Chapter Text
In the Slayers’ Headquarters in Cleveland, there is a room.
Even though the building is busy, people coming and going all the time, no one goes into the room. No one leaves. Even though there never seems to be enough space, no one tries to find it in the room. Even though it’s not uncommon for Slayers to drag their boyfriends or girlfriends into empty rooms, none of them are ever dragged into this room.
Because the room isn’t empty.
The room has a bed, chairs, bookshelves, and none of them have been used for years. They are all covered in a thick layer of dust.
So is the woman who stands in the centre of the room. She hasn’t moved for years. She didn’t move when there were full-scale battles erupting in the corridors outside her room. She didn’t move when spiders began spinning webs in her hair. She doesn’t leave the room, and no one comes in. That’s the way things have been for years. Occasionally, a bright young Slayer will ask why, and someone older, someone who was around when the woman wasn’t always in the room, will tell them a story. A story about a God who died, and came back in the body of a young woman. A God who’s waiting for the end of the world.
They’re wrong. She isn’t waiting. Waiting would imply that she expects something to happen at some point, that there’ll be a particular moment when she can stop waiting. But she has no such expectation.
Sometimes, they say that the God is hibernating, that she’ll sleep until the world ends, at which point she’ll wake up and rule over the ashes.
They’re wrong. She isn’t hibernating. Her mind is working constantly, thinking, planning, calculating. She is always, always awake.
It would be more accurate to say that she exists. She simply is. No one is entirely certain what she is. She was a God, that much is certain, and now she’s not. More than this cannot be said.
In the Slayers’ Headquarters in Cleveland, there is a room. Illyria stands in it, perfectly still.
~*~
Then, one day, the drumming starts.
Illyria can hear it. It’s quiet, just on the edge of hearing, but it doesn’t ever stop. Just a four-beat rhythm, repeating over and over and over and over again.
At first, she thinks that it’s some kind of magic, something that the witch is working, but as the days go by and the sounds of Headquarters are exactly the same as they always are, she comes to doubt this. She realises that the Slayers, keen though their senses are, can’t hear it. They don’t even know it’s there.
But she can hear it. She doesn’t know what it is, doesn’t know what it’s for, doesn’t know who’s causing it, but she can hear it and for the first time in years, Illyria thinks that she might have found something interesting.
She closes her eyes, and listens. Listens carefully, trying to pinpoint it. It’s harder than it should be, even as weak as she is. She realises quickly that there are multiple sources, but that shouldn’t be a problem. Not for her. It’s as though the signal doesn’t want to be found.
She opens her eyes, and smiles. A spider who has spun an intricate web between her face and the nearby chair is disturbed, but she doesn’t notice. She’s realised what the drumming is doing, and she’s excited.
For the first time in years, she leaves her room. The door’s hinges squeal from disuse, but she doesn’t notice.
She walks down the corridor and into a room down the hall. There are several Slayers sprawled in chairs, talking, watching TV. One of them is texting on her phone. All conversation stops as she enters the room, which is fine by her. She has no interest in human chatter. She takes the phone from the Slayer's hand and turns to leave.
The Slayers leap to their feet, crying out that there’s a demon, demon in the lounge. They try to hit her, but they are slow and clumsy and Illyria has had years to become accustomed to her form and work out exactly how much force is required to incapacitate a Slayer.
The door to her room squeaks shut even before the corridors are swarming with Slayers responding to the alarm. She sits at her desk, looking at the phone, listening to the drumming. Even now, this close, it’s difficult to hear. She smiles again, and then she takes the phone apart.
She’s disappointed when the drumming stops, is even more disappointed when she can’t work out where the drumming came from. Her shell was good at this, she reflects. If there was something in the phone, in every phone, she should be able to find it. That means that it’s not something physical.
She puts the phone back together again, and there it is, the drumming. The four-beat rhythm greets her like an old friend that she hasn’t met yet. It must be in the signal, she reflects. She’ll have to track it down, figure out where it came from. She has to meet them, the person behind the drummer. She has to tell them that she knows what they’re doing, and how happy it makes her to see it being done.
The door opens behind her. “So.” Willow says. “You want to tell me why you stole Kira’s phone?”
Illyria mulls this over. “No.”
Willow sighs. “Just... give it back, ‘kay? And don’t do it again. Most of these girls don’t know who you are – pull something like that again and you’ll get yourself killed.”
Illyria thinks of the Slayers she left behind in the other room. “Unlikely.”
“Right.” Willow says. She sighs again. “Will you at least give the phone back?”
Illyria stands, and looks at the witch. The witch looks back. She is, Illyria thinks, the only person still living who knew the shell before the shell became Illyria. She remembers talking to Willow, back then. She remembers the kind of things they used to talk about. “The signal for the phone. Where does it come from?”
Willow frowns. “What? What do you mean?”
Illyria merely stands, looking at her. She knows Willow understands.
Willow shrugs. “Archangel, probably. It’s a network of satellites.”
“Who launched them?”
“How am I supposed to know? There are fifteen of them! They were launched all across the world, I doubt one person did it all.”
Illyria digests this. “I see. I require a computer.”
“Why?” Willow asks suspiciously.
Illyria doesn’t answer. Doesn’t point out that, if she needed a computer, she could take one. This is her being polite.
Willow nods. “Fine. You can borrow - borrow - mine.”
Illyria thinks about this. She knows that Willow will try to work out whatever Illyria is going to do with the computer, when she takes it back. She also knows that she isn’t capable of stopping the witch from finding out if she truly wants to know. Illyria nods. “That is acceptable.”
Willow takes Kira’s phone, comes back about half an hour later while later with a laptop under one arm. She finds Illyria standing in the centre of the room, just like she always does, except that there are the smashed remains of a different laptop littering the room.
Willow doesn’t ask Illyria what she did with the laptop. She knows she won’t get an answer. Instead, she leaves again, and makes a note to tell Buffy that Illyria’s up to something.
~*~
In England, the Minister of Defence sits with his feet up on his desk, music blaring from speakers, his hand idly tapping against the arm of his chair. He’s tapping a four-beat rhythm that doesn’t match the music, doesn’t change and doesn’t ever stop.
All at once, he sits up, eyes on a screen in front of him as the music cuts out. He looks at the webpage that’s just gone up.
It’s a sound bite, just a few seconds, on a loop. A four-beat rhythm.
There’s also a question.
Who’s the drummer?
He smiles. This, he thinks, is going to be fun.