walkswithheroes | (no subject)

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When the last time you were stuck somewhere against your will maxed out at five years, a measly four months stuck in an alternate dimension is nothing. Especially not when there's a regular supply of money and a place to stay and someone Fred knows from home around. It's more than a few steps up from living in a cave.

Though, all of that doesn't mean that Darrow's stopped feeling like some weird place that Fred can't wait to figure out how to leave. Even without much success, she's kept up trying to figure Darrow out. Which is why she's holed up in a booth in a diner near Chelsea Cloisters, a small stack of books on the seat next to her while she flips through a book on magic that she's found in the back of one of Darrow's libraries.

There's a cup of coffee next to her that's gone cold, but every time she remembers to ask for a refill, Fred's distracted by something else in her book.

Just three more pages and she'll flag down a waitress.

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"You left?" Fred asks, eyes wide as she leans in, interested. She was about to get into just what kind of research she's been doing-- and was likely on the verge of a whole lot of rambling-- but this is way more important.

"How? And why am I only just hearing about it? This is big."

She should be taking notes.

"Sort of," she says, because she still isn't completely sure how it works. Most of the time, she's sure it happened in an instant, that she and Spike never actually left, but it felt like longer and now that she's talking to Fred, she wishes she'd looked at the clock when they came back.

"We were at my place and then we were suddenly back where I came from," she says. "For a couple of hours, actually, but when we came back it was still the same night. I'm not sure how much time passed here, but when we were there it was definitely two or three hours."

"Did you do anything different right before? Maybe you read something in another language from a book?" Fred asks. She knows it probably sounds strange to Andrea, but it's a relevant question. Fred's learned her own lesson when it comes to reading things out loud from books when you're not one hundred percent sure what they mean.

It sounds almost like it could have been a spell or some portal as a result of a spell, but who knows. Darrow doesn't seem to work in ways that are exactly logical.

"No," Andrea answers, shaking her head as she wraps her hands around her coffee cup. She's quiet for a moment, trying to remember all the details of the evening before she and Spike had ended up in the church, but it had been so normal that it's difficult to remember everything. "We'd just had dinner and I was about to ask him if he wanted some blood. It was like my entire apartment just shifted and instead we were inside this church with the people I'd been travelling with before."

She pauses, then says, "It was like a loop, though, too. We kept experiencing the same thing over and over again."

Fred can't help but think that doesn't sound a whole lot like actually leaving Darrow. Her expression falls and her mouth twists into a small frown. It sounds more like a spell and less like a potential way out of the city than she'd like.

"Oh," she replies, "That sounds a lot different than actually leaving. Like maybe an pocket universe inside a pocket universe."

It's still fascinating, but she can't help but feel a little let down.

"Not much help, though, huh?" she asks, her smile turning apologetic. "Sorry. I just thought it was so strange that you might be able to figure out some kind of explanation for it."

What she knows of Fred both from talking to her and what Spike has said about her is that she's a genius. And if anyone is going to figure this place out, Andrea has her money on Fred or Spock.

"I can definitely look into it. But it sounds like some kind of spell," Fred says, and she's already wracking her brain for a better possible explanation. If it was a spell, then they have to wonder just who was behind it. But considering how Darrow generally works, it might have been absolutely no one at all.

"I'm glad you guys made it back, though. Can you imagine having to live the same thing over and over and over for eternity?"

Even with Spike there, the idea of going through that over and over forever gives her chills and Andrea shakes her head. "No," she says, pausing to take a sip of her coffee. "I wouldn't want to be stuck doing that, it would be awful."

As much as she was happy to see Rick and Dale again, her life here is different and she's happy now. Killing the Hunters over and over again is the very last thing she would want to be stuck doing.

"What were you stuck doing?" Fred asks, though she gets the feeling already that Andrea might not want to talk about it. She's only been in Darrow four months, but it doesn't seem like the kind of place that would trap you in an endless loop of perfect days.

It's a strange situation to try and explain, especially to someone who doesn't exactly know the world she's come from, and Andrea tilts her head, considering her options. There's no real reason to lie to Fred, though, especially not since she's so close to Spike.

"It's sort of a long story," she says finally, then laughs. "But the world I came from was pretty much overrun by zombies and food was scarce. It made a lot of people do some pretty terrible things, including... well, they ate part of my boyfriend at the time. We were stuck there. Dealing with those people over and over again."

In the years since that portal turned her life upside down, Fred has been through a lot of strange stuff. However, Andrea's story is a definite first. Back home, it's mostly the demons killing and eating people that's a concern. Less so with the humans.

"You had to relive people eating your boyfriend over and over? God, Andrea, I'm so sorry. That's horrible."

"It was pretty bad," she agrees, her nose wrinkling slightly as she looks down at her coffee. "But I got to see Dale again. I got to say goodbye and really... accept that he's gone, I guess."

She looks up again and smiles. "That sounds sort of awful, too, but it wasn't. That part was nice and it was necessary, I think, and so as much as it sucked, I'm not sure it was entirely meant as a punishment or as some kind of cruel joke."

Fred's expression twists into a tiny frown and she flexes her fingers around her coffee cup.

"This whole place is kind of a cruel joke, I think," she says, "All us brought here and set up with what look like normal lives, and then things like this happen."

Fred accepted a long time ago that her life was never going to be normal again, though. She's lucky to even have the rest of her life, lucky to not be dead in another dimension somewhere, but she knows that this is what she gets now.

"Maybe in some cases," Andrea says, nodding her agreement. At first she'd been so angry, faced with Rick and Abraham and the Hunters all over again. She remembers wanting to hit Gabriel just to get him to shut up, because she didn't want to be there anymore. And she remembers being scared they'd never get back to Darrow.

"Hell, maybe even in this case," she says with a shrug and a laugh. "Maybe I'm crazy for taking anything away from it at all, but if I don't try to think of it as something I needed, it just... it feels so aimless."

"But otherwise, it sounds like someone's doing all of this on purpose instead of just being random," Fred replies, and she's not sure which is worse. Random's more difficult to figure out, but Fred thinks she likes that idea better than there being someone behind sending them all here, their own personal Professor Seidels.

She can't stand the idea of being used like that again.

"That's true, too," Andrea allows and she isn't sure which is worse. Sometimes she's just glad she's here, no matter what happens, because it's better than what she left behind, but at other times, she misses what she had there. The freedom. The knowledge that she was doing something right, that she was helping people.

"But it's better than zombies," she finally says with a smile, because it is. Maybe she's struggling to find her place here, but it's better than the Roamers.

"Heck, it's not the worst dimension I've ever been stuck in," Fred replies, trying to look on the bright side. Maybe there's someone pulling the strings, and maybe she's way past frustrated when it comes to research, but things could be a lot worse. They could all be cow slaves.

She remembers her coffee, despite the fact that she's had her hands wrapped around the cup, and takes a sip.

"How's Spike?"

"Jesus, we're cheerful," Andrea says with a laugh, but she figures they've both earned the right not to always have to be cheerful. She tries most days, she looks on the bright side of things and remembers what she has and what she'd been given, even in the midst of all that horror. But sometimes it's hard, because sometimes the horror is all she can remember.

"Spike is... good," she says, her smile growing a little shy, even though she doesn't know why. "I'm pretty sure we're... well, together, I guess." She isn't sure what else to call it. Calling a vampire who's more than two hundred years old her boyfriend seems strange, even if that's what he is.

"Wait, really?" Fred asks, and she was really asking about how Spike was after they'd been stuck living the same thing over and over, but doesn't mind the change in subject.

"Officially?"

She's heard a lot of warnings about Spike— mostly from Angel back home— but to this day, he's still never given her any reason to doubt him or be wary of him. Right now, she's really just glad that both he and Andrea seem to have found a little happiness.

"Yeah," Andrea says, then laughs, her nose wrinkling a little. This is why she feels like that loop wasn't arbitrary, it was something she'd needed even though she hadn't known she'd needed it at the time. Now that it's happened, she feels better, like things have settled. Maybe it won't last long, but she'll take it for now.

"He met Dale, which was weird, but it was like Dale's way of telling me it was okay," she adds, looking down at her coffee briefly. He's been dead for almost three years now, she thinks, and it's okay for her to move on. She knows that now.

"It's still so weird," Fred says, though there's still a grin on her face, "I never really thought of Spike as... I mean, when I knew him back in Los Angeles, he didn't even have a solid body."

It wasn't for lack of trying, though. Fred had devoted a lot of time to trying to make Spike corporeal again, and eventually she would have figured out a way. Hopefully.

"I'm glad that's changed," Andrea says with a laugh, then covers her face for a moment before she looks at Fred. "How did that even work? How... I mean, I know I came from a strange world, but that's beyond anything we ever saw."

The dead had been hard enough to adjust to, but it had only been a virus. There was nothing magical about them and even with everything she's seen, it's sometimes hard to wrap her head around all of it.

"There was a lot of walking through walls and popping up in places you didn't really want him to be," Fred replies, remembering. Of course, he'd tried to leave Wolfram and Hart, but somehow his spirit had been bound to the place by whatever spell was keeping him around.

"We weren't completely sure what it was keeping him tethered to our dimension, to be honest."

That thought causes her smile to fade a little and Andrea pauses to take another sip of her coffee. There are always risks, she knows that, especially with the weird things she's been through, but the thought of Spike not being here or not being able to stay bothers her deeply.

"But it got fixed," she says. "Somehow. So that's a good thing."

Fred nods. "Somehow, whatever's keeping us all here fixed it right up," she says, "Or maybe the properties of this dimension are different. Maybe vampires can't be non-corporeal here."

She doesn't know everyone in Darrow, but Fred hasn't come across any more vampires who can walk through walls yet.