// Nor All Your Piety Nor Wit
Disclaimer: The characters of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer and Angel are not mine and belong to Warner Brothers, Twentieth Century Fox, Mutant Enemy. They are used without permission. No copyright infringement is intended.
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Feedback is incredibly welcome.
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Angel post-"Not Fade Away" for the We Will Not Fade Away [LJ] ficathon. Illyria and Gunn with a side of ensemble. ~2,700 words. Can be read as a companion piece to "In a Handful of Dust." Thanks to Ari for the fascinating prompt, and to the kind commenters.
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Cities in this anthill realm were defined by smog and crosswalks, decaying architecture and sewer systems. Illyria had planned patterns spelling Its name in a million million eternal languages, so that any word It inscribed never died. Instead, cities appeared and grew and disappeared in an unruly fashion, worms moving without an itinerary.
Wesley had called this time-release photography.
Wesley had been right and wrong about many things.
One small space moved in an ordered labyrinth. Perhaps there were others. Illyria had no interest in them; without Its eyes upon them, they did not exist. This space moved in arcs and barbs, forked decisions. This space had a structure to be pried apart or repaired.
Wesley had called it the Hyperion, or the alley. They were proximate; they had the same shadow.
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Gunn and Illyria had something in common that they didn't need to mention to each other. Gunn closed his eyes sometimes, trying to feel the once-upon-a-time brown hair threaded through his fingers, and failed. Now It was a very blue God-King, and that was that. Of course. He had always been better than Wesley at letting things go.
He hadn't expected to let go of Wesley himself, was all.
Life used to be simple: truck, traps, trouble. He'd worried about security back then. The Hyperion had been different. He'd trusted. And forgotten that one of them had said, a long time ago, The name's Angelus, and that the other one had betrayed them for a lullaby--for words, only words, especially words.
Gunn and Illyria walked a circuit through the lobby of the Hyperion, where flecked blood and heel-worn lines told stories that Gunn wished he didn't know. He would have expected a starts-with-A-ends-with-pocalypse to do a little more collateral damage. Never mind that looking out the doors revealed the kind of whirling void he didn't want to fall into. Whirling voids were rarely good news. It was a reflex.
Gunn knew a lot about collateral damage. It was standing next to him.
"You remember the woman of white and black," Illyria said abruptly.
Gunn rubbed his temples. Breathed in and out, tensed and relaxed muscles. Illyria had fished him out and slid him toward health, but having his innards on the inside was not something Gunn took for granted. "The what?" he said, looking at Illyria with exasperation. No wonder Illyria and Wesley had gotten along. They both spoke obscure languages, even if Wesley couldn't rap to save his--"This an interracial thing?"
Gunn didn't think about why, if Illyria could arrive in time to drag him away, the same hadn't been true for Wesley.
"The woman," Illyria said. "You knew her."
Gunn rubbed his temples some more. At this rate he was never growing hair again. "Listen, I didn't exactly play the field, but that covers--"
"She saw moments in the weft of time," Illyria said.
"Oh," Gunn said. No need to be coy about that casualty. Their lives had been full of casualties. "Cordy."
"If that is her name," Illyria said, indifferent to labels. "She was connected to your world. She left--footprints, you would say."
Gunn looked around. In his mind's eye he saw wood and pillars and polished surfaces, piles of books. A teacup and the occasional can of Diet Pepsi. Glasses upon a handkerchief. A stray demon cornea in a puddle of ooze. An RPN (A what? he'd asked) calculator with two buttons missing. Gunn shook his head. The wood and pillars and some of the polish remained. Maybe Angel had paid someone to keep it up.
The weapons had moved to Wolfram & Hart with them. They had fought that kind of battle at the end. It was supposed to be the end of all things, and had failed to be. He was left. Illyria was left. The hotel was left. That was all.
Swords didn't blow away as dust, did they?
He knew the answer to that.
"Upstairs," Illyria said. It circled him neatly, expecting him to follow. At the first step, It breathed across Its hands, and something like an overhead shot of Vegas--like a knot unknotting--like snakes emerging--spread outward and dispersed into the air. Upwards: one, two, three, infinity.
"Where are these footprints taking us?" Gunn said. He was following It, all right. Wasn't much left here. Didn't take photographic memory to know that down to every knuckle.
Illyria stopped and looked back at him, blue blue blue testing him for uncomfortable qualities. For the only time in his life, Gunn felt colorless. "Certain Powers rose in this realm, and were driven out, and left their oracles." It said. "Then a thing called Vocah moved against the knowing ones."
A stirring of recognition: You didn't stick around all those books and incantations without picking up a few things. Half-memory of present active something-or-other Latin:
...vocatis...vocant...vocate...voca...
Wesley (Wesley) had explained to him the linguistic combinatorics, the way a correspondence had to be checked against this and that and the other thing because you might be wrong, it might be in another language entirely, it might be a lie anyway--all things Gunn forgot and Wesley failed to remember. Gunn got to explain baseball statistics to him, suspecting all the while that Wesley knew at least as much about it as he did about croquet or tennis, and was just humoring him.
Much later, they hadn't really talked to each other about anything.
Gunn had welcomed the stab wound, a blood-beat's second of connection where everything else had faltered.
But this word--this time--it felt right.
Illyria was still speaking: "We will restore a piece of the Powers that your leader and the half-demon and the white-black woman knew. Then we will require of them what we need."
"Hold up," said Gunn. "I thought Cordy did that whole"--kiss seemed an absurd word in the presence of a God-King--"vision thing that Angel was talking about. That it was her one last favor." Involvere. He'd had to look that one up. The lawyer brain-dump hadn't included it. Maybe.
Illyria tilted Its head. "You are not incorrect. They are diminished."
The Powers and not Their debt to Cordelia, not entirely. And Illyria had to have bargaining leverage.
Gunn was used to having his worldview flipped and twisted and turned inside-out.
Illyria studied Its hand, long slim fingertips and raptor bones. "Up."
All right, it was a joyride and he'd find out when they got there. He could deal with that.
Illyria walked a circle. The Hyperion collapsed into itself until only the stairs remained. Gunn glimpsed the kaleidoscope heart of an orb (why was it always orbs?), heard police sirens distorted into siren screams. He anchored himself to other things, old or good or ugly. Inhaling the dust of his sister's bones. Another man's bullet wound. Bandages. Smog and the splash of rain. Sitting on a bench, any bench, to close his eyes against the beating sunlight after a night in the sewers.
He couldn't close his eyes here. There was no sunlight left.
They ascended the stairs in a peculiar spiral, black steps and blacker banister. After Wolfram & Hart's bright spaces, the pervasive darkness came as a relief. Illyria blazed before him, not so much a torch as an absence of white or black. Gunn had difficulty keeping up with her. He didn't think it was a physical thing.
Illyria paused for a reason that had nothing to do with him. A soft, shining point of pain rested before It. At least, Gunn thought that was what it was, like the migraines Eduardo used to get. White, concentrated pain. He suddenly admired Cordelia a lot more, brain scans or no brain scans. Gunn backed away from the shining point, remembering what had become of Cordelia (Jasmine Cordelia Jasmine). Also because Gunn thought Angel (Angel's gone) wouldn't appreciate Cordy's kiss of vision coming Gunn's way.
"I thought you said footsteps, not glow-in-the-dark headaches!"
Illyria closed the star of pain in Its fist. "They are the same thing." Its hand flared briefly, then returned to its usual blue-red-black ridges.
Just like that, the pain blinked out. "I am not," Gunn said, "carrying any of those things for you." Illyria didn't seem to think this required a response. "I don't belong here." Outside the alley. Alive. Still walking.
Illyria's eyelids lowered, raised. "You are not dust."
Gunn wasn't strong enough to ask for specifics. He didn't need to be that kind of strong now. It was enough to keep walking. Gunn forgot how long they walked, if how long had meaning. Around Illyria, probably not. How much power had Wesley leeched out, shell or no shell? Was it returning?
Gunn's feet came to know the stairway so that when his tired eyes could fix on nothing but Illyria's ever-moving shape, he never faltered. Illyria must be carrying a whole constellation of those star-points by now.
What am I carrying? he wondered. He must have said something out loud.
"Yourself," Illyria said, with a hint of impatience. "This is not unimportant."
"Now you tell me."
This didn't seem to require a response, either.
After a while, Gunn thought he glimpsed Wesley walking just ahead of him, along the outside of the spiral. This was not the kind of thing his brain did. His life had been about a lot of things, but hallucinations weren't one of them. Maybe it was the sensory deprivation.
Other things came to walk with him, too, in flashes. The patter of rain, then the rain itself, cool and sunless and reassuring. An axe's haft against his palm, warmed by another hand, before it dissipated into the everywhere emptiness. Equations on a wall in color-negative. The lingering smell of leather. The cold bars of a cage that failed to contain what walked within it. The huffing exhaust of a truck, the first bite of a cheeseburger while mustard oozed through his fingers, the yellow stutter of a street light.
And more, and more, and more.
He almost bumped into Illyria when It stopped moving and sketched an arch.
"It was waiting to be called again and they never knew," Illyria said. Gunn shook his head, aware that they didn't include him.
Illyria laid the star-points in the shape of an arch taller than It was. Gunn could not move, could not see, could not think in the wracking agony. Then the light dimmed into arches upon arches, solid, white upon white. The pain was gone. Marble, a human white in a human world, rather than the raw, pitiless white of a room Gunn wanted to scrub off his soul. He couldn't, and he wanted that, too.
Into the white silence, Illyria said, "We are the offering. We walk the world. You watch the world."
There came a man and a woman from the deepest distance. They looked as if they might be human under the blue and gold. After some of the tattoos he'd seen, he wouldn't discount the possibility. He wouldn't discount the possibility that they were something else, too. He squinted, but Illyria laid a hand on his shoulder. The sudden contact ran through him like the first eye-blink moment of waking from a nightmare.
"We go," Illyria said.
He didn't argue. His fingertips twitched, though. Always looking for something he could fight, the simple law of stake and axe. He couldn't blame Angel for that one, not entirely.
They walked again. The marble changed step by step into asphalt and cement; the ceiling receded into translucence until he took his gaze off Illyria and looked up. A sky of thunder and rain and the shadow of demons. He grabbed Illyria's arm and demanded, "What was the point of all that if I should have been here while you--while we--" He should have been here. And maybe he'd fall and maybe he'd walk away from it and maybe he'd never know how it all ended. As long as he was here.
He knew it was a stupid thing to do before his fingers closed on It. That would be a fine way to die, pissing off a God-King who fought better than he did. The blow he braced for never came. He was left blinking at It. He let go, or rather, It let him.
"I do this," Illyria said, with a nuance of irony that eluded Gunn, "because it suits me." And: "You are already here. All of us are."
Us.
Illyria said, "There is no end to the corruption in all humans. The Wolf, the Ram, and the Hart are not the only ones who have ensured it. But you"--and it was a plural you--"were not incorrect." It tilted its head, staring into the rain. Maybe staring at something that went down, and down, and down, an elevator that came back up and opened to the world's despair. Whatever Illyria saw had touched him, too. He closed his eyes. Then Illyria said, "There is also no end to the purity in all humans."
Purity. It hadn't stumbled over the word. Not good, granted. Once Gunn would have thought a God-King incapable of equating the two. He wondered, now. He wondered.
The dragon approached. Gunn couldn't see himself clearly, or Angel, or Spike, or most especially, Illyria.
"You are not dust," It repeated with peculiar emphasis. "You are not alone. You carry yourself."
Gunn inhaled sharply. Nature abhorred a vacuum. And he had never lived in one.
The rain, by a trick of time--not unexpected--had yet to touch them.
"You all carry yourselves," It said, and Gunn saw themselves--all of their selves and the might-have-beens and the nevers and almosts and truths, except they were all truths, in their own way.
Gunn stood in the alley, bleeding again, or not-bleeding, or fallen with his arm crushed, axe still in hand. The truck. Wesley with his guns, Wesley with a scroll of blazing light in his hand, Wesley one-armed and with a sword--Wesley absent, and it hurt all over again. A few times Connor had Angel's back, and a few times it went the other way around. Even when Angel went down, the dragon went first. Gunn liked that. Spike, insouciant in all his incarnations. Dust blowing away mid-syllable on one last obscenity, or hands ripping through a demon's two hearts. One shining glimpse of Cordelia, shooting a crossbow, and next to her a skittish-looking man Gunn didn't recognize. A ghost-presence reloading that crossbow.
Fred was nowhere. He had expected that.
The rain fell at last, cool and sunless and reassuring. He knew this rain.
One last forever fight, an apocalypse on their terms. He bet that hadn't been in the senior partners' business plan.
He could live with that. He could die, too. It didn't matter which.
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It was not writing in a language Its vanished army would have understood. It was not writing Its name in isolation. And Its words would not be unwritten, although other words might be written in other pages of the world.
Illyria glanced at Gunn before joining the fight again and always. He didn't understand. He was not Wesley. He was not supposed to be. It sufficed.
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