Reconstruction

See Chapter 1 for notes and disclaimer.


3.

Spike led them through a forest of jagged wall fragments spearing precariously up into the sky. Lilah trailed her fingers down her right wrist as they progressed, feeling the reassuring bulk of the weapon held underneath, just gently enough not to spring the blade. She might be the one responsible for their current arrangement, but that still didn't mean she trusted Spike.

And they only had his word on it that the entity which had destroyed Sunnydale, the Slayer, and all the Slayer's friends (some of whom had not been without power themselves, from Lilah's recollection) was gone.

Take the mad vampire on trust? Yeah, right.

"I don't see any signs of life," Fred was saying with waspish impatience. Hell, even the Twig was suspicious.

"No," Spike agreed, stopping in his tracks. Fred and Lilah glared at him as he cocked his head. After a few seconds, his eyelids lowered a little and he sank to his knees in the dust in a smooth slump. His hands caught at something on the ground... no, in the ground... a metal handle. He yanked it up. An approximate two-foot square rose with it, tipping dust. Fred, caught a little too close, stumbled back spluttering.

Lilah realised then that the harder texture of the ground underfoot was scorched kitchen or hallway tile beneath a thin layer of charcoal-dust. That the fragments of ruin around them followed the line of four walls, smaller fragments marking out the thinner walls that had divided the rooms within.

"A basement," she said.

Spike was backing off from the hole, eying it with caution. "This is as far as I go," he said.

Fred started to protest, but another voice cut through the air before she could.

"Yes. It is."

The woman covering them with an old hunting rifle looked on the edge. Her clothes were domestic, pastel checks on a pinafore dress, matched with blonde hair and hoop earrinA weA wedding ring caught the red glint of the altered daylight on her hand.

She said to Spike, "I thought I told you to stay away."

"I'm going," Spike said, hands rising open-palmed to the level of his shoulders, slowly backing off. "Don't fucking shoot me again, all right, you bitch."

The gun jerked and clicked in the woman's hands at his movement.

"Don't-" When Fred stepped forward (and why the hell? It wasn't as though the bullets would kill Spike, assuming they even gave a damn about the welfare of Spike), the barrel spun around to zero in on her. "We asked him to bring us here. It's not his fault."

"And who the hell are you?"

The gun didn't waver. The Twig fidgeted under its aim, which was unlikely to make the trigger finger of PsychoSusie Homemaker any less itchy.

"We're human." Lilah felt her voice rasp in her throat, cracked and dry, thin as paper, sounding as frail as she felt. The woman with the gun evidently reached the same conclusion; although her eyes flickered minutely, her aim never wavered from Fred.

It was probably a testament to Lilah's state of exhaustion that it was only after a moment of dying inside that she realised Fred was still holding the crossbow and the empty gun, albeit loosely in hands dangling by her sides. Fred had evidently been too surprised to even think of bringing them to bear. It was probably why she was still alive.

Fred caught Lilah staring, followed the line of her gaze, and tossed down the weapons with a convulsive motion that almost got her shot anyway.

"We're not dangerous!" she protested, raising her hands in a copy of Spike's gesture. Her eyes slid nervously around. "I swear. We only want to try to put things right."

The woman gave a bitter snort. Lilah figured it would be unwise, in the circumstances, to raise an objection on the grounds of semantics.

But the woman was looking more closely at them now - taking in the bruises, the bandages, the blood, the stained and torn clothes. "Where did you come from?" she asked slowly. "We looked all over here. We spent most of yesterday and this morning looking. We thought we'd found everything human that had survived, that the demons hadn't got to first."

"We came from LA," Fred told her. "It's... things are bad there, too. Anarchic. The city was crumbling... earthquakes and fire... when we left."

"And you came here?" The woman laughed. "Of all the directions you could have chosen. Everyone left here is trying to get out and as far away as they can."

"We thought there might be people here who could help. I thought - have you heard of the Slayer?"

The woman nodded, and at last the tip of the gun fell. "You're out of luck. The Slayer's dead."

"I know."

Liquid grey eyes flickered across to Spike. "Yeah," she said. "You should know, then, what this one did as well?"

"He claims it wasn't from choice," Fred said, sounding like she was trying to exorcise her own doubt. Her voice grew firmer as she spoke. "He claims he has a human soul. We can't leave him here, when we leave, if that's true."

The woman's eyes glittered, but quickly narrowed again in suspicion.

"I heard those too. That's why I didn't saw his head off after I introduced him to Doreen for the first time." She moved the gun in her hands indicatively. Doreen.

"I don't think he'd hurt us."

"Unless he was jonesing for a snack," the woman said, and there really was nothing Fred could say to that.

Spike was still trying, surreptitiously, to edge away.

The woman looked at Lilah again. Her face softened (Lilah flinched at the sight of pity) and she let out her breath in a drawn 'hmmmfh'. The rifle drooped in her hand and finally rested harmless, parallel to her thigh.

"All right," she said, and jerked the tip of the barrel towards the basement hatch. "Why don't you all stop gawping out here and come along in?"

There were a dozen of them huddled into the underground room, which took on the aura of a nuclear bunker with such a crush of frightened humanity within. The woman with the shotgun was called Sarah-Jane Kramer and seemed to be more or less in charge. Fred came alive with nervous, driven energy when presented with the array of tools and junk in the basement, and took Sarah-Jane aside almost immediately, the two of them quickly becoming buried in discussion of tactics, options and survival amid a battle of their warring drawls. Lilah didn't miss the whispers and the sideways glances towards her that marked a brief departure close to the beginning of their kinetic debate.

She was left, awkward and self-conscious and increasingly angry with it, to the mercy of ten strangers and Spike. The strangers regarded Spike with suspicion and her with vague pity. She sidled closer to Spike.

"Here." The man introduced as Garth something-or-other whom Lilah had pegged tentatively as Spike's mystical dabbler (Garth was fortyish with a beer belly and wore the most ludicrous clothes she'd ever seen on anyone, ever, including in the surveillance tapes Wolfram and Hart had taken of Angel's fashion-sorry band) offered her an opened tin can and a fork. She cringed at the cold baked beans within, the smell alone almost enough to make her retch. It was over twenty-four hours since she'd last eaten.

"No," she said, turning her head aside reflexively. "Get it the hell out of my sight."

Spike's staple goddamn diet would have looked more appetising.

The man's eyes narrowed as he said, "You should eat."

"Well, I don't fucking want to."

"I'll have it-" Spike began.

"Don't feed the vampire!" Sarah-Jane's voice rang out sharply, echoing in the small underground room. The woman had ears like a bat. "Save it for those of us who actually need it."

"Bloody witch," Spike muttered as the beans were withdrawn.

"I resent that," piped up the teenage girl all in black (apparently keen on playing up to stereotype). Spike aimed two raised fingers behind him without turning. She kicked at the back of his ankle with one inordinately bulky black boot.

Good old Garth gave in his efforts to make Lilah eat, and with an extra-suspicious last glance in Spike's direction, turned away.

"So," Spike said, voice muted in the back of his throat, lips barely moving. "Your girl. She's pretty good at this stuff, right? One of the massive poof's band of the brave and bold?"

"Yeah." Fred was rifling through boxes, snatching up various items she and Sarah-Jane passed back and forth between them in study. "How did you know that? I mean, yeah, you were consorting with the Slayer and all - in the very biblical sense, from what I hear - but I didn't think those two ex's were much on communication."

"Willow said there was a girl called Fred working with the poof." Spike shrugged. "Don't know why I remember, really. Said the bint hid under the table the entire time she was at Angel's place in LA. Could be what stuck in the mind."

Lilah snickered, then fell abruptly quiet, watching Fred lift up something with a heap of wires trailing from it, and examine it with bright-eyed knowledge.

"She's changed a bit since then, I gather."

"I suppose so." She watched Fred animatedly planning the survival of a dozen souls with a woman who ten minutes ago had been threatening her at gunpoint.

"People climb back up all the time, I guess," Spike added. "Even the ones you think are too far gone. Even the ones you might think can't, or wouldn't."

"Even the ones who aren't people?" Lilah turned to look at him archly.

Spike swore and stared at his feet. His fingers twitched as though missing a cigarette, which set Lilah's thoughts on a track of similar cravings. She wanted food - good food. Alcohol, preferably a halfway decent scotch. Most of all, she wanted a change of clothes. They didn't even have to be a label.

She could already see it would be a waste of time asking these people about any of those things.

"Nifty device you got there. I meant to say, before." Spike trailed a finger on Lilah's wrist, and the unexpected touch made her flinch. "How do I get one of them?"

"I have no idea. The person who owned this had it made. It may have even been to his own design."

"Another of the poof's?"

"In a roundabout sort of fashion." Lilah explained, flat-voiced, briefly, about Wesley.

"Sounds like you got it bad," Spike observed when she'd done.

"Fuck you, Soulboy Lite."

"Angelus won't have killed him. You know that. Not if he meant enough to the bastard to have him all riled up in stalk mode. Those, he likes to take his time with."

Lilah didn't want to hear that. "Doesn't matter. They're both dead under the rubble of LA anyway."

"If yay say so." Spike shrugged, and returned to watching Fred. His eyes were narrow and thoughtful, the insanity temporarily on resp "Yo "You and her. Opposite sides. Pretty much opposite everything. How far you gonna follow her, huh? How long are you gonna let her lead you?" Something oddly resentful - oddly wistful - in his voice.

Lilah blinked, and didn't tear her gaze from Fred to look Spike in the eye. "I don't know."

"Garth says he knows how to fix us up a line to the Powers - the 'mystical oracles' or something like that, he said." Fred was smudged with grease and engine oil, perched uninvited on the wall fragment next to where Lilah leaned observing the proceedings from out of the way, feeling numb with an insistent buzz of exhaustion running through her veins and inside her head. "You know, I think Angel might have spoken about them once."

"The oracles were destroyed," Lilah responded irritably.

Garth popped his head over Fred's shoulder on his way across to the mended truck carrying supplies. "New oracles," he emphasised somewhat warily to Lilah, before ducking back and continuing on his way.

Fred's attention followed him a second, then returned, flashing Lilah a slightly scrunched-up smile. "New ors," s," she repeated unhelpfully.

Lilah supposed it was indeed possible that the powers hadn't sat back and let their oracles be slaughtered without at least replacing them. She hadn't known of a gateway located anywhere near Sunnydale. "They only see Champions," she said. "Although I guess since those are a bit in short order at the moment, all things considered, they might see you."

"Don't laugh." The Twig's hands were bitterly clenched into fists at her sides. "Do you want this to be the end of everything? The Slayer's dead. Angel's gone. Cordelia..." Her face twisted. "They're probably all dead, and the truth is, we were losing sight of the mission even before. It was supposed to be about the fight, not about our petty squabbles."

Blinking, Lilah stared, intrigued by her phrasing. "The fight? I thought you helped the helpless?"

"We killed evil demons. It's the same thing. We made the world better... can we forget the semantics?"

Lilah shrugged. She'd pursue the issue another time, assuming she could be bothered. Assuming there would be another time to pursue it. She watched their not-so-merry little band of allies trudging back and forth, taking everything they would need and could carry out to the truck.

"I noticed you've been avoiding everyone." Fred sounded annoyed, and gave a quick glance around before she continued, as though she'd been waiting for opportunity to bring this up in some semblance of private. "Do you hate people so much? I know you're evil and everything, but shouldn't you ought to try get along?"

"I don't - all right, so maybe I do hate them. But that's not why." She bit the sentence off with a growl.

"Why is it, then? I mean, you were a lawyer, so in theory that means you can at least pretend to be polite to people, right?"

"I hate the way they look at me," Lilah finished.

"Oh." Fred cast her gaze down.

"Or the way they don't," Lilah added maliciously, finding some consolation in her relish at the look on Fred's face as her eyes shot back up.

"I didn't mean to-"

"Yeah. Of course. Spike's a shit, but at least he doesn't flinch from a reality that's staring him in the... face." She glared down the depths of the Twig's widened pupils, driving the point home. "Angelus fucking raped and tortured me. That's not going to change. This-" her hand flew to the bandaging covering the side of her face "-isn't going to change either. End of the world rules out cosmetic surgery as much of a viable option. My face is going to look like dogmeat for as long as I survive. But fucking deal, already. And give me some credit that I can."

"They don't mean anything," Fred said unhappily. "And it's not like they don't all have their own pain, too."

"I don't care."

They faced each other in angry silence for long moments, before Fred slipped off the wall. Her feet hit the floor and she leaned in to Lilah, and she started talking, her eyes fixed unblinking to some point on Lilah's breastbone.

"Sarah-Jane's two children were out playing in the street when the flame wall hit. She saw them burn as it swept through. Her husband shoved her down into the basement but he was caught by the fire as he followed. Half the flesh on his back was cooked and he took three hours to die while she had to watch."

Fred paused to absorb Lilah's silence a moment before moving on.

"Garth was out jogging. He had a split second to cast a protective magical shield around himself, before an entire street of people turned into ashes around him. If he'd thought quicker, thought about more than personal survival instinct, he could have made a bigger shield. He doesn't know how many he might have saved."

There was moisture in Fred's eyes now. "Ruth," she said. "The little girl? She was playing in an underground den in her garden. Her home was on the very edge of the town, the fringe of the fires. She heard the screams as her family burned slowly in the heated air."

"Stop it," Lilah said.

Fred took another gulp of breath.

"I said don't." She could feel her nails digging potholes in the flesh of her palms, couldn't unclench her fingers. A shudder ran through her body. "I don't want to hear it. I don't care."

She really didn't. She had no idea why she was trembling.

"Lilah was raped and tortured by a monster who then... killed the man she loved," Fred said in a rush, a hitch in her voice. "Who loved her."

God, her eyes were stinging, and there was actually something - a hot, damp trickle sliding down her cheek. Wet heat, too, from the gouges in her palms.

"Who's denying reality nowred'red's voice was shaking, too, wildly fluctuating and crossing registers. "Does it hurt so much to acknowledge it, Lilah? To be just like everyone else? To be just one more human victim?"

"Fucking shut up!" Lilah grated, almost a scream. A couple of heads turned their way, but she was too angry to dial it down. "Shut the fuck up! It's no wonder Angelus wanted you to shut the fuck up. All you ever do is fucking talk!" She sagged down onto her knees.

The only reaction from Fred, thin and brittle and pale from more than just the verbal onslaught, was to reach out a shivering hand, and with it wipe the trail of tears from Lilah's face.