Burning Down
chapter 3
3.
Fred upended the whisky bottle, rolled the burning liquid around her mouth and spat. The next mouthful, she swallowed. Ten seconds later she was hunched over the sidewalk, being violently ill.
A warm pair of hands rubbed comfort into the centre of her back. "It's all right," said Lilah's voice, a little croaky. "Come on, any more to let go? It's all right."
The hands retreated as Fred straightened and determinedly took another swig, which this time stayed down. She gave the bottle to Lilah.
It had been surprisingly easy to obtain. Not all men, apparently, possessed the characteristics Lilah seemed convinced of, and when she'd gone inside the bar, hair tied back with string Lilah had found in the glove compartment to disguise the fact Angelus had evidently wiped himself off on it after she'd passed out, the majority of the patrons had been surprisingly gallant, in a drunken sort of subdued way. They seemed to instinctively know more or less what had happened, for all her tidying up. Maybe they'd been seeing too much of it.
She'd bought the whisky, but hadn't even been charged for the call. The lines by sheer chance were working - their reliability lately had been spotty at best - but there was no answer at the Hyperion. Her insides felt cold as she listened to the phone ring and .
.
Now she sagged next to Lilah at the edge of the street, back resting on rough brick that grated her skin through and around the thin cotton of her dress. She became aware she had bruises developing, on her arms and shoulders, around her jaw (and maybe that was how they had known, in the bar). Her throat felt raw, dry and scraped. Whisky would not improve the dehydration.
The ground shook slightly. She felt it through her planted buttocks and the wall at her back.
Lilah raised the bottle again to her lips. Fred noticed with some alarm that over three inches of its contents had already disappeared. She snatched the bottle, prying it away.
"Hey-"
"We need to get going again. You've drunk enough to anaesthetise. You have to be at least functional if we're to stand any chance at all."
"It's not enough. Give me it b-"
Fred scrambled to her feet and stepped back out of the way of Lilah's lunge. "No. We need to find somewhere safe. We can't stay here. We can't just sit here and get drunk. If we're gonna survive-"
"Oh, yeah." Lilah sneered. "The day I need survival lessons from the purer-than-pure Texas Twig... Wesley's little Madonna to my whore..."
"I wasn't... I'm not virginal. I haven't been virginal in - why does everyone keep thinking that?" Fred heard her own voice rise to an indignant squeak. "I mean, there was the hell dimension, sure, with the rape, and the slavery, and the torture and the rape and the hiding in caves - and the rape. But, I mean, I went to college! I went to grad school! Does everyone think that I didn't have any dates in all those years of student parties and substance abuse?" She wound down her ire, noticing that Lilah was looking... well, it would be amusement, the twist of a smile there beneath the blood on the near-intact skin of the right side of her face.
"Hit a nerve?"
Fred took an annoyed hiss of breath. "I know a thing or two about staying alive, okay?"
"I thought I did." Lilah's voice was muffled. "Now? I'm not so sure I even want to."
"Don't talk like that."
"Why not? Everything I worked for has gone. This body-" She choked, and forced the next words out. They grated on the sharp edgf hef her teeth, ribbons and shreds of words. "It was an asset. I made it an asset. Angelus took that away. My work, my money - the goddamn world is ending. I don't even have my self anymore."
Fred pressed her lips together, feeling the stab of that pain, even if she didn't want to. Sympathy for the devil, indeed. She reached out and cautiously touched Lilah's arm, ran her hand down the smooth skin. "It's not you."
"What would you know?"
Angelus' words echoed inside her head and she lowered her eyes. She'd never been sure what Gunn and Wesley had seen that drew them to her. Wasn't sure that it was not, after all, that mythic purity, her her attractions built around a thing that didn't exist. Angelus - with all his appetites and perversions, with no illusions - Angelus had tossed her aside like a rag.
Lilah was eying her with something approaching suspicion, or perhaps her gaze was just glued to the bottle that swung from her hand, Fred wasn't sure. She made efforts to pull herself together. Someone had to see them safe, and Lilah was a mess, which didn't leave too many options.
She said, "We need to go. There are things we need. Medical equipment - antiseptic, bandaging, and I'm pretty sure yo gon gonna need a lot of sutures. If I can do a decent enough job, though... maybe... maybe it won't scar too badly. I'll try."
A grudging acquiescence. "Thanks, Twig." Lilah held out her hand again stubbornly for the bottle.
Fred shook her head. "You'll need it later." She gestured towards the truck, its passenger door standing ajar, as Lilah must have left it when she climbed out to offer that odd show of sympathy.
Grumbling under her breath, Lilah climbed back aboard looking as though movement hurt. Fred climbed in the driver's side, very much wanting to drink from the bottle in her hand but beset by the feeling it would be vaguely unfair. Not trusting it anywhere near Lilah, she set the bottle down at her feet, where it fell over and sloshed around when she started up the engine, interfering with the pedals and needing to be constantly kicked aside.
Lilah jerked and gave a gasp, although the needle had barely touched her. Her eyes slid to follow the metal, gleaming in the not-ideal dim light of the cheap motel room. She reached a blind hand to the side, head held near motionless (she was trembling), tendons standing out from her neck around the patch of gauze covering the bite wounds, her gaze still on the needle.
"I need more fucking alcohol, you bitch."
"It won't make it any better. You'll only get drunk."
"Yeah. And that'll make it much better."
Fred sighed and ignored the reaching arm; pulled the needle through, watching the trailing thread cinch the edges of the deep cut together. She winced herself, but there was no point in lingering. The faster she was finished the better, for all that Lilah might curse her. She sank the needle in again, drew it through - a nip of torn skin flicking out and back with the tug, making Lilah's eyes glisten wetly and Fred's sting in sympathy - to pin the other edge of the cut and draw them, again, together.
She tried her best to make the stitches neat and small, to not misalign and pucker the skin. She was no craftsman, though, not in any sense. They looked clumsy to her eyes, and probably would look more so to Lilah's.
The cuts were extensive. Barbed. Jagged. But at least they were linear. She could put the jigsaw of their ragged edges back together, after a fashion. Some spots, little round nicks that looked more like Angelus had poked the tip of the knife in and twisted it to core out a tiny bit of flesh, there was nothing she could do about those. She tugged the last piece of the jigsaw into alignment, and finished off the stitch, cut away the thread. The moisture that had been brimming on the edges of Lilah's eyes broke the banks and dribbled down.
Without thinking, Fred reached out to gently wipe the trail from her left eye, catching it before it could reach the wounds. The unmarked skin below Lilah's eye felt like silk beneath her thumb. Then Lilah shifted and reached up a hand to catch hers, pulling it away as a trailing finger accidentally touched the raw flesh of her cheek.
"Sorry." Why was she whispering?
Lilah was still holding her hand. Lilah's fingers felt big-boned, solid and strong for all the rest, wrapping her own bird-frail digits.
Twig.
She would have pulled away as the memory of the insult hit her, but Lilah was raising her hand. Lilah's lips pressed against her fingers. "Thank you."
Lilah's breath was warm against her skin.
Lilah, she reminded herself, was more than a little drunk. Stammering, she extricated her fingers and tried to still their trembling - apparently Lilah's was contagious - because she had to use them yet to apply gauze and bandaging to protect the cuts as best they were able with their limited supplies.
When it was done, Lilah flopped back on the bed with a groan. Fred gave in and let her have the whisky bottle. After a few long swallows, Lilah shuffled up onto her knees and crawled across the covers to where Fred was standing at the end of the bed. She held the bottle out. "Here," she said brusquely. An offer. An attempt at generosity even, if not much of one.
"No. I - I shouldn't. I should stay alert. One of us - I don't want to get drunk."
"Oh, come on. Don't give me the martyr crap. I know Angelus fucked you in the mouth. Take the edge off."
"I'm all right."
Lilah sat back and stared at her until it got awkward. Then Lilah kept staring, and Fred got very uncertain and started staring herself - around the room, trying to think up something to say. But it was Lilah who spoke first. "Yeah," she said. "'Cause this... this happened to you before, like the bastard said."
"Pylea. It was a demon dimension-"
"Yeah, right." Lilah flicked a hand. "I've read a file on you this big-" An expansive gesture that almost upended the bottle still in her grip "-'cause, evil... remember? Plus, with Wesley's crush and... everything? I've kind of spent a lot of time trying to figure out the most appropriate revenge."
"So why ask?" Fred demanded harshly. "You know all about me."
"I know some facts. I don't know much about Pylea, what happened there - Wolfram and Hart is finite, as recently demonstrated, even if what it represents isn't. And whole different dimensions? Not much exchange of information going on there." She went quiet, and Fred thought for a moment that she'd finished, but then she near-whispered, "And besides. Hard facts? I don't need to know right now."
"Then what do you need to know?" Fred snapped.
"How you're still here. How you... live... knowing. How you keep drawing breath. How you keep wanting to. How did you get through it? How do you?"
Fred was shocked into silence herself for long seconds, until the bitterness took over and found her voice for her. "I didn't, remember? I went insane. I guess you should know about the part where things get bad and I end up mumbling to myself and writing on the walls? Angelus didn't want me. Someone who's already been broken isn't much of a challenge."
"You're not broken." Lilah's voice was surprisingly hard. "But you have been. And now you're not. Angelus is a fuckhead lying dickwad, and you'd do well to remember it. Besides - shit, would you rather he sliced up your face with a bread knife? He wasn't interested in breaking you because he knew he was too much a -lou-lousy amateur to get anywhere near to it, and don't you ever tell yourself any different. You got through five years in hell. What can he do?"
"Apart from torture and kill all my friends-"
Lilah winced, drank, and pulled a face. "Friends. I knew there was a reason why I didn't ever have those."
Their eyes met. Held. Something besides irritation registered from Lilah's speech. The Evil Lawyer Bitch had said things... comforting things... Things that, upon evaluation, sounded rather like kindness.
Her mind shied from dealing with such an extreme shift in worldview.
After a moment, Lilah turned away and tossed the capped bottle into the pillows. "Fuck it. Let me at that shower, while I still have the energy to move."