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Illyria's sick. But Illyria doesn't get sick. Sickness is for mortals: it's not just that she hasn't the capacity, it's that it's alien to her very nature.
But she is, she's sick just the same. It begins after the battle: after Wolfram and Hart decided to crush them, and thought they could go up against a human or two, a few supernatural creatures, an under-fuelled superannuated god on half-power. Sucks to be them.
It begins after Wesley dies. She chooses to sleep, for a long time, once their sinister paymasters have been – not crushed, but beaten back and taught their place, before coming to a further understanding and compromise. (Of course. Compromise: it's what her new associates do, after every new leaf, every resolve that this shall not stand.) Sleep had been an alien concept, too, on first being stranded in a strange age.
Now she chooses it, though. It's better than thinking about Wesley: his pleasant mortal face, broken a long way beyond grief. She'd eased that for him, at least, soothed his passing with pretty lies and a pretty face. Then she eases herself, throws her mind into Lethe and refuses knowledge and self-knowledge for a while.
When she awakes days later, it'ss between rubble and marble walls. Wolfram and Hart's offices are half-wrecked and re-building is not yet begun. It's intolerably hot. It takes her minutes to understand that the heat isn't coming from without, is sliding and slicking along the stone surface of her skin.
Pain is new too. Spike finds her outrage amusing, especially when he tries mortal remedies on her. Something he calls Lemsip, a plethora of little white pills, a hot toddy, tea and soup: she accedes to quiet his mirth and mother-henning. Expectably, they do nothing. 'My bones are rotting,' she says finally, and hunches into his bed, in the little apartment he's stolen from Lorne, now the demon's left town.
He stops laughing, then, and begins to understand it's real. 'Sure it's not a hangover, luv?' he asks, sceptical and shrewd. 'Been hitting the bottle, drinking away the sorrow?'
'If I could then I would, Spike,' she says distantly. 'There is nothing a human can ferment or distill that will derange my senses. I only wish it was so.' The pain really wracks her then, and she hunchs, draws herself up to sit bent over on the edge of the bed. It's humiliating: she could kill him with a swat, like a kitten, still, but the only name she has for this feeling is vulnerable. Fire on her skin, in her veins, a sore hot sour pain that pulls and contracts her muscles and bones and makes every position a punishment, is this what mortality feels like?
Worse than that, though, the slight flickering other pain, the one with no concrete material place save her wakefulness. Wesley's face, and his alarmed, contorted distress, his refusal of plain fact.
This is the pain that sends her to the liquor cabinet, which Lorne has stocked with bewildering ampleness. She has no care for what she uses to dampen this feeling, downs neat blue curacuao and cherry liqueur and cheap beer. Spike joins her and is more discriminating: will only highly selectively mix one single malt and ginger ale after another, matching her shot for shot, but showing more of the effects.
Because there is no effect at all, and the pain wis something not good, to which she has no tolerance, can not bear. She gets herself to the medicine cabinet in the bathroom while Spike slumps on the living room sofa, close to passing out. Rummaging through, she searches for methadone, codeine, vicodin, anything she has ever heard off, shutting off the knowledge that these palliatives might as well be sugar pills for all they will or can do for her.
There's nothing anyway. Slamming the cabinet door with slow hopeless heavy hands, she stares into the mirror. If she could flinche, she would flinch at her own face.
It isn't her own face: Winifred Burkle's is the face in the mirror. She's played the down-home country-girl before, for Wesley, it's true. But that was her own choice.
This time, it's no soothing lie she's conjured, to lullaby a dying man into the cold end. Illyria isn't soothed: isn't lullabied. Not when the lips she's taken and petrified to granite speak without her permission, into the glass.
'Illyria. Hello.' The very sweetest smile. 'Nothing's inevitable, did you know that? Nothing except entropy and the death at the end of it, and even then there are doubts, if you ask the right people. You're a god, Illyria: you're only a god. You're not a physicist, Illyria.'
In the mirror, Winifred Burkle moves up closer, smiles with a lovely fair innocence, gives it everything that had ever charmed and snared Wesley Wyndham-Price, and his best friend too. 'You're evitable, Illyria. I can prove it to you, if you give me a dry-wipe board and an eraser. But I think I'll take more direct means. Here I am, and here I stay. And I'm coming back.'
xxx
Illyria has taken Burkle's apartment – only a little marked and scuffed around by war and hell-beasts – just as Spike claimed Lorne's. Illyria is older than a mortal could imagine, and well-used to living. It may have become tiresome in some ways: but she's not ready to relinquish it at the behest of a sugar-sweet homespun Southern girlie, overloaded with brain tissue. An imaginary girlie, at that. In the intruder, the former incumbent's old territory, she roams and curses every genus of mortal creature, and tears the place apart. Looking for evidence, looking for reasons, looking for a cure.
It's an impossibility. Winifred Burkle no longer exists, can never exist again. No breath of her remains, no heat-trace on the face of the universe, no spirit or thought. And yet she's trying to reclaim the body that has been requisitioned for Illyria's use?
Unless Illyria is just going insane. A mad god: it isn't as if there isn't ample precedent. She doesn't feel mad, though. Mostly she feels afraid. Of a little Southern girl, who smiles at her in the mirror, every time now, twirls and plays with locks of her hair, coy and fey and with a curling rage in her eyes. Liquid hot metal bubbling at the dim distant end of a very deep vat, a hole in the world.
In a hunger to know, to hunt down prey and means to destroy it, Illyria sucks up everything on Burkle's bookshelves, every six-inch thick text-book and William Faulkner collection and tattered Le Guin novel. The answer might be anywhere: a letter stuck between leaves, a notation in pencil. A vicious epithet in lipstick on the mirror glass of the girl's wardrobe. Who knows what she's using Illyria's body for, in the moments, brief yet, increasing, that Illyria is losing every so often.
ILLYRIA'S BODY, and she screams it suddenly into the empty air of the apartment. 'Mine!' Possession is nine-tenths of the law according to these scrivening fools, isn't it? Lawyers or faux-lawyers, aren't they, half of them, and kill all the lawyers her mind snarls, from some borrowed braincell still bearing the imprint of a brainiac Blanche Dubois.
Her rampage through the books is halted. She stops apace in the middle of the big living-room, a heavy biography in her stilled stone hand, at the quotation on an otherwise empty page. Robert Oppenheimer, quoting, oh, some other ant, some other puny human. 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' No, it's a god, that he quoted, isn't it? But she can't remember the fellow, at all, isn't sure she ever met him. Godhood, it 's becoming so common. They let all kinds of people into the club now.
So another human – another physicist – has become Death before now. Perhaps Burkle is taking him for a template. Maybe she had ambitions regarding becoming a god, even before. A paranoid moment: maybe Illyria has played into her hand.
xxx
She knows it isn't madness, when Spike sees it too. He comes around to the apartment he still calls Fred's place, and startles in the doorway. Illyria has put the place into some disorder: inflicted entropy upon Burkle's obsessive classificationing and refinement of function and form, her detailed worker-bee systematization.
She's still sick but that's not what he sees. There's only his spontaneous cry, the burst of joy. 'Fred? Fred!' He has to arrest himself, stop himself with a couple of paces flown towards her over the threshold (his invite being of long-standing), arms out.
'No, of course not, sorry, what an idiot- It was just the light. Just the light, okay, Illy? You looked just like her, for a minute. Well, of course, using her body and all, but normally I don't have any problem telling the difference. It was just the light, luv. Or something.'
He's still shaken, though, and she can tell it. Still disappointed too. If she cared she might be hurt. He's supposed to be her chew-toy, after all. But she drags herself over to him, to spit out her web of theories, her sudden fear of her own shadow because it isn't hers, might betray her to its original owner. Would tell him that Burkle, his dear Fred, is a sly minx trying to claw her way back into existence even though-
She would, but she falls before she gets to him, though his arms are opened for her. She falls, and feels the black blood spill over her lips, and thinks that defeat feels very strange. She's never known it before.
xxx
When she wakes she's on a bed, has no memory of being placed there, is surrounded. She has been powerless, defenceless, and it's unacceptable. Angel is here: Gunn, Lorne, Spike. All Winifred Burkle's boys, her heroes, and before Illyria can stop herself she reaches out a delicate hand. There's soft wonder on each face, turning to her like flowers to the sun. It's not for her.
She's paranoid enough already to understand immediately. 'While I was out-?' she says, looking to Spike.
And he nods, a little apologetic, but burning with happiness he can't hide. 'She came back, you were her. Well, not you, luv. Ah.' He searches for tact, for suitable sympathy. Comes up empty-handed, and the others shift uncomfortably. No-one is sad here. Joy sings in the air. No-one's meeting her eyes.
'She's coming back,' Illyria says, flat as a pancake. Joyless, but not destroyed, either. She's known it, before now, known it for sure. Just hasn't accepted it until now, confirmed by the evidence of the eyes of others.
Angel's forehead is creased, and anxious disbelief roils amongst all of them. 'It's not supposed to be possible?' he asks. He asks to be contradicted: it's clear enough.
And she feels her eyes glaze: her focus and concentration hum and veer back, inward, inward, to her traitor self. 'It's not. No-one can bring back what doesn't exist, in time or space, anywhere. Except here: in this body. She's burnt out of it: but all of it, every anti-atom, it has the blueprints. It can rebuild her: if it wants. Body and soul. She was a light, and it was extinguished. But it can be re-lit.'
'Without your permission?' Gunn asks. He looks almost ready to protest: his lawyer's mind circling through the convolutions of it, arguing it out and prodding for fault-lines in the argument.
Her smile is tired, forced, she feels it. 'What's permission?' she asks. 'Permission of what? My free mind? My godhood? My soul?' She shakes her head, and the pain's still brutal, still a sore choke and knife in her neck and shoulders. 'Everything here-' and she jabs a gesture, stabs at her torso, 'has decided that, that she's better.' It's so bitter, she can hardly speak it. 'That Fred is what should exist: that Illyria must go.' She stares sightless a moment. 'Without godhood it couldn't be done. She winked out of existence a moment. But I am a god, and nothing is beyond me. And everything in me is god: and when I am put out, and she is re-installed, everything in her will be godhood, too. Just so you're warned.'
Gunn whistles, awed. 'Our Fred, a god! Not that Cordy didn't get pretty close...'
'That didn't go too well,' the Host notes, apprehensive.
'She'll be fine,' Illyria says distantly. 'Her brain was remarkable. And there is no malign intent at work here. Or at least, none I can put into effect.' She's galvanized: suddenly pulled up puppet-like out of her stupor, her apathy. There's work, at least: and her shrunken army to set to, to win the only battle she has left. 'Now bring me the ancient runes, the books, the bowl: get robes, make ready to chant.'
Oh, these humans, so slow she wants to knock their heads together hard enough to break them. And she could, too, even now, that's the thing. The temptation is awful, but she withstands. She sighs, a sulphurous burn. 'To bring him back. What's the use, to resurrect only her? I wouldn't have done it, even for him. But only because he was better off.'
'Him?' It's the Host that asks, but he's only checking.
'Wesley,' Illyria confirms.
xxx
An hour later, and the chants are annoying her. Too shrill, they haven't the true rhythm, the translation is inferior. No matter, because it suffices. They haven't moved proceedings: are still crushed into Burkle's old bedroom, a circle of cowled and hooded monkish figures praying, muttering, clamped up against the walls. But whenever a hood falls back, it's the same old gang.
Illyria's teeth grit and spark, with the effort of keeping Winifred Burkle out. She's the last thing they need: the emotion that would bleed from her stupid soft human heart might wreck the ceremony. She hangs on: even at the point where pain makes her almost as stupid as they, and she fluffs half the final lines of the scroll. Near enough though.
It works, and when it works it's brutal, she knows what to expect. At the clap of thunder that shakes the building's foundations, she collapses. At his feet, she collapses, as he stumbles back into mortal existence, naked and raw and bewildered, falling beside her.
The clamour's unbearable, and she shouts at them with sonic force, pushes them back to the walls as eyes pop out of heads. And Wes jerks his head about at the hail of yelled greetings. Disbelief, excitement. They really had no faith at all, and she's utterly tired. They don't deserve her.
They're yelling about her, though, and about Fred. And Wes looks down, and maybe half-understands. 'You brought me back,' he exhales. Harsh and angry, not a soft breath. 'Why?'
So it's time, and she stops holding back the invader, pretender to the throne. 'For this,' she tells him, reaches out a wavering hand to touch his naked knee, and knows nothing.
Until she blinks her eyes open again a moment: to cries of dismay, and horror. Truly, they don't value their lives. She's in Wes's arms: and if her stone arms could register pain, the grip would crush. Fury animates him. 'No! No, you can't do this, can't give and take away again, I don't care if you're a god!' Weeping, of course: froth-mouthed, raging too, the same as all the rest of them, huddled around, only to a higher power.
A little voice sing-songs in her ear: 'See, it's me they want. Let go: I'll take good care. Destroyer of worlds, let go. This place is better off in my hands: you don't understand, you don't fit, but with me they'll never feel the iron hand in the glove. A gentle sweetie like me: there'll be no war, just love and flowers everywhere. And universal AP physics compulsory by sixth grade.'
Illyria pities the world she's leaving: for the second she has left to her, she whispers, 'I was merciful in comparison-'
Then she's gone, and a new god rises.