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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"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.

"It was the same on the island," she says thoughtfully, chewing on her lower lip a little as she considers it. "He was, I mean. Solid. We weren't close by any means, but I knew him enough to know he wasn't walking through walls."

She pauses, then asks, "Has he told you about the island?" Because saying it like that, in such an offhand way, is bound to confuse someone who doesn't know anything about it.

"Bits and pieces," Fred replies, and she really hasn't pressed the matter as much as she probably should. Especially considering that every time somebody mentions this island place, it seems like she should know more about it. It's strange, just like all the stuff with Officer Stackhouse strange.

Though with slightly fewer mysteriously appearing stomach butterflies.

"Maybe it's just a biproduct of dimensional travel?"

Being in Pylea had affected Angel in strange ways, so this could be somehow related.

"If it is, I'll leave all that to you to figure out," Andrea says, smiling again. "I'm not exactly... experienced in figuring out dimensional travel or time looping or any of the things that happen here." She's good at exactly two things and being good at law isn't something she's sure she wants to go back to.

"Tell me where to point a gun, though, and I'm your girl," she adds.

"I wish it was that easy," Fred replies. In a lot of ways she really does miss the days when the best solution just involved plunging a stake in something, even if she's never been too good at that part of things.

"Tell me about it," Andrea says. "The easiest part about living in a world full of zombies was the zombies." There was no moral quandary when it came to getting rid of them. Even Hershel had come around after seeing what had happened to his wife and children.

"You know, this is the first time I've thought that maybe we had it easy," Fred says, "Just when it comes to creatures. For the most part. The clean up part, at least."

Of course, there were the demons that Fred is convinced exist almost entirely to spew mucus all over everything, but with vampires all you really needed was a broom and dustpan when it came to clean up. Something tells her that it's not quite the same with zombies.

"We buried our own. Burned the rest."

She hears Rick when she says it, hears his voice clear enough that she would think he was standing right there with them if she didn't know better. Sometimes it's like he's right beside her, reminding her of the things they went through together. Their rules, the way they lived. But she's glad he isn't here.

"It definitely wasn't easy," she says.

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