Fic: "Chthonic" (Angel)
Chthonic
Written for the second round of the lynnevitational challenge.
Characters: Fred, Faith
Setting: Primarily during the Faith arc in Angel season 4.
Summary: Vacant, unfathomable space. From it arose all things, earthly and divine.
Thanks to likeadeuce for betaing, and romanticalgirl for the summary.
Pylea is a place of unmaking, and Fred unmade is no Fred at all, no girl at all, only skin and bones and disobedient cow who talks and dreams in patterns that don't belong there.
Pylea unmakes Angel into a demon, and Fred-who-isn't...the unmade Fred...the body who was Fred...easier to retain the signifier of the whole, Fred, for clarity's sake. Concise if not accurate. And she has lost her way again, words dense as trees hiding thoughts like monsters.
Begin again. Pylea unmakes Angel into a demon, and Fred calls to him, blinds his eyes with songs and blood. She guides him home and remakes him, as she remakes herself every morning and night from dust and rags and fractured memories. He is stronger, he has the others he brought with him, and she sees that he is more whole than she has been able to be alone.
She needs others, she thinks, and oh, she's so glad when they let her follow them home. She can remake herself better there, more completely. Pylea won't steal anything else from her, and she can fill the cracks and spaces by borrowing from all of them. They have more than enough to spare.
**
The pieces overlap here and gap there, scrape together, buckle under stress. She is rebuilt but blurred; she covers up the spaces where things are still missing with tissue paper and glue.
She has rebuilt herself in their images, but she's done it wrong; each of them also holds the image of hero and she knows that that is the one she hasn't managed, she can't get right. She borrows from each of them and the sum is less than the parts, a flaw in the math that leaves her awake at night, wondering what she's missed, what she's done wrong, what she needs to find and change to make things better. To be better. To be complete instead of pieces and patches.
Her flaws and errors are symptomatic, she's sure: the smallest signs of the greater crisis, the grand disease that poisons everything and grinds the world down. The seeds are here, at the smallest level, in every single body, in her, and they move outwards, upwards (exponential growth, deterministic chaos, the words are lodestones, symbols heavy with meaning and empty of power). She can only imitate the cosmic form, the function in the mathematical sense (variables here, here, and an outcome that is itself a variable that fits there, like so). However hard she tries, she is as much a hero as she is a paper doll, a figure drawn in chalk, and any one is as much use in the firestorm as the others.
The model runs again and again in her mind, flowing through endless iterations, and chaos theory shows the ending stark and clear and brilliant between margins of error bright as flames; each time the fractal curve is redrawn, her weakness spreads until it unmakes the world.
"That's Jurassic Park," Charles says when she tries to tell him, her breath too tight in her chest, her heart thudding in her ears, panic rising and trying to bubble over in a way she hasn't allowed herself since she was nineteen. "Chaos theory and fractal curves and iterations. Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park, more the book than the movie. Jeff Goldblum can't really sell 'genius.'"
The theories were there before the book, she points out, and he hugs her. It's the two of them alone in the hotel, a moment together that the relentless press of chaos dictates will be among the last. He is solid, he is grounding, he is a pattern of order weaving off into the universe instead of instability like she is, and she wishes that she could break off pieces of him, his solidity and his love, and use them to fill the gaps in her. His strength doesn't translate, as hard as she tries; it crumbles at the edges and falls away. But she wishes...God, she wants...if only...
They asked her to be Wesley, to make herself into what even he could only pretend to be (wisdom, certainty, infallibility, all of it disguises, illusions and lies, and they threw him out when he got it wrong, why should she even want to try?). But Wesley is brittle where Charles is solid, glass instead of earth, and each piece she tried to take from him fit better at first and then cracked, cutting as it fell away.
She can't be Angel. No one wants her to be Cordelia. Fred-who-is-just-Fred was lost a long time ago, far away from here. And so she is uncertain, incomplete, in-between, waiting for a critical event, a catalyst.
**
When she sees Faith, she shakes all over, a chemical reaction, a neuroelectrical shock. That was who she had wanted to be, in Pylea and perhaps before, vague half-wishes in the shadows of her mind that hid from the sunlight of reality (mundanity, innocence, ignorance, happiness).
But in Pylea, most of all, she had tried to dream herself into being this, this elemental function signified fidelis in the Latin. Strong and proud and self-contained; Slayer, all the pieces her own, with power under her skin instead of only in her mind. Created by chaos and carrying it within her, instead of bowing her head to its control.
Faith doesn't care about a cracked and discarded could-have-been-her who never was. Faith doesn't like her, doesn't see her, dismisses her out of hand in the first minute they meet. But Fred watches her, the way she watched monsters and storms in Pylea. She unmakes herself to dust and rags again, easily laying aside her patchwork borrowed strength and watching from cool nothingness, hidden behind her hair.
Muscles tense and flex under Faith's skin, more than human--metahuman, she thinks, stolen from Charles' comic books. And yes, that fits, she can imagine Faith rendered in ink lines and primary colors. She waits for Faith to look her way, to let her see the lightning and thunder in her eyes, and she whispers the word to herself, tasting its curves and shadows. Slayer.
Secrets there, mysteries. A whole being, identity and name, that would own the one who owned it, fill her up like water. No, heavier than water--sand, stone, blood.
Born in the dark, she thinks, watching Faith, born singing the song of the chthonic depths, and she knows she's gone too far, dreamed too much in, made a fetish of what is only the other side of the ordinary world, which obeys rules and laws as much as stone and sand and blood do, as much as water. Faith bleeds, Faith bruises. And yet Fred can't look away, can't stop the spinning in her mind and the pit of her stomach that takes this other woman and turns her into the idol of a goddess, Kali in the dark, and makes Fred yearn to give a sacrifice.
**
Faith ignores her, maybe doesn't even see her. That's all right. Fred is used to waiting and watching, fading into shadows and scavenging for what she needs, surviving on the scraps and pieces she can fit together into something new.
She can take from Faith with her eyes--a tilt of the head, a cock of the hip, a way of standing or walking or striking out. She watches Faith and Connor--the way he falls into line spellbound, dazzled by charisma and respectful of strength greater than his own--and remembers her own failure with him, how he turned her kindness around as weakness and hurt her with it. Her, and Charles, and Angel as well, and who knows how that echoes out, turning and growing until it wounds the world.
It's not that Faith can't be hurt, hasn't been broken. Angel told them about her, and what he skipped Cordelia filled in, with Wesley giving the very last pieces. There are bruises on her face now, half-healed cuts, as she walks around the Hyperion, marks left by Angelus and the Beast. She can be hurt, has been hurt, is as broken and remade as any of them. Fred still wants to press her fingers and her mouth to those marks, feel the blood throb under her touch, taste it hot on her tongue. Faith's weaknesses fall on Fred's strengths, and Fred is strong where Faith is cracked and faulted. If she could draw Faith into her, or crawl inside her and wear her skin like a shell, they would both approximate--simulate--something whole.
Negative images. Inverse broken places, mirrored shards. Fred would draw the image on the walls in chalk, in ink, in blood, if she hadn't painted over that desire already in Angel's name.
**
The courtyard smells like jasmine, sweat, stone giving up the heat of the day, and the smoke that rises from Faith's cigarette and hangs in the still night air.
"Tonight I'm gonna get the big bad," Faith says, tilting her head back to the sky on the other side of the night-haze. "Got Wes's suicidal crazy-ass plan to make the world safe for apple pie and puppies and you flashing your chest at him till he does what you want. The way it all ought to be, right?" She isn't looking at Fred, hadn't appeared to have noticed that Fred is there at all. "Maybe try your ass next time, since chest isn't really your thing. Or say fuck subtlety and go straight to showing him your cunt. Probably your best chance. Wes is fuckin' slow for a smart guy."
Fred breathes in the smoke and jasmine and heat and doesn't say anything. Faith's words run over her and flow down into the cracks, sharp edges dulled by the fall. Nothing makes contact, a benefit of being made of pieces and patches not her own.
Faith throws the end of her cigarette down to the courtyard stones. "You have some kind of an issue, Burkle? You're supposed to be the resident genius and you just follow me around and stare all the time. You want me to notice you or not? Staring like that means you do, but the hiding and the lurking, that makes it kind of hard to tell."
Fred blinks slowly, dazed and unable to catch words, to remember the pattern of lips and tongue and breath that would make them. So many patterns, too many to learn, remember, know. She feels heavy and slow, immobile, made of wood and stone while Faith is fire and clouds, untouchable, immune to axes and shovels and being reduced to dust. Deterministic chaos, fractal curves; as long as one piece of her remains, the whole is there.
"Are you high or something?" Laughter bubbles under Faith's voice, the edge of nerves and mania, the side effects of building herself up to the hunt and the plan. "Because if you are, bitch, you gotta share."
"I'm afraid," Fred blurts out, her tongue finding itself too late, spilling words that make Faith's eyes darken with contempt. Wrong words. Flawed again.
"Join the damn club."
"Not of Angelus." Fred wants to step closer, wants to reach out and touch, wants to see if the power can flow to her through skin. Her heels press to the earth, holding her, rooted.
"Yeah? What, then?"
"I'm afraid of none of it mattering. Not making a difference." The sky is clear again, the sun is back, the Beast is dead, but she still looks up at the sky and knows that it--ineffable, unnameable it--is wrong. "I'm afraid that nothing we do is going to mean anything."
Faith stands for a moment and watches her, eyes gone dark and flat, and Fred realizes that they do have a weakness in common, a gap in both of them. Maybe it's a gap in everyone, the uncertainty of one body and mind having any weight in the world. Maybe it's only one in ten million who have strength there, the chosen, the Champions, the heroes who can't be anything else. And they can't share that, no matter how much she wants to borrow it, draw it into herself, find some certainty. Have...a little faith.
Faith shakes her head and reaches for another cigarette, letting her hair fall forward over her eyes until they're as shadowed as Fred's own. "I don't know anything about that," she mutters, smacking the lighter against her palm and striking the flint until it catches and she cups the flame in her hands. "Just do your job when the time comes. Do what you can. That's gotta matter somehow. To somebody, even maybe just you."
It's a platitude, meaningless, something from prison therapy most likely, and from the set of Faith's jaw, she doesn't believe it herself. But Fred smiles. Patterns build on patterns, curving outward in each iteration of the fractal curve, until they become the world. What matters to her can change everything.
**
Faith lies in the bed, bleeding into the sheets, and Fred presses bandages over her wounds, follows with tape, watches the flutter of the pulse under the soft skin of Faith's throat. Faith is down in the dark with Angelus and Orpheus, and Fred can see the battle in her even as she seems to sleep.
Lorne is lecturing on outrage, on how Wes should have found a different plan, but Fred thinks that this is right, after all. The myth won't fit, can't turn either Faith or Angel into Eurydice or imagine that anything here is a song, but it's right underneath the symbols, in the patterns, in the seeds of the grand design. Faith is doing her job, fighting even in the unconscious mind and the underworld.
She sits beside the bed and watches Faith breathe, bleed, twist and whimper in her sleep, grow paler, tense and relax again. Once or twice her mouth turns like a smile, and Fred presses her fingers to her own lips to keep from tracing the curve of Faith's. More often, Faith's face twists in pain and Fred's echoes in sympathy, wanting to share but outside of the conflict and the gamble, powerless.
No, that's not right, not entirely; she is here as witness, just as down in the dark Faith is witness, trying to call Angel up and hold Angelus at bay without being able to act on either. Fred wipes another trickle of blood away, the only action she can take here on this side. Mirrored roles, twinned, sacred tasks in passivity.
Soon she will have to go help Willow with the rituals, help call Angel back in truth, even if again the will and power are not hers, and she is only a witness. She looks at Faith lying on the bed, pale as the sheets, and remembers the desires that flashed through her while watching Faith move about the hotel. To touch, trace her fingertips feather-light over muscles, slide her tongue along curves of skin tight over bone and soft over tissue, kneel between Faith's legs and lower her mouth to hot, slick flesh, lick and taste, then turn her head to the side and bite into tender skin, feel her mouth flood with heat and salt. She wants to get as close as she can, reach through the space and the body, and touch to claim, use the giving as a mask while she takes what she needs, builds it into herself, owns the power that runs through Faith's veins.
Now Faith is down in the dark and there is no strength to spare; being Slayer may not be enough to win this fight. Maybe all that power doesn't mean anything after all, just another illusion to shatter and let fall away.
Patterns spiral out and create the world. Everything means something, she knows. The key is to identify, to classify, and thus to control.
**
Willow shimmers with light, for all the depths of power under the surface. She is carefully-built artifice and control, and Fred is grateful for that, because it is easy to respond in kind, to choose a face and wear it well. She has masks that are suited for this, that work, that fit. She can easily be something Willow wants to see, and that has its own temptation, the lure of the safe and effortless rather than the seductive urge to be woven with Faith.
The spell rises and falls, power swelling and breaking over the hotel, and Faith comes flying from nowhere, from the other side of the real, and stops Connor mid-stroke, mid-motion that no one else saw at all, and Fred's heart jumps, freezes, threatens to break, because yes, that's it, that's what she wanted to see, what she wants to have as her own. Strength deeper than body and bone, strength to stand up at the very last and be enough, be powerful, be there.
Her throat is dry and her hands shake and she doesn't know what to do except move closer, drawn in like a charged particle, air to a vacuum, water chasing salt.
**
Faith rolls her other set of clothes into a tight bundle, then shoves them down into the bag Wes found for her in the depths of the hotel. "You're stalking again, Burkle."
"Sorry." Fred stands in the doorway, watches, trembles with the need to make herself heard and the fact that it can't be done, because the thing choking her throat and aching to get out isn't made of words. Help me. Hide me. Give me yourself. Make me into you. None of them are right, even strung together; it's the shadows between the words that she needs, and they won't be caught, won't be framed.
"Do you need any help?" she asks instead, watching Faith run a hand through her hair. "Or...or a comb?"
"Uh, no. I'm good." Faith looks at her oddly and zips up the bag. "You keep looking at me like you want to ask me something. Or bite me. So either just ask, or stop looking, because you're freaking me out."
She doesn't want to ask; she wants to be asked. Invited along to somewhere else, where maybe it'll be different, work better, even though she knows that this place, these people, this end of this particular world is where she belongs, is hers. It's a selfish desire, to run, but she realized long ago that the selfish desires are what keeps the body alive, even if the selfless ones make the name and story immortal. She still wants the former more than the latter, for as long as she can.
It's selfish, too, to do what she does, to borrow pieces, attitudes, selves from the people around her and stitch them into the patchwork being that's the only way she knows how to move through this world anymore. It's adaptation, the stopgap of individuals cursed by logic and definition to be unable to evolve alone. Only a population evolves, a population in which each single being disappears. She disappeared once; she doesn't want to do it again. She wants to dig in, teeth and grasping fingers, she wants to survive.
"What am I supposed to do?" she asks, as startled as Faith is by the words, the anger in the question, the gaping aching lack of an answer. "I'm just a person. I'm just a human body. No powers. No magic. What the hell am I supposed to do?"
Faith stares at her, shifts her weight, looks away, and Fred knows that Faith thinks she's crazy as well as useless, parasitic, whatever the flicker of contempt in her eyes translates to. And Fred doesn't care all that much, because she's right, on all counts. But crazy fights harder, more desperately, demands to survive. Parasites live, as long as anything is there to share self and sustenance. The scavengers are the last to be defeated by the world when entropy is winning the day.
"Hold the line," Faith says finally, shrugging and looking down at the floor. "Stand up and keep fighting. Do your job. Wait for what you need and then take it. Just like the rest of us, Jesus, I don't fucking know."
She pushes past Fred, out the door and down the hall toward the stairs, muttering to herself about fucking crazy, little bitch, fucking out of her mind. Fred lets her go, stands and waits, curves her fingers against her palm to keep where they brushed Faith's wrist as she passed. A touch is enough, symbolic, the Greek letter in the equation that stands for whatever she needs.
Hold the line. Do the job. Wait for what you need and take it. Faith has no special certainty, the borderline arrogance of the chosen ones, the Champion. She has rules, scattered through the wilderness like stones. But Fred can build those in, can use them. She can be that. Make another face, another mask, fill another gap under the skin.
"Be strong," she says out loud, looking out through the window at the city, still under siege from the chaos that grows out of the most infinitesimal cracks. "Don't run away."
She can feel it, electric under her skin, quickening in her blood, the click of spaces being filled. It will take time for them to grow up from under the surface, to spiral out into the world, but the patterns are all about to change.
Written for the second round of the lynnevitational challenge.
Characters: Fred, Faith
Setting: Primarily during the Faith arc in Angel season 4.
Summary: Vacant, unfathomable space. From it arose all things, earthly and divine.
Thanks to likeadeuce for betaing, and romanticalgirl for the summary.
Pylea is a place of unmaking, and Fred unmade is no Fred at all, no girl at all, only skin and bones and disobedient cow who talks and dreams in patterns that don't belong there.
Pylea unmakes Angel into a demon, and Fred-who-isn't...the unmade Fred...the body who was Fred...easier to retain the signifier of the whole, Fred, for clarity's sake. Concise if not accurate. And she has lost her way again, words dense as trees hiding thoughts like monsters.
Begin again. Pylea unmakes Angel into a demon, and Fred calls to him, blinds his eyes with songs and blood. She guides him home and remakes him, as she remakes herself every morning and night from dust and rags and fractured memories. He is stronger, he has the others he brought with him, and she sees that he is more whole than she has been able to be alone.
She needs others, she thinks, and oh, she's so glad when they let her follow them home. She can remake herself better there, more completely. Pylea won't steal anything else from her, and she can fill the cracks and spaces by borrowing from all of them. They have more than enough to spare.
**
The pieces overlap here and gap there, scrape together, buckle under stress. She is rebuilt but blurred; she covers up the spaces where things are still missing with tissue paper and glue.
She has rebuilt herself in their images, but she's done it wrong; each of them also holds the image of hero and she knows that that is the one she hasn't managed, she can't get right. She borrows from each of them and the sum is less than the parts, a flaw in the math that leaves her awake at night, wondering what she's missed, what she's done wrong, what she needs to find and change to make things better. To be better. To be complete instead of pieces and patches.
Her flaws and errors are symptomatic, she's sure: the smallest signs of the greater crisis, the grand disease that poisons everything and grinds the world down. The seeds are here, at the smallest level, in every single body, in her, and they move outwards, upwards (exponential growth, deterministic chaos, the words are lodestones, symbols heavy with meaning and empty of power). She can only imitate the cosmic form, the function in the mathematical sense (variables here, here, and an outcome that is itself a variable that fits there, like so). However hard she tries, she is as much a hero as she is a paper doll, a figure drawn in chalk, and any one is as much use in the firestorm as the others.
The model runs again and again in her mind, flowing through endless iterations, and chaos theory shows the ending stark and clear and brilliant between margins of error bright as flames; each time the fractal curve is redrawn, her weakness spreads until it unmakes the world.
"That's Jurassic Park," Charles says when she tries to tell him, her breath too tight in her chest, her heart thudding in her ears, panic rising and trying to bubble over in a way she hasn't allowed herself since she was nineteen. "Chaos theory and fractal curves and iterations. Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park, more the book than the movie. Jeff Goldblum can't really sell 'genius.'"
The theories were there before the book, she points out, and he hugs her. It's the two of them alone in the hotel, a moment together that the relentless press of chaos dictates will be among the last. He is solid, he is grounding, he is a pattern of order weaving off into the universe instead of instability like she is, and she wishes that she could break off pieces of him, his solidity and his love, and use them to fill the gaps in her. His strength doesn't translate, as hard as she tries; it crumbles at the edges and falls away. But she wishes...God, she wants...if only...
They asked her to be Wesley, to make herself into what even he could only pretend to be (wisdom, certainty, infallibility, all of it disguises, illusions and lies, and they threw him out when he got it wrong, why should she even want to try?). But Wesley is brittle where Charles is solid, glass instead of earth, and each piece she tried to take from him fit better at first and then cracked, cutting as it fell away.
She can't be Angel. No one wants her to be Cordelia. Fred-who-is-just-Fred was lost a long time ago, far away from here. And so she is uncertain, incomplete, in-between, waiting for a critical event, a catalyst.
**
When she sees Faith, she shakes all over, a chemical reaction, a neuroelectrical shock. That was who she had wanted to be, in Pylea and perhaps before, vague half-wishes in the shadows of her mind that hid from the sunlight of reality (mundanity, innocence, ignorance, happiness).
But in Pylea, most of all, she had tried to dream herself into being this, this elemental function signified fidelis in the Latin. Strong and proud and self-contained; Slayer, all the pieces her own, with power under her skin instead of only in her mind. Created by chaos and carrying it within her, instead of bowing her head to its control.
Faith doesn't care about a cracked and discarded could-have-been-her who never was. Faith doesn't like her, doesn't see her, dismisses her out of hand in the first minute they meet. But Fred watches her, the way she watched monsters and storms in Pylea. She unmakes herself to dust and rags again, easily laying aside her patchwork borrowed strength and watching from cool nothingness, hidden behind her hair.
Muscles tense and flex under Faith's skin, more than human--metahuman, she thinks, stolen from Charles' comic books. And yes, that fits, she can imagine Faith rendered in ink lines and primary colors. She waits for Faith to look her way, to let her see the lightning and thunder in her eyes, and she whispers the word to herself, tasting its curves and shadows. Slayer.
Secrets there, mysteries. A whole being, identity and name, that would own the one who owned it, fill her up like water. No, heavier than water--sand, stone, blood.
Born in the dark, she thinks, watching Faith, born singing the song of the chthonic depths, and she knows she's gone too far, dreamed too much in, made a fetish of what is only the other side of the ordinary world, which obeys rules and laws as much as stone and sand and blood do, as much as water. Faith bleeds, Faith bruises. And yet Fred can't look away, can't stop the spinning in her mind and the pit of her stomach that takes this other woman and turns her into the idol of a goddess, Kali in the dark, and makes Fred yearn to give a sacrifice.
**
Faith ignores her, maybe doesn't even see her. That's all right. Fred is used to waiting and watching, fading into shadows and scavenging for what she needs, surviving on the scraps and pieces she can fit together into something new.
She can take from Faith with her eyes--a tilt of the head, a cock of the hip, a way of standing or walking or striking out. She watches Faith and Connor--the way he falls into line spellbound, dazzled by charisma and respectful of strength greater than his own--and remembers her own failure with him, how he turned her kindness around as weakness and hurt her with it. Her, and Charles, and Angel as well, and who knows how that echoes out, turning and growing until it wounds the world.
It's not that Faith can't be hurt, hasn't been broken. Angel told them about her, and what he skipped Cordelia filled in, with Wesley giving the very last pieces. There are bruises on her face now, half-healed cuts, as she walks around the Hyperion, marks left by Angelus and the Beast. She can be hurt, has been hurt, is as broken and remade as any of them. Fred still wants to press her fingers and her mouth to those marks, feel the blood throb under her touch, taste it hot on her tongue. Faith's weaknesses fall on Fred's strengths, and Fred is strong where Faith is cracked and faulted. If she could draw Faith into her, or crawl inside her and wear her skin like a shell, they would both approximate--simulate--something whole.
Negative images. Inverse broken places, mirrored shards. Fred would draw the image on the walls in chalk, in ink, in blood, if she hadn't painted over that desire already in Angel's name.
**
The courtyard smells like jasmine, sweat, stone giving up the heat of the day, and the smoke that rises from Faith's cigarette and hangs in the still night air.
"Tonight I'm gonna get the big bad," Faith says, tilting her head back to the sky on the other side of the night-haze. "Got Wes's suicidal crazy-ass plan to make the world safe for apple pie and puppies and you flashing your chest at him till he does what you want. The way it all ought to be, right?" She isn't looking at Fred, hadn't appeared to have noticed that Fred is there at all. "Maybe try your ass next time, since chest isn't really your thing. Or say fuck subtlety and go straight to showing him your cunt. Probably your best chance. Wes is fuckin' slow for a smart guy."
Fred breathes in the smoke and jasmine and heat and doesn't say anything. Faith's words run over her and flow down into the cracks, sharp edges dulled by the fall. Nothing makes contact, a benefit of being made of pieces and patches not her own.
Faith throws the end of her cigarette down to the courtyard stones. "You have some kind of an issue, Burkle? You're supposed to be the resident genius and you just follow me around and stare all the time. You want me to notice you or not? Staring like that means you do, but the hiding and the lurking, that makes it kind of hard to tell."
Fred blinks slowly, dazed and unable to catch words, to remember the pattern of lips and tongue and breath that would make them. So many patterns, too many to learn, remember, know. She feels heavy and slow, immobile, made of wood and stone while Faith is fire and clouds, untouchable, immune to axes and shovels and being reduced to dust. Deterministic chaos, fractal curves; as long as one piece of her remains, the whole is there.
"Are you high or something?" Laughter bubbles under Faith's voice, the edge of nerves and mania, the side effects of building herself up to the hunt and the plan. "Because if you are, bitch, you gotta share."
"I'm afraid," Fred blurts out, her tongue finding itself too late, spilling words that make Faith's eyes darken with contempt. Wrong words. Flawed again.
"Join the damn club."
"Not of Angelus." Fred wants to step closer, wants to reach out and touch, wants to see if the power can flow to her through skin. Her heels press to the earth, holding her, rooted.
"Yeah? What, then?"
"I'm afraid of none of it mattering. Not making a difference." The sky is clear again, the sun is back, the Beast is dead, but she still looks up at the sky and knows that it--ineffable, unnameable it--is wrong. "I'm afraid that nothing we do is going to mean anything."
Faith stands for a moment and watches her, eyes gone dark and flat, and Fred realizes that they do have a weakness in common, a gap in both of them. Maybe it's a gap in everyone, the uncertainty of one body and mind having any weight in the world. Maybe it's only one in ten million who have strength there, the chosen, the Champions, the heroes who can't be anything else. And they can't share that, no matter how much she wants to borrow it, draw it into herself, find some certainty. Have...a little faith.
Faith shakes her head and reaches for another cigarette, letting her hair fall forward over her eyes until they're as shadowed as Fred's own. "I don't know anything about that," she mutters, smacking the lighter against her palm and striking the flint until it catches and she cups the flame in her hands. "Just do your job when the time comes. Do what you can. That's gotta matter somehow. To somebody, even maybe just you."
It's a platitude, meaningless, something from prison therapy most likely, and from the set of Faith's jaw, she doesn't believe it herself. But Fred smiles. Patterns build on patterns, curving outward in each iteration of the fractal curve, until they become the world. What matters to her can change everything.
**
Faith lies in the bed, bleeding into the sheets, and Fred presses bandages over her wounds, follows with tape, watches the flutter of the pulse under the soft skin of Faith's throat. Faith is down in the dark with Angelus and Orpheus, and Fred can see the battle in her even as she seems to sleep.
Lorne is lecturing on outrage, on how Wes should have found a different plan, but Fred thinks that this is right, after all. The myth won't fit, can't turn either Faith or Angel into Eurydice or imagine that anything here is a song, but it's right underneath the symbols, in the patterns, in the seeds of the grand design. Faith is doing her job, fighting even in the unconscious mind and the underworld.
She sits beside the bed and watches Faith breathe, bleed, twist and whimper in her sleep, grow paler, tense and relax again. Once or twice her mouth turns like a smile, and Fred presses her fingers to her own lips to keep from tracing the curve of Faith's. More often, Faith's face twists in pain and Fred's echoes in sympathy, wanting to share but outside of the conflict and the gamble, powerless.
No, that's not right, not entirely; she is here as witness, just as down in the dark Faith is witness, trying to call Angel up and hold Angelus at bay without being able to act on either. Fred wipes another trickle of blood away, the only action she can take here on this side. Mirrored roles, twinned, sacred tasks in passivity.
Soon she will have to go help Willow with the rituals, help call Angel back in truth, even if again the will and power are not hers, and she is only a witness. She looks at Faith lying on the bed, pale as the sheets, and remembers the desires that flashed through her while watching Faith move about the hotel. To touch, trace her fingertips feather-light over muscles, slide her tongue along curves of skin tight over bone and soft over tissue, kneel between Faith's legs and lower her mouth to hot, slick flesh, lick and taste, then turn her head to the side and bite into tender skin, feel her mouth flood with heat and salt. She wants to get as close as she can, reach through the space and the body, and touch to claim, use the giving as a mask while she takes what she needs, builds it into herself, owns the power that runs through Faith's veins.
Now Faith is down in the dark and there is no strength to spare; being Slayer may not be enough to win this fight. Maybe all that power doesn't mean anything after all, just another illusion to shatter and let fall away.
Patterns spiral out and create the world. Everything means something, she knows. The key is to identify, to classify, and thus to control.
**
Willow shimmers with light, for all the depths of power under the surface. She is carefully-built artifice and control, and Fred is grateful for that, because it is easy to respond in kind, to choose a face and wear it well. She has masks that are suited for this, that work, that fit. She can easily be something Willow wants to see, and that has its own temptation, the lure of the safe and effortless rather than the seductive urge to be woven with Faith.
The spell rises and falls, power swelling and breaking over the hotel, and Faith comes flying from nowhere, from the other side of the real, and stops Connor mid-stroke, mid-motion that no one else saw at all, and Fred's heart jumps, freezes, threatens to break, because yes, that's it, that's what she wanted to see, what she wants to have as her own. Strength deeper than body and bone, strength to stand up at the very last and be enough, be powerful, be there.
Her throat is dry and her hands shake and she doesn't know what to do except move closer, drawn in like a charged particle, air to a vacuum, water chasing salt.
**
Faith rolls her other set of clothes into a tight bundle, then shoves them down into the bag Wes found for her in the depths of the hotel. "You're stalking again, Burkle."
"Sorry." Fred stands in the doorway, watches, trembles with the need to make herself heard and the fact that it can't be done, because the thing choking her throat and aching to get out isn't made of words. Help me. Hide me. Give me yourself. Make me into you. None of them are right, even strung together; it's the shadows between the words that she needs, and they won't be caught, won't be framed.
"Do you need any help?" she asks instead, watching Faith run a hand through her hair. "Or...or a comb?"
"Uh, no. I'm good." Faith looks at her oddly and zips up the bag. "You keep looking at me like you want to ask me something. Or bite me. So either just ask, or stop looking, because you're freaking me out."
She doesn't want to ask; she wants to be asked. Invited along to somewhere else, where maybe it'll be different, work better, even though she knows that this place, these people, this end of this particular world is where she belongs, is hers. It's a selfish desire, to run, but she realized long ago that the selfish desires are what keeps the body alive, even if the selfless ones make the name and story immortal. She still wants the former more than the latter, for as long as she can.
It's selfish, too, to do what she does, to borrow pieces, attitudes, selves from the people around her and stitch them into the patchwork being that's the only way she knows how to move through this world anymore. It's adaptation, the stopgap of individuals cursed by logic and definition to be unable to evolve alone. Only a population evolves, a population in which each single being disappears. She disappeared once; she doesn't want to do it again. She wants to dig in, teeth and grasping fingers, she wants to survive.
"What am I supposed to do?" she asks, as startled as Faith is by the words, the anger in the question, the gaping aching lack of an answer. "I'm just a person. I'm just a human body. No powers. No magic. What the hell am I supposed to do?"
Faith stares at her, shifts her weight, looks away, and Fred knows that Faith thinks she's crazy as well as useless, parasitic, whatever the flicker of contempt in her eyes translates to. And Fred doesn't care all that much, because she's right, on all counts. But crazy fights harder, more desperately, demands to survive. Parasites live, as long as anything is there to share self and sustenance. The scavengers are the last to be defeated by the world when entropy is winning the day.
"Hold the line," Faith says finally, shrugging and looking down at the floor. "Stand up and keep fighting. Do your job. Wait for what you need and then take it. Just like the rest of us, Jesus, I don't fucking know."
She pushes past Fred, out the door and down the hall toward the stairs, muttering to herself about fucking crazy, little bitch, fucking out of her mind. Fred lets her go, stands and waits, curves her fingers against her palm to keep where they brushed Faith's wrist as she passed. A touch is enough, symbolic, the Greek letter in the equation that stands for whatever she needs.
Hold the line. Do the job. Wait for what you need and take it. Faith has no special certainty, the borderline arrogance of the chosen ones, the Champion. She has rules, scattered through the wilderness like stones. But Fred can build those in, can use them. She can be that. Make another face, another mask, fill another gap under the skin.
"Be strong," she says out loud, looking out through the window at the city, still under siege from the chaos that grows out of the most infinitesimal cracks. "Don't run away."
She can feel it, electric under her skin, quickening in her blood, the click of spaces being filled. It will take time for them to grow up from under the surface, to spiral out into the world, but the patterns are all about to change.