An official facility, some time before the Fall of Los Angeles. Two medical personnel, Grace and Michelle, are discussing a patient while on their way to a meeting to review the progress of said patient. Grace thinks that the patient shows potential. Michelle, rather harshly, showing the strain, suggests they simply put the patient down! Grace hopes she was joking.

Inside the meeting, a Doctor Gray is preparing to address his colleagues with his case notes. The patient, he says, has seen a sharp decline in her condition since she’s been in the facility: nothing they have done has countered her delusions. In fact, anything they’ve tried is having the opposite effect – and her delusions are becoming more and more complex.

According to her chart, the patient believes she is a 150 year old vampire that had a passionate love affair spanning the entire time. She’s extremely violent and can be unpredictable, set off into mania at the slightest and easiest provocation. She is also not responsive to any medications, no matter what dosage she is given.

Doctor Gray recalls the night that the LAPD brought her into their care some time ago: She was found in an alley, covered in wounds and was apparently self-harming. If she had been attacked, as assumed, her attacker was nowhere to be seen. The wounds could have been self-inflicted. She was also eerily calm when being treated.

When his colleague asks him what he wants to do, Gray announces he wants to take her out of isolation. This causes silence in the room. He looks down at his file as his colleagues disperse. He wonders… Vampires…

Later, he goes deep into the facility, where he opens a padded cell. Inside, the patient sits in the dark, but when the light shines into the room, she covers her face with her arms to protect her eyes. As Gray enters, he soothingly tells her it’s all okay. He addresses her by name.

“Drusilla.”

She doesn’t respond. She stares blankly, at nothing in particular. He tells her that he would like to transfer her somewhere more comfortable: she would like that, right? As long as she promises, promises to be a good girl and not be aggressive. Drusilla, eventually, turns around: she is a mess, make-up smeared on her face – she looks like she’s been crying and wailing for days. She quietly agrees to behave.

Not long after, Drusilla is showering. She relaxes under the water, feeling more like herself again. She exits, checks her hair and dresses into some blue scrubs. The nurses, who were attending to her, lie dead on the floor, fang marks in their necks.

Outside, Dru emerges, much to the delight of a male guard who comments that she cleans up well. The female guard is repulsed, and stays behind as he takes Dru to Gray. The guard enters the bathroom and finds the bodies of her colleagues.

She quickly grabs her phone, but she doesn’t call back-up. She talks to a mysterious someone and tells them that if they want Drusilla safely kept hidden away, then they had better send a clean-up crew – and quickly.

45 minutes later, Doctor Gray sits opposite Drusilla at a long table: she explains what happened the last time she was in Los Angeles, when her ‘daddy’ set her on fire. She recalls a vision of her ‘grandmum’ dying. Or was it her daughter, or both? And her son? Or lover? He ran off with a cheerleader, but to be honest that may have been the chip in his brain.

She says all of this as lucid as she can be. Almost the picture of sanity, Gray thinks. She really believes all this. Finally, he asks if she’d like to conclude todays session outside… in the daylight. Drusilla gets up and skips down the room to reach Gray. She jumps into his lap and says they should stay where they are.

Gray gets up and struggles to move her off him. He tells her that this is inappropriate, but she whispers in his ear: “That’s why it’s so much fun.” Gray starts to sweat – he’s visibly nervous now, stammering over his words. He tells Drusilla that he has something to give her, a gift, if she’d like. He encourages her to draw her ideas – the things she sees in her head – and calls for a guard to escort her to her new room. Dru specifically asks for Michelle, who is preparing to leave for the evening. Although unhappy about it, Michelle does so, as it’s encouraging for Drusilla to make new connections with reality.

As they walk to Dru’s room, she skips and dances behind an annoyed Michelle. She then sneaks up behind her, tells her she is a complete waste of time and vamps out, telling Michelle to shush. Drusilla’s nails slash her throat, and Michelle drops down dead, her belongings scattering to the floor.

As Drusilla examines her work, the other doctors from the board meeting come around the corner. She slaughters them without mercy. As she picks up the last, she hears a voice, trying to be quiet, in another room – it’s the female security guard, once again warning her mysterious employer that Drusilla needs reigning in. Dru finds the door, singing to herself. She opens the door and glides in, closing the door as the guard begs for mercy. A snap is heard, and as Drusilla exits and skips along the corridor, the guard’s corpse falls to the ground.

An hour later and most of the staff at the facility are dead, massacred. There’s blood adorning every single wall and desk, bodies everywhere. But as she walks through the violence, Drusilla isn’t seeing the hospital and the bodies: she’s seeing her past in London, in the year 1860. Her mother being slaughtered and killed in front of her, her pendant being snatched away.

She continues walking and sees more, this time images of her father. She remembers Angelus and Darla slaughtering the nuns, the day she took her holy orders, sitting there, wailing, as they paraded their lust for each other in front of the scared novitiate. She can’t differentiate between her past and her present, it seems, as she continues walking through the gore left in her wake.

She looks around the communal area. It looks so much lovelier now. Now that she’s spruced it up, she smiles. She asks one of the staff members if she agrees. She’s disappointed when the severed head doesn’t talk back.

Suddenly she collapses to the floor, in agony, claiming that ‘everything is breaking loose… falling.’ As she regains her composure she reaches for paper and some pens and starts to draw, focussed on nothing but her art.

She draws Angel, human and broken. Gunn, killing Connor. A dragon flying over Los Angeles, Angel atop him, Hell all below. She draws Spike fighting by his side. The armies of Hell. Illyria the Old One. Spider and her warriors with their Lord: All Hail Spike!

Doctor Gray and Grace, still alive, race into the room and mention that they’ve called the authorities. Grace tells Drusilla that it’s all going to be okay. Drusilla shows them her picture of Los Angeles in Hell. She knows it’s coming. She has seen it. She tells them to run before it comes. Grace is startled: are these premonitions real?

Gray dismisses her concerns and takes a closer look at the drawings. He thinks it’s a dream journal, like the one he asked her to keep in the earlier session. Drusilla looks stupid at him, as if he was a complete idiot. Then she collapses again. She reaches up for her pens to draw, whispering only one word: “Hell”.

She thinks back again. The night of her siring in the church. Darla ripping her family necklace off, Angelus watching as it burnt. A symbol of everything she had. Her humanity, her innocence… Gone.

Drusilla looks down: she’s drawn Angelus and Darla and the pendant in the flames. As she looks through her drawings, she realises what else she’s drawn: her victims.

Hundreds of them, some familiar, some not, but all the same: dead at her hands. The doctors are still not convinced in her delusions and tell her that none of it is real. Suddenly, Drusilla gets up – fast – and growls. She spins around, and her fangs are revealed. She told them to run, she explains. As they flee, Drusilla’s fragile mind sees her victims attacking her and she passes out in shock.

When she wakes, there’s a bright light in her eyes: it’s the sun. She looks over: she’s in period dress, and outside it looks like the 19th Century.

She goes outside and doesn’t burst into flame. It looks lovely outside, picturesque, horse-drawn carriages, friendly people. She goes to what she thinks is her front door and enters. She hears her mother calling her. She walks up the stairs of the great house to a room, that she recognises as hers. Her dolls line the shelves, including Miss Edith, a favourite from Sunnydale. She kisses the doll, delighted to be there, in peace. She cradles the doll in her arms, accepting the illusion for once.

She knows where she is, of course. She knows it’s all in her head. She’s still in the facility where she collapsed.

But she’s right about one thing: Hell has come to Los Angeles. the sky is burning, demons are unleashed and the forces of good have been defeated. Now is the time of evil.

And Drusilla wouldn’t have it any other way.