Cordelia had seen the entire below-ground floor of the Wolfram and Hart building in her nightmares. The basement where Angel had locked the lawyers with the vampires appeared especially frequently, even if in real life it wasn't even in Wolfram and Hart but in Holland Manners' home--nightmares didn't make distinctions like that.
:Too bad I didn't imagine this place enough, Doyle. For your sake, I hope that just my words are invading your head, without the visuals. It's creepy. Uh, good ways down the hall from the last staircase I mentioned; there's five doors on the right and three on the left so far, and we're stopping.:
She prayed there really was someone listening, that she wasn't imagining the connection. If Doyle were back in the Hyperion lobby wondering aloud where she had gone...well, she wasn't going to think that way.
Nightmares asserted for a moment. Cordelia was in the Master's hideout, hung upside down from rusty manacles with blood running down her face and into her hair.
No, she was standing upright with only travel bruises, and Lilah was pushing her somewhere. :This is it, Doyle. Why can't evil lawyer guys come up with something besides the standard dungeon cliche? Don't forget, sixth door. Any time you want to break it down would be great.:
The door had time to clang soundly into place before Cordelia’s eyes adjusted to the near-absolute blackness and she realized she wasn’t alone. "Willow?"
Willow looked horrible. Even in the non-light, Cordelia could see the scrapes and dark marks all over her body, the rags she was still wearing, the places where her hair had been tangled or torn. The witch had made a faint but consistent glow ever since Cordelia had seen her--perhaps not a physical light, since no one else had mentioned it--but an aura of barely-suppressed power. That aura crackled here, in the dungeon, and Willow’s eyes were bottomless black.
"Willow? Are you okay? No, dumb question; are you morally wounded?"
"Nice to see you, too, tact girl." Willow’s voice was barely a whisper. The power crackled through every word, but it never left Willow’s immediate vicinity.
"So they want you to make Angel evil. Or change time to make him good."
Willow made no response.
Cordelia added, "I know because of a vision."
"Then you know you'd better stake him now."
"Absolutely not. We're all sworn to stake Angel if he ever turns evil. But he's just fine right now, thanks very much."
"Returning Angel’s soul was my very first spell. I could never figure out how to bind it, but of course I could make it return to me. Worse. Somehow, they--I think using some kind of physical mystical thing--they haven’t figured out how to make me do anything yet--but they’ve bound the power I have. If I try to do anything magically, anything at all, I’ll go into the spell that would make Angel all soulless monster again."
Cordelia had a sudden vision of Willow in a hospital, surrounded by magical paraphernalia and stinky herbs, shuddering as the magic went through her. "If you become a conduit for this kind of power," Giles had said, "You’ll open a door that you may not be able to close."
"So don't," said Cordelia. "Magic and will and time and love, they're all blurring together here, but you haven't figured out the key is will?" :Any time would be great, Doyle.: One step at a time, she picked her way across the muck on the floor of the dungeon. She reached out her hand toward Willow’s shoulder. Sparks shot across the contact before her hand actually reached the other girl. It hurt. "You can’t touch anything without losing control of the power?"
"I can. You had probably better not."
"So the electricity doesn’t hurt you?"
"The power is me. I don’t know why I didn’t see that before."
Willow must be closer to the edge than Cordelia had realized. What internal scars must they have left her with, when her physical form looked that bad? Closer, Cordelia could pick out every scrape. Willow’s clothing hadn’t been torn, it had been cut and ripped by devices that had gone right through.
Deliberately, Cordelia touched Willow again. The sparks flew again, but she held on. It wasn’t that bad. Like touching the static generator in ninth grade science class; it only hurt when you put your hand on it or took it off.
Willow met Cordelia’s eyes for the first time.
That was a good sign. "Did they tell you we weren’t coming for you or something?" Cordelia pulled Willow up to face her with her other hand. That didn’t hurt all that badly either; perhaps Cordelia had grounded the power or something.
"They told me--yeah, that’s about what they told me. That I’d kinda gone too far to be worth a rescue." Willow laughed shakily. "Once I told Faith that it was too late. Now I’m the one who had everything and gave it up for the power."
"That’s not what it sounded like from Tara. She--her power doesn’t crackle all over her like yours, but I could feel it gathered all around her, and I definitely wouldn’t want to be in her way when she catches those lawyers who took you."
"Tara’s here?"
"You think Buffy would drive to L.A. again by herself?"
"Buffy’s here too? Here in the Wolfram and Hart headquarters?"
Cordelia started to respond, "Not yet, but she'd better be--I'm sending messages out by--"
Willow’s face suddenly darkened, and the girl did not seem to hear what had come before. "They told me Buffy was in L.A., but she just came to stop the spell I did."
"Well, since neither Buffy nor Tara knew anything until you started the actual casting, and by the way, could you try to look a little less gross the next time you resurrect someone? You drooled slime for more than half of that three straight hours that the spell took." Cordelia grinned; she'd been saving that line since the actual chaotic moment. "Buffy and Tara showed up just after you’d finished, in the thick of the battle with the Wolfram and Hart assassins. Buffy demanded every single vampire tell her where you were, right before she staked it. All of them. She’s even--I mean, I thought I was getting good with a sword, but she was--"
"They told me Buffy wanted to come here and kill me."
"You? No, Willow!" Cordelia tried not to shake Willow’s shoulders, not wanting to jar the girl’s injuries, but wanting to penetrate that fog. "Look, if anyone’s to blame for this crisis, I am, and by the way, it was worth it, Doyle’s helping this entire attack as much as he can and he is just as much--to see him is--anyway, you didn’t do anything wrong. Buffy is beside herself trying to get you back, and I honestly don’t think this building is going to keep standing much longer if they keep holding you here. We just have to hold you together in time to find them."
"It’s too late. Trapped here, remember? I can’t even find Tara."
"What?"
"I could send out a little energy ball. Like--" Willow’s face fell. "No! I will not use magic. But if I could, I could send out a little beacon, well, like my own essence, guiding. Or I could draw Tara here."
"Yeah," Cordelia thought for a second. "She tried that, actually. A couple of times."
"Really? No, she wouldn’t--"
"Really." Cordelia let go of Willow and started to prowl the edges of their cell. "We just have to..."
"Cordelia. They’ll torture you too," Willow said quietly.
Visually, Cordelia ignored the younger girl and continued to examine the walls and the bars. :It's weird to relay the things I've been saying, but I found her. Willow is here. They've hurt her really badly, and they're going to do the same things to me. Let me know if you need better directions--well, no, you can't, so I'll repeat the whole thing!:
"They put you in here because they want me to hope rescue is coming. So I’ll try to help it along and maybe use magic. Or maybe you'll convince me to wish that I'd never become a witch. I know that's all it would take. But I won’t. I can’t. And they’ll use you."
"So we’ll break ourselves out before they have a chance," Cordelia said, ignoring the shiver that ran up and down her back at Willow’s words.
"I told you, I can’t..."
"Not with magic. With our hands. That Tara of yours, she isn’t useless without whatever mumbo jumbo you guys do, so why should you be?" Cordelia went over to Willow again, took her hand, ignored the pain she felt as Willow’s magic again crackled (and her horror at the deep welts all through the tiny arm), and said, "I saw Willow with resolve face once." That wasn’t helping. "I was told about a Willow who ripped pages out of some prophecy while the bad guy in said prophecy held a knife to her throat, a Willow who came out of a crisis without even showing a shard of weakness and put herself right back into danger. "
"Who said--"
"Buffy. She also said that if she didn’t find you in the ashes of Wolfram and Hart she wasn’t going back to Sunnydale."
"Buffy?’
"Did they put acid in your ears?"
"Well..." Great...another thing Cordelia didn’t want to know about recent torture, but Willow recovered herself before Cordelia‘s eyes. "If Buffy thinks I can do this without magic..."
Maybe Angel and Doyle weren't even coming, but now Cordelia had an auxiliary plan. "We can do this without magic. So come on, science nerd. What kind of leverage would we need to break one of those rusted bars on the door?"
They got to work.
