[Reviews - 15]
-
Table of Contents [Report This]
Microsoft Word Chapter or Story | ePub eBook Chapter or Story | Printer Chapter or Story

Has been viewed 2532 times

- Text Size +




ANGER


Buffy

They came back for her the next morning, wending their way through the emergency vehicles and news vans and cars full of gawping sightseers. Police and fire-fighters stood on the edge of desolation, the scale of the devastation beyond their comprehension, while army and National Guardsmen stood by with military indecision. Overhead helicopters criss-crossed the clear blue sky, scanning, testing, analysing – attempting to classify the chaos and rationalise it with science.

Buffy sat at the roadside by a red and white barrier, her face pale and unreadable, lines of strain etched in the dust that grimed her skin. She climbed into the bus without a backward glance, asked after the injured calmly and nodded her tight-lipped satisfaction at their arrangements. She tolerated Dawn fussing over the almost healed wound in her side, avoided her sister’s anxious eyes. She spoke little, said less.

She knew they were watching her, sensed the uneasy glances they exchanged, heard the worries whispered between her friends. No-one knew what to say and that was fine by her. She settled in a seat, rested her head against the window and closed her eyes against the questions in theirs. Her body screamed for rest, battle-weary, wounded, drained of strength by the power of her emotions, by the adrenalin rush she’d ridden for hours… days… for what felt like forever. The night cold had seeped into her bones and she felt leaden, heavy under the weight of her new world. But her mind refused to rest – rat-in-a-trap thoughts chasing each other frantically around the cage she’d built for them.

Spike hadn’t come back. She’d waited and waited and felt certainty bleed to uncertainty and hope fade to despair. And he hadn’t come back.

He was gone.

He was her champion, life-giver, saviour of her future - her hero.

Hero?

She didn’t need a hero. She needed him. Here. Now.

She needed…

How could he do it? She’d told him… told him…

And still he left her.

Chose to die.

How could he do it?

Choose death over the life she offered him. Choose to end his future… their future.

Hero.

Champion.

Lover.

I love you.

Spike...

I want to see how it ends.

The words that had followed her as the world fell apart around her stung her mind, writhed in her chest. How it ends? She’d offered him a tomorrow and he chose an end?

Left her.

I can't do this alone!

You didn’t have to…

She screwed her eyes tight, refused the tears that caught in her throat, took her hurt and wrapped it around the fragility of her heart. She walled the loss and yearning away with anger and held on to the anger to stop herself drowning.

She felt Giles slip onto the seat next to her, sensed his discomfort. “Buffy… do you… can you talk about it?” His voice was careful. “Spike…”

“There’s nothing to talk about.” She looked round at him, face set. “Spike did his bit. Played the Champion. Saved the world. And now he’s gone.” Giles winced at the cold, hard anger in her words. “Cleveland, right?” She turned her face back to the window, closed her mind and watched the miles of nothing pass.


Spike

The thing about the pain… the thing about the pain… was it really shouldn’t have mattered.

Had he been human of course, it would have mattered even less, because nature’s way would have been to snuff out his consciousness long before it got to the stage he really felt any of it. Only he wasn’t human, was he? One of the pluses of being a vampire was nature was kind of inclined to let you suffer – ain’t unlife grand?

So the pain – the feel of his nerves screaming as his flesh charred, as muscle shortened and twisted in the heat, organs shrivelled and split, as bones became ash, as skin crisped and tore as the fire burned from within, the final bubbling and boiling of brain – he felt every exquisite, agonising, excruciating moment of it.

But it all shouldn’t have mattered.

Because he should be dead, properly dead, and if that meant he went to a better place, then the deal was all his pain would be forgotten as far as he read it, and if it was the other place… well, that particular pain was going to fade into insignificance next to what faced him there. But if, as he had pretty much hoped was the case given his history, this was be it and beyond this was nothing, then he wouldn’t be conscious of what it had felt like, would have no memory of it – or anything else, come to that – to revive, so it shouldn’t have mattered.

But it did. Because here he was again, reliving the whole thing. Double time. In reverse. A different agony to lay on top of the destroying fire as he was rebuilt, elements wrenched back from the maelstrom around him, forced to recreate bone and tissue and nerves and to restore his consciousness and with it, memory.

He’d read once that the body has no memory for pain, that it remembers that there has been pain and that that pain was intense, but the actual sensation of pain does not linger.

Bollocks.

He screamed in anguish, doubled up, his muscles imprinted with the pain-memory of the fire, their foreshortening by the heat, his brain reeling in the white-hot, blinding anguish that tore through every cell of his body, as if that agony were imprinted on the very molecules and atoms that had been torn apart then slammed back together.

The pain confused, sent panic signals to an already overloaded brain. As his sight began to clear he made out a bewilderingly unfamiliar office where the crumbling Hellmouth should be, unknown, tear-blurred faces instead of the First’ hordes.

What the bloody hell…?

The faces were talking, words coming at him as if through static, senseless sounds and syllables, sibilant hissings in stunned ears. He shook his head, tried to clear the clamour of agony, tried to make sense of the bedlam in his brain.

It ended! It was done!

“William the Bloody. He's a vampire. One of the worst recorded. Second only to...” Words from the sounds, the beginnings of consciousness.

No! Shouldn’t be here. Shouldn’t have to… Who?

And then – something familiar, cutting through the chaos of his mind. A voice.

“Me.”

Who the fuck else would it be?

The pain and confusion hardened to a single, recognizable emotion that he clutched to his wounded mind. Anger. Blinding, white-hot anger that howled through him, dragging forth the demon. He launched himself at Angel in a confusion of rage, fear and despair.

Finding himself buried up to the goolies in a bloody great desk kind of took the edge off it, though.





You must login (register) to review.