When Hell Freezes Over
by Alixtii
"You know, I started it. The whole having a soul. Before it was all the cool new thing."
—Angel, in "Chosen"
London, England—December 2002
Lydia Chalmers, formerly of the Watcher's Council of Britain, sat down at her dining room table and began to eat. Alone. She was alone, now. Her vocation, her colleagues, her mentor—all of these had been stolen from her by the First.
"I told you that there would be a time when we would no longer be there for the Slayer," a familiar voice rung out from behind her. "I simply did not expect it to be so soon."
Lydia looked back to see Quentin Travers watching her with curiosity, his sad smile upon his face. "You're not him," she said simply.
"Oh?" he asked. "Then who am I?"
"The First Evil," she answered, "absolute wickedness older than men and demons, something we cannot even conceive. Beyond sin, beyond death, you are the thing the darkness fears. You are everywhere: every being, every thought, every drop of hate."
"Yes, that's you, Lydia, always with the textbook answer. The perfect scholar. If I ask you about the Slayer, will you go all 'Into each generation, a Slayer is born' on me?"
Lydia did not answer. It wasn't him.
"Maybe you don't understand how this works," he said. "I am the First Evil, certainly, beyond your comprehension, but in this form I am also Quentin Travers. I have his memories, his mannerisms, everything. He was proud of you, you know that? I was proud of you."
Don't think about the pain. Don't let him get to you. "What do you want?"
"But now, look at you. You have no direction, no purpose. You've become useless. This is not why I protected you."
"What?"
"What did you think, Lydia, that you just had remarkably good luck? Please. We make our own luck. Fortune favours the brave."
"And I earned having my colleagues—not to mention my mentor, whose form you are now defaming—blow up around me, how, exactly?"
"Lydia, you were never one to lack long-term vision. Sometimes what is required of us is not as we would like it. Think of it as your Cruciamentum. Necessary...in the end. I have plans. They don't require a bunch of Watchers thinking they could win a war against me. It's not their war. You know very well that in the end, there's only two people in this war that matter."
"You," said Lydia. "And the Slayer."
"One girl, chosen to fight—but you know it, don't you? You have it memorized. Only no longer. Soon there will be no more potential Slayers. No more Watchers to train them. And then, when I have the two Slayers killed, no more of anything."
"You may find her a more capable foe than you expect."
"Her unpredictability and heterodox methods may yet prove to be an asset? That's what you told me two years ago, isn't it. And I didn't listen and now I'm dead. But I haven't forgotten. That's why you are still alive."
"You lie."
"What is the first lesson a Watcher learns, Lydia?" That was classic Quentin Travers style: to ask a question in true Socratic form, and only afterwards to relate the answer back to the matter at hand.
"To separate truth from illusion," she answered. "In a world of magicks, it being the hardest thing to do."
"Yes! Another textbook answer. Look into my eyes, Lydia, and tell me that I am merely an illusion. A mere phantasm, the First Evil playing tricks on your mind. I am the truth, the hard-core reality. Good is the illusion, the lie. Only I am real, and deep within yourself, you know it is true."
London, England—December 2003
"Bloody hell," Lydia said in response to the knock on her door. It was followed by an even stronger expletive when she looked through the peephole and saw who was standing on the other side.
It was Roger Wyndam-Pryce.
"It's Wyndam-Pryce," Lydia said to Reginald in as loud a whisper as she could manage.
"Dear God," said Reginald, his face suddenly ashen. "What are we to do?"
Lydia loved Reginald, but he did tend to be a little overawed by authority. If there was anything she had learned from Quentin Travers, it was that the person with the power was not always the person everyone thought it was. "Get dressed," she answered as she pulled on her own blouse. "You're my advisee, and we're working a case together. You have a perfectly legitimate reason for being here."
Dressed, she opened the door. If Wyndam-Pryce had been phased by the delay in her answering his knock, he didn't show it. He simply stepped inside, as if it were his flat and not hers. "Reginald, I'm glad you're here. This is subject to Lydia's approval—that's why I came here—but it concerns you." He paused dramatically, and Reginald just stood there, hanging on every word."
But Lydia had had enough of that. "Out with it, Roger. What is it?"
"Well, you know that the sudden increase in the number of Slayers, along with the unfortunate decrease in the Council's numbers, has put an enormous strain on the Council's resources, both financially and in terms of personnel. As a response to this, the Council has decided to tap into our pool of talented young Watchers-in-Training and begin pairing them with Slayers prior to the final reception of their thesis."
"'The Council has decided'?" asked Lydia. He meant that he had decided. Any decision made by "the Council" as an entity would have to go through her. She had made sure of that when she agreed to help Wyndam-Pryce rebuild the Council.
"As I said, Lydia, it is subject to your agreement. Although we really have no choice."
"I must agree. And in terms of Reginald, I see no reason why he isn't capable of handling his own charge. I trust you have an assignment in mind already?"
Es-Lazur, Hell Dimension
"Miss Morgan is expecting you."
Eve nodded and made her way down the hallway to the door of the deceased lawyer.
"Come in, Eve," Lilah said. "Please sit down. How are you?"
"Well," answered Lilah, uncomfortable. Hell dimensions tended to do that to one. Not for the first time, Eve mentally thanked the Senior Partners for making her immortal; permanent residency here would have been more than she could have stood. "Yourself?"
"My workplace is quite literally a hell," answered Lilah. "What do you think?"
"My apologies. I—"
"Enough of that. A few weeks ago, your universe was thrown into catastrophic turmoil due to the corporalization of a certain vampire."
"Spike." Eve felt her heartrate suddenly increase. Had they found out? What would they do to her if they found out? At the very least they'd remove her immortality, pass it on to the next liaison. Eve couldn't imagine spending her entire afterlife in Es-Lazur or a similar dimension, and didn't want to find out what the experience was like the hard way.
"As you know, it took a great deal of the Senior Partners resources to temporarily stabilize the universal equilibrium."
"They're still working on finding out what happened," Eve insisted. "Someone will figure it out: Fred, Lorne, Wesley..." As always, there was a miniscule flinch at the mention of Wesley's name. It was Eve's trump card, the one thing she could use to distract Lilah's attention. They better not figure out what happened, she thought to herself.
"I don't have to tell you that the fulfillment of the Shanshu prophecy is inextricably linked with the business of the L.A. branch, Eve, especially in light of recent events."
"Angel will be on our side during the apocalypse. Or Spike. Or both," Eve promised.
"Or someone else?"
Eve paused. "What do you mean?"
"As of 6 o'clock this morning—Pacific time, of course—there is a third souled vampire loose on Earth. Of course, she may nonetheless find herself on the pointy end of Buffy Summers' stake. Or she may end up a Champion and play a pivotal rôle in the Apocalypse. Whichever future comes to pass, Eve, the Senior Partners are relying on you to make sure that it benefits the firm. Do you understand?"
"I'll have Angel get his team on it at once."
Lilah shook her head. "The vampire is Angel's chylde and Spike's sire. Neither of them is to find out what has happened. Do you understand?"
"But how am I to—"
"The resources of both our Cleveland and Rome branches will be made available to you for this project. I recommend that you make good use of them. The stakes are too high to risk disappointing the Senior Partners, Eve. It isn't safe. Believe me, I know."
Somewhere in Romania...
A vampire with a soul is like a child without her skin, Drusilla knows. Vampires are creatures of the night, predators, capable of killing without qualm or conscience. That is who they are, it is the very core of their being. Nothing can change that, just as not even the sharpest dagger will make a shadow lavender instead of black. But the soul tries, the dirty souls which whisper to Dru's boys and divided their family, drove Grandmother back to her Master with the bloody mouth.
They became aberrations, both of them. Angel was driven into the streets for a hundred years feeding on rodents, Spike to the shadows of a basement, to the Hellmouth, muttering nonsense. (But who is Drusilla to separate sense from nonsense? People who live in glass houses should not bathe in blood quite so extravagantly, lest the neighbours see her underskirts lying on the floor.) They both were driven insane.
But Drusilla is already insane, and so as everything she has done over a century of vampiric unlife comes back to haunt her, she only steps further into her dementia. The pixies will protect her; the stars whisper it to her.
Drusilla knows what it is to witness atrocities, terrible happenings over which she has no control. She learned the lesson when Angelus murdered her family and massacred her convent. She relearns the lessons each time the stars whisper their horrible secrets to her, show her a future she does not choose. She has learned to detach herself from the world, to accept what she cannot change, to retreat into her own insanity.
This is how she has survived so long.
London, England
Gwen Raiden made her way above the top of the London building. She was calm and composed, as she always was on a job (at least until something went wrong). After all, this job was supposed to be completely routine. Of course, in her business, there was no such thing as a completely routine job.
She made her way to the cable which connected the mansion to the power cables which ran down the street. Caution, a sign said. Hot. There was a lightning bolt symbol, and the cable was surrounded by a metal grill.
Pulling out a small pair of wire cutters, Gwen cut a hole through the grill large enough for her to fit her hand through. Then she passed her hand through the hole, and wrapped her fist around the hot cable.
For a moment, she simply let herself feel the current, the gentle rhythm of the energy flowing through the wire. Then, she caused the power to spike, once and then again. Just enough to knock out the mansion's "sophisticated" security system—sophisticated enough to have cost the owner a pretty penny, undoubtedly, but grossly inferior to some she had penetrated. And hell, she was still in one piece, wasn't she?
Even better, even, as she thought of the LISA chip which sat on her desk back at her hotel room.
She strapped herself into her harness and lowered herself off the side of the building, stopping in front of a large window on the top story. She opened the window, unsurprised to find it unlocked. After all, people falling out would have been more of a concern than people getting in, at this height.
She made her wall through the chamber, silently slipping through the wall. She had memorized the plans provided her by the Watcher's Council, and knew she had to enter the third room on the left. A small electronic device sat above the doorknob, containing a small scanner and an LCD display asking for Gwen's thumbprint. Smilingly, Gwen placed her finger on the scanner, providing just enough extra electricity to short the circuit and unlock the door.
Gwen had been told she could expect to find the Thesulac in this room. The information she had been given by the Council, however, had not prepared her for what she saw. Instead of a single Orb of Thesula, there were rows and rows of the orbs. Dozens, scores...hundreds? Gwen thought furiously for a moment. She had been offered two million dollars by the Council for a single orb. How much could she sell the others for (on the internet? to an auction house? to one of her black market contacts?) if she managed to abscond them all? She was already richer than she herself could imagine, but there was no doubt in her mind that she would be able to find a use for the money.