Burning Down

See part 1 for notes and disclaimer.


5.

They kept driving. There was nowhere to stop, so they just kept going, looking for... anything, nothing, the ruins of LA passing by like something unreal, as if the truck's windows were just television screens and all this destruction mere special effect.

The rubble of the Hyperion made for a harsh stab of reality amid it all. Fred didn't want to get too close. She could see the space distorting as she squinted into the darkness, strange flares of light and energy, movement amid the shadow of things inhuman. Some kind of dimensional rift, perhaps. Thought blanked at the concept, narrowing to words, diagrams and figures, but she didn't have a marker pen.

Lilah stared out with irritable pursed lips over the mess. Perhaps she was annoyed it hadn't been her work.

Fred changed gear and turned them away from the hotel, and she headed back out again, away from Connor and Cordelia (assuming they were even alive), away from Lorne (hoping he was, but she wouldn't know where to start looking for him), away from Angelus and Wesley (hoping they weren't; wishing them dead under tons of steel and stone). Away from everything she'd known since Pylea.

Los Angeles was dying. If they stayed, they could only die with it.

Neither she nor Lilah spoke. Their course was clear. With Lilah all silent venom and torn pride sobering up in ill grace in the passenger seat beside her, Fred joined the tail of exodus blocking the interstate, and the traffic queue took them sluggishly out through the night.

Anarchy ruled in the ownership of vehicles and petrol alike. The gun Fred carried on the dashboard saved them more than once from being relegated to the bottom of the food chain. She had to watch helplessly, though, as their harassers merely moved on to easier prey.

Humans, she thought. No demons or monsters, these. She wanted to weep for humanity.

Then Lilah sarcastically remarked, "I always did wonder at times why my people were even needed," and Fred wanted to knock the smirk off her face, shove her outthe the door and leave her in the road like those other poor unfortunates.

The queue slowly drifted into less and less congestion, like gas released into vacuum expanding and dispersing, as they progressed further from the city. Cars peeled off and away at exits or were left behind, out of fuel, jamming the ever-dwindling space of passage, increasing the disaster in their wake.

And still too there were the occasional tremors. On one occasion, cracks split the pavement like a jigsaw directly behind them. Lilah, who could afford the attention to crane back and watch, did so, relaying that the cracks increased as two further vehicles achieved passage, then swallowed up the third without a trace. The abrupt braking of the fourth resulted in a pile-up even as the scene disappeared into distance and dark. Further on, past San Fernando, cars swerved to avoid a larger rift, the traffic stream bottle-necking down to one lane on the wrong side which an ever-widening tributary of the rift crept slowly across.

A while after they had exited the city and departed for open country, where the other traffic thinned almost to nonexistent, Fred eased the truck off the tarmac and over the dust. Took them far enough out that they would not be spotted from the road and targeted by anyone in need of gas, and finally killed the engine.

Back the way they had come, she could see an orangish smudge on the horizon. Not the dawn, though that couldn't be far distant now either.

Los Angeles. Burning.

"Well, fuck," said Lilah, her eyes fixed on the blemish, her croak of a voice giving lie to the flippancy. "I kinda liked Tinseltown."

They tried to steal a few hours sleep in the back of the truck. Sleep was the dull black of coal dust, and it didn't last for long. When she woke up, the world was still there, defying expectation, in grey-dark pre-dawn shades.

Her arms were full of evil lawyer.

Fred's initial reaction would have been recoil, but she stifled it. Lilah would certainly need what rest she could get, and swift movement would only wake-

Raising her head slowly, she encountered - barely visible in the darkness - two heavily-lashed, half-open eyes washed with exhausted, arch amusement.

"I didn't want to wake you," Lilah said, her voice muted, echoing strangely when the night stifled it, wrapping around it in thick woolly layers. "You're driving. We both need you rested and refreshed."

Embarrassment crushed down on her as Fred realised it was she, not Lilah, who had moved. She was the one of them accustomed to sleeping all night beside another body; to holding, touching.

Lilah, though taut and tired, did not look drowsy, and Fred could feel tension still fierce in the muscles beneath her hands. "You haven't slept?"

Lilah's expression was uncommunicative as stone. "I wouldn't have anyway."

Unaccountably upset, and additionally made to feel very exposed by the thought of Lilah watching her sleep, Fred tried to pull away.

Lilah's hold tightened. "Don't."

"Why?" Angry; a little scared. She was, after all, very, very close to the Evil Lawyer Bitch, the heart of Wolfram and Hart, the most evil woman she knew.

"It's cold." Lilah's tone was all disgruntled laziness.

Fred was taken aback. But the floor underneath her was hard and chilled, and Lilah was soft. Soft and warm and comfortable, and she was still very drowsy. So she relaxed into the hold, and slipped away into the abyss again within minutes, eyes sleepily noting the paling of the grey on the lip of the horizon as they drifted shut.

The second time she woke, Lilah's warmth was gone, although the world still remained. Still. Still and calm.

Stolen sheets tucked tight around her, wrapping her body as she tried to rise to her knees and then stand, pushing them away.

There was a wide strip of dawn across the horizon, increasingly fading out the burning city with its glow, colours tainted by the mustard-gas haze of a new, angrily discoloured sky.

Lilah was standing, arms hugged over her breasts. Her back was to Fred, but she looked cold, her form wavering with the occasional tremor, bouncing her dark hair gently on her shoulders. She still wore the tattered business suit in which she'd walked through the door of Wesley's apartment the previous afternoon. Fred's heart squeezed at the realisation. She should have remembered to find other clothes for Lilah than those.

She caught up the sheet around her ankles, took it to Lilah and draped it around her shoulders, patting automatically in comfort when she felt the shoulders jump under her touch.

"I'm fine." Lilah's assertion was forceful, resentful. But she didn't shrug off the sheet. After a moment, her hand disentangled and crept up to drag the corners tighter around her.

"You should have woken me before now." Fred could see the flare of the growing sunlight glinting off the occasional car passing on the road. They must not now themselves be so invisible as she had counted on last night.

"You looked so peaceful I thought I'd let you keep on snoring," Lilah said dryly, turning and leaning on the back of the truck, belly and breasts flattened against the edge, arms curled over the top. "Besides, it isn't as though there's a lot we can do. Places to go, people to see, whatever. The world's ending. You can't run from the apocalypse."

"The world's still here," Fred said slowly. "When was the last tremor you remember? And it's not as if we know what's going on. I mean, apocalypses - it isn't as though they're a precise science. Nobody's gonna have done a lot in the way of practical research-"

Lilah let out a bark of laughter. The sharp movement tugged at damaged muscles as much as the flinch that followed it. She wrenched her head to one side, and a wing of dark hair swept around to hide her face.

Fred realised the numbing effect of the alcohol must have worn off hours ago, and they had nothing else. The nerves of the face were sensitive. Lilah would be in severe pain. Possibly, too, that was the least of it. She hesitated, not wanting to pry - but they had fewer options now, and this had become almost as much her concern as Lilah's, since certainly the need to track down qualified medical attention would be a quest in itself.

"Are you, uh, all right, with the rest-?" She broke off, inclining her head and twisting her own face, cold science abruptly deserting her, leaving her unable to voice the hard, clinical words she needed.

"Huh?" Lilah's eyes had narrowed.

"You know. Angelus, and-" She made a gesture with her hand that caused her to blush and reduced her voice to a whisper. "Down there."

"Angelus and... down there." Lilah's sarcasm was full of flat disbelief, ared red felt herself reddening all the more at the mocking mirror of her gesture. "Why? You really keen to do some more patching up?"

"No - well, maybe I should - I just - If we need to find a doctor, then-"

"It's all right." Lilah cut her off. She stepped from the truck, tension in the line of her shoulders, her gaze way over across the expanse of dry landscape.

"You're not in any pain?"

"Of course I'm in fucking pain. Did it look comfortable to you? I'm bruised all to hell. But I'll be fine."

"Oh." In the silence that followed, Fred tried to force down her embarrassment and to think. "If we don't need to find a doctor, that is, if everything's all right with your face - and if we find some basic supplies and keep the wounds clean there's no reason why it shouldn't be - then we need to decide what it is we are going to do."

Lilah's shoulders lifted and fell, uncommunicatively.

"We need to figure out how this is going to work," Fred insisted. "If it even is going to work."

"What the hell do you mean?" Lilah pivoted on her heels, finally attentive.

"Us. The two of us. I mean, you're evil, and I'm - well, I'm not. And all of this, maybe we're on the same side now, but I don't know. You've done some bad things to us, to my friends, in the past. If we can't figure out a way to work together..."

"There's only one truck," Lilah spat, cutting through to the essentials. "And if you think either of us would stand much chance of surviving out here alone-"

"I... I know." Fred tried to resist the impulse to shrink away. "We both need someone to watch our back. What I need to know is if I can trust you to watch my back." She swallowed, and blurted, "Are you gonna keep being evil?"

The question earned her a blank stare.

"That presumes I have something left to be evil for. Wolfram and Hart is destroyed, this dimension cut off from contact with the senior partners. Any demons we encounter will be as much out to kill me as you. Humans too, as likely. So yeah, I suppose I'm still technically evil, but what in the hell purpose it serves when the world's turned to shit is something I really haven't had the chance to figure out yet."

Her eyes narrowed at Fred's apparently all-too-evident doubt. "Besides," she added, menace creeping into her voice. "You don't think, do you, that you're just going to leave me out here?"

On the last word, her arm swung up and around. Tladelade shot out from her wrist and, wavering a little in none-too-practiced fashion, she brought it up to rest against Fred's throat in a swift motion. Forced back against the side of the truck, Fred gasped and tried to keep her skin from touching the sharp edge.

But then the blade wavered, Lilah's hold somehow wrong, and it seemed to fold in on itself. Lilah shook her arm irritably but achieved only the opposite effect to her intentions, causing the weapon to collapse fully and retract.

"Shit!" Lilah looked on the verge of stomping her foot. She shook her arm again, to no result.

Fred pressed her lips together, trying not to smile, unsure how the ex-Evil-she-supposed-now-Lawyer-Bitch would react.

Lilah composed herself stiffly and glared. "You realise I have no fucking idea how to use this thing, right? I had minions for this shit. So my threat quotient right now is pretty much nil in any case. Why couldn't you have given me the fucking gun?"

Unable to hold it in any more, Fred's giggle finally escaped. And, in freedom, multiplied. After a moment of looking put out, Lilah sighed and relaxed, and moved to join her, leaning tiredly against the side of the truck and shaking her head. Maybe she was too exhausted for anger. Or maybe the Evil Lawyer Bitch had been harbouring a sense of humour all this time that Fred never knew about because, when she came to think of it, she really didn't know Lilah at all.

Her mirth aside, her heart was taking its time to slow back to normal, and she wasn't filled with confidence by being threatened. But Lilah was right. Just now, they needed each other, and she wasn't about to abandon the other woman.

In this place and time, it was about survival. They could hammer out the details of the arrangement later.

"So what the fuck now?" Lilah asked eventually, evidently reaching the same conclusion, and extrapolating Fred's own - because, despite their differences, Fred supposed they were both creatures of logic at the end of the day.

She thought on the question a moment.

"Fucked if I know," she said finally.

She glanced up and exchanged Lilah a weary smile for a sage nod, and they leaned there, watching the last traces of the burning city become lost in the apocalypse dawn.


END