“Hey! You can’t come in here!”

Illyria doesn’t care this is the men’s restroom. Gender is irrelevant, a human thing she doesn’t understand. All she knows is this is where the one called Wesley goes, time after time, to return with hands that reek of flowery soap and all the despair he’s cried into them.

Illyria gives the staff of Wolfram and Hart the shivers. A hard thing to do; they knew what they signed up for the day they sold their souls, and they’re used to Hammer Horror strangeness of the law firm, but even they take pains to avoid the Old One left wandering their corridors. No one will dare ask again if she’s lost.

An unlucky intern has chosen the wrong time to visit the restroom and relieve himself of his morning coffee. As he aims she stares at him, her disgust as evident as her curiosity, and he shrivels under her pointed scrutiny. His protest for privacy is of no consequence to her, yet she looks up and their eyes meet, blue to blue. He gulps sharply and fervently hopes that there’s still something of the sweet scientist left underneath the chill, but she’s dripping with fresh blood and looking right through him with eyes unblinking, fathomless, and he feels like she’s seen his mortgaged soul and found it lacking.

He tucks himself inside and zips up; somehow shamed that he can no longer do his business. He’ll scurry away and never bother her greatness again, but as he tries to pass her in the doorway, she brushes him aside like she might flick away an aggravating gnat on a summer’s evening. At her violent push, he loses his footing and careens into a urinal, the back of his head cracking against the porcelain. He doesn’t get up. Illyria is satisfied. She will go where she pleases. He’ll get out of her way and like it.

She steps forward. She is to clean in here, in this filthy place, to wash away the gory remains of her slaughter, but the room stinks of piss and the basest of human functions. She’ll never be clean here. The place makes her want to retch, to vomit out her loathing and contempt. These are dirty mammalian secrets and they are laid out before her, hidden shames of waste, contamination and humanity. She’d prefer to taste the acid burn of bile on her dead tongue than the fetid air and harsh disinfectants, which irritate her olfactory senses with their sharp chemical tang.

She avoids the stalls, stalking past them without a glance. She does not wish to touch them and she needs them not. Instead, she pauses as she catches sight of herself in the wide mirror. She looks small, delicate, weak, even as the blood slides slickly downwards, dark against the ghastly pallor of her skin as it’s caught in the soft light. Discomforted, she turns away and looks no more, avoiding the reflection that just shows a fragile mortal shell. She stands then, confused with the modern plumbing, before the basins. Her head tracks through a jerky series of Arecibo scans, every movement assessing her options, seeking the answers she needs. There is water here, surrounding her and she feels it the same way she senses the life in the green. It’s in the small pools deep in the bowls of the toilets, some stained with cigarette butts from a Lawyer’s sneaky smoke. It’s in the curious Pollock patterns drying on the floor, the careless splashes that make the tiles slippery underfoot. It’s surging through the pipes above her head into hidden cisterns waiting in the walls. And something is dripping, drip, drip, drip, in a perfect metronome tempo. But she doesn’t know how to use the faucets and there’s no one left alive to ask.

She finds the drip. Water is leaking into the bowl before her, each drop rolling down the ceramic like tears of sympathy mourning those that have fallen to her savage campaign. She reaches out to touch the tense, perfect droplets. Water is eternal like her and it remembers her deep in its chemical bonds, the way it remembers the rocks it filters through over and over. Such familiarity is a comfort to her now all she knew are gone.

As she moves an infrared sensor is tripped. The water gushes, strands of coppery red spiral away from her bloodied hand into a whirlpool of diluted death. Blood and dust and life spin away down the plughole, purified in the torrent. The time is over when she would wash dutifully for those that thought to run this place, when she must be clean for them and not stain the expensive carpet, as if she cared for such things, all while her degradation gnawed resentfully inside. While she may convince herself that washing away the grime of war is an indulgence or a practicality, nothing more, this compulsion for cleanliness comes from another place, another life, another occupant of this shell. Soon though, when her plans are finished and complete, she’ll ignore the tug of those memories and will delight again in a bath of blood.

She has much to do before she seizes this world for her own and Wolfram and Hart is only the start. She has no need of these benefactors anymore, those who presumed they could contain her, control her. They have learned their mistake in a costly lesson. Like this one, prostrate and bleeding into a puddle of his own urine at her feet, they were cast down before her or were crushed in her deadly fist until dust, and there will be more before she’s done. For now though, she is victorious and victory is everything. There is power in this place, strong and malicious, and it’s hers now by conquest. She’ll take what she needs and move on.

The earth has no Champions left to stop her.