milliways_bar | (no subject)

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Illyria is in the bar, mainly because her mun is forcing her to be.

Normally when she is in these moods of great indifference and mild annoyance, she is out by the lake. But since the weather generally discourages anyone else from being around, and since she's not particularly averse to meeting people, she is for once actually in the bar. She sits in a corner booth from which she can survey the rest of the bar with mild interest for anyone or anything that might be of interest.

And when she's not doing that, she's toying with tiny currents of blue energy which she causes to spark between her fingertips. Just for show, really. It may be that she is trying to access memories that have begun to fade -- not the Shell's, those will never fade, but others which had never been natural to her.

At any rate, she is in the bar, and probably will not object to idle conversation.

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Wesley's spent the last few days upstairs, slowly adjusting to his new post-life in the bar. But he's down here now, and looks about for a familiar face.

His feelings at seeing Illyria this time are...complex. But he asks bar for a Lagavulin, 12-year, and walks over to her cautiously. Seeing her toy with the currents brings back a painful memory, but he shoves that out of his mind.

"Hello, Illyria. May I join you?"

"If you wish." she replies, and stops with the blue sparks, either out of courtesy or just because she no longer cares to do so.

She is rather less inclined to admit to having feelings than is usual, but if she were, she would say that complex is an understatement. These interactions are perhaps as difficult for her as they are for Wesley.

Of course, being Illyria, it is difficult to read anything at all into her expression.

Wesley slips into the booth and sets his scotch on the table. He looks around the bar for a bit, then turns back to Illyria.

"Well. This is more pleasant that last time at least."

He remembers how cold the air was that first night he saw her here, out back by the lake. How disoriented he had been.

"Is it?"

The last time, technically, had been in the cells, though she had not been entirely herself then. In any case, this meeting was, so far, more pleasant than either of those. Whether it would stay that way remained to be seen.

"I do not expect that you find any of our interactions pleasant."

Wesley feels a twinge about that. The thought it might be guilt disturbs him, and even more the question why he should be feeling that way at all.

"Perhaps that had more to do with the circumstances, Illyria. Our previous encounters came during a ... difficult time."

"I suppose they did." she agrees, quietly.

She realizes perhaps for the first time that he was not aware of what had transpired for her during the time when they had known each other. He wouldn't know that she'd spent time in the Bar, before, and that her return to the world they'd briefly shared came at a difficult time for her, as well.

"I think that there are things about this place that nobody has bothered to explain to you." she says, carefully. "By now you have worked out that time functions oddly here, but I do not think you know all of the implications of that fact."

She pauses, waiting for some sign of acknowledgement that he actually cares to hear more of what she would say.

Wesley nods. "I've spoken with a few of the people here. I wouldn't say I comprehend it, not quite yet anyway. But the basic fact of what you're saying seems clear enough."

The old rhythm of talking to Illyria is starting to come back to him slowly. Which perhaps means he's starting to move past the initial shock of this place.

"I would be grateful if you could explain it to me."

"Very well. Perhaps it is best that I start at the beginning, then. I first accessed this place shortly after my return to the world. It was accidental, an anomaly that occurred when my powers caused odd things to happen to the time stream, though I found that my powers stablilized again once I was here, and for a time I existed in relative peace in this place."

She pauses, considering how best to sum things up without going into excessive detail.

"A number of things occurred during this time, details are irrelevant. Suffice it to say that events here drove me back through the door after a number of months, at which point I arrived precisely in the spot where I had left, and at which you took my powers from me with that vile contraption of yours."

"I was trying to save you, Illyria. Regardless of what I had to tell Angel in order to convince him to give me the chance to use it."

"Angel has the best intentions, but..."

No matter how I try, I always seem to end up following my own agenda.

"So you've been here for some time then. You hadn't mentioned this place when you were with us on Earth. I never suspected. But then there is so much about you we never knew."

And so much I still don't know.

"You never asked." she says, with a touch of something accusatory in her tone. "You took the trouble to save me, as you put it, and then locked yourself in your office with your books and ignored me entirely until you had found some use for me."

There is a touch of bitterness in her tone, but it is faded, no longer hateful.

"Regardless of this, I was ... troubled by my inabilty to return to favor." She admits, staring down at the table.

"After the battle, in my timeline, I was returned here again by chance, and at some point after that I made the acquaintance of Andrew Wells, who came here from some point much earlier in an alternate timeline. He intended to change the events that had happened that evening, and was, for the most part, successful. Your colleagues all survived. But the timing was slightly off, and I arrived too late to prevent your demise for a second time."

She doesn't look up from the table yet, certain that somehow this attempted favor will matter as little to him as everything she has tried to do for the vampire.

"But you did try?"

Wesley's voice is odd as he says it. More than a statement, not quite a question. His tone is uncertain, unsure, reflecting the confusion he feels as he tries to imagine Andrew--

...of all people...

--trying to accomplish such a thing. And with the denizens of the bar to help.

Then a trace of bitterness, that saving him was perhaps never considered. That had it not been for Illyria, perhaps his fate would have gone unremarked, thought irrelevant.

No. No, I won't believe Angel--. But he wasn't making the decisions, was he?

If Illyria is correct, this wasn't Angel's idea. Nor Gunn's. Not Spike's. Not even Lindsay's. It was Andrew. And perhaps Giles.

And why should *I* have been a factor in the transdimensional machinations of the new Watchers' Council?

Does Illyria sense the pain of Wesley's thoughts? Perhaps not. But there is a flash of gratitude in his eyes despite Wesley's attempt to keep his own counsel.

If nothing else, she did try. Perhaps when no one else was so much as giving it a thought.

"Thank you, Illyria. Thank you, at least, for trying."

"Kindly save your gratitude for someone to whom it matters." she says, coolly. Her composure back firmly in place, she is able to look him in the eye once more.

"It seems that there are things which may not be changed. Nor, perhaps, should they. I merely wished for you to know. I do not expect that this knowledge will make any difference whatsoever in our future interactions."

Nor does she expect that he will ever need to find out just how much his death had affected her, both times.

Idiot, Wesley thinks savagely, after all this time you forget who she is.

(We look so tiny to her.)

"You're right, of course. I beg forgiveness. I had forgotten my place."

Wesley's voice is a dead monotone as he says it, but his sincerity is real.

(She's monumentally self-possessed...)

"Our future interactions? So you intend to remain in this place?"

"I was here first." Illyria says, and somehow the statement fails to take on the childish sense that it would coming from anyone else.

But she remembers that she had intended to leave, after the final battle. Had Wesley survived she was going to take her leave of him in any case. Too many things about their interactions unsettled her. It would likely be the same here.

Still, the idea of being forced out yet again by another lesser being offends her.

"I was here before either you or Winnifred arrived, and now I suppose you wish me to leave. Do you think that my leaving will make it easier to forget?"

Wesley shakes his head. "I have no wish to forget you, Illyria. Nor force you from this place. I've hardly been here long enough to lay any claims to it."

Truth be told, Wesley simply hopes for familiar faces to stay a bit longer.

And despite everything, he finds himself hoping Illyria's will be one of them more than all others. Save perhaps one. But he can hardly be blamed for that.

"Your motivations make no sense." Illyria retorts, still a bit snappishly.

"But yes, I do intend to stay, at least until this place either bores or frustrates me into leaving. Neither of my return trips to the human-infested Earth have been pleasant."

Wesley would shrug at that--explaining human motivations, especially conflicted ones to Illyria has never been easy--but since it would probably result in her removing his head and tossing it across the bar, he opts not to.

Now he wishes he had ordered a coffee, because that would allow him to pause the conversation while he stirred it. On the other hand, he's talking to Illyria, and that nearly always requires scotch. So he takes his time drinking it instead.

Illyria goes silent as well, her head tilted just slightly as she watches him.

After a few moments, she speaks again.

"I suppose I should also inform you that Winnifred - the one who is here, in the bar - is tied to me in a manner that neither of us would prefer. It seems that she is from the same timeline that I am. I experience her memories moments after they are formed. I do not attempt to purposefully sort through them as a matter of habit - it is easy enough to allow them to become lost within my consciousness most of the time."

A slight flicker of some faintly troubled emotion may be present in her inhuman blue eyes, if one could recognize any emotion at all there.

"I know you must have hoped otherwise, so I thought it best to inform you now."

"I suspected as much. It seemed the most likely alternative." His voice is dull and flat.

"Are you finding her memories helpful toward understanding humanity?"

Despite himself, Wesley is curious.

Her eyes flash dangerously and then narrow into an expression of distaste.

"Why is every last being in this place so very concerned with whether or not I understand one lowly species? I know more than I ever wished to about your kind." she says, her voice fairly dripping with disdain.

"I know what emotions feel like." she continues, with a controlled sort of neutrality. "I recognize them. I can pick apart the layers of my consciousness that were human, spend hours doing nothing but that, but I do not think that I will ever precisely understand any more than you could ever hope to understand me."

"Perhaps not," Wesley replies. "I'm--."

He was about to say, 'I'm upsetting you,' but that, of course, would provoke only another heated denial and sweeping statement about the smallness of all humans.

"I should go."

Illyria neither confirms nor denies his last statement. She merely blinks at him once, and then regards him with the same impassive gaze as is usual for her.

"Very well." she says, dismissively, and just like that, her attention goes back to her fingertips as she resumes playing with sparks.

Wesley sits there for a moment longer, as if waiting for some further sign of interest from her that he really should know is not going to come.

Then, finally, without another word, he leaves the booth and slowly makes his way back to the bar.

"Could you zap berks with that?" asks a grey-eyed skull, which has stopped to watch her sparking fingers.

Illyria stares.

"...Perhaps, if I had any knowledge of what berks are." she replies, and allows the energy to make a sharp crackling noise as she releases it, the sparks dying away for the moment.

"For that matter, what precisely are you?"

The skull dips himself. His eyes flick over the rest of her body - not covertly, either - before he speaks.

"I'm a mimir - a floating encyclopedia of places you've probably never heard of, if I know this burg."

"And berks are people whose brains rattle when they shake their heads."

"I have heard of a great many places." Illyria replies. "Though the names which are given to things change over time."

She pauses for a moment, eyeing the skull appraisingly.

"Do you always assume that form?"

"Mmm, really? Sigil, the Cage, City of Doors, centre of the Planes?"

He tumbles, dips and twirls in mid-air before facing her again. "I find it very mobile. And it's the only one I got."

She shrugs.

"I would only know a place if I saw it again, which due to certain constraints upon my powers, I no longer can with as much ease as I once did."

Though it is quite likely that if a place existed, she had travelled through it in passing.

"I would imagine that most beings would prefer not to receive their information out of the mouth of an entity that appears as one of their dead, though perhaps I am mistaken."

"What kind of powers? And how didja lose 'em?" the skull asks.

"Sigil's a right barmy place at times," he admits. "Me, I think the talking skull motif comes from the whole 'dead having knowledge denied to the living' bit of screed."

"During my original reign as a god of my world, my powers were vast and numerous. I could travel the planes as I wished, exist in several places at once, for example."

She sighs, faintly.

"They were taken from me as a means of preserving the body in which I currently reside. It was unable to sustain my full power indefinitely. The powers I have left are mere parlor tricks in comparison. Such a grievous waste of an existence."

Morte's assessment of that is, "Wow. Some tough luck.

"So...how's the new body working for you?"

"Adequately enough, I suppose." she says. "I do not mind it as much as I once did, at least."

It is a great deal better than being a floating skull. she thinks, but is courteous enough not to speak her thoughts aloud.

Morte takes the opportunity to check her out. He's not hiding it - he can't. Being a floating skull has its disadvantages.

"Not much to mind, is there?" he purrs rhetorically.

"On the contrary, there is quite a lot to mind, and you may cease leering at me now. I do not find it flattering." she says, with a stern look.

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