she's gone {fred}

[WESLEY WYNDAM-PRYCE]

"Do whatever you want. Live the day like it's your last... 'cause it probably is."

There were very few times when Angel said things which cast Wesley into such a deep state of uncertainty as the one he found himself in now. Nothing really shook him lately because there was nothing left of him to be shaken. What could possibly shake a man who was already crumpled down to small pieces, far from what people liked to define as the "shadow of the man he once was"?What could possibly be bad for a man whom just laid there, waiting for the day in which he would finally be relieved of the burden of having to carry on living in a world which was suddenly ridiculously empty? Wesley was resigned to the idea of death. Since he lost the one woman that mattered more to him than anything else in the entire world... no, universe... he was almost in a desperate search for it, each day trying to see if another glass would help him finally cross that line and be where she was... Because she was somewhere. They were wrong, everyone was wrong, everyone was telling lies because they didn't mind that Illyria was there, or because they didn't dare go to the extremes to undo what had been done. He didn't presume to know their motivations and it hardly mattered. It was not something which Wesley could do on his own. How could it be that, at the same time, he wanted to fight and to surrender? Perhaps the alcohol had finally destroyed his reasoning completely?

The chance were great that this day would finally be the last. For him, for mankind - it was irrelevant. Night could finally fall for good upon him. There would be no more alarm clock ringing early in the morning, waking him up to another day of torment in which every little thing would remind him of her. No more looks full of pity or concern for his health or mental state. No more Illyria, a walking obituary refreshing horrible memories with every move, with every word she spoke. By the end of the day, he could probably be in a place where he would find peace by her side... No... No, that would not happen because Fred would be in heaven whereas himself... People like him went down in the deepest circle of Hell to pay for their sins. Wolfram and Hart might have erased everyone's memories of his deed but this was far from erasing the deed itself. Even so, the notion of going to Hell seemed much more pleasant than the current reality he lived in. All Wesley could wish for was that he would die for a cause, so that the Powers, or the Devil, or whomever it might be dealing these things, would grant him not more than a couple of fleeting moments to see the woman his heart had used to beat for.

Without her, there was no perfect day for him. It was Angel's words had struck him deeper than they should have, making him realize the fact that the death he had wished for so much would not find him as resigned as he considered himself to be. Wesley separated himself from Illyria soon after they left the meeting place, choosing to wander the streets for a while to put his thoughts into some sort of an order. Surprisingly, he avoided walking into the first bar to numb himself in a bottle of finely aged scotch. Oddly, Wesley found that he preferred to be sober today – as much as he had sobered up from the glasses with which he started the day, as per usual, anyway. Sobriety came at a high price, however. Apparently it gave his mind the time to start and think of what could really be a perfect and memorable last day. Wesley could visualize it in the smallest of details. He would have held the car door for Fred as they left the meeting, acting perfectly normal, as if they would just be heading home. He would, then, get in as well, smiling reassuringly in the way only he knew that would make Fred's worries vanish as if they never existed. She would smile – there was nothing he loved more than the way she smiled, so widely and warmly... It could melt glaciers, as silly and romantic as that sounded. Even if he would have focused on the road ahead of him, somehow Wesley would have known that she was watching him with a look in her eyes of a woman that felt accomplished and happy. Every time they went for one of their drives which had become a small routine for the couple, Wesley would cast small her glances her way and see this, which was why he had grown convinced that she did that all the time. He would feel her subtle and fresh perfume fill the car as he turned down roads never traveled before- not in her company. Fred would be worried and start asking where they would be heading and he would just tell her to trust him and it would be enough. She would find out that her trust was not misplaced when the car would finally pull over on a small and secluded beach which Wesley had stumbled upon one day. From the instant he saw it, he had promised himself that one day, he would bring Fred there, even if they were not a couple at that moment. He would explain this to her and apologize for having waited for so long before doing it. For having waited for what could be their last day... She would silence him here, her finger soft upon his lips, quickly replaced by even softer lips. Promises would be exchanged that they would live for one another because there was still so much which they needed to do together. A ring would be slipped on her finger to emphasize the promise, before they would be each others' right there, on the sand, the ocean their only witness. In each others' embrace, they would watch the sun slowly fall down upon the world, wishing that the moment would freeze so that they would not have to go and fight just yet.

That would have the perfect day that could have summed up the life of Wesley Wyndam-Pryce, the perfect day to give him the strength which he needed to give his best into the fight, to use the best of magicks against Cyvus Vail. He would not have that perfect day, though. He would arrive to his home to find Illyria there, tormenting him with her mere presence. It was why he kept drawing the moment out, walking down streets which he never walked before, until he could no longer recognize his surroundings when he finally paid enough attention to his surroundings. Wesley frowned just slightly. The buildings, the streets, the clean air. Nothing spelled Los Angeles any more. A new dimension? Perhaps he just walked right into Hell somehow? Had he been actually drunk and could not even remember the fact that he had fought and died? Most of all, did it matter? Nothing mattered any more. Nothing at all.

[WINIFRED BURKLE]

Run. She had to run. Maybe if she ran for long enough, or fast enough, then she would find herself running through the corridors of the hotel back towards her room, and she would be able to lock herself inside and never come out, not for anything. Not for Wesley, with the way that he always spoke to her, soft and reassuring, never demanding anything, not for Angel, who still hadn’t come back even though he’d been gone for ages. Fred had to run. Then she would be safe; nothing would be able to catch up with her, nothing bad would happen, because Fred would be the wind. You couldn’t catch the wind. You couldn’t put it in a sack and put a collar around its neck, because it didn’t have a neck; you couldn’t make it into a slave and give it electric shocks and turn it from a person into a thing. She was a person. A real, live person, and she’d only just remembered that; Fred didn’t want to lose it again. God, she was so scared of losing who she was, because while she might have known now that she was Winifred Louise Burkle, it would fade slowly until she would just be a girl. And then she would stop being a girl, and be a cow instead, and the beautiful world that she’d found herself in in Los Angeles would be a dream again. The handsome man that had saved her from the monsters would just be a face, blurred in her mind because she couldn’t quite remember the set of his jaw or the warmth in his brown eyes. She would always remember the strength of his arms, how big he was in comparison to her starved frame, but it wouldn’t be real. None of it would be, anymore; the hotel, the demons and vampires, the people that left her food outside her door and talked to her even when she was too busy trying to write everything into a story to talk back – who was she kidding? She always talked back, even if she wasn’t a hundred percent sure if anyone was the other side of the door – the feel of a bed and a shower and knowing that she was safe and warm and if she screamed, someone would be there to help her. Would they do that if she screamed now? Fred didn’t think so; there wasn’t anybody here. There was just Fred in a different world, and she was losing herself.

Just by being here, she was losing herself. Was that possible, when she’d barely begun to find herself again? Angel had given her a name and an identity and a home, and she was trying desperately to cling to that with both hands, but it was slipping out from her fingers. She could feel it; the fear was winning. She knew how this story went, because she had lived it before; the girl found herself in a different dimension and though she had no idea what was going on, she was interested because there were two suns, or gravity acted differently. But then they came and they snatched her, and they treated her roughly and beat her until she was chained in a line with other people, people who wouldn’t talk, and some scary-looking monster bought her, and called her a cow, and pressed a button that made her hurt every time she didn’t do something quick enough, or she asked what was happening. That couldn’t happen now. Not twice, not again, not ever; she couldn’t escape from it again, and she couldn’t survive for years on her own now. Before, she hadn’t remembered what she had been missing, but now she knew. Fred had friends, and a life, and Los Angeles was so beautiful that she didn’t know how she would survive on her own now. Would she want to? Was this the pattern of her life? She would be happy with her life, even if things weren’t entirely perfect and then she would be snatched away from it all, plunged into a hell that gave her terrible nightmares and made her so, so scared of everything. But then, after years and years, a hero would come riding up on his horse and save her, and she would get a name and a room and food, and she would be Fred again...only for it all to be taken away from her. Over and over again she would lose everything, and if that was how her life was going to be, Fred couldn’t bear it. She couldn’t bear the idea that she would get lost here again, because she was still lost from Pylea; was it possible to think that you couldn’t get more lost, and then find that you could? Because that was what was happening now; Fred was losing. She was losing against the world, against her fear, losing the ability to do anything but run and try to keep alive. She was losing herself.

She wanted to curl up in the dark, in the smallest space she could find, and close her eyes and wait until someone came to save her, because Fred knew she was the damsel; she didn’t want to be, but there were a lot of things she didn’t want at this moment, and she thought that needing to be saved was the one that she could give up on. She wanted to press herself against solid stone, a hand over her mouth so that her shaky breathing wasn’t too loud, the fingers of her other hand tracing numbers on the wall, over and over, so that she was thinking about maths instead of how scared she was, because then she would start crying and she couldn’t do that, not when she was trying to hide. She had to hide; she had to run until she found somewhere nobody would think of looking in, and she would wait and wait for her knight in shining armour to appear, because surely Angel would come and look for her when he found out she was missing. He had to; she couldn’t entertain the thought that he wouldn’t, because Angel was Fred’s hero. Without him, she would be nothing, and without him now, she would be back to that again. This couldn’t be happening; she wanted to go home. Tears filled her eyes and she tried to brush them away with the back of her hand, because how could she search for convenient caves or hidey-holes as she ran if her vision was blurred, but it didn’t stop them from falling. She hadn’t thought of the hotel as home when she’d been there, because Fred had known for sure that she’d not really belonged there. But now, now it was home and she wanted it. She wanted it even if Angel wasn’t back yet, if Wesley stopped coming to talk to her, if she had to swallow her fear and find the kitchen to get her own food (but she wouldn’t; she would starve before she went downstairs). She was too scared here.

What had she done to deserve being sent here? She knew that she wasn’t getting better, that she was still as crazy as she’d been when they’d all got her out of Pylea, just with clothes and as much food as she would want and a room instead of a cave, but that didn’t mean that she was bad, did it? Fred didn’t know; she wasn’t sure she knew anything anymore. The world as she knew it had been turned upside down and inside out so many times that everything was more than a little skew-whiff. And here, in this world that didn’t look like LA, even if she wouldn’t set foot in the city, she had nothing to cling to to keep her on balance. She was falling, and she was getting tired from all the running, but she didn’t stop. Fred couldn’t stop until she found somewhere to hide, somewhere to curl up and cry and start her opening portal equations again from square one. She had to run and run and—she stopped suddenly, having barrelled straight into another person; the first person she had seen since arriving here, since she’d fled in fear. Breathless and trembling, she looked up, and when she saw who it was, the tears fell harder than before. He looked different, without his glasses and his hair more messed up, more muscles, his eyes dark and a little lost, but Fred didn’t care. He wasn’t Angel, but he had come. He had come to save her and she buried her head against his chest, forgoing her dislike of having people in her personal space in favour of the safety that he provided just by being there. “Wesley,” she breathed, sinking to a crouch on the ground, her arms wrapping themselves protectively over her head, her blurred gaze focussing on his shoes so that she would know if he moved. “Wesley, I’m so scared.”

[WESLEY WYNDAM-PRYCE]

Hell. One place whose name usually made people shudder in horror, even those who liked to claim that they were agnostic and did not care of notions such as hell or heaven because they rejected the existence of an afterlife. Wesley was not an overly religious man, perhaps because he was so pragmatic and well trained into discerning mystical elements from reality. He did believe in Hell however – not as much in the sense given to it by religion, however. There were many dimensions parallel to this one which could perfectly fit the description of hell and those were the ones which Wesley believed in. After all, Angel himself had spent two centuries in one. There was no telling if one of the many dimensions would actually be the one that had inspired the biblical descriptions, or the writings of Dante, only one thing was absolutely certain: Wesley was not afraid. The notion of Hell did not make the blood rush through his veins any more, nor his heart thump in his chest wildly in fear. No, he had grown accustomed to the idea that when he would close his eyes for eternity, he would not ascend for a better living, but descend to one of eternal torment. The first time when Lilah Morgan pointed that out to him, very soon after he had been cast to the side and abandoned by his friends for having had kidnapped Connor, Wesley had been mortified by the idea. That feeling faded away quite sooner than he had expected, under the haze of alcohol and the darkness constantly present in his life at that point. Wesley was perfectly aware of the place that awaited for him among the ones that betrayed their friends and he was resigned with it. Better said – he had been that way and only now he was remembering it.

It took shattering the Orlon Window, in a desperate hope that it would reverse time and bring Fred back, for Wesley to regain the memories of the part of his existence that had involved Connor. It took despair to regain Fred for him to become aware of the fact that the traitor was not him. God, day after day it was increasingly hard not to blame Angel, not to hate him for everything that had happened to the woman that was the love of his life. Yes, of course, now Wesley was perfectly aware of the fact that Angel's strange behavior as of late and his claims that he actually was behind Fred's death were nothing but the ensouled vampire's attempt to win the good graces of the Circle of the Black Thorn, so that he could get one step closer to the Senior Partners. That was not the point. Who had been the one to take the executive decision that they were going to be working for Wolfram and Hart? It had been Angel. All of them had been weak and had allowed themselves to be seduced with resourceful laboratories or libraries but Wesley doubted that they would have been able to make the leap and sign the dotted line had Angel told them that they didn't need to go right into the enemy's hands in order to fight it. Angel had sold them to the enemy, he had allowed the bastards of Wolfram and Hart to tamper with the memories all to save his son. Angel had been the Judas. It was irrelevant that Connor was the only son which Angel was going to have, that did not change the fact that Angel chose to give away to the devil no less than four lives, all for the sake of one. Yet, ironically, when it had come down to choosing to give away another thousands or tenths of thousands of lives for the sake of one innocent, sweet, loving woman, Angel turned his back on the one for whom he had been the ideal hero. He didn't come galloping on a horse to save her from the claws of death, no. He allowed for Illyria to hallow her to nothing but a mere shell, he allowed that thing to consume a soul so beautiful that it should have laid with the angels in heavens. How was that fair? How could Wesley not have moments – specially when the alcohol did most of the thinking instead of him – when the urge to grab a stake and run it through Angel's heart was so overbearing?

Taking out on Angel would have been so easy and convenient. Blaming him was such an easy way out, even if Wesley knew perfectly well whom should have been blamed for the team joining Wolfram and Hart. For what reasons would have Angel had to sign the dotted line if Connor wouldn't have turned into a murderous teenager threatening the lives of innocents? Why had Connor grown up to be an unstable teenager if not because of the fact that he had been forced to grow up into the worse hell dimension there was, abiding by a “kill or get killed” philosophy? How would Connor have gotten to that place, if it hadn't been for Holtz trying to take his vengeance on Angel for the deeds which Angelus and Darla had committed in the past? And, ultimately, how did Holtz get to have Connor in his hands? It all boiled down to one name. To the pompous, British name of Wesley Wyndam-Pryce. A little more trust in Angel and in his friends and nothing of those things would have happened. They would have never had a motif to join Wolfram and Hart, Fred would never be in charge of a lab and receive a sarcophagus and she would be alive. She would alive and, perhaps, they would not be together and she would be living happily with Gunn for ever after but she would be alive. That was all that mattered for Wesley. Although he had blamed himself for Fred's passing even before he recovered the memories wiped away by the evil law firm's sorcerer's, after the moment in which that trinket had been shattered, guilt had become even more so overbearing, because the former Watcher kept remembering this sequence of causality. Gunn signed off the papers to get the sarcophagus released from customs, Angel had chose not to risk more lives for Fred's at the Deeper Well, but it had been him because of whom everything had happened. He killed Fred.

Could this be the moment in which he was going to pay? Strange, but this place hardly made him think of Hell. In his view, any respectable hell was supposed to have terrifying views, fire and brimstone, demons wherever you turned your head. Whereas this place seemed so... Wesley slowed down his pace and cast his eyes over the buildings, over the streets and, inevitably, he could only think of one place. Perhaps this was a Hell tailored specially for him, if it made him think so much of Pylea. Minus the crowd of strange demons, there was the same... rural, medieval air to the place and... Wesley stopped in his tracks and closed his eyes, one memory taking over his mind: his wild girl appearing with her hand smeared in blood, luring a beastly Angel away from him and Gunn. His hell: a place in which he was all but expecting his beloved wild girl to appear at any moment and... his eyes snapped open with the impact of a body into his, his heart nearly halting in its beats when he found himself staring down into... God... Those eyes... Those tearful eyes and that quivering body... It was impossible. He had wanted it so much to be possible even when everyone else claimed otherwise but now, that she was right in front of his eyes, the only thought was that it was impossible. He was paralyzed. Every muscle in his body was completely frozen, disregarding the faint voice in his brain that bid the arms to raise and wound themselves around the smaller and frailer frame of the woman he adored. ”Illyria?”, he barely managed to voice the name when his mind decided to start function, only that once the wheels in his mind were set in motion, that first thought that it was the blue murderer parading around once more was suddenly contradicted. Fred was crouching now but Wesley could still feel it against him: the trembling of that delicate frame and the loud thump of her heart, the warm breath against his shirt... Signs of live which Illyria did not have because she just wore an empty body. Still staring down in disbelief, Wesley crouched in front of her, trembling arms coming up to her shoulders hesitantly, gingerly touching her shoulders. ”Fred...” His lost, blue eyes filled themselves with tears as his palms traveled up to her arms, tugging at them delicately in an attempt to make her uncover her head. ”Fred... God, Fred... I missed you... I missed you so much...”

[WINIFRED BURKLE]

Fred didn’t think that she asked for much in life. She had had nothing for so long that even the most basic of things were still a novelty for her, and she could easily spend days amused by one magazine, or one calendar with pictures of space, of the stars and planets for each month; Wesley had bought it for her, and she religiously crossed off one square a night, just before she went to bed. One more day that she was in safety, one more day that she was grounded by regulated months and weeks and days and nights...one more day until Angel’s return. Fred might not have known when the vampire would be coming back, whether that would be tomorrow or in a year, but logic dictated that whenever it would be, each day that passed made it one day closer to that occasion – and Fred was waiting for that. She was waiting for Angel to return. The world wasn’t safe without him there; her world wasn’t safe, and until such time as she felt that it was, there was no way that Fred could leave the safety of her room and the few creature comforts that had been provided for her. A soft bed, and warm covers; a bath with hot water and as many bubbles as she could pour into it; books, pens, and a whole room’s worth of walls for her to write on; food, left outside her door, and always her favourites, even when she was sure that nobody else was eating tacos at nine in the morning, or Chinese food every day for lunch. They were all Fred needed, and she had been so sure that she hadn’t been too greedy, not when it had been the first time that she’d had any of them in years. But maybe she was wrong. Maybe the fact that she was never full meant that she had been asking for too much, and in Angel’s absence, the safety of the four walls of her bedroom had gone. She had wanted too much, to ask for a name and an identity and a place to stay as well as those other things. Now she was paying for it, because it hadn’t been safe without Angel there. She hadn’t read strange words aloud this time, but she’d been dragged into a different world all the same. Had she brought it upon herself?

If she was thinking logically, Fred didn’t see how she could have done, because she’d barely ventured out of her room in the time since she’d gotten back. Every now and again she would run along the corridor, leaning over the balcony and looking down on everyone at work, in the hope that one of the heads she could see would be Angel’s, but then she’d scurry back to her room before they could see her and invite her to join them, losing herself in the stories that she was writing on the walls, the attempt to readjust to a world where she didn’t quite fit in anymore. She tried very hard to talk to Wesley when he came and sat outside her door, even if she couldn’t manage it for very long, getting lost inside her mind, and she always said thank you when someone brought her food...but Fred wasn’t thinking logically anymore. How could she be, when exactly the thing that had made her lost and crazy in the first place was happening all over again? Any minute now, some monster would jump out of the shadows and bundle her up, taking her away to be a slave all over again, and if that happened, Fred wouldn’t be able to bear it. In her panicked state, Fred was sure that somehow, this was all her fault. She might not have been able to see the reasoning behind it, but why else would she be transported to another uncivilised world so soon after she’d returned from Pylea? She didn’t want this; all Fred wanted was to be able to lie on her bed, her door firmly shut, her writings on the walls around her, and know that that was her space. Within those walls, nothing could get at her, and she was safe. She should never have gone down the corridor to see if Angel was back again; she should never have left her room, and now she had, and she was going to lose everything that she’d worked so hard to regain, and she wouldn’t be Fred anymore. Her life might have been full of fear and an edge of wildness that wouldn’t go away, but she very much liked being Fred.

She was losing herself, though. Already, she was losing. There was nothing here for her to ground herself with, nobody to hold her hand and talk softly and remind her that she had friends now. Every step she took, Fred glanced furtively around her, almost waiting for the monster to take her away, because that had been how it had happened last time. Just because she was expecting it, this time, fearing it with every fibre of her being, it didn’t mean that it wouldn’t happen; Fred was far less capable of fighting for herself now than she’d been before Pylea had turned her into a cow. She’d never been strong, but she’d known who she was, and she hadn’t had terror coursing through her blood, working its way through her so fast that it was a wonder that she was only trembling and half-crying, and not entirely paralysed. Fred knew that she was scared of everything now, but nothing was quite like this. This was worse than any nightmare, any flashback she had, because she knew that this was real. She wouldn’t wake up, breathless and drenched in a cold sweat, and find herself back in her room, the sheets thrown off her and her pillows on the floor. She wouldn’t wake up and find that Wesley was sitting on the other side of her door, his gentle voice being the thing that had brought her back to consciousness, realising that she was safe, in the real world, in Los Angeles, and not stuck in Pylea. This wasn’t Pylea. Fred didn’t know how she knew that, only that she did...but it wasn’t a dream. Wesley was here, somehow, but he hadn’t helped her wake up from this nightmare and be alright again, still talking to her even while she buried herself under the covers and whispered to herself. He wasn’t helping her calm down, and she wanted to know why he looked different to the way that he had last time she’d peered over the balcony without ending up in another dimension, and how had he gotten here, and could they get back now, and could they go somewhere that the monsters wouldn’t find them, and, and, and.

She trembled on the ground, not moving from her near-foetal position even when she felt Wesley’s hands on her shoulders, her arms, doing everything she could not to whimper in fear, and failing, the sound as close as Fred could let herself get to letting her tears fall as much as she wanted to, sobbing her heart out. She couldn’t do that, not yet, not while they were out in the street, not while anything could have come across them. Perhaps if they found somewhere safe to be, then she might let herself cry and cry until she had no more tears left, but not now. Not yet. But Wesley was here. He wasn’t Angel, and would never be Angel, but he was good. Fred trusted him. She knew he could calm her, and look after her, and make sure that nothing took her and made her into a cow-slave again. “Wesley,” she whispered again, slowly letting him pull her arms from around her head, her eyes wild, lost and full of tears as she looked at him, her fear apparent. How could he miss her? She had only just found herself here, running as fast as she could, even though she had no idea where she was going. She hadn’t been gone long enough to be missed; it was another question she had to ask, but she couldn’t do that now. She couldn’t think now, not properly, not when all she wanted to do was run until she couldn’t run anymore, finding somewhere small and dark to bury herself in until she could go home. She didn’t want this, any of this; Fred buried her head against him, tensing at the invasion of her personal space, even if she had been the one to initiate it, but deciding that it was far more bearable than everything else she was feeling. Wesley was solid and warm and real, and she might have known why he was crying or looking so sad, but he would help her. It took her a few attempts to speak again, it getting harder for her to form words the further she retreated into her mind. “Wesley, I’m scared. I-I’m scared, I’m so scared. Help me.” She didn’t care how he helped her, only that he did. Only that he tried to get her back to the world she wanted to be in.