anythingbutgrey (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
anythingbutgrey) wrote2011-01-14 04:58 pm
anythingbutgrey) wrote2011-01-14 04:58 pm
Entry tags:
AtS -- A Fight So Old
a fight so old
lilah morgan. wesley/lilah.
for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
eleusis_walks at the what-if ficathon, prompt: "Lilah is Angel's liaison to the Senior Partners."
Lilah freezes. She's not very good at advice. "Play it out," she says after a moment. "That's all you can do."
a/n: needless to say, this is an AU for AtS s5.
Angel's crossed arms drop to his sides. Wesley doesn't flinch.
"Hey boss," Lilah says, perched on Angel’s new desk, mouth contorted into a paler, dead woman's version of a smirk.
Lilah is tired.
-
When she applied to this job, there was a hearing. Some very important, very nasty people (if she can call them that) wanted to keep her underground with the rest. But she knows Team Angel — as she likes to term them with a well-placed sarcasm laced in her voice — better than anyone. She knows their weaknesses, their strengths, and how to exploit those. That's what she said, with her files and charts and presentation notes. Lilah prepares well.
Linwood cackled from the prosecutorial table. Lilah winced.
"This board can't be serious about sending her up," he said, rising in his seat. Lilah represented herself. Lilah always does. "We've already produced evidence of her emotional involvement with a member of Angel's team —"
"Whose memory of the last year was erased," she interjected.
Linwood's head snapped to her. She clenched her jaw to keep from bristling. "That doesn't change your intentions, Lilah."
Lilah looked back toward the board, cloaked and cross in the dim light of the room. "I sold my body to get at the informational equivalent of eleven hundred pieces of silver. If anyone is confusing emotions with professionalism here, Linwood, I think you’ll find it’s you."
Linwood shifted on his feet, and paused too long. The gavel echoed when it dropped, sending a drop of water down her spine.
-
She can pluck her head off her shoulders if she wants to. No one knows, but she's tempted, come Halloween — scare some small children when she starts to walk and speak. And Wolfram and Hart has all the best parties; it would be the greatest hit. But Lilah knows she's not going to this year's Halloween party. That's beyond her now. Now she sits, files her nails, keeps her shoulders back.
-
"I don't think you get this," Lilah says, adjusting in her seat. "This job? You don't get to do whatever you please. You get to use the resources here to do whatever sort of good it is that you and your bag of ragamuffins choose, but you still work for us."
Angel scowls. He's been doing that a lot lately, more than usual, and of a new caliber. It makes her nervous. If he gets unpredictable this won't end well at all.
"Lilah," Wesley says from the other end of the table, and she shivers when his voice drops. Wesley remembers nothing, not of her, but sometimes Lilah thinks he remembers enough. She'd like to think there's a part of her he can't erase. But that's a schoolgirl's daydream. Anything can be erased if you know the right people, and Lilah knows the best. "Surely there's some way of working us out of having to represent Mr. Dunthrop. He does like to sacrifice virgins every third Tuesday."
Angel's eyes are heavy on her, but she doesn't look back. She's looking at Wesley, and Fred is looking at Wesley, and Gunn is looking at Lilah, and Lorne is looking between the two with the most obvious of questions poised on his lips. Spike’s off doing whatever it is Spike does, and Lilah doesn’t miss him. There are enough eyes here.
"I'll see what I can do," she says, each consonant crisp as an apple slice on her lips.
-
"Can I ask you something," Wesley says. This is weeks later.
Lilah looks up from her lunch of mixed greens and vinaigrette dressing — even the dead need to watch what they eat.
"Come in," she says, harried and with a wave. Still, Wesley lingers in her doorway before stepping inside, holding his breath like a child at a graveyard. The door clicks shut behind him, and Lilah sits up straighter in her chair.
"I keep feeling like there's something you're not telling me," he says, unflinching but looking at her forehead instead of her eyes. "I just don't know what it is."
Lilah tilts her head to the side a safe seven degrees. "And why do you think that?"
"Gut feeling," he says. "I don't have anything more substantial than that yet." He takes a step toward her. Lilah doesn't breathe. She doesn't have to. "But if there's something you're keeping from us, Lilah, I will find out."
She doesn't think of a witty response until he's out the door. Wesley's the only person to make her feel human anymore, and it's really an overdose of it, with the stuttering sentences and near missteps in hallways. She's sure no one else notices bar Angel, because no one else would ever think of putting a name to it, would dare to think about why it is that Lilah is harsh and cool around anyone but him.
But Angel does know. And Angel looks at her like he pities her, and it makes Lilah want to spit.
-
Cordelia comes back. Lilah stays away from the office that day, is early for the funeral when she dies, is gone before anyone else arrives.
-
Wesley has his hand around her throat, her back against the wall. In another lifetime, she'd be looking forward to this. But Fred's coughing up blood in the medical wing, and Lilah's so easy, so easy to blame.
"You did this," he growls. There's a look in his eyes that simultaneously makes her want to slap him and hold him. Lilah is tired.
She shoves him off her. "I didn't do anything. And I'm trying to find something to help her, so the longer you stay here arguing with me, the worse she's going to get."
Wesley freezes. "You're helping?"
The question mark seems to hover between them. Lilah looks away. "I'm helping."
She doesn’t say why. He doesn't ask.
-
Fred dies. Lilah is unsurprised, given the events, and while she's not glad of it, she doesn't particularly care either way. What she does care about is Wesley, carting himself around like a corpse with that blue copy of a woman lingering behind him. Lilah could scream. Emotions aren't really her strong point, and yet here they are, in her, clawing at the lining of her stomach and threatening to crawl out of her mouth. She swallows it back. She clutches it back.
Lilah hears Illyria before she sees her. It. Him. The pronouns don't concern her. Illyria wears this tight leather catsuit-like... thing that inevitably squeaks when it comes around corners. It creaks through the hallways and the sound grates against Lilah's skin. Lilah's a fan of fine leather. She doesn't know what to do with this.
"My presence discomforts you," Illyria announces when it turns the corner into Lilah's office. Lilah doesn't particularly like God-Kings roaming haplessly around the building, tends to get kind of messy, but she thinks Wesley is off sitting in the dark with his whiskey again. She's leaving him alone with that grief. She doesn't know what to do with it, the tender quiet, the necessary gestures.
Lilah tosses a letter into her outgoing box. "You'll find, Illyria, that most humans don't like reanimated corpses walking around their office buildings."
"You're a reanimated corpse," Illyria returns, and if Lilah didn't know better she'd think the God-King was trying to be witty.
Lilah doesn't flinch. "Like I said, most humans don't like reanimated corpses walking around their office buildings."
"We're — I'm not a corpse."
Lilah lifts her chin. "Then what are you?"
Illyria says nothing.
-
Connor shows up at the office and this time it's Angel's hand around her throat. She's really not getting paid enough for this.
"I had nothing to do with it," she croaks. It's not that she needs to breathe, it's that his hand is pressing on her larynx. "And if you'd get off of me I can find out what's going on."
Angel takes a huffy step back and she drops onto her heels, rubbing a hand along the chiffon scarf around her neck. He sits slouched by her desk while she makes the appropriate phone calls, takes a half page's worth of notes.
"It's got nothing to do with us," she ultimately tells him, and can see he doesn't like it. "He came in of his own accord."
"Fix it," Angel hisses.
Lilah rolls his eyes. His temper tantrums are getting to be a bit much. "No can do, boss. If we tried re-writing memories again your son — and your friends, for that matter — could end up with brain scans as calm as cucumbers."
Angel sighs, his face turned at the ceiling. "So what do I do?"
Lilah freezes. She's not very good at advice. "Play it out," she says after a moment. "That's all you can do."
With a sigh, Angel's head falls into his hands. Lilah thinks she's supposed to move toward him, but instead she steps back.
-
Wesley remembers. She doesn't find out from him. She finds out from Gunn.
"It's like something's snapped in him," he says, sitting across from her as she sits at her desk with a cup of green tea that burns her tongue. "He hasn't left his office since we got back."
She taps her finger against the edge of her desk. Lilah's trying to think in contracts, and if the return of memory invalidates their agreement with Angel, and what that will do. She's keeping it clinical, ordered notes and organized files.
"And you?" she asks. "You were at the event as well? You remember?"
Gunn looks away. "I remember. Wish I didn't."
Lilah nods, picking up a pad of paper. "And can you outline for me the precise order in which you remembered the events?"
Gunn blinks at her, and then shifts uncomfortably in his chair. "Look," he says, hands resting together in front of him. "I don't like you. And you don't like me, so I'm going to get to the point of this, which is that I remember you and Wes, and now he does too. You need to talk to him. I don’t care what you say. But this is going to splinter him if you don't."
Lilah folds her arms. "Is that your legal opinion?"
Gunn makes a sound caught halfway between a laugh and a groan. "Not at all," he murmurs. "Not at all."
-
Lilah presses her ear against the door to Wesley’s office. It’s supposed to be soundproof, but it’s not, not to her.
"Try to push reality out of your mind," Wesley is saying, and he sounds so far away. "Focus on the other memories. They were created for a reason."
"To hide from the truth?" Illyria asks with that scuffling, short voice of hers. It’s a her now. There is no denying that.
The chair creaks. "To endure it," he says.
Illyria says nothing. Lilah can hear the creaking catsuit as the God-King paces around the room. Illyria is beginning to feel more than she should. Lilah doesn’t think anyone else dares to notice the scraps of Fred that are still trapped under that blue skin. But Lilah doesn’t care, so Lilah sees everything. She can imagine what’s going on behind the door now, Illyria’s tiny girlish body trying to look like an adult in her leather getup, meandering from side to side in the dark room, Wesley with the drink in his hand that seems almost permanent these days. Lilah catches her breath before she knocks on the door, and is somehow surprised when Illyria is the one to open it.
"Wesley doesn’t want to talk," Illyria says, her body silhouetted in the doorway.
Lilah looks over her shoulder to the chair in the far corner, where Wesley’s arms are resting impossibly still on the armrests. "I think he might want to talk to me," she says, quieter than she meant.
Illyria doesn’t budge. She looks like a guard dog these days, teetering behind Wesley and always ready to pounce.
"It’s fine, Illyria," Wesley croaks after a moment. "Let her in."
Illyria pauses for a moment, and then steps aside. Lilah brushes her shoulder as she enters. "And if you’ll excuse us," Lilah says, "that would be appreciated."
Illyria looks back to Wesley, who is slowly standing from his chair with a body bent like the old man he is. "Please, Illyria," Wesley says, waving toward the door. The God-King seems to bristle, and then bows out.
Lilah looks back to Wesley. He has one hand resting on the back of his large armchair, the other stuffed into the pocket of his trousers. Lilah keeps her hands clasped behind her back, spine straight, and is thankful that the dark room keeps her from looking him in the eye from this distance. Still, neither of them moves or speaks. It’s five minutes that feels like hours, like a challenge, and it grates because she and Wesley are many things, but quiet is not one of them.
"I imagine you might have some questions," Lilah sputters finally, just to say something, anything at all, even something so paltry.
"I understand everything," Wesley says, and does not flinch. Lilah does. But Wesley does step away from the armchair, and walks over to his desk and switches on the lamp. He doesn’t look at her, though. He stays turned away, shoulders forward, both hands flat against the table. Lilah watches the curves of him, the particular bends of his spine, his neck dropped forward.
"I knew," he says, just above a whisper. "I knew there was something — off about you. About being around you. I just didn’t know what it was."
Lilah looks away. Of course he didn’t. He would never know what name to put to it. She’ll admit she takes some comfort in that, knowing there was something about his body that remembered her body, but it doesn’t mean much. Memories are heavy things, especially when not allowed to speak of them. Now that she can, she finds herself allowed to think about them, and that presses heavily against her back.
"I wasn’t allowed to tell you," she says. This might be the only honest conversation they’ve had since the records room. But the records room meant everything. She wishes it didn’t, but it did. Meant everything, if she thinks about it too much.
He shakes his head, standing up straight but still refusing to face her. "I wouldn’t have wanted to hear it."
She knows. The memory wipe might as well have redrawn him. There were days she didn’t even recognize him at all, with the bright smiles and the cleanly shaved jaw. It made him look so young, unscathed, like someone who hadn’t even seen the world yet, who didn’t yet know the lurking truths of the matter. Lilah wondered about him most on those days, about what this mind, freshly scrubbed, thought about demons or violence or the smell of blood. Wesley always had that dusting of darkness in him, that much wasn’t lost, but it was a part of himself he tried to hide away, a part Lilah saw straight to. She has an eye for it.
"Is there something —" her voice catches. She doesn’t know how she wants to end the question. "Is there something you need?"
Wesley pauses, and then turns around too quickly. Lilah does not jump.
"I need —" there’s a tremor in his hands that Lilah watches, like waiting for a car to leap to a start. "I need you to get out."
Lilah catches herself mid-breath. She wasn’t expecting that, though she should have been. For a moment, she thinks to say something, but instead she sspins on her heels, and does her best impression of a storm out of the room. When the door slams behind her, she presses her back against the wall, trying, trying to keep from screaming.
"I did not think that would end well," Illyria says from the shadows. Lilah shoots an aimless glare into the darkness before walking away.
-
He ends up fucking her anyway. She’s not surprised. There’s a grief that hovers over him and mixes with guilt, the kind of air she’s seen before in him. It’s the afternoon after Fred’s parents leave and he has a new level of exhaustion in him when he storms into her office, slams the door shut behind him, and grabs her by the wrist, pulling her close. Her dead heart seems to sputter back into a pound in her chest even as she leans into him, wanting, wanting, wanting. He kisses her with too much teeth and with bites that threaten to draw blood. Her breath seems caught halfway between a gasp and a cackle as the sound tumbles out of mouth, nails pressed into his back as he presses her against the front of her desk. The sharp contact against the edge would build a bruise if she were still living, but for a moment she forgets about that, forgets about the scarf around her neck, just allows her body to fit, to fit around him, to keep itself together.
-
She passes him in the hallway the next day. He doesn’t look at her. She can’t help but stare. Secret’s out. Maybe there’s a last scrap of honesty in her. Death will do that to a woman. Lilah sometimes grows tired of games.
-
He doesn’t speak to her for a week. But then the world is ending.
"The world is always ending," Lilah says with a dismissive wave.
Wesley shakes his head, shifts on the balls of his feet. He doesn’t look like himself at all. He’s been a frenzied mess since the memory return but this is something new. Something both unsettled and unsettling.
"This isn’t an apocalypse," he says. "This is a war. This is real. We’re not coming back from this."
Her eyes narrow, jaw popping open. "You’re serious."
Wesley takes a seat in one of the chairs opposite her desk, sitting on the edge with his elbows on his knees. "I’m very serious."
Lilah looks out the window. Outside, the sun is beginning to set. Wolfram and Hart does its best work after dark. "You shouldn’t be telling me this," she says, though it comes out a gargled whisper.
"You’re not going to tell anyone."
Her head snaps back to him. "How do you know? It’s my job, Wesley."
Wesley doesn’t blink. "Because I remember everything now."
Lilah breathes in a small hiccup of a breath and stares down at her desk.
"Memories are funny things," Wesley starts slowly. "When you have two sets of them, like I do, you get to look at things from a bit of a distance. It makes things a bit clearer. Something about hindsight."
Hindsight. Lilah could laugh. History has not been kind to either of them.
"Listen to me, Lilah," he says, when she still refuses to look him in the eye. She won’t. She will not, shakes her head, shuts her eyes. "Lilah, I don’t have time for childishness."
Her eyes snap open. "Childish. Who’s the one going off to pretend to be a hero? Haven’t you learned by now that’s not your part?"
This time it’s his time to turn away. "It is now."
"This isn’t going to end us," she says. "Wolfram and Hart will keep going just as it has for the last thousand years, longer. Any damage you could do would be a scratch in the paint we’ll have fixed in an hour."
His mouth turns. "It’s not about that. It’s about taking a stand. That’s something you wouldn’t understand."
"No," she says. "It’s not. We’re supposed to look out for ourselves, Wesley. That’s the human condition."
He sits up straighter in the chair. "Well, that’s not true at all, is it? You’ve been looking out for us. For me."
"That was my job —"
"No, it wasn’t," he says, and she thinks he might actually be laughing, the bastard. "Not with me. I can see it now. Maybe your oncoming demise brings clarity."
She looks down at her hands, clasped in her lap. There was a flash of a moment before her death, just the panicked last gasp of air and the first instant of the knife in her neck, when things did seem more obvious. And her first thought waking up in Hell was of him, still in that hotel, still with that thing in Cordelia’s body, still blind. Death brings clarity, yes. Hers made a number of things abundantly clear.
"I’m sorry," Wesley says, and his voice is suddenly calmer, the familiar Wesley she knows and not the harried man speaking of noble deaths and the lessening of time. "I didn’t mean to —"
She waves her hand to silence him. Now it is his turn to look down at his hands, and it is only then that Lilah sees the near-invisible shake in his fingers. His face is still stolid, the sort that a less trained eye couldn’t see past but Lilah sees everything now. She is well studied in the details of him. It’s a moment she doesn’t want to end, if she’s honest. As soon as it does, time is going to keep passing, he is going to leave. He is going to be the idiot who throws himself on a sword. Lilah wants to stop it. She knows the right people, could make the right calls, could put a stop to this madness right here and keep him alive. But it’s nothing so simple. It’s not a matter of turning back the clock.
"I have to do this," he says, and she shuts her eyes, clenches them shut so tight her head starts to pound, because she already knew.
"I’ll see if there’s anything I can on my end," she says, eyes still closed. "Do people get head starts in suicide missions?"
"Lilah," he says and she opens her eyes. He’s staring at her with a look of concern she doesn’t like at all. "You need to get out of town. If they find you —"
She laughs. "They’ll find me. The best option for me is to feign ignorance of the whole event before I go downstairs again. But I’ll do what I can."
He sighs, and turns to look out the window, where the sun is finally about to vanish under the horizon. "I’m sorry I wasn’t able to save you."
Lilah tries to chuckle again, but it just comes out a melancholy puff of air and a sad smile. She runs a hand along a wrinkle in her skirt. "It means something that you tried."
Wesley turns back to her with a look she refuses to decipher and begins to stand. She rises with him. "I need to be going," he says. "It’s nearly time."
Nearly time for her too. Not that Hell’s so bad — she already knows her neighbors. But still she will miss this. Miss him. There’s no Hell clause in their contracts, Angel saw to that. It’ll be a long eternity without him. Lilah thinks something inside of her, something very human and long since repressed, is starting to crack open and grab at her neck. She gasps, wraps an arm around her stomach, keeps it together as she makes the slow walk around her desk and as Wesley moves to meet her. When they’re two inches away he takes her hand, just one. Lilah could cry if she were anyone else, because Lilah doesn’t cry and because if death is a moment of clarity then this is a long, drawn out epiphany, the sort where her entire life, for a brief moment, makes perfect sense.
"Will you be okay?" Wesley asks. It’s like they’re not even themselves anymore, she thinks, hands clutched together like school children who do not snip and bite. But maybe there’s just no time for that anymore. Maybe they’ve seen enough.
"I’ll make it," she says. She will. In eight years she’ll forget his face, in twenty his name. She’ll be fine. Wesley steps forward and presses a small, quiet kiss against her lips, a hand pressed against her back as she tangles her free hand in his hair and to be honest she’s grateful for it. It’s far more a goodbye than they’ve ever had before.
"Good luck," Wesley whispers as he steps away, keeping his eyes trained on her until the door slips shut.
Lilah sits at her desk, picks up the phone, sits up straighter with each empty ring the way they told her to do when she was a child, like a string descends from the ceiling to pull her up.
lilah morgan. wesley/lilah.
for
eleusis_walks at the what-if ficathon, prompt: "Lilah is Angel's liaison to the Senior Partners."Lilah freezes. She's not very good at advice. "Play it out," she says after a moment. "That's all you can do."
a/n: needless to say, this is an AU for AtS s5.
Angel's crossed arms drop to his sides. Wesley doesn't flinch.
"Hey boss," Lilah says, perched on Angel’s new desk, mouth contorted into a paler, dead woman's version of a smirk.
Lilah is tired.
-
When she applied to this job, there was a hearing. Some very important, very nasty people (if she can call them that) wanted to keep her underground with the rest. But she knows Team Angel — as she likes to term them with a well-placed sarcasm laced in her voice — better than anyone. She knows their weaknesses, their strengths, and how to exploit those. That's what she said, with her files and charts and presentation notes. Lilah prepares well.
Linwood cackled from the prosecutorial table. Lilah winced.
"This board can't be serious about sending her up," he said, rising in his seat. Lilah represented herself. Lilah always does. "We've already produced evidence of her emotional involvement with a member of Angel's team —"
"Whose memory of the last year was erased," she interjected.
Linwood's head snapped to her. She clenched her jaw to keep from bristling. "That doesn't change your intentions, Lilah."
Lilah looked back toward the board, cloaked and cross in the dim light of the room. "I sold my body to get at the informational equivalent of eleven hundred pieces of silver. If anyone is confusing emotions with professionalism here, Linwood, I think you’ll find it’s you."
Linwood shifted on his feet, and paused too long. The gavel echoed when it dropped, sending a drop of water down her spine.
-
She can pluck her head off her shoulders if she wants to. No one knows, but she's tempted, come Halloween — scare some small children when she starts to walk and speak. And Wolfram and Hart has all the best parties; it would be the greatest hit. But Lilah knows she's not going to this year's Halloween party. That's beyond her now. Now she sits, files her nails, keeps her shoulders back.
-
"I don't think you get this," Lilah says, adjusting in her seat. "This job? You don't get to do whatever you please. You get to use the resources here to do whatever sort of good it is that you and your bag of ragamuffins choose, but you still work for us."
Angel scowls. He's been doing that a lot lately, more than usual, and of a new caliber. It makes her nervous. If he gets unpredictable this won't end well at all.
"Lilah," Wesley says from the other end of the table, and she shivers when his voice drops. Wesley remembers nothing, not of her, but sometimes Lilah thinks he remembers enough. She'd like to think there's a part of her he can't erase. But that's a schoolgirl's daydream. Anything can be erased if you know the right people, and Lilah knows the best. "Surely there's some way of working us out of having to represent Mr. Dunthrop. He does like to sacrifice virgins every third Tuesday."
Angel's eyes are heavy on her, but she doesn't look back. She's looking at Wesley, and Fred is looking at Wesley, and Gunn is looking at Lilah, and Lorne is looking between the two with the most obvious of questions poised on his lips. Spike’s off doing whatever it is Spike does, and Lilah doesn’t miss him. There are enough eyes here.
"I'll see what I can do," she says, each consonant crisp as an apple slice on her lips.
-
"Can I ask you something," Wesley says. This is weeks later.
Lilah looks up from her lunch of mixed greens and vinaigrette dressing — even the dead need to watch what they eat.
"Come in," she says, harried and with a wave. Still, Wesley lingers in her doorway before stepping inside, holding his breath like a child at a graveyard. The door clicks shut behind him, and Lilah sits up straighter in her chair.
"I keep feeling like there's something you're not telling me," he says, unflinching but looking at her forehead instead of her eyes. "I just don't know what it is."
Lilah tilts her head to the side a safe seven degrees. "And why do you think that?"
"Gut feeling," he says. "I don't have anything more substantial than that yet." He takes a step toward her. Lilah doesn't breathe. She doesn't have to. "But if there's something you're keeping from us, Lilah, I will find out."
She doesn't think of a witty response until he's out the door. Wesley's the only person to make her feel human anymore, and it's really an overdose of it, with the stuttering sentences and near missteps in hallways. She's sure no one else notices bar Angel, because no one else would ever think of putting a name to it, would dare to think about why it is that Lilah is harsh and cool around anyone but him.
But Angel does know. And Angel looks at her like he pities her, and it makes Lilah want to spit.
-
Cordelia comes back. Lilah stays away from the office that day, is early for the funeral when she dies, is gone before anyone else arrives.
-
Wesley has his hand around her throat, her back against the wall. In another lifetime, she'd be looking forward to this. But Fred's coughing up blood in the medical wing, and Lilah's so easy, so easy to blame.
"You did this," he growls. There's a look in his eyes that simultaneously makes her want to slap him and hold him. Lilah is tired.
She shoves him off her. "I didn't do anything. And I'm trying to find something to help her, so the longer you stay here arguing with me, the worse she's going to get."
Wesley freezes. "You're helping?"
The question mark seems to hover between them. Lilah looks away. "I'm helping."
She doesn’t say why. He doesn't ask.
-
Fred dies. Lilah is unsurprised, given the events, and while she's not glad of it, she doesn't particularly care either way. What she does care about is Wesley, carting himself around like a corpse with that blue copy of a woman lingering behind him. Lilah could scream. Emotions aren't really her strong point, and yet here they are, in her, clawing at the lining of her stomach and threatening to crawl out of her mouth. She swallows it back. She clutches it back.
Lilah hears Illyria before she sees her. It. Him. The pronouns don't concern her. Illyria wears this tight leather catsuit-like... thing that inevitably squeaks when it comes around corners. It creaks through the hallways and the sound grates against Lilah's skin. Lilah's a fan of fine leather. She doesn't know what to do with this.
"My presence discomforts you," Illyria announces when it turns the corner into Lilah's office. Lilah doesn't particularly like God-Kings roaming haplessly around the building, tends to get kind of messy, but she thinks Wesley is off sitting in the dark with his whiskey again. She's leaving him alone with that grief. She doesn't know what to do with it, the tender quiet, the necessary gestures.
Lilah tosses a letter into her outgoing box. "You'll find, Illyria, that most humans don't like reanimated corpses walking around their office buildings."
"You're a reanimated corpse," Illyria returns, and if Lilah didn't know better she'd think the God-King was trying to be witty.
Lilah doesn't flinch. "Like I said, most humans don't like reanimated corpses walking around their office buildings."
"We're — I'm not a corpse."
Lilah lifts her chin. "Then what are you?"
Illyria says nothing.
-
Connor shows up at the office and this time it's Angel's hand around her throat. She's really not getting paid enough for this.
"I had nothing to do with it," she croaks. It's not that she needs to breathe, it's that his hand is pressing on her larynx. "And if you'd get off of me I can find out what's going on."
Angel takes a huffy step back and she drops onto her heels, rubbing a hand along the chiffon scarf around her neck. He sits slouched by her desk while she makes the appropriate phone calls, takes a half page's worth of notes.
"It's got nothing to do with us," she ultimately tells him, and can see he doesn't like it. "He came in of his own accord."
"Fix it," Angel hisses.
Lilah rolls his eyes. His temper tantrums are getting to be a bit much. "No can do, boss. If we tried re-writing memories again your son — and your friends, for that matter — could end up with brain scans as calm as cucumbers."
Angel sighs, his face turned at the ceiling. "So what do I do?"
Lilah freezes. She's not very good at advice. "Play it out," she says after a moment. "That's all you can do."
With a sigh, Angel's head falls into his hands. Lilah thinks she's supposed to move toward him, but instead she steps back.
-
Wesley remembers. She doesn't find out from him. She finds out from Gunn.
"It's like something's snapped in him," he says, sitting across from her as she sits at her desk with a cup of green tea that burns her tongue. "He hasn't left his office since we got back."
She taps her finger against the edge of her desk. Lilah's trying to think in contracts, and if the return of memory invalidates their agreement with Angel, and what that will do. She's keeping it clinical, ordered notes and organized files.
"And you?" she asks. "You were at the event as well? You remember?"
Gunn looks away. "I remember. Wish I didn't."
Lilah nods, picking up a pad of paper. "And can you outline for me the precise order in which you remembered the events?"
Gunn blinks at her, and then shifts uncomfortably in his chair. "Look," he says, hands resting together in front of him. "I don't like you. And you don't like me, so I'm going to get to the point of this, which is that I remember you and Wes, and now he does too. You need to talk to him. I don’t care what you say. But this is going to splinter him if you don't."
Lilah folds her arms. "Is that your legal opinion?"
Gunn makes a sound caught halfway between a laugh and a groan. "Not at all," he murmurs. "Not at all."
-
Lilah presses her ear against the door to Wesley’s office. It’s supposed to be soundproof, but it’s not, not to her.
"Try to push reality out of your mind," Wesley is saying, and he sounds so far away. "Focus on the other memories. They were created for a reason."
"To hide from the truth?" Illyria asks with that scuffling, short voice of hers. It’s a her now. There is no denying that.
The chair creaks. "To endure it," he says.
Illyria says nothing. Lilah can hear the creaking catsuit as the God-King paces around the room. Illyria is beginning to feel more than she should. Lilah doesn’t think anyone else dares to notice the scraps of Fred that are still trapped under that blue skin. But Lilah doesn’t care, so Lilah sees everything. She can imagine what’s going on behind the door now, Illyria’s tiny girlish body trying to look like an adult in her leather getup, meandering from side to side in the dark room, Wesley with the drink in his hand that seems almost permanent these days. Lilah catches her breath before she knocks on the door, and is somehow surprised when Illyria is the one to open it.
"Wesley doesn’t want to talk," Illyria says, her body silhouetted in the doorway.
Lilah looks over her shoulder to the chair in the far corner, where Wesley’s arms are resting impossibly still on the armrests. "I think he might want to talk to me," she says, quieter than she meant.
Illyria doesn’t budge. She looks like a guard dog these days, teetering behind Wesley and always ready to pounce.
"It’s fine, Illyria," Wesley croaks after a moment. "Let her in."
Illyria pauses for a moment, and then steps aside. Lilah brushes her shoulder as she enters. "And if you’ll excuse us," Lilah says, "that would be appreciated."
Illyria looks back to Wesley, who is slowly standing from his chair with a body bent like the old man he is. "Please, Illyria," Wesley says, waving toward the door. The God-King seems to bristle, and then bows out.
Lilah looks back to Wesley. He has one hand resting on the back of his large armchair, the other stuffed into the pocket of his trousers. Lilah keeps her hands clasped behind her back, spine straight, and is thankful that the dark room keeps her from looking him in the eye from this distance. Still, neither of them moves or speaks. It’s five minutes that feels like hours, like a challenge, and it grates because she and Wesley are many things, but quiet is not one of them.
"I imagine you might have some questions," Lilah sputters finally, just to say something, anything at all, even something so paltry.
"I understand everything," Wesley says, and does not flinch. Lilah does. But Wesley does step away from the armchair, and walks over to his desk and switches on the lamp. He doesn’t look at her, though. He stays turned away, shoulders forward, both hands flat against the table. Lilah watches the curves of him, the particular bends of his spine, his neck dropped forward.
"I knew," he says, just above a whisper. "I knew there was something — off about you. About being around you. I just didn’t know what it was."
Lilah looks away. Of course he didn’t. He would never know what name to put to it. She’ll admit she takes some comfort in that, knowing there was something about his body that remembered her body, but it doesn’t mean much. Memories are heavy things, especially when not allowed to speak of them. Now that she can, she finds herself allowed to think about them, and that presses heavily against her back.
"I wasn’t allowed to tell you," she says. This might be the only honest conversation they’ve had since the records room. But the records room meant everything. She wishes it didn’t, but it did. Meant everything, if she thinks about it too much.
He shakes his head, standing up straight but still refusing to face her. "I wouldn’t have wanted to hear it."
She knows. The memory wipe might as well have redrawn him. There were days she didn’t even recognize him at all, with the bright smiles and the cleanly shaved jaw. It made him look so young, unscathed, like someone who hadn’t even seen the world yet, who didn’t yet know the lurking truths of the matter. Lilah wondered about him most on those days, about what this mind, freshly scrubbed, thought about demons or violence or the smell of blood. Wesley always had that dusting of darkness in him, that much wasn’t lost, but it was a part of himself he tried to hide away, a part Lilah saw straight to. She has an eye for it.
"Is there something —" her voice catches. She doesn’t know how she wants to end the question. "Is there something you need?"
Wesley pauses, and then turns around too quickly. Lilah does not jump.
"I need —" there’s a tremor in his hands that Lilah watches, like waiting for a car to leap to a start. "I need you to get out."
Lilah catches herself mid-breath. She wasn’t expecting that, though she should have been. For a moment, she thinks to say something, but instead she sspins on her heels, and does her best impression of a storm out of the room. When the door slams behind her, she presses her back against the wall, trying, trying to keep from screaming.
"I did not think that would end well," Illyria says from the shadows. Lilah shoots an aimless glare into the darkness before walking away.
-
He ends up fucking her anyway. She’s not surprised. There’s a grief that hovers over him and mixes with guilt, the kind of air she’s seen before in him. It’s the afternoon after Fred’s parents leave and he has a new level of exhaustion in him when he storms into her office, slams the door shut behind him, and grabs her by the wrist, pulling her close. Her dead heart seems to sputter back into a pound in her chest even as she leans into him, wanting, wanting, wanting. He kisses her with too much teeth and with bites that threaten to draw blood. Her breath seems caught halfway between a gasp and a cackle as the sound tumbles out of mouth, nails pressed into his back as he presses her against the front of her desk. The sharp contact against the edge would build a bruise if she were still living, but for a moment she forgets about that, forgets about the scarf around her neck, just allows her body to fit, to fit around him, to keep itself together.
-
She passes him in the hallway the next day. He doesn’t look at her. She can’t help but stare. Secret’s out. Maybe there’s a last scrap of honesty in her. Death will do that to a woman. Lilah sometimes grows tired of games.
-
He doesn’t speak to her for a week. But then the world is ending.
"The world is always ending," Lilah says with a dismissive wave.
Wesley shakes his head, shifts on the balls of his feet. He doesn’t look like himself at all. He’s been a frenzied mess since the memory return but this is something new. Something both unsettled and unsettling.
"This isn’t an apocalypse," he says. "This is a war. This is real. We’re not coming back from this."
Her eyes narrow, jaw popping open. "You’re serious."
Wesley takes a seat in one of the chairs opposite her desk, sitting on the edge with his elbows on his knees. "I’m very serious."
Lilah looks out the window. Outside, the sun is beginning to set. Wolfram and Hart does its best work after dark. "You shouldn’t be telling me this," she says, though it comes out a gargled whisper.
"You’re not going to tell anyone."
Her head snaps back to him. "How do you know? It’s my job, Wesley."
Wesley doesn’t blink. "Because I remember everything now."
Lilah breathes in a small hiccup of a breath and stares down at her desk.
"Memories are funny things," Wesley starts slowly. "When you have two sets of them, like I do, you get to look at things from a bit of a distance. It makes things a bit clearer. Something about hindsight."
Hindsight. Lilah could laugh. History has not been kind to either of them.
"Listen to me, Lilah," he says, when she still refuses to look him in the eye. She won’t. She will not, shakes her head, shuts her eyes. "Lilah, I don’t have time for childishness."
Her eyes snap open. "Childish. Who’s the one going off to pretend to be a hero? Haven’t you learned by now that’s not your part?"
This time it’s his time to turn away. "It is now."
"This isn’t going to end us," she says. "Wolfram and Hart will keep going just as it has for the last thousand years, longer. Any damage you could do would be a scratch in the paint we’ll have fixed in an hour."
His mouth turns. "It’s not about that. It’s about taking a stand. That’s something you wouldn’t understand."
"No," she says. "It’s not. We’re supposed to look out for ourselves, Wesley. That’s the human condition."
He sits up straighter in the chair. "Well, that’s not true at all, is it? You’ve been looking out for us. For me."
"That was my job —"
"No, it wasn’t," he says, and she thinks he might actually be laughing, the bastard. "Not with me. I can see it now. Maybe your oncoming demise brings clarity."
She looks down at her hands, clasped in her lap. There was a flash of a moment before her death, just the panicked last gasp of air and the first instant of the knife in her neck, when things did seem more obvious. And her first thought waking up in Hell was of him, still in that hotel, still with that thing in Cordelia’s body, still blind. Death brings clarity, yes. Hers made a number of things abundantly clear.
"I’m sorry," Wesley says, and his voice is suddenly calmer, the familiar Wesley she knows and not the harried man speaking of noble deaths and the lessening of time. "I didn’t mean to —"
She waves her hand to silence him. Now it is his turn to look down at his hands, and it is only then that Lilah sees the near-invisible shake in his fingers. His face is still stolid, the sort that a less trained eye couldn’t see past but Lilah sees everything now. She is well studied in the details of him. It’s a moment she doesn’t want to end, if she’s honest. As soon as it does, time is going to keep passing, he is going to leave. He is going to be the idiot who throws himself on a sword. Lilah wants to stop it. She knows the right people, could make the right calls, could put a stop to this madness right here and keep him alive. But it’s nothing so simple. It’s not a matter of turning back the clock.
"I have to do this," he says, and she shuts her eyes, clenches them shut so tight her head starts to pound, because she already knew.
"I’ll see if there’s anything I can on my end," she says, eyes still closed. "Do people get head starts in suicide missions?"
"Lilah," he says and she opens her eyes. He’s staring at her with a look of concern she doesn’t like at all. "You need to get out of town. If they find you —"
She laughs. "They’ll find me. The best option for me is to feign ignorance of the whole event before I go downstairs again. But I’ll do what I can."
He sighs, and turns to look out the window, where the sun is finally about to vanish under the horizon. "I’m sorry I wasn’t able to save you."
Lilah tries to chuckle again, but it just comes out a melancholy puff of air and a sad smile. She runs a hand along a wrinkle in her skirt. "It means something that you tried."
Wesley turns back to her with a look she refuses to decipher and begins to stand. She rises with him. "I need to be going," he says. "It’s nearly time."
Nearly time for her too. Not that Hell’s so bad — she already knows her neighbors. But still she will miss this. Miss him. There’s no Hell clause in their contracts, Angel saw to that. It’ll be a long eternity without him. Lilah thinks something inside of her, something very human and long since repressed, is starting to crack open and grab at her neck. She gasps, wraps an arm around her stomach, keeps it together as she makes the slow walk around her desk and as Wesley moves to meet her. When they’re two inches away he takes her hand, just one. Lilah could cry if she were anyone else, because Lilah doesn’t cry and because if death is a moment of clarity then this is a long, drawn out epiphany, the sort where her entire life, for a brief moment, makes perfect sense.
"Will you be okay?" Wesley asks. It’s like they’re not even themselves anymore, she thinks, hands clutched together like school children who do not snip and bite. But maybe there’s just no time for that anymore. Maybe they’ve seen enough.
"I’ll make it," she says. She will. In eight years she’ll forget his face, in twenty his name. She’ll be fine. Wesley steps forward and presses a small, quiet kiss against her lips, a hand pressed against her back as she tangles her free hand in his hair and to be honest she’s grateful for it. It’s far more a goodbye than they’ve ever had before.
"Good luck," Wesley whispers as he steps away, keeping his eyes trained on her until the door slips shut.
Lilah sits at her desk, picks up the phone, sits up straighter with each empty ring the way they told her to do when she was a child, like a string descends from the ceiling to pull her up.