BtVS/Angel Fic: "Funeral" (2/2)

[alixtii]

Title: Funeral (2/2)
Rating: PG.
Timeline/Spoilers: Post-"NFA." Spoilers for the entirety of both series. Prologue to my Dark Champions series.
Summary: Illyria mourns alone. But she isn't the only one. Requiescat in pace. Thanks to karabair who made a suggestion regarding this that I just couldn't pass up.

Continued from Part I, here.

Funeral

Faith

Faith stood outside what used to be Wesley's apartment, tried the door. The knob resisted her efforts to turn it; it was, of course, locked. She turned harder, and suddenly the resistance was gone. Oh, well. It wasn't locked anymore, was it?

She stepped into the apartment which had been her first refuge after leaving prison. Angelus had battered her into a bloody pulp, and Wesley had taken her here. To his home.
She stepped into his bathroom, into his bathtub. If she looked closely enough, she could see where the bathroom wall had been re-tiled.

That had been money wasted. She punched it, and then again, slamming her fists into the tile, watching it shatter until it was in as many pieces as it had been a year and a half ago. Even then, she didn't feel all that much better.

Suddenly, she heard a voice call out from the living room. "Um, is someone here?" It was a woman's voice, high-pitched, with a southern accent. Faith recognized the voice as Fred's without any difficulty.

"What if I had been someone dangerous?" asked Faith as she slipped back into the main room of Wesley's apartment. She was dangerous, of course. She had killed two men and who knew how many demons. Claiming to be reformed didn't make her less dangerous.

Fred shrugged. "I'd have screamed really loudly."

"And then they kill you."

"I can handle my own in a fight, Faith. I saw what happened to the door, though. I thought it might have been you."

Faith walked over to the wall. A one-dollar bill hung on it, held up by a dagger. "Guess I wasn't the only one to vandalize this place." On the dollar, in an elegant handwriting, was the name Lilah Morgan. Below that, in Wesley's distinctive script, was Wesley Wyndam-Pryce.

"Wesley put that there the night he went to face Vale," Fred explained. "He said he was going to do it for all of the women he had failed. For Lilah, for you, and—and me."

"Wes didn't fail me," Faith said, her voice firm. "Okay, he made some very bad decisions. But he was there for me when it counted. And you? What did he do to fail you?" Fred only looked at Faith, meeting the Slayer's gaze, refusing to answer.

Their eyes locked for a moment, the two of them together in the dead man's apartment staring into each other's eyes. For that moment, it seemed that Fred was the only other person in the world. But she knew in that moment that there was at least one other person who knew what she was going through, the pain, the burden. Then the moment passed, and Faith lowered her gaze.

"You miss him," said Fred. It wasn't a question.

Faith shrugged. "It's been a year and a half since I saw him, and I wasn't planning on dropping by L.A. anytime soon. But now that I'll never have the chance...yeah, I miss him."

She paused, then exhaled. She'd never really had this conversation with anyone, not even Giles, certainly not Wesley himself. Except maybe the prison shrink (to whom she had given a strongly edited version), who seemed to have been more interested in how Faith may have projected her own troubles with her father onto the young Watcher. (Troubles? What troubles? She was just as sure as ever that all of that psychobabble was utter nonsense. After all, hadn't Buffy's Into Psych professor released a demonoid creature who had tried to destroy the world? Faith did not have an Electra complex—-whatever that was.)

"Wesley was my Watcher," she explained. "He didn't approve of everything I did—-in fact, he approved of very little I did for most of my life. But that didn't matter. What mattered was that he bothered to have an opinion at all, that he paid attention no matter what. And now he's no longer watching, and you know what that means?"

"You are now alone."

"Yeah." Yeah, that was it. Didn't mean it didn't hurt to hear Fred say it.

"You grieve for him."

"Hell, yeah. My first Watcher died too, you know. Murdered by a vampire. I watched the blood be sucked out of her. And I cried. God, did I bawl. But that didn't bring her back. Nothing could bring her back. Except the vampiric blood Kakistos gave her. That was the worse part, seeing the demon which took up residence in her body. I had to stake her. And now, I'll never have another Watcher."

"They fear you."

"I guess I gave them reason, didn't I? After what I put Wesley through, I guess I shouldn't be surprised that no one's exactly clamoring for the job. But it means no one is watching anymore. No one cares. I fight alone from now on. Without an audience."

Faith walked over to the desk which stood in the corner of the room, examined the contents atop it. Next to what she was pretty sure was an Oracle of Illa and a copy of the Tradescan Codex, there was a group photograph of Wesley, Angel, Fred, Cordy, and Gunn in an expensive-looking wooden frame, but it had been turned around to face the wall. "Fred, where's Angel?" Faith asked. "Or Gunn? Lorne?"

"Charles is dead—I think," answered Fred, her voice low, looking at the picture in Faith's hand. "Lorne is—-gone. Angel and S—-I don't know where Angel is. If he is?"

"How can you live like that?" asked Faith. "Don't you want to do something? Find out?"

Fred looked at Faith, and suddenly Faith saw a sorrow in the physicist's eyes which until now she had only seen in her own reflection's eyes, or Buffy's. "Wesley is dead," said Fred. "That is all I need to know."

* * * * *
Illyria

After the Vampire Slayer had left Wesley's apartment, Illyria did not transform back from the form of the shell immediately. Instead, she made her way into the bathroom, looked at the wreck of broken tile which had once been Wesley's bathtub and shower. Illyria knew the release that came from violence, the cartharsis of destruction and of pain. She had felt it in that final battle. The Slayer, apparently, found it in her mentor's bathroom.

But that was not the reason Illyria had entered the small room. She turned to the mirror which stood above the sink, looked at her reflection in it. Or, more accurately, Winifred Burkle's reflection. The face of the shell. She transformed back into her own visage, or rather what had been her visage since she had escaped from the Deeper Well. She remembered when the mere sight of her features would send minions running, so great and terrible it was. But all of that was gone.

She watched intently as her own eyes, hair, and forehead became blue. This was who she was now. Illyria the mockery. Bluebird. A smurf. Babe the blue ox. Little Shiva. The blue meanie. She who had once been god to a god—-

On a whim, she transformed again. Her forehead, hair, and eyes-—now they all were green. Then red. Then orange. Yellow. Purple. White. Back to blue. All mere modulations of her form. But no matter what color, the same eyes stared out from behind Illyria's face: the eyes of Winifred Burkle. Illyria could not escape those eyes which stared back at her no matter how she altered her appearance.

The Shadowmen had all been fooled by Illyria's guise, had believed her to be Winifred Burkle. Even Faith, who had met the real Fred, did not see through the ruse. The shell's own progenitors did not. But none of that changed anything, did it? Winifred Burkle was dead, her soul destroyed in the all-consuming Fires of Resurrection. And Illyria, who now inhabited her body, was her murderer. She was like the demon which had possessed the corpse of the first of the Shadowmen whom had gone to Faith, the woman she had first called Watcher. A creature to be hated and despised by all who had loved the shell.

The Burkle personality-—her mind, her soul-—was gone. And now her body-—the shell-—belonged to Illyria. She had taken it, with the amoral lack of concern she had done everything she had ever done. Want. Take. Have. That had been the way of the God-king of the Primordium, shaper of things. But no longer. She was not a vampire, and not a god. She was a . . . human. Even though she had only thought the word, she could still feel a bad taste in her (the shell's) mouth.

"The first thing a Watcher learns," Illyria had heard Wesley say (for Watcher was the term that the Shadowmen now used to refer to themselves), "is to distinguish truth from illusion, because in a world of magicks that is the hardest thing to do."

Illyria let her leather garments dissipate, her features revert to Burkle. Which was the truth, she asked herself as she looked down at the unadorned shell, and which the illusion? Where was the line between the two? Or did the two just blend into each other? Where did the shell stop and Illyria begin? This was her form now, she decided. As much as she disliked the cold truth, she was the shell now; there was no longer any other self to which she could make claim. The shell was no longer Winifred Burkle, for she was dead. The shell was Illyria.

But Illyria was still alone.


* * * * *
Eve

Across the street from St. Anne's Episcopal Church in downtown L.A., there stood a small and rather dingy diner. Word on the street was that the owner of the diner was willing to pay out under the table to any prospective waitress with blonde hair, a petite figure, and a pretty face. Word on the street was right.

For example, six years ago there had been a petite blonde sixteen-year-old whose nametag had only read "Anne." Who she had been beyond that, no one knew, and no one had ever found out. No one cared. This summer, it was a different blonde girl (older) and a different name on the nametag, but the story was the same. The story was always the same. A nice girl decides to or needs to give up the life and identity she once had, and become invisible. This diner was the place such girls found their way to.

* * * * *
Across the street, the church bells began to ring. They were clearly having a funeral, Eve could tell, because the people who now streamed out of the church were all dressed in black. Eve couldn't help but think about Lindsey. He never had a funeral, and never would. His body had been disposed of (she didn't know by whom-—someone with Wolfram and Hart?) quickly and silently. It was just as well, perhaps. Besides Eve, who would have gone to mourn? He had died alone and—-except for Eve-—unloved. Just like, with Lindsey gone, Eve now was.

Two people, probably husband and wife, entered. They had clearly just come from the funeral, as they were both dressed in black. Expensive fabrics, even. Eve knew there was only one reason why people who could afford to be dressed like that came to a place like this to eat—it was because they were cheap. She knew not to expect a big tip.
They were both older, perhaps in their seventies. The woman was somewhat frail, but the man looked like he let nothing get in his way, not even the ravages of time.

"Can I get you anything?"

The man looked at the woman. "What are you getting, Delores?" he asked.

"I think I'll just have a bowl of tomato soup, Roger," the woman answered him.

Roger looked at Eve as she wrote the woman's order down.

"And you, sir?" The man ordered a chicken salad sandwich and an iced tea.

Cheap, she thought. Definitely plan for a small tip.

When she brought back the food, the two of them seemed to be discussing the funeral. "I don't know why the preacher had to say all of those things," said Roger. "Made him out to be some sort of hero." The contempt in the old man's voice was unmistakable, and Eve loss no time in getting away from their table as fast as she could. She stopped back two or three times before they left to make sure they didn't want or need anything else, but they never did.

The bill came to $9.67. On the table, they had left a dollar, a quarter, and a dime.

Oh well, she thought as she pocketed the change. When you were all alone, every little bit counted.

THE END

Comments

[married-n-mich.livejournal.com]

They're alone, even though they're not the only ones

Exactly!!! That came across wonderfully and we know they always will be alone in that respect.