herself_nyc (herself_nyc) wrote in herself_nyc_fic, @ 2008-02-06 09:10:00 |
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When she could feel again, think again, Buffy was lying on the roof of a parked car, its alarm whooping. Sliding off, she saw Willow lying on the sidewalk a few yards off. They seemed to be streets away from the old hotel.
As she ran to her, Willow sat up.
"Are you okay? What was that?"
Willow coughed. "Pretty sure Illyria's left this dimension. Talk about snits."
"Where's Spike?" Buffy pulled Willow to her feet, looking around. The block was mostly light industry, a couple of streetlamps dark, parked cars. She concentrated into the night air, feeling for vampires, but there was nothing. "Did she take him?"
The alley was deserted. Up on the fire escapes, the pigeons perched, apparently asleep. Willow did a sweep with her glowing golden gyroscope while Buffy paced up and down the sidewalk, feeling for Spike, listening out, yearning to see him turn the corner and come pacing back to her.
"Well?"
"The power signatures are faded, the hotspot is cold. She took her marbles and went home."
"Crap."
"I don't know if Spike went with her."
"Don't say went. If he's gone, she took him against his will."
Willow gave her a cautious look. "She must've taken him, Buffy. Otherwise why blast us five blocks away like that?"
"Maybe she blasted him too. He could be anywhere."
"I'm running locater spells as we speak. There's no trace. If he was in this continuum, I'd feel something."
No. No. No no no. She wasn't ready to hear this, not a stark denial, not so quickly. She needed to run around first, clinging to hope that Spike was somewhere in the city. Needed hours or days for the anticipation of finding him any minute now to graduallyvery very graduallydeflate. So that when Willow told her there was no trace and the tears boiled up to sear the backs of her eyes and scorch her throat as she choked them back, she'd be ... sort of ... ready.
"So what did she do? Open another portal?"
"I get no sign of that. But she had abilities, Buffy ... she could do things I can't even codify." Willow shook her head. "Basically, Illyria is to Glory as a big lion is to the house-cat."
"So, not all gods created equal, huh?"
"She was some kind of juiced."
"What does she want with Spike? If she's so powerful, she could have anything! Why does she need my vampire?"
"Well ... he's pretty."
"She wanted to fuck him? Did she even have genitals? Andwhat was she talking about, anyway? Wesley? Was that really our Wesley?"
"Yeah. Wesley Wyndam-Pryce. I got some of the story from Andrew and some more of it from the grapevine. He changed a lot, since he left us."
"Gods fall for the darndest guys." Buffy sniffled. "Slayers, too."
"Buffy, I'll keep searching." Willow took out her phone. "I'll get the covens onto it, we can girdle the globe, we can"
Buffy look up. The sky was a lighter blue, starting to pinken at the east end of the alley. Some of the blackened greasy bricks at the tops of the buildings began to glow with the rising sun. She took in the details more slowly, more thoroughly, than she had before.
This was the place.
The place where Angel ... her Angel, she'd never really stopped thinking of him as being somehow hers ... had gone to his death. Illyria had killed him, for some revenge Buffy didn't really understand.
And here was where Spike was taken from her, much much too soon. And despite what Willow was saying into her phone with such quiet confidence, despite her own history of confidence, Buffy couldn't resist the deep dread welling inside her that this really was the end. Spike might've been once more cocky, defiant, angryhis old precious selfbut against the will of a god, what was any of that?
Where had Illyria taken him?
Perhaps he was already dead. If the god had enslaved himwhat else was 'pet' but another word for 'slave'?would he kill himself if there seemed to be no other way out? Or would he wait and watch for some opening?
Maybe she'd taken him somewhere that had no possibility of escape.
S'the Mission I love. Love the Fight.
Spike's words resonated in her head, irrepressible, an ear-worm Buffy couldn't expunge. In the next bed in the hotel room they shared, Willow was asleep. Buffy tried to lie stillwilling herself to motionlessness as if that would really help her doze off too. She doubted she'd sleep again for a week. It took all her effort not to fall to sobbing.
They'd done the running around. She'd spent most of the daylight hours in the L.A. sewers, and in and out of demon bars and hang-outs. Spent the whole subsequent night going around kicking ass and taking names. No one knew a thing about Spike's current whereabouts, but she'd garnered some information to fill in the blanks, at least some of them, about Angel's last year, Angel's last battle.
The enormous gambles he'd taken, risking all for an enormous pay-off. Apart from the fact that the world hadn't ended, and that Wolfram & Hart's local operation was, at least for now, knocked out, Buffy wasn't really sure if she could say Angel had ultimately won. He hadn't gone rogue, as Giles had been so certain. But he had done wrong that good might ensue, and out of that wrong more wronglots morehad come. Tragedy personal and systemic.
Nothing, no-one Angel had touched was the same.
S'the Mission I love. Love the Fight. When the god had asked him if he loved her, Spike had answered that way.
Maybe he'd meant those words for her. A reminder, of her original purpose, of what she was here for, of her primordial slayerness. She wasn't formed for love and for happiness, but for the mission. The fight. Maybe he'd been instructing her, that she'd made a mistake, thinking their romance had anything to do with his own purpose. After all, in the alley, he'd been Spike again. Restored, possessed of all his faculties, asserting himself through the pain Illyria imposed. Not the man with the truncated mind who'd spoken poetry and made promises, but the actual Spike, Spike at one hundred percent, who'd died in Sunnydale, who'd spent a year with Angel.
Who'd changed.
Or, really, not changed. Not changed from the champion with the amulet whom she'd led into the high school that last time, the Spike intent on nothing but the glory of sacrifice, of ending.
All he'd wanted.
They were both all gone now, her two vampires, her two loves. No more to choose between them.
Nothing to do now but mourn.
Dawn opened her dorm-room door and welcomed him in with kisses. "I was starting to worry about you."
"There were snow squalls in the mountains. And I let the battery run out on my mobile. Sorry."
"You're forgiven. Snow. It's supposed to be spring."
"This is Scotland. It can snow in April." Xander flung his duffel in the corner and drew her into his arms. "Miss me since last weekend?"
"How's my sister?"
Xander made a face. "The same. Same as she was when you were back over spring break. Same as she's been since last fall."
"She doesn't really talk to me anymore. I call her, she texts me back. I email, she texts me back. OK, OK, OK. All I get out of her is OK. She's not okay."
"She's K-O-ed," Xander said. He squeezed her hand. "You get hungry while you were waiting for me?" He pulled his car keys from his pocket.
Dawn plucked them out of his hand and tossed them after the duffel. "Uh-huh. I'm ravenous." She went up on tip-toe, her mouth closing in on his. "Better feed me."
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