"Honestly," Fred lied aloud, returning from her daze back to the rooftop. "I wasn't really thinking about him at all."

"If not that then…" Illyria paused. "You're considering my request," he noted, a smack of pleasure entering his voice. "It is in your best interest to do so." She bit the inside of her lip. Despite his former communication with plant life, he could not read her mind, thankfully. He may have been surprised to discover what Fred really thought about at that moment.

Physics.

Her daddy called it the "bounce test" but she wondered if Illyria would pass it. If she pushed him off the roof, what would the body do? Would it shatter into a billion pieces like the brittle shell he claimed Spike's body to be? Or would he – more likely – simply stand up and deliver her a treatise on the origination of gravity, treating her act of violence as nothing more than one of her experiments? Betrayal did not register with Illyria, whether he considered himself above it, or thought Fred useless to wield its power against him. Trivial the difference really, and she shuddered when she realized that she had started understanding too well how he thought now.

Fred sighed and felt the wind effectively gust out of her sails. Tired, too tired, an ache in her bones that panged her soul in sympathy, with the finality of losing someone settling over her like dust after a scuffle. Angel didn't allow any of them, least of all himself, to mourn – in theory, she supposed that made sense. How to mourn for someone already dead? Yet his practicality reminded her too much of how he refused to acknowledge Cordelia's end, too. She arrived and vanished so quickly Fred wondered if she dreamt her friend's brief reappearance. Cordy had been missing from them for so long, and her sudden return became such a joyous relief, a sign that maybe things wouldn't be so bad after all, only to lose her for good. Angel didn't speak of her and the rest of them didn't dare. She lingered in that hospital bed for so many weeks, so far out of their range of vision. Not much more effort to keep silent as to where she had really gone, as though on some level, she remained suspended there.

Treating Spike the same way, though, didn't sit right with Fred. For his body remained stubbornly present – ever in their faces, a constant reminder of how they failed. Sure, the patterns of death looked similar enough but that's where the science always fooled you, would blow up in your face if you expected the same reaction from a different subject.

"I'm not thinking about what you asked," she replied finally. "But I am…thinking about you."

She heard that pomposity of content return to his voice. "Of course you are."

Fred turned back around. "I'm thinking about what will happen to you if I ever leave you."

Illyria looked shocked. He always looked shocked. Shocked or blank or at rapt attention or furious or blaringly absent – didn't matter. All those words were wrong for Illyria because they were all too human.

"You consider many erroneous possibilities before you select your correct path, scientist," he said tersely, and she strove to hear some dry humor in his delivery. "Primarily, is your idea that you will leave me, when I assure you that you will not."

Fred felt her mouth drop open and recovered her surprise quickly. "Why do you say that?"

"Because to do so would equal my death. And you would not abide by that."

She had to hand it to him. At least he understood what it meant to be beat. And by no less than the Slayer.

When Illyria had asked for the representatives of the shell's storehouse of memories, Fred had had no illusions that the request came out of some misplaced romanticism. She couldn't find that long-buried kingdom of his so Illyria would have to start converting on his own, one borrowed memory at a time. Those individuals who would recognize him as Spike – the most frequent players with the most intense emotions attached to them. He said he could not feel them himself, "only an imprint of the reaction they created. Like a stain."

One of them dyed Spike's thoughts deep, bloody red and glossy black. "The dark-haired one, the other half-breed, the sire," Illyria said. "She is of no use to me. She is unpredictable and unstable."

"Not sure where we'd find Drusilla anyway," Fred mumbled, doodling on a notepad of paper that she'd brought into the conference room, more for the others who watched them with confusion, to make her meeting with Illyria look official. She would humor him until she could brainstorm another way to try to get to Spike. "Not to mention a crazy vampire around here would do a world of not good. Okay. Who next?"

Illyria paused, considering. "There is a considerable history with the shell and your commander."

"Angel?" Fred asked. "Well, sure there is. At least a century's worth of animosity there."

Illyria pursed his blue-hued lips and gave Fred a sidelong glance. "The memories indicate they were not always adversaries, but confidants. Even…intimates."

Fred felt her eyes grow wide. " I How /I intimate?"

"Summon him," Illyria demanded with a wave of his hand. "I will instruct him to perform the acts upon me for your study. It is a subject that made deep impressions upon the shell and that warrants further exploration."

"Maybe there is a reason…to explore," Fred hedged uncomfortably. "But Angel won't come here. Not with you. Not for any reason."

Illyria stared at her for a moment, his face a taut grimace of frustration. "You provide the reason. Bend him to my will."

"He won't budge on this one. In fact," she said, the pen slipping from her fingers to the tablet. "He'd kill you before he'd bend to you." Her cheeks burned. "In any position."

Illyria began to pace across the conference room floor. "My assimilation into this pathetic miniscule world is thwarted on every turn by that leader of yours. It is he who should die! It is I who should reign in his stead! His attachment to the shell," he surveyed Fred with a haughty glare. "Rivals even yours."

"Angel's out," Fred said firmly, avoiding his eyes and their accusation. "Who else?"

His face morphed gradually from a look a fury to one of measured avarice. "Slayer," he hissed in a voice so like Spike's it made Fred's stomach twist to hear it.

"Y-you mean Buffy?" Fred asked, the girl's name turning to a squeak in her throat. "Oh, no. No, no, no. We can't. Really truly cannot. Bad, very bad idea."

"The shell prized her among all things, living or dead," Illyria continued, an almost dreamy lilt to his voice. "I wish to examine why."

"You know why. You have the memories, you figure it out," Fred stammered, getting up from the table. "I never should have agreed to this. You can't have these people. They were Spike's. They don't belong to you."

His gloved hand squeezed her shoulder and forced her back down into the chair.

"But you do."

"NO!" The anger tore through her in a flash, and she shoved her chair into Illyria's midsection, causing the leather-swathed figure to step backward and giving Fred the space to hurry away from him toward the door. He gazed at Fred in eyes wide with wonder.

"We belong to each other, Winifred Burkle," he hissed. "Through circumstance. I have done everything in my power to make that abundantly clear."

"That's your opinion!" she cried. "It has nothing to do with truth."

"You believe you had no part in my resurrection?" he asked softly. "No role in continuing my existence once my consummation of the shell became complete? You have secured my tether upon this meager existence. Pledged yourself to be the guardian of my life. What of that is not truth?"

"You know why I've kept the others from destroying you," Fred said through clenched teeth. "And it has nothing to do with what you are."

"It is who I represent. To you and to your cohorts."

"Yes."

"It is for the shell, the residue of which you believe still remains."

"Yes."

"It is for what I have become. The pinnacle of your inquiries, scientist."

Fred turned away from him, her heart throbbing in her throat. "I don't know about that," she demurred.

"Am I to understand then, that to you, a truth is impingent on your acceptance of it?" She heard amusement in his voice. "In my sovereignty, I surrounded myself with the most learned beings of my time. Those who calculated theory based upon trials, which would inevitably prove or disprove their suppositions. Within this structure, they formulated truth. I urge you to do the same."

Fred's lip curled. "For you."

"For yourself. For a legitimate pursuit of what you seek."

She closed her eyes. He knew, through all of her work, all of her protests, he cut right to the quick of her, drawing out that desperate need to know, to learn, to discover. Not because of Spike or because of anything like the right thing to do. But because of her, who she was, what science had helped shape her into being.

"You want to see Buffy."

"Only a brief discourse. I will receive her in the testing chamber where you have assessed me previously. I trust you will be present for the examination."

She bowed her head and nodded. "I wouldn't miss it."