Reconstruction

See Chapter 1 for notes and disclaimer.


2.

A groan from the man they had saved split their gazes apart like guilty lovers'. Lilah looked down at the sword in her hand and felt stitches tug as the revulsion stretched her face. "Ew."

She knelt and wiped the greenish blood off the blade onto the dead demon. Then she tried to find a spot of grimy demon fashion she could bear to touch in order to wipe off the dribble of slime that had reached her fingers.

"Yuck," Fred agreed. She retreated a little as though she thought Lilah might choose to wipe it on her and hung back, her movements skittish, one small hand beating an irregular rhythm against the hem of her dress at mid-thigh. "What the hell was that?" she asked eventually. "I thought you said you couldn't fight?"

"I can't. I don't know. Luck. Dumb fucking luck. And without it, that demon would've been finishing what Angelus began, so what the hell was that, huh? Are you trying to get us killed?"

"No! But... I could see them tormenting that man... he was bleeding... I think they would've killed him if I hadn't done anything. I couldn't just watch. We've had to stand by too often. And he... we've seen nothing human still living in this place at all. I had to."

"After all, there were only five of them," Lilah spat.

But Fred wasn't listening. Her attention had been drawn back to their rescuee, and she'd sidled around to kneel beside the injured man. Lilah regarded the smudged blade of the sword dubiously, and tried again to clean it sufficiently to bear retracting it back into its sheath and to such close proximity with her skin.

Fred asked in a muted voice, "Are you all right?"

The man's response was a rather hysterically pitched giggle.

Lilah rolled her eyes and turned a wre wrestling with the sword device as she trudged back up the slope to where she'd kicked off her shoes. She nudged them back onto her feet, wincing at the sight of their expensive leather reduced to a filthy mass of scratches. By the time she returned, Fred had gotten the dishevelled man to his feet.

The demons had marked him with fists and claws, and their contusions distorted his visible skin. Beneath the blood and bruises, he was youngish, slight, not tall, had stubby dyed-blond hair - and looked vaguely familiar.

Lilah studied him narrowly. "I know you."

Fred raised her head from fussing over his scratches, her mouth opening in surprise at the announcement.

The sword shot out from Lilah's arm, considerably easier than it had been to coax the thing back. "Move away from him, Twig. That isn't any man."

"I bloody am," the creature in question protested. "Here, you want me to prove-"

"Shut up!" Something - Lilah wasn't sure what - had clued Fred in as well. She darted to the demon corpse with her crossbow bolt still embedded in it and yanked the bolt out. She raised it in her hand, held ready to stab. "You're a vampire!"

"He's more than that," Lilah said, amused. "He's William the Bloody, another one of Angelus and Darla's brood. Spike." She tipped her head on one side. "Lilah Morgan, Wolfram and Hart. I believe you spoke to my colleagues that time when you were in LA a few yebackback. But then I heard you had a chip in your head. And then I heard you had a soul. The Senior Partners were getting in one hell of a snit over that one."

"Yeah?" The vampire's movements were uneasy, shifty. He wasn't the type to run, though he might want to. "Well, you and your people can just sod off, all right? I've had it up to here with being used. Villains, white hats, you're all the bloody same. I don't give a shit. Just fuck off already and leave me alone." He sneered at Fred, who was continuing her impression of a goldfish long past the point of tedium. "Both of you."

Fred swallowed and pulled herself together. "You have a soul?" And, hell, already her voice had softened at the information, her hand falling to her side, the weapon in it held slack and useless. Silly little bitch. "How? Were you cursed as well?"

"Oh, don't bloody start. I am not going through my deeply pathetic life story for-" He paused and sniffed, and his head twitched violently to the side as though sickened by what he sensed. But he just said, "Fucking hell," then shut his mouth and settled into a vague look of brooding disgust.

"If it helps, Wolfram and Hart doesn't exist any more," Lilah said dryly. "Destroyed with everything else. We have no intention of using you for anything. The only matter we need to settle here and now is why we shouldn't chop off your worthless head and watch you niftily transform to a pile of dust where you stand."

"Lilah!" Fred piped up. "He has a soul."

"I have a soul," Lilah pointed out.

That shut the Twig up. For all of two seconds.

"We can't just kill him - besides, we need information. If he's survived what happened here, there's a chance he can tell us what caused it." Fred rounded on Spike and, a challenge in her voice, asked, "Well?"

Spike sneered. "I don't have to tell you anything. 'Cause, you know, vampire. Super-strength and all the trimmings ringing any bells here? Reckon I could take you two bints with or without the toys."

"These two... bints... just saw off your five demonic tormentors," Fred said. Her voice was quavering, and though it was probably with anger, it had to be said that the Twig didn't do threat and bluster precisely well. She made a visible effort to calm herself, though, and said more quietly, "Please. We need to find the Slayer. We need to know if there's a way we can still set right everything that's happened. If anyone can, surely it would be her. And if you can tell us where she is, or where she might have been..."

Spike's howls of laughter drowned out the rest, and killed any further reasoning as Fred's lips froze and she stared at him, a realisation in her face. Shocked comprehension lay behind it, enough to show this development awoke more than a few personal ghosts.

Little mystery as to why. Even Lilah could see that either the soul or the apocalypse or both had sent William the Bloody mad as a hatter.

His laughter wound up finally and he brushed the back of a hand across his eyes. The moisture smudged dried blood and mud around his face. "Slayer's dead," he said hoarsely. "Nothing anyone can do to bring her back this time, either." Another giggle escaped, except it wasn't, and Lilah let out a frustrated hiss of breath and tapped her fingers on the sword handle while Fred, of course, knelt down to offer comfort to the sobbing vampire.

"Geroff," Spike said indistinctly, and then Fred was hurtling backwards. Lilah had no time to move, and barely managed to avoid skewering her on the end of the sword. They both went down in a heap.

"Sorry," Spike added - none too sincerely, but that was possibly more through preoccupation than malice.

Lilah wrested her right hand free from the tumble of limbs and struggled to retract the blade again, cursing. Spike's next words caught them red red was halfway up onto her knees.

"She laughed, and they burned. They were there to fight her, thought they'd found a way to force her - it - to materialise corporeally. All of them, there, threatening her and she laughed. They burned in the fires she called up. It swept through here... a firestorm so hot there was nothing left... they smelled like pork, the Slayer and all her little friends and all the stupid girls... smelled good..." His maniacal laughter softened into whimpers.

Fred clambered to her feet and helped Lilah to hers. In order to stand at all, it was necessary to rest a lot of weight on that skinny little body, which felt as though it might snap beneath her, but didn't. She could count Fred's ribs easily under the palm of her hand. Her fingertips found a bruise, prompted a wince, and since their faces were inches apart and their foreheads all but touching, she leaned just a little closer to whisper an apology into the Twig's ear.

When they looked back to the vampire, still hanging onto each other for support, Spike was staring intently at them. "Why're you all shiny?" He blinked a few times and shook his head. He tried to peer at them with his head turned at different angles. "Nah. Can't be. Two silly bints... Angelus' rejects..."

Lilah felt the blood leave her face. "How the hell did you-?"

"He can smell it on us," Fred said nervously.

"Yeah, you both stink of that psychotic ponce. Must be losing his touch. He usually fucks 'em dead."

"We got away," Fred said thinly.

"Like I said."

Lilah wrapped her arms around herself, feeling the hard shapes of harness and weapons press against her breasts. She'd showered, and showered, and showered, and scrubbed half her skin raw, but she'd had to put the same clothes back on afterward. She'd been wearing them maybe fourteen hours now. They almost stung against her skin - had done so even before the brutal reminder. She felt as though she'd never be able to get clean again.

What the fuck had Spike meant by that 'shiny' talk?

He glanced between them. "His taste's taken a dive as well, that's for sure."

"I hear it's just that you're all about blondes now," Lilah snapped.

The vampire snarled, but caught himself on the verge of a threatening move. Heck, maybe he had reformed. She'd seen stranger things.

"What I want to know," Fred's voice suddenly cut through to them with deliberate volume, "Is how you could possibly have survived when everything else here was burned to nothing. Vampires aren't immune to fire." Lilah saw she had the bolt raised again in threat.

"Because it suited her that I did, you stupid cow." But the words were without force, and Spike slumped cross-legged on the ground in apathy. "Thought it was dead funny. A big joke."

"Who is this 'she'?" Fred pressed.

He looked around as though he expected just thinking it, let alone voicing it, would cause his mystery entity to materialise.

"The First Evil," he said finally. Something resembling sanity returned as he provided dry facts. "Some kind of incorporeal shape-shifting entity. Styles itself all-powerful. Hell, maybe it is. All I knew for the largest time was that I had dead people talking in my head. Wasn't too great in there to start with, with the soul and everything. Bitch fucked me up."

"You helped her - it," Fred said resentfully. "That's what you meant by 'used'. You helped this happen."

"Not by choice. I tried - damn it, I tried-"

"You still can," Lilah said.

"What?" Two faces turned her way.

"Help us, Spike. We need to know if there's anything we can do to put things right. You need to do something to assuage the guilt on your soul. Now, it seems to me that we could come to an arrangement here that benefits all of us. You must know mystics, have contacts in the magical world, maybe even other survivors here and now who could help. And after all, what do you have to lose?"

She became aware that Fred was watching her intently over the souled vampire's bowed bleached head, her eyes alight. Lilah had to quash her responding smirk, given that it probably wouldn't help induce confidence in the competitor across the table from her in this particular negotiation.

She looked back to Spike.

"All right," he said dully, after a long pause. His voice was softer, almost pleasant, and somehow more human than it had been. "I'll help you, here and now. I'll lead you to the others. After that, whatever you do - it's down to you. They won't want me around."

"There are others here, then?" Fred asked eagerly.

"Oh, yeah. Normal folks, mostly, but - there's a witch, and some other guy that's supposed to be some kind of magical dabbler. Maybe they can whip up something between them. If there's any help can be given at all, that is - because me, I'm betting on the apocalypse."