herself_nyc (herself_nyc) wrote in herself_nyc_fic, @ 2008-02-05 13:12:00 |
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Entry tags: | distance: redacted part |
Fic: DISTANCE (pt 50 of ?) - redacted
This section of the fic has been redacted. I've left it here as an out-take.
Previously
"Get dressed, Buffy. We need to take him to the alley now. It's the only chance."
"You know what's wrong with him?"
"Not exactly. But I feel ... something I can't describe. Because it's literally undescribable. We've got to go."
"I'll phone for the plane."
"No time for the plane. I'll get us there."
Buffy admitted the ease, the instantaneousness, of teleportation. Undoubtedly there were times when it was the only way to travel. But she didn't like it. It wasn't just that it gave her the heaves, and an after-effect worse than jet-lag (she wasn't subject to the regular jet-lag everyone else got, some slayer-power thing she thanked her stars for). Even quick as it was, she was never able to get through it without experiencing a moment that felt exactly like dying.
Maybe that was just the nature of it. Maybe Willow felt it too; she'd never asked.
To complain about the sensationafter all, the moment was literally thatseemed petty, so she never had.
But this time, she was seized with particular dread. She'd been hanging on to optimism by a thread. The transition they were about to make might spell the end of Spike's ordealand hers too. Orand she feared this would be the caseshe might be about to lose him. To madness, to another dimension, to death.
How should a woman dress for an occasion like this?
"To be on the safe side, we're going to hold on to each other," Willow said. "Well, we'll hold each other, with Spike in the middle."
Spike hadn't come to. Willow had propped him up in a sitting position in the middle of the couch. She was on one side, and Buffy took the other, cradling her red axe across their laps; they passed their arms around him and took hold of each other. Buffy just had time to think that was perhaps the oddest physical arrangement she'd ever found herself in, when Willow met her eyes, nodding, and then blinked.
Later, she'd swear it lasted a whole lot more than a moment.
And it wasn't exactly like dying.
But she got the indescribable part.
You couldn't describe it because the mind couldn't comprehend it. Passing through it was sheer agony. Afterwards, all she would clearly summon back of the throes was a disjointed memory of getting her tonsils removed at the age of three, when two big doctors had had to hold her down while a third clapped the anesthesia inhaler over her face. It was as if, while they traveled from Scotland to California, she was reduced to nothing but that single pinpoint of consciousness, everything else she was or ever had been or ever might be smeared in nonexistent colors across a foul plain of horror so profound that just the mere intimation of it made her scream.
It was her screaming and Willow's, echoing off the dank charred alley brick, that announced their arrival.
They were splayed in a heap on the dirty broken pavement, as if they'd been slammed there.
"Uh, ouch."
Buffy said, "So it's not just me?"
"It feels like this to you every time?"
"Well, no. Butwhat just happenedhappened to you too?"
Willow was scrambling up, gingerly, like an old lady. "Let's not talk about it, okay? How's Spike?"
Spike was still a rag-doll. No, a rag-doll that twitched. Looking at him, Buffy had an uneasy sense that what she'd just gone through, the sensation her mind refused to contain, that her body needed to evacuate, was due to them having somehow come through him. That was his interior scape, the real one that his personality had retreated from.
And with this idea came the nausea, and when she was done horking, the idea was gone. By then Willow was at work, pacing up and down, taking little hovering flights into the air. She'd pulled a small instrument out of her pocket, something that looked like a gold sextant crossed with a gyroscope; it glowed and floated before her.
Before Buffy could open her mouth to ask, Willow volunteered: "This is bad."
"What's bad? What it is?"
"There's instability here. Spike's caught in it."
"Caught? What do you mean caught?" He was still just lying on the ground; she'd straightened him out, pulled him to a dry, relatively clear patch of cement, and now knelt by him again, taking his hand.
"Maybe the better word is bound."
"Oh, sure, let's have the better word. Why didn't you detect this when we were here before? And what can you do about it?"
That's when the airexcept it wasn't the air, it was the space that contained the air, the reality that contained the airshook like a square of Jell-o, then froze.
A small flock of pigeons that was crossing through, hung in the air at eye-level. Buffy stared at them.
Then came the voice.
"You can do nothing."
The birds were fixed, but she could move. Could turn to see the figure that strode toward them. Some kind of demon, blue and leathery and female.
Willow cried out. "Oh noFred Burkle? What happened to you?"
"You address the shell. Fred is gone."
"Where? Who are you?" Willow seemed intimidated, which was a look Buffy hadn't seen on her in years. It wasn't reassuring.
Time to be the slayer. She could move, and did, wielding the axe, putting herself between the demon and her friends.
"You have returned him." The demon gestured, and Spike rose; not by himself, but levitating into the air. "He is altered. The top was yellow."
"What are you talking about? Leave him alone."
She had enormous mesmerizing eyes. When she trained them on Buffy, Buffy found herself on her knees.
"You will bow to Illyria."
Behind her, Willow squeaked: "You're Illyria?"
Buffy said, "You know her?"
"Not like we've met. But I've heard about her. She, uh, caused the death of Fred Burkle, and overtook her body. She's a god. It was her coming into being in this dimension that Angel was trying to prevent. When Giles wouldn't send help."
"Oh great."
"Hullo, pet." It was Spike. Still hovering in the air, but open-eyed and animatedhis gaze fixed on her with the fervor of a devotee at an altar. "Let these two go, please, Majesty. They're friends."
Buffy had never heard Spike sound so ... cringing. Submissive. It sounded so wrong.
"We have no friends. Only subjects."
"Friendly subjects, then, who mean you no disrespect. Leave 'em be. Please. Majesty."
"I'm nobody's subject," Buffy said. "And gods don't impress me." She tried to rise, but couldn't. Illyria gestured again, and Spike whooshed over their heads, coming down on his feet, and then falling hard to his knees before the blue demon.
"You do not instruct me."
"No, pet. Forgot. Was the surprisethought you were no more."
"I am eternal." Illyria looked at her again, and once more Buffy felt the power that came through those bug-eyes, like the spectrum spilling from a prism. The body, slender and small in its leathery covering, was merely the thinnest visible edge of some staggering concentration of authority. "These females are inconsequential, and may depart this place."
The flapping of the pigeons overhead broke the silence; the frozen moment was liquid again.
Buffy leapt up. "I'm not going anywhere without Spike. What's going on here?"
On his knees, his head bowed, Spike stared at the ground. Tears rolled down his cheeks. He didn't look at her. She wasn't sure if it was because he wouldn't, or couldn't.
Willow cleared her throat. "Majesty, it was by your mighty act that the armies of the apocalypse were diverted from this place, wasn't it?"
Illyria's head pivoted like a bird's.
"Will you tell us, Majesty, the glorious tale of your triumph?"
Buffy stared around. "Will!"
Willow shushed her. "Majesty! We humbly implore, tell us of your magnificent conquest."
For a split second Illyria seemed flummoxed, and Buffy thought it very likely that in the next second both she and Willow might cease to exist.
"The half-breed Angel was not without honor. His cause was just." Her eyes sparked. "But he was deceitful. By his deceit, I was weakened. Wesley was killed, and I could not restore him. Thus in my grief I came to this place. I took my vengeance on all these pests."
"How did you take this glorious vengeance, Majesty?" Willow said. "Was it by opening the portals that bled the worlds together?"
"You know much," Illyria said.
Buffy couldn't tell if the god was impressed or pissed off; she seemed to examine Willow as through an invisible magnifying glass.
"I shunted them to a place of retribution. I saw them all cut down, turned to ash, their ashes decimated across time and space. It is finished, utterly. Yet my grief for Wesley remains. A hole at my core that nothing can fill, in this world or any other. It disgusts me."
Buffy said, "You brought them. The armies. And Angel and his people?"
"I did not choose among them. I caused them all to be crushed."
"But not Spike?"
Willow said, low and deferential, "She was angry at Angel. But mostly, she didn't have enough control over her power to do more than just hold Spike back for long enough to spare him."
Illyria said, "My power now is greater than it has ever been. Within me cluster entire universes. Time refracts around me."
Gods did love their exaggerated declaratives, but Buffy had a sense that this was only the truth. Like Spike's slivers of memory, they were experiencing only the barest tip of this god-head, manifesting here.
She said, "Then you can bring Angel and his people back. You can bring back Wesley." Wesley? Could she mean her old watcher Wes? Huh.
"Those who are destroyed are destroyed forever. Their particles eternally scattered in time. What is done thus cannot be undone, even by my magnificence."
Willow nodded. "You are indeed magnificent. But still you mourn."
"I was only beginning to enjoy Wesley. He is irreproducible. He is nowhere else. His erasure offends me. Grief offends me."
Willow said, "Yes, grief is very hard."
"But my pet will serve to distract me." Illyria gestured at Spike. He looked up then, his hands slowly rising to his forehead. Buffy couldn't tell by his expression if he was experiencing some fresh pain, or the relief of it. He still didn't look her way. "I have sought him over and over in this place and now he is returned to me. I will restore his more pleasing appearance and take him to my Seat."
Buffy tried to go to him, but though she could move, and there was nothing explicitly blocking her way, she couldn't get anywhere close.
The situation though, was getting clearer.
"Spike, you heard her. You weren't a coward. She held you back. She wouldn't let you follow Angel."
Illyria tossed her head, the blue hair flaring out. "He was stubborn, would follow his leader. Three times I repelled him from the portal. Then when I returned for him here, he was gone. He is a rebellious pet, and will take much taming."
"He's not your pet. Spike, are you hearing this? It wasn't your fault."
"I will set him as the lord of worlds, to amuse him. He will know pleasure in my service."
Oh shit. Buffy set down the axe. "Majesty. Spike is my mate."
"He is a half-breed. He cannot mate with your kind."
"Not in the fertilizing my eggs sense, okay. We're lovers. We cherish each other, the way ... the way you cherish Wes. If you take him to console your grief, you will cause big grief to me and to him. Is that really the right way to honor Wesley?"
"It is not for honor that I claim my pet. What means honor to one who is no more?"
"You loved Wesley, didn't you? You ... you wanted to be with him, to ... enjoy him."
"There was no opportunity."
"And that makes you sad."
"This will never end. It is eternal, as am I." Illyria's voice was low, but Buffy heard something thunderous in it, a sadness as huge and unassimilable as the bad space they'd traversed to get here.
The bad space that was inside Spike's mind. That this god had somehow consigned him topurposefully, or as some careless side-effect of her huge act, impossible to know.
"I'm sorry, Majesty. But Spike can't really substitute for Wesley, can he?"
Illyria frowned. "You have found him and think to appropriate him, but he was already mine."
"Um ... I didn't just find him. I've known him for years. And I'm not appropriating"
Illyria seized her by her the throat. Buffy kicked; the god's small hand squeezed her windpipe.
From the corner of her eye, she saw Spike move. "Oi! Blue, leave off!"
Still holding Buffy at the end of her outstretched arm, Illyria's head turned towards him. Her eyes seemed to whir into focus on this new element.
"Blue. Ducks. You don't want to do that."
Buffy kicked out again, and this time, the god let her fall. Illyria went to Spike, stood before him with arms akimbo, an expectant air.
He said, "So, was you kept me out of the big ending."
"Yours was the only death I did not desire."
"Yeah, well. You fucked me up. Took away my choice. Wasn't quite kind of you."
"Your choice?"
"Maybe I'd have preferred to die with my comrades." He stood up to her, wide-stanced, head high. But as he talked he began to wince.
"You had no reason to choose death."
"You don't bloody know my reasons. An' the others, they didn't really get to choose either, did they? You squashed 'em in a snit."
She waved a hand. "This is of no importance. You will come with me now."
Spike was certainly in pain now, his eyes flashing gold as he struggled with the headache. "I won't. You may be all powerful, you may be able to squeeze my little mind through your fingers thoughtlessly as dabbling 'em in a stream. But you can't make me yours. You spared me, yeah, so you'd better spare me altogether. I've got work to do, won't be your toy."
"Mating with this female, that is your work?"
"No. My mating, an' this female, are none o' your concern. The workyou know what that is. What Wesley died for, an' Angel, an' Charlie-boy. The mission. You won us this battlean' I thank you for it. But the war's still on."
"This world is no more concern of mine. I will not revisit it for a billion billion billion centuries. You will forget it too."
He stumbled then, curled over, the heels of his hands pressed to his temples.
Buffy cried out "Stop hurting him!"
But she might as well have been a bug; when she tried to intervene, again she couldn't get close. "Willwhat is she doing?"
Willow shook her head. Magic sparkled at her fingers' ends, but dripped off, ineffectual. "This is for Spike only."
Spike was on his knees again, fanged out, shrinking. "Y'know what Wesley would say if he was here? He'd tell you this was wrong."
Illyria's eyes closed. It was like fitting a hood on a hawk. For the moment that they were covered, Buffy was able to draw breath.
Then she opened them again, trained them on Spike with a terrible will.
He was against the wall now. "The same pain you caused him, when you snatched Fred's life just when she'd begun to love him at last ... that's what you've got now. Some call that karma, but you an' me, pet, we know it's just how things are, yeah? Payback's a bitch, even for gods."
"Wesley would not summon this agony to me." For the first time, Illyria sounded less than sure of herself.
"You let in love an' you let in sufferin'. That's love's underbelly. That's how it works."
He sank then, down the greasy bricks, to land on the ground. Game-face distorted in a way Buffy had never seen before, like some presage of how he might look in thousands of years, if he survived that long.
There was no question now that she was the cause of his torment, that she was imposing it with such a small part of herself she was almost unaware of it. Illyria stared at him.
"You love this female?"
Spike grimaced. "S'the Mission I love. Love the Fight."