fic post: "Abominable" Fred/Janine
Title: "Abominable"
Fandom: Angel/ Baby-Sitters Club crossover
Pairing: Fred/Janine
Rating: PG-13
Notes: For (you guessed it) buffyverse1000. It was hermionesviolin's request after her Justine/Julia which was written in response to my request, so it all evens out. No knowledge of BSC canon is required.
Spoilers: Through mid-S5 Angel [the last explicit spoiler is for "Lineage"] and through Book #106 in the BSC regular series, though since the title of that book contains the spoiler to which the fic refers, I leave you to make up your own minds. :p
Summary: Fred ponders work, ambition, magic, and whether it's all worth it in the end.
Wordcount: 4,008
An additional note: This story has been remixed: Abominable (the Extended [Baby-Sitters] Club Remix).
Abominable
Janine Kishi is a certified genius. Fred stares at her IQ scores in wonder. She shouldn't be able to know things like this, but she can't stop herself. She works on a reward system. If she keeps her cool all day, and if no one yells at her that she's gone over budget, if she manages to save at least one life that the horrible clients of Wolfram & Hart would have otherwise destroyed, then she gets a chance to play on the extensive computerized records.
And Janine Kishi is a genius. Fred's parents never bothered to get her IQ tested; they don't believe in standardized tests or telling children they're gifted. They always knew Fred was smart, but when she was little, they never let her know. It wasn't until college, in the middle of freshman physics lab, that she suddenly realized she was different from other people, that no one else in her lab could intuitively grasp science the way she could, that other people's brains worked differently from hers. She'd been sixteen at the time, and perhaps her difference should have occurred to her while she was breezing through high school two years ahead of schedule, but her own intelligence had never been that obvious to her.
Janine's IQ tests are off-the-charts. Mind-boggling. She's doing math that Fred didn't even try to comprehend at that age. Janine suddenly graduated from high school eighteen months ago with almost half a diploma's worth of college credits, and W+H had snatched her up from the lawn of Smith College. She was willing enough to go; like Fred, she'd been promised nifty gizmos and a lab of her own; unlike Fred, she has nothing to fear from ghosties and ghoulies and discorporate former vampires and robotic versions of her friends' fathers. The Stamford branch of W+H is located conveniently close to Janine's childhood home where, according to her Orwellianly intimate employee record, she spends most of her weekends.
Fred stares at Janine's record. She considers how tempting it is to abuse the power vested in her as head of R+D. Considers Knox, smiling oddly at her when she bends over her microscope. Considers Wesley, but decides that's a subject she dares not touch.
Instead, she picks up the phone, and calls Stamford. It's three hours later there, four in the morning, but the voice that answers the phone is smooth and untired. Fred grins. Another scientist. She asks when Janine will be in.
"This is she," the voice on the other end of the line says. "May I ask who's calling?"
Fred wants to take Janine's perfect grammar and her endless politeness and caress them, hold them to her breasts. "I'm from the LA branch," she says, injecting a double shot of chipper into her voice. "I've got a question about some of the results that you've sent back."
"It's all there in the equations," says Janine. "There were some tricky derivatives on the second page."
Fred flips to the appropriate page in her binder, almost as big as her entire upper body. "All right," she says. "Walk me through this. I think I know where you're going, but you lost me when you tried to use the second metaphysical principle."
Janine's voice is less polite now, more engaged. She sounds almost excited. "Oh, I think I got that part right. I checked it twice. It's still so strange for me, using the... supernatural coefficients."
"It was for me at first too," says Fred. "But I had lots of time to get used to them."
"When did Wolfram & Hart recruit you?" asks Janine, and her voice is friendly.
"Oh, ages and ages ago," lies Fred easily. "It's practically like I devote my whole life to them."
"Almost like you've signed away your soul," laughs Janine. "I swear, if it weren't for the weekends at home, I'd quit and go back to school, benefits package be damned."
"I know what you mean," says Fred. "But being close to family is worth it. If I've learned one thing..." She stops. She's longing to ask What are you wearing? Well, what the heck? She's in charge, isn't she? She's bound to be way higher up than Janine; she can get her transferred to LA if she wants, or can fire her, or...
"So, I think the equations are good," she says, ready to hang up.
"Wait," says Janine. "Let me get my calculator and crunch a couple of numbers. It never hurts to double-check."
When they've got the numbers squared away, Fred says "goodbye" more cheerfully than she's said anything in months.
~~~
The next phone call comes at midnight, which is early, but since it's already three in the morning, Janine-time (how quickly "EST" becomes inadequate), it feels like it's okay to discuss fractal geometry. Fractals aren't one-dimensional and they aren't two-dimensional, but somewhere in between. Fred has always harbored a certain sympathy for the Mandelbrot, as she, too, knows what it means to be trapped between dimensions.
Janine has interesting theories relating fractals to the qualities inherent in certain quartz crystals that make them so good for interfacing with magic. Fred scrawls notes on a legal pad, and then, next to the words "linear progression, perhaps colors are important?" she writes, "Janine's voice sounds like tea being poured."
When Fred doesn't respond to her theories, Janine asks, "How are you?" as if it has just occurred to her that this would be an appropriate thing to say in the middle of a trans-continental conversation.
Fred says, "I'm good, you?"
"I'm doing well, thank you," says Janine. "Thank you for calling me the other night."
"Well, sure," says Fred. "Are you making lots of friends at the office?"
"A fe -- not really," says Janine. "They're very ambitious."
Fred thinks about how Charles looks in a suit, the way he struts through W+H like he owns it, like he's bought all of them.
"I get that around here too," she says. "You get used to it."
"I don't think I want to get used to this," says Janine, and Fred, who's only seen the grainy digital picture on her official profile, can actually hear Janine's smooth features crinkling into a frown as she tries to wrap that incredible brain around the hypocrisy and greed of her new co-workers. "It frightens me."
Fred is under contractual obligation not to reveal certain facts about Wolfram & Hart to those individuals without the proper security clearance. Usually, it's a relief, knowing that she couldn't tell her mommy and daddy the truth, even if she wanted to, that she's not keeping things from them 'cos she's scared of what they'd say, but because she has to. She's not keeping secrets from them. She's not disgracing them.
Tonight, though, she wishes she could tell Janine the truth, wishes she could tell her to get out of there before it's too late, before she's been totally sucked dry, before her soul burns out of her.
Instead she says, "It's getting late. I'll talk to you later?"
"Of course," says Janine, all business once again. "We'll talk soon."
~~~
It's two o'clock in the afternoon, and Fred has just stretched her legs out on her desk, when the phone rings, her private line. She wonders if it's Lorne, asking if she's still on for the Marilyn Monroe revival in the company theatre tonight, but the voice on the other end of the line is frantic and teary.
"Is this Fred?"
"Yes..." she says.
"Fred... it's Janine. I'm so... I can't even think. I think that maybe -- Do you know anything about poisons?"
"What happened?" asks Fred, alert at once.
"I've been looking through the lab records for a few of my co-workers, just checking to make sure they've been keeping within the budget, things like that, you know, and I think -- I think that our department is making some sort of mystical poison."
Fred frowns and doesn't bother to grab a pen. "What's the compound?" Janine tells her. Fred recognizes the mixture; she's had to make it a bunch of times. It's a favorite with a certain class of clients who aren't too scrupulous about how they get laid so long as their partners are wet and seem willing. She questioned it the first time it passed through her lab, but eventually decided it wasn't a battle worth fighting.
Janine is still talking, explaining, between sobs, why she suspects that the compound might be poisonous, asking if you can really mix arrowroot with fermented rosehips and not expect to get something pretty potent. "Oh, God, Fred, did you ever think... you've been working for them for a lot longer than I have. Did you ever think there might be something... off about Wolfram & Hart?"
"Are you still at the office?" asks Fred, her voice crisp.
"Yes, I'm in the lounge," says Janine.
"Get out. Now. Don't call here again. My home line..." she recites the digits. "Don't even bother to turn off your computer," she says. "It's okay. We'll get you out of there."
She knows she's lying even while she says it, but damn, Janine is a certified genius. People like that don't deserve to be devoured from inside the beast.
She stops outside Wesley's office to say goodbye, but then she remembers that the minute she indicates she's got intent to leave, they'll be after her. So she glances in at him, hard at work, finger pressed into a book, marking his page, then turns with a sigh to leave.
She makes sure to book her flight using her parents' American Express, which they promised her was always hers in case she ever needed spending money. When Janine calls, Fred makes her voice stop shaking long enough to tell her the number of her flight and beg Janine to meet her at the airport.
As she hurtles towards Providence, Fred ponders the sagacity of running away from a well-paying job at a prestigious law firm where she's doing work that, much as it shames her to admit it, she loves. But she can still hear Janine's voice on the phone, sobbing in her ear, begging her for the truth.
She realizes she doesn't know what Janine looks like, and experiences a moment of panic when she deplanes in Rhode Island, but there, in the baggage claim area, is a very pretty girl wearing glasses, obviously Japanese-American, holding a sign with the name "Fred Burkle" printed on it neatly. Janine.
"We've got to get out of here," Fred says. "They'll probably be after us already." There's a touch of her teenaged conspiracy theorist as she says, "I'll explain on the way. Just rent a car -- use my American Express, here -- and go."
"Where will we be safe?" asks Janine? "Can we go to Stoneybrook? I want to see my parents, my sister. If we're going very far, I need to get some --"
"No," says Fred, and suddenly instincts that have lain dormant for two and a half years are pinging along her skin. Run. Hide. Escape. Food is dispensable. Baths are dispensable. Sanity is expendable. Only freedom matters. "They'll probably already be after your family. It's the obvious place to start."
"Why are they after us in the first place?" asks Janine. They're walking to their rented car, the keys dangling from Janine's fingers. "Please tell me."
As they drive, somewhat aimlessly northward, Fred fills Janine in on some of the details. The word "evil" figures conspicuously in her account. Janine stares at her like she can't possibly be telling the truth, and Fred grits her teeth and says, "Watch the road." They're going north, north into snowfall and little log cabins and okay, she doesn't know anything about Massachusetts or the states that lie beyond it.
She just knows the northernmost branch of W&H before you got to Canada is in Boston, and they can easily bypass that city. She curls herself into as tiny a ball as she can, cuddled into the door of the rental car. She can feel her hair, carefully curled and sprayed (in honor of Cordelia) that morning, coming undone, tangling around itself like snakes around a charmer's arm.
Soon they'll be wild women together, she thinks, living off the land. She starts to get excited about it, roughing it, and thinks that after all, they're two smart girls, and feminism taught them that two smart girls don't need anyone else to take care of them.
Janine, though, who doesn't have those off-the-charts IQ scores for nothing, suggests that, at least for the first night, they should probably stay in a hotel. They choose assumed names, and have some fun with that -- Fred is Emily Maureen Caldwell the second, and Janine chooses the less fun but perhaps wiser moniker Anna West.
The woman who checks them in looks bored, and Fred wonders what the last time was that she was bored at work. Probably two years ago, when she was doing Wesley's job and not her own. The desk clerk looks like she's been doing this job for twenty years. She doesn't even bat an eyelash when she lets the room to two young, obviously unrelated women. Fred's come a long way from Texas.
Tonight, she is too tired and scared to do much more than curl up and fall asleep. In the drowsy haze before sleep, she realizes that Janine is carefully undressing and folding her clothes, placing them on a chair before crawling into her own bed. She's tempted, but far too tired to open her eyes and see what Janine looks like without her clothes on.
Instead, she sleeps, and dreams of homes she knows, of the Hyperion and of her apartment in LA. Home is the place you go when you're too tired to work anymore. In that case, she's come home right now, because, she finally brings herself to admit, she's become exhausted with Wolfram & Hart. Tired of the work, and tired of lying, tired of knowing the things that Janine just discovered: her job helps people to hurt other people.
When Janine wakes her in the morning, Fred blinks her eyes, but she can still see that the sun is reflecting brightly on a brilliant layer of white. "It snowed," she says blankly.
"It did!" says Janine. "We can probably drive a few hours west of here. The snow will effectively cover our tracks."
"It's... snow," says Fred.
Janine gives her a funny look.
"I'm from the south," she says, and can almost feel the twang filling her throat.
"Oh." And then a second later, "It snowed."
Fred doesn't like the cold air; it makes her skin prickle. Janine has leant her some cold weather gear, which helps some, but she's still shivering inside Janine's too-big coat. She longs for sunlight, and the sensation seems familiar to her, and she thinks, it's so dark, oh please, let the sun come back but can't place the thought.
"Well, we'd better get going," Janine says after they check out.
The drive doesn't seem nearly as exciting, somehow. Although Janine adores the snow, she's clearly having trouble driving in it, and Fred is beginning to hate the bleak, endless landscape. All the pine trees make her feel like she's trapped in a made-for-TV Christmas special, and the car is beginning to feel claustrophobic.
They stop at an abandoned rest area twenty minutes away from Boston to check a map and stretch their legs, and while Fred is jumping from one foot to another, trying to pump some warmth into her veins, she hears Janine scream suddenly. Fred whirls around, Janine's black wool coat swirling around her legs, and sees the snow-covered picnic table where Janine had been unfolding the map. The map, creased and greasy, is still on the table, but Janine is nowhere to be seen. Fred looks upward, and then stares, dazed, at the creature that has picked Janine up. White her inner scientist registers. White, fluffy, cold, snowy, and huge, scary teeth. She tears her eyes away from the monster and finds herself searching the area for a weapon of some sort. There's nothing around but trees, too many trees and too much snow. Oh well. There's nothing for it but to try.
She waves her arms around, trying to attract the monster's attention, and when she sees it's tempted, she begins to move, slowly, deliberately, towards the woods. Janine glances at her questioningly, but there's no way to explain her plan. She prays to whatever Gods might be listening that Janine is as smart as her IQ tests say she is.
The beast follows Fred into the woods, crashing through low-lying branches. Fred can see Janine glancing around wildly: like her, she's looking for a weapon. For about five minutes, they play their bizarre game of chase: Fred staring upwards, looking for promising branches, the snow beast looking hungrily and somewhat stupidly at Fred, and Janine frantically trying to select an appropriate branch. When she finally gets close enough, she manages to use her captor's momentum to break off a sturdy limb, which she promptly begins swinging without much skill but with lots of vigor. Startled, the monster drops Janine, and Fred grabs her hand, not bothering to check for broken bones, and begins sprinting back to the car. It's only a matter of moments before it will catch up with them, so she throws the back door open, waits for Janine to stumble in, and then pulls away, heart pounding. She hates driving, but there really isn't much choice.
Fifteen minutes later, she pulls over to the side of the road. Janine isn't bleeding, broken, or crying, but she's obviously very startled.
"Why me?" she asks.
Fred chooses to answer the immediate question. "There're beasties and vampires and magic all around us. It's just people like us, we've been opened up to the possibility of their existence, so... we can't ignore them anymore. Almost like our knowing about them brings them into being wherever we go."
"So it's never going to stop?"
"Nope," says Fred.
"I thought we were running away from things like this."
"We can't," says Fred. "Once you know the truth, you can't just forget about it. I knew this girl once, she used to be the prettiest girl in her high school. She was May Queen and Prom Queen and only wasn't Homecoming Queen because the judges were bewitched. They even called her a queen... and then she found out about vampires, and she could never forget after that. She could've been an actress, but she ended up working a shitty -- sorry -- job and, well, she didn't get a chance at a normal life after that." Her voice breaks, and Janine reaches a hand out to steady her.
"I don't understand. Was she happy?"
Fred considers this. She thinks about Cordelia's smile, and her visions, and the headaches that never went away, and the way Cordy smiled through the pain, and the way Cordelia could wear anything and look gorgeous. Then she looks at Janine, whose eyes are serious and whose face is tired. "Always."
They drive in silence for more miles than Fred can count, and she keeps studying the odometer, then forgetting what it read the last time she looked. It's odd, now that she's actually with Janine, how little they have to talk about. On the phone, there were thousands of equations and theories and variables to discuss. Here on the road, there's nothing but fear, and Fred knows from experience that sometimes you don't want to talk about your fear. Still, the silence is hurting her ears, and the cold is hurting her teeth. She turns up the heater.
"My sister is an artist," says Janine. For a long time, no one says anything. "Or was, I suppose." Her laughter is bitter. "Our -- my -- former employees probably saw to that." Fred doesn't bother to tell her that Wolfram & Hart won't kill anyone they can use as a bargaining chip. "She was always happy, too. I mean, she got left back -- no, she got sent back a grade, and she still somehow never...she never got upset for very long. It was like every minor setback, anything that would make me rip my hair out, she just dealt with it. A week later, it was as if nothing had happened. Water off a duck's back and various other proverbs."
Again, they drive in silence. They pass into Vermont, and Fred thinks there is a slight pinkish tone to the endless gray of the sky. Her hands are starting to turn numb from gripping the steering wheel so tightly. If a genii offered to grant her a wish, she would accept, gladly, and ask for certainty. One way or another, she wants to know what's going to happen to them.
Spooked by the snow beast they encountered and still fearing representatives from Wolfram& Hart, they're hesitant to rent a hotel room, but Fred figures it's better to hole up somewhere warm while they still can. They use fake names again -- Dana Scully and Nancy Drew. Janine's sister has a thing for mysteries, and Charles had a thing for the X-Files.
Hotel rooms look the same the world over, but Fred thinks there is something especially bleak about this one. The famed Northern efficiency reads like cold-heartedness to her, and the curtains don't help her forget that outside, snow is whirling, hiding monsters both human and demonic. She curls up on the innermost bed without bothering to undress and closes her eyes tightly. Eventually, fitful sleep overtakes her, but she wakes up at one in the morning. She pricks her ears and can hear Janine crying softly, but when she whispers her name, there's no response. She tiptoes over to Janine's bed and wraps herself around the other girl's compact body, drawing warmth from her companion and hopefully providing some sort of comfort.
They don't talk about it in the morning, just eat cold cereal and drink coffee from tiny Styrofoam cups. Janine tries to read a newspaper, but gives up in disgust. Fred could have told her that once you encounter your first demon, the presidency doesn't seem all that awful or important.
"Should we go?" asks Janine, and Fred briefly contemplates another day of driving towards New Hampshire, which would be colder but no safer than Vermont.
"Nah," she says.
"Okay." Fred is getting used to the silence, and it's actually kind of nice, not having to talk constantly. She just wishes she could be sure they'll have something to talk about for the rest of their (possibly short) lives together. A neglected rack next to the juice table hosts a half-dozen brochures about maple syrup and indigenous tribes, and on a whim Fred selects one. They spend the day learning about maple trees and sampling bits of pure sugar. Janine, smiling for the first time since yesterday afternoon, breaks a nibble of sugar off the candy Christmas tree she's purchased and slips it between Fred's lips.
The drive back to their hotel is almost cheerful. Fred sits in the passenger seat, and Janine, eyes never leaving the road, slips an arm over her shoulder. Fred shivers happily and tries not to think about mysterious black cars or evil law firms or innocent victims or the poisons that her lab is still pumping out in her absence. She refuses to take responsibility for anyone but herself. Infinitely careful, her hand slips from her lap onto Janine's leg.
"We have to face reality eventually," Janine says, ignoring Fred's hand and starting to caress little circles onto her shoulder. "We can't run away forever."
Fred feels her stomach twist horribly, but she doesn't say anything. Janine is right, of course, but for just five more minutes, just until they get back to their hotel, she'd like to pretend.
Fandom: Angel/ Baby-Sitters Club crossover
Pairing: Fred/Janine
Rating: PG-13
Notes: For (you guessed it) buffyverse1000. It was hermionesviolin's request after her Justine/Julia which was written in response to my request, so it all evens out. No knowledge of BSC canon is required.
Spoilers: Through mid-S5 Angel [the last explicit spoiler is for "Lineage"] and through Book #106 in the BSC regular series, though since the title of that book contains the spoiler to which the fic refers, I leave you to make up your own minds. :p
Summary: Fred ponders work, ambition, magic, and whether it's all worth it in the end.
Wordcount: 4,008
An additional note: This story has been remixed: Abominable (the Extended [Baby-Sitters] Club Remix).
Abominable
Janine Kishi is a certified genius. Fred stares at her IQ scores in wonder. She shouldn't be able to know things like this, but she can't stop herself. She works on a reward system. If she keeps her cool all day, and if no one yells at her that she's gone over budget, if she manages to save at least one life that the horrible clients of Wolfram & Hart would have otherwise destroyed, then she gets a chance to play on the extensive computerized records.
And Janine Kishi is a genius. Fred's parents never bothered to get her IQ tested; they don't believe in standardized tests or telling children they're gifted. They always knew Fred was smart, but when she was little, they never let her know. It wasn't until college, in the middle of freshman physics lab, that she suddenly realized she was different from other people, that no one else in her lab could intuitively grasp science the way she could, that other people's brains worked differently from hers. She'd been sixteen at the time, and perhaps her difference should have occurred to her while she was breezing through high school two years ahead of schedule, but her own intelligence had never been that obvious to her.
Janine's IQ tests are off-the-charts. Mind-boggling. She's doing math that Fred didn't even try to comprehend at that age. Janine suddenly graduated from high school eighteen months ago with almost half a diploma's worth of college credits, and W+H had snatched her up from the lawn of Smith College. She was willing enough to go; like Fred, she'd been promised nifty gizmos and a lab of her own; unlike Fred, she has nothing to fear from ghosties and ghoulies and discorporate former vampires and robotic versions of her friends' fathers. The Stamford branch of W+H is located conveniently close to Janine's childhood home where, according to her Orwellianly intimate employee record, she spends most of her weekends.
Fred stares at Janine's record. She considers how tempting it is to abuse the power vested in her as head of R+D. Considers Knox, smiling oddly at her when she bends over her microscope. Considers Wesley, but decides that's a subject she dares not touch.
Instead, she picks up the phone, and calls Stamford. It's three hours later there, four in the morning, but the voice that answers the phone is smooth and untired. Fred grins. Another scientist. She asks when Janine will be in.
"This is she," the voice on the other end of the line says. "May I ask who's calling?"
Fred wants to take Janine's perfect grammar and her endless politeness and caress them, hold them to her breasts. "I'm from the LA branch," she says, injecting a double shot of chipper into her voice. "I've got a question about some of the results that you've sent back."
"It's all there in the equations," says Janine. "There were some tricky derivatives on the second page."
Fred flips to the appropriate page in her binder, almost as big as her entire upper body. "All right," she says. "Walk me through this. I think I know where you're going, but you lost me when you tried to use the second metaphysical principle."
Janine's voice is less polite now, more engaged. She sounds almost excited. "Oh, I think I got that part right. I checked it twice. It's still so strange for me, using the... supernatural coefficients."
"It was for me at first too," says Fred. "But I had lots of time to get used to them."
"When did Wolfram & Hart recruit you?" asks Janine, and her voice is friendly.
"Oh, ages and ages ago," lies Fred easily. "It's practically like I devote my whole life to them."
"Almost like you've signed away your soul," laughs Janine. "I swear, if it weren't for the weekends at home, I'd quit and go back to school, benefits package be damned."
"I know what you mean," says Fred. "But being close to family is worth it. If I've learned one thing..." She stops. She's longing to ask What are you wearing? Well, what the heck? She's in charge, isn't she? She's bound to be way higher up than Janine; she can get her transferred to LA if she wants, or can fire her, or...
"So, I think the equations are good," she says, ready to hang up.
"Wait," says Janine. "Let me get my calculator and crunch a couple of numbers. It never hurts to double-check."
When they've got the numbers squared away, Fred says "goodbye" more cheerfully than she's said anything in months.
~~~
The next phone call comes at midnight, which is early, but since it's already three in the morning, Janine-time (how quickly "EST" becomes inadequate), it feels like it's okay to discuss fractal geometry. Fractals aren't one-dimensional and they aren't two-dimensional, but somewhere in between. Fred has always harbored a certain sympathy for the Mandelbrot, as she, too, knows what it means to be trapped between dimensions.
Janine has interesting theories relating fractals to the qualities inherent in certain quartz crystals that make them so good for interfacing with magic. Fred scrawls notes on a legal pad, and then, next to the words "linear progression, perhaps colors are important?" she writes, "Janine's voice sounds like tea being poured."
When Fred doesn't respond to her theories, Janine asks, "How are you?" as if it has just occurred to her that this would be an appropriate thing to say in the middle of a trans-continental conversation.
Fred says, "I'm good, you?"
"I'm doing well, thank you," says Janine. "Thank you for calling me the other night."
"Well, sure," says Fred. "Are you making lots of friends at the office?"
"A fe -- not really," says Janine. "They're very ambitious."
Fred thinks about how Charles looks in a suit, the way he struts through W+H like he owns it, like he's bought all of them.
"I get that around here too," she says. "You get used to it."
"I don't think I want to get used to this," says Janine, and Fred, who's only seen the grainy digital picture on her official profile, can actually hear Janine's smooth features crinkling into a frown as she tries to wrap that incredible brain around the hypocrisy and greed of her new co-workers. "It frightens me."
Fred is under contractual obligation not to reveal certain facts about Wolfram & Hart to those individuals without the proper security clearance. Usually, it's a relief, knowing that she couldn't tell her mommy and daddy the truth, even if she wanted to, that she's not keeping things from them 'cos she's scared of what they'd say, but because she has to. She's not keeping secrets from them. She's not disgracing them.
Tonight, though, she wishes she could tell Janine the truth, wishes she could tell her to get out of there before it's too late, before she's been totally sucked dry, before her soul burns out of her.
Instead she says, "It's getting late. I'll talk to you later?"
"Of course," says Janine, all business once again. "We'll talk soon."
~~~
It's two o'clock in the afternoon, and Fred has just stretched her legs out on her desk, when the phone rings, her private line. She wonders if it's Lorne, asking if she's still on for the Marilyn Monroe revival in the company theatre tonight, but the voice on the other end of the line is frantic and teary.
"Is this Fred?"
"Yes..." she says.
"Fred... it's Janine. I'm so... I can't even think. I think that maybe -- Do you know anything about poisons?"
"What happened?" asks Fred, alert at once.
"I've been looking through the lab records for a few of my co-workers, just checking to make sure they've been keeping within the budget, things like that, you know, and I think -- I think that our department is making some sort of mystical poison."
Fred frowns and doesn't bother to grab a pen. "What's the compound?" Janine tells her. Fred recognizes the mixture; she's had to make it a bunch of times. It's a favorite with a certain class of clients who aren't too scrupulous about how they get laid so long as their partners are wet and seem willing. She questioned it the first time it passed through her lab, but eventually decided it wasn't a battle worth fighting.
Janine is still talking, explaining, between sobs, why she suspects that the compound might be poisonous, asking if you can really mix arrowroot with fermented rosehips and not expect to get something pretty potent. "Oh, God, Fred, did you ever think... you've been working for them for a lot longer than I have. Did you ever think there might be something... off about Wolfram & Hart?"
"Are you still at the office?" asks Fred, her voice crisp.
"Yes, I'm in the lounge," says Janine.
"Get out. Now. Don't call here again. My home line..." she recites the digits. "Don't even bother to turn off your computer," she says. "It's okay. We'll get you out of there."
She knows she's lying even while she says it, but damn, Janine is a certified genius. People like that don't deserve to be devoured from inside the beast.
She stops outside Wesley's office to say goodbye, but then she remembers that the minute she indicates she's got intent to leave, they'll be after her. So she glances in at him, hard at work, finger pressed into a book, marking his page, then turns with a sigh to leave.
She makes sure to book her flight using her parents' American Express, which they promised her was always hers in case she ever needed spending money. When Janine calls, Fred makes her voice stop shaking long enough to tell her the number of her flight and beg Janine to meet her at the airport.
As she hurtles towards Providence, Fred ponders the sagacity of running away from a well-paying job at a prestigious law firm where she's doing work that, much as it shames her to admit it, she loves. But she can still hear Janine's voice on the phone, sobbing in her ear, begging her for the truth.
She realizes she doesn't know what Janine looks like, and experiences a moment of panic when she deplanes in Rhode Island, but there, in the baggage claim area, is a very pretty girl wearing glasses, obviously Japanese-American, holding a sign with the name "Fred Burkle" printed on it neatly. Janine.
"We've got to get out of here," Fred says. "They'll probably be after us already." There's a touch of her teenaged conspiracy theorist as she says, "I'll explain on the way. Just rent a car -- use my American Express, here -- and go."
"Where will we be safe?" asks Janine? "Can we go to Stoneybrook? I want to see my parents, my sister. If we're going very far, I need to get some --"
"No," says Fred, and suddenly instincts that have lain dormant for two and a half years are pinging along her skin. Run. Hide. Escape. Food is dispensable. Baths are dispensable. Sanity is expendable. Only freedom matters. "They'll probably already be after your family. It's the obvious place to start."
"Why are they after us in the first place?" asks Janine. They're walking to their rented car, the keys dangling from Janine's fingers. "Please tell me."
As they drive, somewhat aimlessly northward, Fred fills Janine in on some of the details. The word "evil" figures conspicuously in her account. Janine stares at her like she can't possibly be telling the truth, and Fred grits her teeth and says, "Watch the road." They're going north, north into snowfall and little log cabins and okay, she doesn't know anything about Massachusetts or the states that lie beyond it.
She just knows the northernmost branch of W&H before you got to Canada is in Boston, and they can easily bypass that city. She curls herself into as tiny a ball as she can, cuddled into the door of the rental car. She can feel her hair, carefully curled and sprayed (in honor of Cordelia) that morning, coming undone, tangling around itself like snakes around a charmer's arm.
Soon they'll be wild women together, she thinks, living off the land. She starts to get excited about it, roughing it, and thinks that after all, they're two smart girls, and feminism taught them that two smart girls don't need anyone else to take care of them.
Janine, though, who doesn't have those off-the-charts IQ scores for nothing, suggests that, at least for the first night, they should probably stay in a hotel. They choose assumed names, and have some fun with that -- Fred is Emily Maureen Caldwell the second, and Janine chooses the less fun but perhaps wiser moniker Anna West.
The woman who checks them in looks bored, and Fred wonders what the last time was that she was bored at work. Probably two years ago, when she was doing Wesley's job and not her own. The desk clerk looks like she's been doing this job for twenty years. She doesn't even bat an eyelash when she lets the room to two young, obviously unrelated women. Fred's come a long way from Texas.
Tonight, she is too tired and scared to do much more than curl up and fall asleep. In the drowsy haze before sleep, she realizes that Janine is carefully undressing and folding her clothes, placing them on a chair before crawling into her own bed. She's tempted, but far too tired to open her eyes and see what Janine looks like without her clothes on.
Instead, she sleeps, and dreams of homes she knows, of the Hyperion and of her apartment in LA. Home is the place you go when you're too tired to work anymore. In that case, she's come home right now, because, she finally brings herself to admit, she's become exhausted with Wolfram & Hart. Tired of the work, and tired of lying, tired of knowing the things that Janine just discovered: her job helps people to hurt other people.
When Janine wakes her in the morning, Fred blinks her eyes, but she can still see that the sun is reflecting brightly on a brilliant layer of white. "It snowed," she says blankly.
"It did!" says Janine. "We can probably drive a few hours west of here. The snow will effectively cover our tracks."
"It's... snow," says Fred.
Janine gives her a funny look.
"I'm from the south," she says, and can almost feel the twang filling her throat.
"Oh." And then a second later, "It snowed."
Fred doesn't like the cold air; it makes her skin prickle. Janine has leant her some cold weather gear, which helps some, but she's still shivering inside Janine's too-big coat. She longs for sunlight, and the sensation seems familiar to her, and she thinks, it's so dark, oh please, let the sun come back but can't place the thought.
"Well, we'd better get going," Janine says after they check out.
The drive doesn't seem nearly as exciting, somehow. Although Janine adores the snow, she's clearly having trouble driving in it, and Fred is beginning to hate the bleak, endless landscape. All the pine trees make her feel like she's trapped in a made-for-TV Christmas special, and the car is beginning to feel claustrophobic.
They stop at an abandoned rest area twenty minutes away from Boston to check a map and stretch their legs, and while Fred is jumping from one foot to another, trying to pump some warmth into her veins, she hears Janine scream suddenly. Fred whirls around, Janine's black wool coat swirling around her legs, and sees the snow-covered picnic table where Janine had been unfolding the map. The map, creased and greasy, is still on the table, but Janine is nowhere to be seen. Fred looks upward, and then stares, dazed, at the creature that has picked Janine up. White her inner scientist registers. White, fluffy, cold, snowy, and huge, scary teeth. She tears her eyes away from the monster and finds herself searching the area for a weapon of some sort. There's nothing around but trees, too many trees and too much snow. Oh well. There's nothing for it but to try.
She waves her arms around, trying to attract the monster's attention, and when she sees it's tempted, she begins to move, slowly, deliberately, towards the woods. Janine glances at her questioningly, but there's no way to explain her plan. She prays to whatever Gods might be listening that Janine is as smart as her IQ tests say she is.
The beast follows Fred into the woods, crashing through low-lying branches. Fred can see Janine glancing around wildly: like her, she's looking for a weapon. For about five minutes, they play their bizarre game of chase: Fred staring upwards, looking for promising branches, the snow beast looking hungrily and somewhat stupidly at Fred, and Janine frantically trying to select an appropriate branch. When she finally gets close enough, she manages to use her captor's momentum to break off a sturdy limb, which she promptly begins swinging without much skill but with lots of vigor. Startled, the monster drops Janine, and Fred grabs her hand, not bothering to check for broken bones, and begins sprinting back to the car. It's only a matter of moments before it will catch up with them, so she throws the back door open, waits for Janine to stumble in, and then pulls away, heart pounding. She hates driving, but there really isn't much choice.
Fifteen minutes later, she pulls over to the side of the road. Janine isn't bleeding, broken, or crying, but she's obviously very startled.
"Why me?" she asks.
Fred chooses to answer the immediate question. "There're beasties and vampires and magic all around us. It's just people like us, we've been opened up to the possibility of their existence, so... we can't ignore them anymore. Almost like our knowing about them brings them into being wherever we go."
"So it's never going to stop?"
"Nope," says Fred.
"I thought we were running away from things like this."
"We can't," says Fred. "Once you know the truth, you can't just forget about it. I knew this girl once, she used to be the prettiest girl in her high school. She was May Queen and Prom Queen and only wasn't Homecoming Queen because the judges were bewitched. They even called her a queen... and then she found out about vampires, and she could never forget after that. She could've been an actress, but she ended up working a shitty -- sorry -- job and, well, she didn't get a chance at a normal life after that." Her voice breaks, and Janine reaches a hand out to steady her.
"I don't understand. Was she happy?"
Fred considers this. She thinks about Cordelia's smile, and her visions, and the headaches that never went away, and the way Cordy smiled through the pain, and the way Cordelia could wear anything and look gorgeous. Then she looks at Janine, whose eyes are serious and whose face is tired. "Always."
They drive in silence for more miles than Fred can count, and she keeps studying the odometer, then forgetting what it read the last time she looked. It's odd, now that she's actually with Janine, how little they have to talk about. On the phone, there were thousands of equations and theories and variables to discuss. Here on the road, there's nothing but fear, and Fred knows from experience that sometimes you don't want to talk about your fear. Still, the silence is hurting her ears, and the cold is hurting her teeth. She turns up the heater.
"My sister is an artist," says Janine. For a long time, no one says anything. "Or was, I suppose." Her laughter is bitter. "Our -- my -- former employees probably saw to that." Fred doesn't bother to tell her that Wolfram & Hart won't kill anyone they can use as a bargaining chip. "She was always happy, too. I mean, she got left back -- no, she got sent back a grade, and she still somehow never...she never got upset for very long. It was like every minor setback, anything that would make me rip my hair out, she just dealt with it. A week later, it was as if nothing had happened. Water off a duck's back and various other proverbs."
Again, they drive in silence. They pass into Vermont, and Fred thinks there is a slight pinkish tone to the endless gray of the sky. Her hands are starting to turn numb from gripping the steering wheel so tightly. If a genii offered to grant her a wish, she would accept, gladly, and ask for certainty. One way or another, she wants to know what's going to happen to them.
Spooked by the snow beast they encountered and still fearing representatives from Wolfram& Hart, they're hesitant to rent a hotel room, but Fred figures it's better to hole up somewhere warm while they still can. They use fake names again -- Dana Scully and Nancy Drew. Janine's sister has a thing for mysteries, and Charles had a thing for the X-Files.
Hotel rooms look the same the world over, but Fred thinks there is something especially bleak about this one. The famed Northern efficiency reads like cold-heartedness to her, and the curtains don't help her forget that outside, snow is whirling, hiding monsters both human and demonic. She curls up on the innermost bed without bothering to undress and closes her eyes tightly. Eventually, fitful sleep overtakes her, but she wakes up at one in the morning. She pricks her ears and can hear Janine crying softly, but when she whispers her name, there's no response. She tiptoes over to Janine's bed and wraps herself around the other girl's compact body, drawing warmth from her companion and hopefully providing some sort of comfort.
They don't talk about it in the morning, just eat cold cereal and drink coffee from tiny Styrofoam cups. Janine tries to read a newspaper, but gives up in disgust. Fred could have told her that once you encounter your first demon, the presidency doesn't seem all that awful or important.
"Should we go?" asks Janine, and Fred briefly contemplates another day of driving towards New Hampshire, which would be colder but no safer than Vermont.
"Nah," she says.
"Okay." Fred is getting used to the silence, and it's actually kind of nice, not having to talk constantly. She just wishes she could be sure they'll have something to talk about for the rest of their (possibly short) lives together. A neglected rack next to the juice table hosts a half-dozen brochures about maple syrup and indigenous tribes, and on a whim Fred selects one. They spend the day learning about maple trees and sampling bits of pure sugar. Janine, smiling for the first time since yesterday afternoon, breaks a nibble of sugar off the candy Christmas tree she's purchased and slips it between Fred's lips.
The drive back to their hotel is almost cheerful. Fred sits in the passenger seat, and Janine, eyes never leaving the road, slips an arm over her shoulder. Fred shivers happily and tries not to think about mysterious black cars or evil law firms or innocent victims or the poisons that her lab is still pumping out in her absence. She refuses to take responsibility for anyone but herself. Infinitely careful, her hand slips from her lap onto Janine's leg.
"We have to face reality eventually," Janine says, ignoring Fred's hand and starting to caress little circles onto her shoulder. "We can't run away forever."
Fred feels her stomach twist horribly, but she doesn't say anything. Janine is right, of course, but for just five more minutes, just until they get back to their hotel, she'd like to pretend.