..." But she shakes her head, dismissing him wordlessly with the glazing over of her eyes, and then Lilah crawls into bed and stares into a past half a century old.
*
He figures Cordelia's old office is as good a place to brood as any. But before Angel can even cross the lobby, Lilah is flying down the stairs, looking for all the world like she can't quite remember how to stop; and if he doesn't catch her first, she'll careen right into him.
He catches her around the shoulders, and Lilah reflexively mimics the position, her fingers coming up to clutch at his upper arms.
"I'm Lilah Morgan," she tells him desperately, and it doesn't matter that he's never taken Psych 101, let alone set foot on a college campus. He knows who she is. The words are not for his benefit; Angel is only there so she can say them without sounding crazy. It was Fred who mumbled to herself and wrote about freedom (the key to the dimensions is built of equations, not of iron) on the walls. And Lilah has always hated Fred; even Angel, who refused on principle to try to get to know Lilah-- even Angel has always known that.
"You are Lilah Morgan," he agrees kindly, and Angel finally remembers why he helps the hopeless. He does not believe in the Shanshu, but he believes in Hell. And if he can convince himself that he does not belong there-- well, maybe that will be enough.
"I won't let this break me," she says, still holding tightly to him, though seeing someone else. "I especially won't lose it over a man." Though 'lose it' is a particularly ironic choice of words, since she realizes now that Wesley was perhaps what she was most unwilling to lose. If he had asked her to run away with him, to settle down in some remote part of the country, would she have gone? Yes.
"I am Lilah fucking Morgan!" she cuts off her own train of thought, almost screaming. "I'm not over."
"No," Angel affirms, and carefully lets go of her. Dazed, she follows suit and sinks down on one of the bottom steps.
"Why are you helping me?" Lilah asks quietly.
"I still believe in redemption," he answers, fucked-up creature with a soul that he is. "I need to."
"Yes," she says. "Yes, I suppose you do."
END