Burning Down

See part 1 for notes and disclaimer.




2.

Angelus was too busy with Lilah in the kitchen to hear Wesley's return. The door of the apartment opened with a stealth that indicated Wesley was somehow aware a trap waited within. He shut the door behind him, leaving a gap of an inch or so. He glanced towards the kitchen, the noises still emanating from within probably all that had really drowned out his entrance from Angelus' notice.

Fred resisted the impulse to move, to any any noise that would draw his attention to her. It might also draw other attention. The next moment, he saw her anyway, and moved silently to her. The gun in his hand (they were still aiming to capture, then, rather than kill) was replaced quickly with a knife he used to slash the gag and, kneeling, the ties at her wrists, before it was replaced with the gun again.

She tried to keep silent. Silent. Not to gasp or heave or spit as she tore the wad out of her mouth, or try to speak. Not to whimper with the pain of her hands' returning circulation.

His hands guided her to her feet, gentle touch expressing the affection and concern he could not give voice to. When he'd ascertained she was relatively steady and unharmed, he glanced at the part-open door, then leaned in very close to her ear to whisper, with barely any sound, "Get Lilah out as soon as you see opportunity. Don't come back. Find Cordelia."

She wanted to protest, but didn't. When the time came, she would put him to rights with her actions rather than words. Instead, she nodded. Wesley pressed the gun into her hand, and drew another from somewhere. Even she never knew how much concealed weaponry he was wearing.

She looked up sharply as she realised the noises from the kitchen had reduced to a softer half-moan half-sob, and Wesley looked up with her. Angelus stood in the doorway.

"Wesley. You made us wait long enough. Gee, we had to make our own fun. Lilah was pretty obliging. Can I just say, that breakup? Not nice. You know the bitch deserves better than that. In fact, I might even keep her myself."

He ducked back into the kitchen and grabbed something - Lilah. He yanked her into the doorway and shoved her into Wesley's arms. Lilah was heavy enough, and Wesley slim enough, for her impact to knock him over, leaving them both sprawling on the floor.

Oh, God... Lilah - Lilah's face-

Fred did not have time to think of such things. Shutting out distraction, she aimed the gun and fired into Angel's - Angelus' - broad chest. Once, twice, three times before he'd lurched close enough to rip the weapon from her hand. It fell somewhere out of sight. Angelus smashed her back against the wall, and she sagged bonelessly to the floor, movement temporarily not an option.

Another gunshot rang out. She saw, hazily, Wesley raised onto one elbow, Lilah curled bloodily on the floor at his side. Angelus snarled and, before he could get off a second shot, grabbed onto the back of Wesley's collar and used the grip to stuff his face into the carpet before dragging him upright and shoving him back over the coffee table, onto the floor in a mess of long limbs. A blade extended and retracted with the impact.

Angelus followed, vaulting the overturned table. The same blade shot out to embed in his chest as Wesley sat up to meet him, battered but furious. He twisted the blade in Angelus' chest, craned around the vampire's form to shout to Fred.

He shouted, "Go!"

She saw Angelus, his face twisted with pain, reach out a hand and snap it brutally to one side as it connected with the arm extending the blade into his chest, audibly breaking the bone.

Wesley screamed, as well he might, and jerked his other arm forward. A stake shot out, ill-aimed. Angelus moved enough that it scraped off his thigh to hit the far wall, rattling when it fell to the floor. Angelus' movements moved the blade speared through his chest, coaxing a horrible mewling noise from Wesley as his twisted arm was twisted further.

Fred managed to regain her feet and stumble a few steps. She looked down at Lilah, curled on the floor muttering something incoherent, her hands uncuffed now but clutched over the mass of blood that was her face.

"Fred-!" roared Wesley. He seemed to be deliberately trying to keep himself and Angelus skewered together, no matter the cost in pain.

"I can't leave-" Fred didn't want to do this. Not for Lilah - not for Lilah- "Wesley?"

He made no response. Angelus had torn through his shirt and jacket, exposing pale, scarred flesh and the straps and fittings that married the hidden blades to his body; was tearing at the straps.

She had to leave. Now.

She bent and tried to lift Lilah - a task when the other woman was several inches taller and more than a few pounds heavier than her. Luckily, Lilah was coherent enough to support her own weight once Fred got her standing up, otherwise it wouldn't have been much of an escape.

Behind Lilah, Angelus was still undressing Wesley, who still struggled, and she should... she had to... but she couldn't linger. She couldn't let Angelus capture Lilah again, not when he'd more or less implied he planned to turn her. The bitch might be evil, but she didn't deserve that.

"I'm sorry, Wesley!" Fred wailed, as she wrapped an arm around Lilah's waist, feeling the lawyer's own arm settle over her shoulders. She supported the taller woman as they staggered, out of the door, through the hall, down the stairwell and outside to freedom.

Two battered women wasn't an unusual sight anymore on the streets of LA. Not unusual enough to draw more than a few stares. Nobody offered to help. Amid all the looting, and the demon population who'd seemed to take the apocalypse as reason enough to come out of hiding and inflict even more mayhem, and the sky an angry orange-black all the time now with or without its frequent bursts of combustible rain, it was all pretty much anarchy. People looked out for themselves and their own. The world, as her father might say, was turning to shit.

Gunn's truck had traps enough, though, that it was still where she had left it earlier that day, and Fred loaded Lilah up into the passenger seat, guiding her shaky legs. She noticed that although Lilah's panties and pantyhose had gone, her stylish, expensive shoes had still managed to eitremaremain on or find their way back onto her feet.

The keys were in her pocket. Her hands shook, turning them to start the engine, but she couldn't see any sign of Angelus running out to recapture them.

She pressed her foot down, and as the truck moved, the ground moved as well underneath them. A gathering low rumble - which she'd been aware of, come to think of it, for perhaps a minute already, just on the edge of audibility - became a steady roar. She swerved the wheel as the road in front of them split and cracked, just making it across the narrowest part of the jagged tear before it grew big enough to swallow a wheel.

Looking around frantically, she could see other cracks, the world shaking itself apart.

"Earthquake," Lilah croaked, with the matter-of-factness of someone who'd lived a while in LA.

"No," Fred said, frightened. "No. It's not. Angelus was summoned to prevent the apocalypse. He escaped. He's been too busy torturing and murdering all Angel's friends and acquaintances to do any preventing of any sort. And the apocalypse - this must be it. This is the end."

Lilah swore. "I didn't fucking plan on spending the last minutes of my goddamned shit-for-a-life with you."

Fred's lips moved soundlessly a moment. "Well, if it's any consolation," she began angrily, but didn't even bother finishing that. She swerved the truck around smaller cracks, around a car trying to do much the same as her, and a parked SUV half-fallen into one of the chasms. She said, bitterly, "I guess you'd rather be spending them with Angelus."

"Fuck, no." After a while, as Fred guided the truck down the more open space of a wide street almost empty of cars, trying to avoid falling debris from the buildings, she added, "Thanks."

"That's all right. I guess. I'm glad you're okay." I had to leave Wesley behind for you, you bitch.

Lilah swore pretty extensively at that. "Do I look okay?"

"No, y-you look like hell. But you're still alive and kind of intact, and I guess that'd be one up on most everyone else that's encountered Angelus the last few days."

"Check," Lilah murmured.

The tremors seemed to have died down again, but Fred didn't know if it was only a temporary respite. She kept driving, waiting to put space between themselves and Angelus.

And Wesley.

She'd left him. She'd left him to Angelus. Would Angelus rape Wesley? He'd looked kinda halfway to it when they left. Torture him, certainly. Turn him?

"Earthquake," Lilah repeated positively, drawing her thoughts away.

Fred didn't say anything. Perhaps it had been an earthquake.

She thought furiously, trying to break through all the fuzz in her brain, telling herself all those certificates and IQ tests meant something, and she should be able to do better than this. They needed a plan.

"God, I need a shower," Lilah said suddenly, intently.

Fred melted at the concept. "Oh. Oh." She swallowed dryly, tasting the ever-reminding taste still in her mouth. "I need a drink."

"Amen. Fucking Amen."

"I didn't mean - I mean, water... something to wash away... anything, really." She sighed.

"At least three quarters of a bottle of the finest fucking Scotch to blur the last two hours."

"Yeah." Fred gave in. "I'm gonna see if I can find somewhere selling liquor. Shouldn't have any problem getting business doing that right now, I suppose, so I guess there should be something. Then we need to get you some medical attention."

Lilah seemed to retract into herself. She drew her bloodstained shirt together and wrapped her arms over her chest. "I don't want to go to a hospital."

"For your face," Fred said, after a beat.

Lilah's head sagged and her hair hung over the blood. "They won't see something this superficial. Not with everything else. Private is out. There's nothing left of Wolfram and Hart to use for influence and all my credit cards are in my purse back at Wesley's or at home. I'm not going back to either. Angel - Angelus - knows where I live. I have nothing. But I'm not going back."

"All right."

Fred was going back. Had to. Later, she would go back. First, she had to make sure Lilah was safe.

And that sure wasn't a thought she would ever have imagined herself thinking.

"Then we find medical supplies. Alcohol's as good a field anaesthetic as most we might use, I guess, so we're still on for that part of the plan... damn it. Wesley said to find Cordelia. He knew we were in trouble... she must have had a vision about Angelus. But..."

"But?" Lilah prompted.

"I don't want to go back to the Hyperion. Angelus knows where that is, too, and besides, I don't think it's safe to drive so far across town, through all those built-up streets. Even if that was just an earthquake, there might be aftershocks still to come. But I should call, tell her to get out of there. She's in no condition to fight, and Connor's still beat up from the last round." She drew the truck to a halt outside a run-down bar that looked open, despite the whole apocalypse and the fiery death and all. "I'll use the phone in here, and get some spirit of some kind for you." She felt nervously around the edge of the seat in the cab, breathed relief when she found the crossbow still there.

She held it out to Lilah while with her other hand she continued to search under the seat for the spare bolts.

"You'll need it," Lilah said, not uncrossing her arms.

"I'm in better fighting shape."

"You're an unarmed woman heading into a bar full of drunken louts at the end of the world, who'd probably be as happy as Angelus to, well, get a happy. Take the crossbow."

Fred blinked. "Well, you're an unarmed, injured woman sitting in a truck out in all the demon-rampaged streets. You should-"

"You're going inside that armpit of a bar. Take the crossbow, come back safe with some fucking alcohol, and don't damn well be long."

Oh. So it wasn't anything like gallant selflessness after all. "All right," Fred said. "I don't feel right leaving you here, though." She climbed out and shut the door, a little louder than necessary.

Lilah tapped on the passenger window, and she walked around to the other side of the truck as the glass wound down.

"What is it?"

Lilah looked stonily at her, and pointed her at the wing mirror. "You've got cum in your hair."