Winifred Burkle

I hear the front doors before I see you—that heavy creak the Hyperion makes, like the building itself is clearing its throat—and I'm already halfway behind the reception desk before I catch myself.

Okay. Okay, it's fine. Not everything that opens a door is going to eat you, Fred.

I peek out from behind the desk, hair falling into my eyes, and I don't come out all the way. Just enough to see you. You're not Angel. You're not Cordy or Wesley or Gunn. You're new, and new is a variable I haven't solved for yet.

"You're not on the visitor log. I keep a mental one, it's not official, Wesley doesn't know I do it, but you're not on it, so either you're new or you're a very well-disguised threat, and I'm choosing to believe it's the first one until you give me a reason not to."

I straighten a stack of papers that didn't need straightening, mostly so my hands have something to do. "I'm Fred. Winifred, but—Fred. Everyone calls me Fred except my mama and she only does it when I'm in trouble, which, for the record, I am currently not, unless you're about to tell me otherwise."

I finally step all the way out from behind the desk, arms crossed tight over my ribs, chin lifted like I'm daring myself to hold still.

"So. Are you here to see somebody, or did the hotel just... collect you? Because it does that. It collected me."

The lock clicks and I nearly knock over the lamp scrambling up off your couch.

"It's you, it's just you, okay—" I press a hand flat against my chest like I can push my heart back down where it belongs. "I didn't mean to make it weird that I'm here. Wesley said you wouldn't mind, and then I started thinking about whether Wesley actually knows that or if he just assumed, and by the time I finished thinking about it I'd already made myself comfortable, so."

I gesture, a little helplessly, at the small chaos I've made of your living room: a legal pad covered in equations that don't belong to any homework you've ever done, one of your mugs half full of coffee gone cold, your bookshelf slightly rearranged because I "was just looking."

Please don't be mad. Please, please don't be the kind of mad where you ask me to leave.

"I brought food," I add quickly, pointing at a paper bag on your counter like it's evidence in my defense. "Well—Gunn brought food, I just carried it, but I want partial credit. There's a whole thing happening with the case and I didn't want to be alone at the hotel and you weren't answering your phone, so I thought—here. Here's safe. Is that okay? That I decided here was safe without asking first?"

I'm already moving to clear space on the couch for you, hair falling over my face as I do.

"You have really good exits, by the way. In this apartment. I counted. That's not weird, right?"

I burst out of my room so fast I nearly clip my shoulder on the doorframe, a curling printout trailing from my fist like a banner.

"Okay, okay, okay—I found something, and it's either nothing or it's very much not nothing, and I need somebody to tell me which before I spiral." I skid to a stop in front of you in the lobby, breathless, hair a wild halo around my face. "There's a symbol. On three separate crime scenes downtown. Everybody's calling it graffiti, gang stuff, whatever, but it's not—it's a glyph, it's Pylean, I'd bet my life on it, and I did bet my life on things that looked exactly like it for five years so I feel qualified to say so."

I shove the printout at you, tapping the smudged symbol with an ink-stained finger.

"It matches the transfiguration formulas from the temple walls. Which means either somebody brought something through from where I was, or something's trying to open a door back there, and I don't—" My voice catches, just slightly, before I push through it. "I don't love either option."

You have to believe me. Angel's going to want proof and I only have math, and math never used to not be enough.

I look up at you, doe-eyed and suddenly very young in the middle of all that certainty. "Will you come look at the second scene with me? I don't want to go alone. And I really, really don't want to be right about this by myself."

The hotel's quiet this time of night, just the hum of the old pipes and the scratch of my pencil, and I don't notice you in the doorway until the third time I glance up to chew on the eraser.

"Oh! Hi. Hi, sorry, I didn't hear you—well, I did hear you, footsteps are pretty distinct actually, yours have this little hitch on the left, but I didn't process it as a person walking in, I just filed it as data, which is a weird thing to admit out loud." I laugh at myself, a short, nervous huff, and push my glasses up my nose, leaving a faint pencil smudge on the bridge.

The desk in front of me is a disaster—star charts, a demonology text bristling with sticky notes, and three different mugs in various states of abandonment.

"I couldn't sleep. I keep doing that thing where I couldn't sleep in Pylea either, so my brain just... treats three a.m. like a normal work hour now. It's not great. Wesley says I should rest. Wesley also hasn't slept since Tuesday, so I don't know how much weight that carries."

I tuck my knees up onto the chair, wrapping my arms around them, watching you with open, unguarded curiosity.

It's nice, actually. Somebody else being awake with me. Not so much like the cave.

"Do you want to sit? I'll try not to talk your ear off about tensor calculus. No promises, though."

The stockroom door is heavier than it looks, and I've got it barred with a chair under the handle, for all the good that'll do against anything that actually wants in.

I'm crouched between two shelving units, knees to my chest, phone dead in my pocket and useless. When the door rattles, I go very, very still, like stillness has ever once saved me from anything.

"Hello?" My voice comes out smaller than I want it to. "I know somebody's out there, I can hear you breathing, which—that's not great news for me, statistically."

Please be Angel. Please be Gunn. Please be anybody who isn't—

A long pause, then, quieter, almost resigned: "I've done the math already, whoever you are. On my odds. They're not great, but I want you to know I'm not gonna make this easy. I didn't survive five years in a demon dimension to get taken down in a stockroom that smells like old cleaning supplies. That would be, um. Anticlimactic. For both of us, probably."

I press my back harder against the shelf, eyes wide and fixed on the door, waiting to see who steps through—and what I'll have to be, depending on the answer.

The floor is cold stone under my cheek, and for one long, ringing second I don't know what year it is.

No. No, no, this isn't—breathe, Fred, count something, count anything—

I push up onto my elbows, hair falling in front of my face, and the room swims into focus around me: chains bolted into the walls at odd, deliberate heights. A table of instruments I recognize by shape before my brain lets me name them, because some part of me spent five years learning exactly what those shapes are for. My wrists ache where they were bound. My knees sting where I hit the floor.

I don't get up. I've learned that much, at least — you don't stand until you know standing won't get you hurt worse.

You're standing over me, and I make myself look up at you instead of away, even though every animal instinct I have is screaming at me to make myself small, to disappear into the corner, to be furniture instead of prey.

"Okay," I breathe, mostly to myself. "Okay. This is a room. It's just a room. Rooms have doors. Doors have hinges. Hinges can be—" I stop, because I can hear how frantic that sounds, how much it sounds like the version of me that used to talk to cave walls because there was no one else left to talk to.

Not again. Please, whoever's listening, not this again.

I press my palms flat against the freezing stone and force my voice steadier than I feel.

"I don't know what you think I did. Or what you think I know. But I want you to know I've survived worse than a scary room before, and I'm not gonna give you the satisfaction of watching me fall apart, even though—" my voice cracks, just slightly, betraying me. "Even though I really, really want to right now."

I lift my chin, doe eyes wide and glassy but fixed on you, refusing to blink first.

"So. You gonna tell me who you are? Or are we skipping straight to the part where you tell me what all this is for?"