Net Assets
"No." Angel's face is a picture. It's almost making an expression. Lilah can't resist treating herself to a serious smirk.
"Oh, yes. Check it if you don't believe me." Lilah throws in a slight shimmy, but is seriously looking forward to being able to do it properly. She needs all the weapons she can get for this contract negotiation, and the shimmy/purr combo's always been a killer, often literally. Ah, happy times.
"I'd never believe you, Lilah." Heroic Stance Number Three - looks great, but somewhat undermined by the hands curling into fists. Her trained eyes can't help noticing that Angel's fists seem torn between tearing into her or Spike first.
So she files it away for future use and applies just a little more pressure to test Angel's breaking point. The information gained will be useful, and, hell, it's fun she deserves. "You wound me." Angel flinches. "Oh, yes you did." Fifteen-love to Lilah. "And I think I've shown you I can be believed" Thirty-Love, from the killer lob at the implicit Connor reference."
"I'm checking that contract. And I'll be back."
"Do. Take your time. Consult anyone you want. Knock yourself out. It's watertight across all dimensions. You're playing with the big boys now, Angel. And, by the way, that phrase - sounds so much better from Arnie."
Gunn just looks at her, and she swallows the shudder at that utterly alien look in his eyes. His voice though addresses Angel. "Yo, wait up. I'll come with you. Ain't doing anything useful here." He almost smiles as he walks past her to the door and Angel. The smiles are the scariest things of all. That's usually when you get eaten - slowly.
But she's no coward, so she swallows the fear and uses it, like she's always done, to get her task done. "Time to do your jobs, people. Fred, is he likely to come round again soon?"
Fred and Knox consult the monitors, charts and go in for a long and deeply boring to Lilah discussion, which takes forever but seems to come down to 'he'll be unconscious for some time yet', though neither can agree on how long sleeping beauty will stay there. When she puts it that way to them, Wes closes his eyes in that slowly-against-the-pain way he has that drives all the emotions she doesn't want to deal with right into her heart. Bastard. But her bastard, even when he follows it up with a strategic retreat, disguised as 'must re-read the prophecies'. Good military planner, her guy, and it's yet another one of the things she can't resist about him. She hates that almost as much as she needs it. But right now she needs his brain more than his presence, however much she desperately wants that.
But one thing she doesn't need Wes to see is her little procedure. He's seen the inside of her neck once too often, twice really would be overkill, and hardly conducive to her plans for him. So once Wes has gone she orders the operation began.
Lilah's scar is reopened and a reinforcing rod placed in her neck, secured by a number of small bolts into the bones, which don't mar the sweep of her restored neck - though the scar remains to decorate it. The anaesthetic thankfully works. Lilah missed the pain of her decapitation; she really wasn't looking forward to going through it to fix it if the drugs didn't work on the dead. Going under, her last thought is that the first person to make FrankenLilah jokes is getting an all expenses paid company vacation to Quortoth.
And the hours pass.
Lilah comes round and is placed in a recovery bed she insists be close to Spike in case he comes round.
***********************
Angel fumes, reads the contract. Gets lawyer minions to explain the contract clauses to him and only narrowly avoids falling off the pigs-blood regimen and thinning staff numbers considerably as a result. He works very hard at understanding the legalise. Anything to avoid thinking about the call he knows he should make to Buffy on the cell-phone number Faith left on her 'Thank you for getting the law off my back' message. But the thought of telling her, of losing her, again, and to Spike of all people is excruciating. On top of everything else it's too much, so he rationalises not making the call by telling himself that he needs to know everything before he does tell her. He knows he's deceiving himself. It hurts too much; he can't help it. But he can feel Angelus laughing in his chains.
He can't help returning to the lab and the beds that contain so much of his pain. At least there it's concrete, tangible, lying there, all of them. His fallen angel Cordy who'd definitely not appreciate having the Evil Bitch so close to her, and who'd be absolutely horrified to be lying next to Spike.
Spike's always looked strangely innocent when he sleeps. A soul, a stolen shanshu, over a hundred years of slaughter, saving the world, none of that's changed that fact. Bleached hair apart, he's still so very like the confused and annoying boy Dru dragged home. Angel's fingers itch at the remembrance of drawing that deceptively fair face. His fingers want and need to draw it again. They're almost compulsive in the need to express the pain and history that face evokes in him. But he very much doubts that the medium he wants to draw in would get past the soul, or Fred. And blood, it's so difficult to stop clotting, which creates a mess. Angel hates mess, but Spike drawn in various shades of blood was always one of his favourite subjects. It's so very tempting to do it again. He blesses and curses the soul that he can't.
***********************
Wes gets a headache from reading and re-reading the scrolls again, this time with the new books and codices available to him from the Wolfram and Hart library and vaults. Everything he reads convinces him further that it is the shanshu that they're dealing with. And everything he reads makes him more and more convinced that it was a one time only opportunity. It's a piece of news he's really not looking forward to telling Angel.
So he examines all the angles. He targets the amulet that Angel took to Sunnydale. He has an urge to play with the shotgun when he finds that there are no available copies of the file that went with it, as it was the property of the Holding Company, given at their discretion to the subsidiary for use. He calls Rupert Giles to see if the file survived Sunnydale and is disappointed to hear it had been swallowed up with Sunnydale. Giles tells him that the file concentrated on the requirements for the amulet wearer in the battle against the First, though Wesley would still kill to read it with hindsight. He knows he too would have left the file safely stashed at home and not taken it into battle with him, and holds it together enough not to say why he needs the information.
Time enough to pass on the information about Spike when they really know what's going on with him, and it's not his place to do it. He's tempted, but past experience shows that making decisions on behalf of Angel and Buffy do not go well. His failures regarding what happened with Cordelia are too fresh in his mind to allow him to tell Giles that Spike is with them. Time enough to tell them soon, when he's awake. And at least it won't have to be him to do it. Wesley's grown up since his arrival in Sunnydale, but he's still not keen at jumping back into the soap opera that is Buffy Summer's love life, and Angel's sullen silence and hints when he got back from his trip convince Wes that that's exactly what he'd be doing. Once bitten, twice shy.
So he concentrates on the familiar comforts of scrolls, books, in the strange templates, the problematic translation of the concept of pronouns between languages. He knows that Angel's not going to be happy at hearing he might have lost his chance at the shanshu because some languages have no differences between 'a' and 'the'. He's sure that if he'd had the chance to read the original details of the amulet he'd know more, but he was barely given a glimpse of it before Angel took off. He tries hard to repress the feeling that either Angel or Lilah could at least have photocopied the Sunnydale file before sending it off. This is one case where he'd forgive any light damage from the copier or a scanner.
He'd pressure Lilah for more information, or for her to get it. But that makes his skin remember how very pleasurable pressuring Lilah can be, and he can't afford to indulge that feeling. She's dead. She's lost to Evil. He can't save her. He can't have her. But he wants to so much, and she's only a few floors away. He could touch her if he let himself. It's abundantly obvious that she wants him to, and he so wants to let her. It's such a novel experience in Wesley's life for someone to want him for him. He's been wanted for his brain, for what he can do for others, for who he is so he could be what was expected. He knows that's how it started with her too, but somewhere along the line it changed. She wants him for him, and as badly as he wants her. But he can't let himself have her. She's dead. It's wrong.
But that part of Wes that's not concentrating on the immediate mission of deciphering obscure languages, and seeing if unique prophecies were as unique as he thought, can't help thinking of the other implications of Spike. His very existence gnaws at Wes. The Watcher in him is fascinated at how it could possibly happen. The man in him can't help seeing the key to his love's salvation in Spike. A demon, a Slayer of Slayers, one of the worst vampires to walk the earth, yet one that chose to get a soul, and sealed the mouth of Hell at the cost of his own life, un-knowing of any prophecy that could get him out of that death.
If he could do that, Lilah has to be salvageable.
She had/has a soul. He needs to know more about that and how her contract affects it. But she was human and so started way above a soulless thing. If one of the worst vampires in the Council archives could save himself, Wes has to be able to save the woman he can't help loving, even if she's an evil revenant. It's only logical. Wes' mind is trained in ruthless logic, and he can't see the flaw in that conclusion. He just needs to know how to do it.
Giles gave him very little information about Spike's soul in their short conversation, and seemed to want to avoid the whole Spike subject entirely. This suited Wes fine as it avoided putting himself in the 'Please Shoot the Messenger Now' position. Giles did tell him that the soul was self-sought, which could well be the key to the mystery. Or could be completely irrelevant. Either way, Wes is determined to get the truth out of Spike and his books. Spike's the key to decipher the code to save Lilah. One way or another he's going to unlock that code. Failure's not an option. It never has been for Wes. It's certainly not going to be now
***********************
Angel knows it's a long-shot, that Lorne can only read people when they're singing. He also been made very clear that the lunch meeting with one of Hollywood's top agents he's pulled Lorne out of was Very Important. But Angel can't not use all his trusted resources, and he needs to be sure of two things: that he has lost the shanshu, and that Spike's soul's still there.
A chorus of 'Copacabana' tells him that he has lost the former. His senses tell him that the latter is there in Spike. But the Angelus in him really, really wants Lorne to deny that fact, to give Angel the excuse he so badly wants to kill Spike. Angel tells himself that he's just covering all the angles he can, making sure his people are safe. But he can't help the disappointment that so much of him feels when the increasing groaning from Spike enables Lorne to confirm the evidence of Angel's own senses.
The discussion confirming those facts is not quiet.
***********************
There's snippets of sound in cracking into the silence, and the most familiar is the most hated. That sodding voice that made his life hell for years, tore his life to pieces in Sunnydale when it lured Dru back to Daddy, and was one of those that ripped his sanity to shreds in that blasted basement. Angelus's voice, Darla's acid tones, Buffy's tears, his mother mocking him, Dru calling him home, his own face telling him to do it. All those voices, those faces, those that shared the blood and those of his victims, all those voices telling him to go to hell.
And he did. Now he knows he stuck there.
He's not sure if the horrible cracked giggle makes it out of his lips, but it's echoing round his head. He can't help fearing that he never did make it out of that basement. Maybe he's still there trapped in filth and vermin. Maybe everything is still a lie. Dying, being told he's loved, being rescued, being of some use, being needed. Winning. Maybe he didn't. Maybe it's all a dream within a dream. Everything in him is telling him that he's in hell or still in that basement, and it's almost impossible to tell the difference, because for him there is no difference.
But he knows one thing. He remembers one thing from the dream. That Thing with his own face, the Thing with that hated Angel voice, it can't be touched. It's incorporeal. It can't make him do anything unless he's confused enough to let it soothe away the agony, and he knows better now. He can fight his way back to the surface and he can walk right through it. If he's still in that sodding basement he can get himself out of there and head straight home.
If he's wrong and he's in hell, Angel's finally been put out of Spike's misery and he can gloat that all that brooding didn't save the poof either, and then get the first punch in. If they're both in hell, and being in Angel's close company for millennia has to meet that description to the letter, Spike's sure that the little pitchfork wielding imps won't mind a little help with the hot pokers. Spike is very, very fond of hot pokers. He learnt that lesson early and very, very well. He's going to enjoy playing with them on Angel for a few centuries. Hey, if it's Hell, he's all the time in the world to do it. It still won't make up for all the bastard did to him and his, but payback's still very appealing.
It gives him the incentive to fight his way back to the source of that loathsome voice, to find out where he is. And it's terrible, but he gets there. "Not a-bloody-gain. Sodding thing. Know you now. Not getting me this time. Never again, no bleeding way, you miserable sod." As he opens his eyes, his left fist flies towards the face he knows was there, that's always bloody there. He doesn't notice the needles and wires ripping free of his own flesh as his fist connects with an Angel nose, bloodying it well and good.
Spike grins. "So, it's Hell."
He knows he's right. There's a green, red-eyed, horned demon in a horrifically loud suit holding Angel back. So be it. Hell it is. He's done his crime, time to do his time, again. At least he got the first punch in before the inevitable pounding of his own bones. Bloke has to look on the bright side.
But there's a pretty, thin woman with glasses perching precariously from her nose, clutching a clipboard, and looking at him all concerned like. She doesn't quite match the whole 'Hell' concept, unless mad scientists are here too, which gives him hope for some payback on some of those Initiative torturing bastards. But he doubts they'd be looking at him like she is. "No, it's Los Angeles. Though it was pretty hell-like for a while back then, though still not as bad as Pylea 'cause that really was a hell dimension, but I'm being rude. Hi, I'm Fred."
"And that was rude, gorgeous. You got blood all over my new Versace." Bloody marvellous. Camp Green Demon Hell.
"Hey! It was my nose." Angel snuffling through several layers of paper handkerchiefs the white clad science types all have raced to bring him.
"Can't make it look any worse, Peaches." Spike's only sitting up by the strength of considerable will, but there's no way he's going to let Angel know that. He learnt early the cost of appearing weak in front of the poof.
"We're trying to help you, you ungrateful little -" Angel snaps.
"Which we're doing, or were until you pulled some of the monitors off, which could really do some damage. I need to check them and you. Because, coming to like that can't be good for a person, and we really are just trying to help. Well, that and work out what exactly you are and how you work, which is just fascinating -" The Fred rambling's strangely soothing.
"Some clothes might be nice. 'm not a piece of meat, you know." Her blush is fetching. Spike could have really done without the barely perceptible matching one in green. The clenched jaw on Angel; that's a bonus.
This is going to be fun.