“I was torn out of there. My friends pulled me out. And everything here is bright and hard and violent... Everything I feel, everything I touch... this is Hell. Just getting through the next moment, and the one after that... knowing what I've lost... They can never know. Never.”
Spike sat, speechless, in the alley long after Buffy left him there to go back inside the Magic Box. The sun was too high in the sky by that point for him to get very far, but truth be told, he didn't even notice its lethal rays.
Gobsmacked didn't even begin to cover it. Flabbergasted, confounded, blown away, or dumbfounded either. Well, maybe dumbfounded. Spike, who as hard as he had tried to leave William behind, still prided himself in being a thoughtful man—vamp—had only begun to start wrapping his head around Buffy's revelation.
Heaven. The Big H. It wasn't really something he had thought about in years; after all, he just assumed that vamps by their very nature were excluded from the pearly gates so there was no point to pondering about it. When Drusilla had first turned him all those years ago, the man still inside the beast had wept for the loss of Paradise. Raised a good Christian, in life he had always trusted in his eternal reward. The loss of this through one chance encounter in an alley seemed at the time too great to fathom at the time. And then the love of the hunt and the thrill of the kill, the years of reveling in just taking whatever he desired be it material, sexual, or homicidal, had dulled the thoughts of Paradise Lost to only a whimper from the corner of his mind, a whisper to be trotted out only during the most maudlin of drunken stupors.
He lit each cigarette from the last, smoking it right down until he could taste the chemicals when the filter started to melt. He sat, and smoked, and stared at the place Buffy had been--what was it, five minutes, or three hours ago?
Of course she would have been in Heaven. She was the fucking Slayer. She was all that was good and right and pure in the universe. It didn't matter if it had been the door to a hell dimension that had killed her; the Powers wouldn’t have allowed their Slayer to be sent to Hell.
And now her friends, soddin' Scoobies--Spike found himself getting angrier, and the anger shook him out of his daze--hadn't even bothered to try and find out for sure before doing that bloody resurrection spell, had they? They had just assumed that she’d been in a hell dimension and yanked her back to this world. The same world she had thought with apparent relief had been done with her.
As much as the time without Buffy had pained Spike, this was worse. Much worse.
When his questing fingers finally delved inside an empty Marlboro box, he made his mind up. Yanking his duster up over his head, he darted for the sewers, casting not a single backward glance at the alley. Liquor might not fix things, but it made a damn fine anesthetic until the time at which he was ready to deal.
* * *
Buffy shivered, pulling her leather jacket tighter around her as she navigated the crumbling headstones in the oldest section of Restfield Cemetery. The usually-mild winters of southern California seemed to be creeping in colder and earlier this year, and she found herself longing for sunshine and warmth and comfort.
Something like what she had left. What she had left and could never have back--no, bad Buffy, can't think about that.
Still, the cold seemed to seep into her very bones, and despite the long-sleeve shirt, sweater, and leather jacket she had bundled herself in, another involuntary shiver passed through her.
The moon had defeated the sun hours before, and she had begged away from the Scoobies with the excuse of patrolling. Not that she had actually wanted to patrol, but she had been desperate to get away from the forced camaraderie of her friends. They meant well, really, they did, but they chattered when they were anxious, and they had been oh-so-nervous today, trying to convince her--and themselves--that everything was fine. She knew they sensed her awkward quietness and were attempting to draw her out, which just led to even more chattering, until Buffy had realized she’d never felt so alone in a room full of people.
They hadn't been talking to her so much as they had been talking at her, and between the noise, and the cold she felt seeping into every pore in her body, she had felt like she had to--leaveimmediatelydearGodgetmeoutofhere.
As annoying as the talking was, they had also taken to hovering over her, and the constant scrutiny had been the last straw. She supposed she couldn’t blame them for worrying, but reassuring them that she was going to be fine was draining on a whole different level, and none of them had picked up on the fact that she kept shying away from them until she had finally called it an early night and grabbed her jacket, slipping out the front door while muttering something about “going to hit a couple cemeteries.”
That seemed to reassure them, a sign that things were normal. Just the good ol’ Slayer, back on the job.
There weren't many creepy crawlies out tonight, and she was grateful she didn't have to put too much thought into patrol. She dusted a fledgling or two early on in the evening, and now it had been just crickets and some light fog for two straight cemeteries. It was probably better that way, because Buffy felt more ill-at-ease fighting now than she had when she had first been Called.
It was her same body, sure, and her same mind and training, but there seemed to be some kind of disconnect between the elements that resulted in her movements feeling not quite as smooth as they had been before, like she was a creature of reaction rather than action. Which was not a good way for a Slayer to be.
Maybe after spending several months floating happily as some sort of amorphous being, being stuffed back into this... this... skin suit was what was throwing her off. Her motions weren't fast enough, and there was the slightest jerkiness to her movements that she had never remembered existing before. Stupid, uncooperative limbs. Don't want to be working tonight any more than I do.
Working. That’s what it was, wasn’t it? She might not have been sitting behind a desk, but she toiled away nine to five just like any other working stiff. Just with the AMs and the PMs reversed. And no lunch breaks. And a suck-ass retirement plan. Oh, and no pay. They could refer to it as her ‘calling’ as much as they liked; at the end of the day she still hadn’t made the slightest dent in the huge stack of bills at home, and she certainly didn’t purposeful. She felt used, drained, worn out. Numb.
Numb except for the pervasive cold.
* * *
Spike stumbled home through Restfield Cemetery sometime after midnight far soberer than he would have liked. He had attempted to drown his sorrows in a bottle of Jack Daniels at Willie's, but unfortunately he had run out of cash long before he had run out of sorrows. And Willie had long ago stopped accepting Spike's word as negotiable currency.
So here he was, regrettably cognizant, finding his way alone through a damp, shadowy cemetery long after the witching hour.
Nothing like being something that Goes Bump In the Night to make you impervious to the other things that Go Bump. Thinking about that cheered him slightly, and he was only two mausoleums and one tacky weeping cherub away from his crypt sweet crypt when he heard the sounds of a fight.
Hoping like hell it was some violence he could get in on, he gathered his coat around him and followed the sound of punches being thrown.
Coming into a clearing, he came upon the Slayer fighting a vampire he knew from his occasional poker games. Damon wasn’t a bad sort of bloke, really, but he did owe Spike two Persians and a nice tabby, and had taken to sneaking out the back door of Willy’s when he saw the blond coming in the front. So Spike felt no obligation to help him as he struggled with Buffy.
The blond vampire leaned against a sturdy elm as he watched the fight, and the longer he observed, the more it seemed to him that things were off.
For one thing, the fight was taking entirely too long. While Damon was no fledge, he was as mediocre a fighter as he was a poker player, and Buffy should have been done with him in under two minutes. But she was still fighting, trading blows and wielding her stake in an odd, artless way. Usually she used her stake like an extension of her own arm. But tonight it just seemed like a random object somebody had shoved into her grasp and told her to defend herself with.
Defend herself. The light clicked on in Spike’s brain. That’s what was wrong with this picture. Buffy—the old Buffy, the one he liked to think of in his private moments as his Buffy—always fought on the offensive. She lunged, parried, and staked with a grace that thrilled him in its poetry. She was a warrior, and she always struck first. But tonight, she was half-heartedly blocking Damon’s clumsy swipes, and she hadn’t let loose with a single pun or taunt.
As Spike was processing these facts, the unthinkable happened.
Buffy aimed a spinning roundhouse kick at the other vamp’s head, overshot, and as her foot missed the mark, Damon whirled behind her, yanking her elbows behind her and pinning her back to his chest. The Slayer’s head dropped forward as she struggled to free herself for a moment, and then slowly went still in his arms. The vamp was so startled by her sudden lack of fight that he loosened his grip, and in that time Spike had leapt to her side, ripping her out of the other vamp’s grasp so quickly that Damon’s talons sliced across her exposed palms.
As the rich, heady scent of Slayer blood filled the air, Spike threw Damon to the ground and wrenched his head from his shoulders, turning back to Buffy before the vamp dust had even settled.
* * *
Pain lanced through Buffy. Sharp, stinging pain forced its way down through the numbness and the cold, and she stood staring down as the blood pooled in her cupped palms. It was the first thing she had felt—really felt—since her return. She stared, fascinated as the cut, not a deep one really, went from a red line across her hands to a thick red mark, and then red droplets slowly pooled in each palm.
To say Spike lost his shit after dusting the other vamp would be the understatement of the century.
“ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR BLOODY FUCKING MIND, SLAYER??? ARE YOU COMPLETELY DAFT? I KNOW THIS WASN’T WHAT YOU WANTED, BUT REALLY? YOU WANT A TOSSER LIKE THAT TO FINISH YOU OFF?”
Buffy head popped up and she stared at Spike, jaw agape. He had been very gentle, even tender with her since her return, responding to her apparent skittishness. This was the first time he had shown her anything other than deference.
Spike knew he had slipped into gameface the moment he had started yelling, but quite frankly, he didn’t care. He seized Buffy by the arms and shook her. The fury flattened the faintest stirrings of bloodlust that the smell of her open cuts had aroused, and he continued ranting.
“ALL THOSE YEARS SPENT CHASING YOU, DANCING WITH YOU, AND YOU’RE GONNA LET SOME WELSHING WANKER WITH LIMP FANGS OFF YOU? AFTER ALL THE TIME I’VE PUT INTO THIS, THAT’S HOW YOU WANT TO GO OUT?”
Buffy stared up at Spike for a moment frozen, and then tears started falling. She didn’t scrunch her face, she didn’t sob, and she didn’t sniffle. She just stood and held his gaze as all the pain, all the misery, and all the regret were given form in her hazel eyes and ran down her cheeks, dripping down onto the arms that gripped her.
Spike held his anger tight, close to his heart. It helped to fight away the thought that he almost witnessed her demise—again. He didn’t notice he had slipped back into his human face until he realized he could barely see the small blonde in the dark of the cemetery any more. He pulled back and loosened his hold on Buffy’s arms, staring at her silently as the last of his anger ebbed, once again replaced by worry.
“Let’s get you home, luv. You don’t need to be here tonight. I can finish patrolling on my way back home.” He waited for an answer, and knew when Buffy had come back to herself, for she wiped her tears on the cuffs of her sweater and wouldn’t meet his gaze any longer.
They set silently off towards Revello Drive, and he couldn’t help but notice that when she reached her walkway, she shoved her bloodied hands into her jacket pockets, no doubt to keep them out of sight of prying witchy and sisterly eyes.
“Hey,” he stopped her as she started up the steps, “you, um… you do need to bandage those, okay?” It sounded lame the second it left his lips, but he didn’t want to just give her up to the dark, silent house.
She turned around and looked at him, giving him a small, sad smile. “I know. I just don’t want them to worry. See, Slayer healing…” She took one hand out of her coat and waggled it at him, demonstrating that the cut had already been reduced to the narrowest of slashes, and the bleeding had all but ceased.
He couldn’t quite bring himself to smile in return. He tilted his head to the side and studied her. “I know we’re not exactly best pals, but you really scared me tonight.”
Buffy shifted on the stair, uncomfortable with the open discussing of emotions as ever. “I just… I don’t know. I was just so, so tired, and for a moment… I don’t know…” She took a minute to gather her words. “For a moment, it just didn’t feel like I could go for a second longer.”
Seeing his worried look, she added, “But I’m better now. Just call me Resilient Buffy.” When that failed to get a laugh out of either of them, she reached her free hand towards Spike. For a moment, he thought she was going to touch his face, and then she seemed to lose all nerve, and the hand fell back to her side limply. “Thank you.”
Spike was taken off guard by the sudden display of gratitude. “I just…”
“Wanted to save me so you can kill me yourself?” Buffy finished, half-joking.
“No!” Spike retorted sharply. “Don’t know what I want, but it’s not that. You know that. Haven’t wanted that in a long time, you daft bint. Now go take care of your hands.” He was about to storm away in frustration, but Buffy found her nerve this time.
One slender finger traced his cheekbone so lightly he thought he had imagined it until she gave him her own head tilt.
It looked far better on her than it did on him, in his humble opinion.
“I know you don’t want to kill me any more.” With that certain statement, she turned and walked up the stairs, never looking back as she closed the door quietly after her and the porch light blinked out.
Spike stood in the darkness for a moment, skin still burning where her touch had been. Then he turned in a whirl of leather and headed back towards Restfield, head full of more questions than answers.
* * *
Buffy tiptoed gently into the house, being careful to toe off her boots before going up the inside staircase so that her stylish-yet-affordable footfalls did not wake her sleeping housemates. As she tossed her keys onto the table in the foyer, a huge stack of papers caught her eye, forcing their way back into her consciousness.
A stack of papers all stamped “Past Due.” Nobody had mentioned them to her yet, and she hadn’t had the strength to ask, but she knew what they were. And that they were yet another thing she needed to take care of. A drop in the bucket, really. The weight on her grew heavier.
What were they thinking? Did they really believe that this world, this cold, dark, numbing world with its noise and its needs and its demands—did they really believe that it was better than where she had been?
She stealthily made her way past Dawnie’s room, and skillfully navigated the squeaky board outside the master bedroom. As a teenager, she had always taken the window out of her room rather than try and sneak past that one noisy floorboard, but once Joyce had been made aware of her slaying, they had developed a tacit agreement: Buffy could come and go as she pleased, no curfew, but she had to at least come in quietly and make a good show of trying not to wake Joyce.
Except now, there was no more Joyce, so no more agreement. Buffy felt the sudden urge to tread loudly on the floor--if she was gonna go into hock over this house, she could damn well make as much noise as she wanted—but she resisted the sudden burst of childish spite.
She entered the sanctum of her bedroom and tossed her coat on the chair, gingerly shedding her patrolling clothes as her eyes adjusted the dim lamplight.
The silence was deafening.
It was funny; all day long she had been wishing for nothing more than to be left alone, and now that she finally was alone, all she could sense was the deathly quiet of the house, and she felt like the last person left alive.
Sorrow swept over her like a wave, and she crumbled to the edge of the bed. Alone was one thing, but lonely was another, and this was by far the loneliest Buffy had ever been. The silence felt like it was smothering her, and she fought the urge to scream to break its spell.
Tears started to tumble down her cheeks unbidden, and she did her best to ignore them, trying to ride out the cold chill as it passed through her. She forced herself to continue with her bedtime ritual and crept over to the pajama drawer in her bureau.
As her hand closed around the drawer pull, pain lanced through her, reminding her of her forgotten wounds. The nerve fibers in her hands tingled, and she stared at her palms for a minute. It was one of the first sensations she had really felt, all the way down deep inside her, since her return.
She flexed her hands, curling and uncurling her fingers, feeling the gentle stinging from the not-quite-healed cuts. She stretched her hands out, and she could feel the burn faintly travel up her arms.
The pain was solid, real. It felt like an anchor. It was a reminder that she was still alive. Could still feel.
She tossed her pajamas on quickly and climbed under the covers, pulling the extra blanket and coverlet up over her chilly limbs for a good measure.
* * *
Buffy didn’t know where she was but it was cold. Cold and dark. And there was no air. It felt like she was suffocating. She couldn’t see and she couldn’t hear. She couldn’t feel anything at all. There was the faintest odor, unpleasant and so distant it was unidentifiable. Her blood rushed to her ears until it was roaring in them, and then she couldn’t breathe at all. Blackness… nothingness…
And that’s when she woke up, hands at her throat, scratching and gasping for air.
When she realized she could actually breathe, and the choking sensation subsided, she inhaled great lungfuls of air greedily, sucking them down and then expelling them just as loudly into the empty room.
Her breathing started to return to normal, and she rolled over to look at the bedside digital clock. It felt like it had been hours—days even—that she had been trapped in that dark, airless space, but in reality she had slid into bed, fingers still wriggling, less than an hour ago. It felt like a year.
She listened for a second to see if her panic had awakened anyone else, but the rest of the house slept soundly on, oblivious to her plight. Poor Dawnie, grateful just to have her sister back, but sensing something was wrong. And the two witches that had co-opted her mother’s bedroom. Her dead mother’s bedroom.
Tears welled up in Buffy’s eyes, and she slipped noiselessly out of the room, padding down the hall to the bathroom, vaguely remembering her promise to Spike to do something about her hands. She had no idea where the Bactine had been stashed, so soap and water would have to do.
She stood in front of the bathroom mirror staring at herself for a long time.
It didn’t look like her at all. She looked thin and sad and old. Her hair hung around her face in lank, non-lustrous ropes, her skin looked dull, and her eyes… they just looked flat. Her friends had mistakenly yanked her out of heaven and gotten this strange… doppelganger, one who looked like she had lived twelve lifetimes in the same time of Buffy’s one.
She stared at the mirror, transfixed, until the unfamiliar image seemed to melt away, and she could see forever. The hum of the fluorescent mirror lights faded into the background, their harsh glare unnoticed, until she was just a little girl with no reflection, standing alone on a sea of cold tile.
All her senses receded until it was just her useless shell of a body, frozen in place.
The numbness was deafening.
TBC
End Note: A special thank you to Mari for her beta work, and amasirol, whose lovely email gently inquiring about the status of this fic is what got my off my duff and made me put fingers to keyboard again. You ladies rock!
[Reviews - 19]
-
Table of Contents [Report This]
Chapter or Story |
Chapter or Story | 
Chapter or Story
Has been viewed 5301 times
- Text Size +
-
Table of Contents [Report This]
Chapter or Story |
Chapter or Story | Chapter or Story - Text Size +
Author's Chapter Notes:
Beta: dusty273
A/N: Starts immediately after the end of “After Life.” Opening snippet of dialogue from that episode written by Jane Espenson.