Author: Meltha
Herein lie a few 100 word fics written for the Open on Sunday Livejournal community. Each is in response to a challenge. Expect spoilers up through the end of both Buffy and Angel, and ratings ranging from G to soft R.
To read Drabbles from 2005-2008, click here
“It’s all about the journey,” Giles had mumbled in Xander’s dream. Sometimes he thought that was the only part of it that did make sense.
Xander’s journey hadn’t been a happy one. There were few roses and lucky horseshoes, and a lot of dead friends and knocks to the head. Sometimes that journey left his soles bleeding, and sometimes it was his soul covered in blood.
But he kept putting one foot in front of the other, continuing his journey with nothing but a stubborn determination not to let the bad guys win. And that’s what it was all about.
Things change quickly after you’re dead, or so Jesse thought. Until high school, he, Willow, and Xander had dealt with their strange parents, but mostly, they played: swinging higher than the rooftops, sailing high and low on the teeter-totter, careening down grass-covered hills on their bikes. They had laughed for years at a stretch, it seemed.
After he died, Jesse watched them. He saw Xander afraid to love anyone. He saw Willow’s powers grow strong. He saw Buffy fight every night, and Cordelia turn from a spoiled child into a woman.
But their laughter seemed to have died with him.
Darla doesn’t understand where she is. She had no soul. When she drove the stake into her heart, she should have dissolved into nothing, dust lost in the rain of the alley where her son was born, rinsed clean, paving the way for forgetfulness.
The fade to black didn’t happen. She stayed in the background, silent and unable to touch, but watching Connor’s life unfold before her. Sometimes she wonders if there’s been a mistake and she’s in heaven. But then, when she sees her child in pain, confused, tormented by demons he inherited, she knows watching can be hell.
The Powers That Be. They aren’t particularly happy with the name they have been given, but then human intellect couldn’t be expected to create a proper title for them.
They’re not quite sure why they like playing with the humans so much. They move them around like pieces on a chessboard. Angel is one of their favorites. They never tire of watching him try to battle his way beyond the little squares of his playing board, confused and tired. It amuses them, for now.
But eventually, they know they will tire of the game and simply sweep the board clean.
“Buffy, what are you doing?” Joyce says in exasperation for the thousandth time. Her daughter doesn’t listen. Some things haven’t changed with her death.
To her Buffy is still the seven-year-old who tried to vacuum the drapes while they were hanging up and nearly burned down the house. It’s hard to accept her child has repeatedly saved the world on a yearly basis.
But she sees other things, too. She sees self-doubt leaking from Buffy’s pores and poisoning those around her. She sees an old woman in a young body. Most of all, she sees someone terrified of being herself.
Tara hates being here sometimes, but she can’t let herself be anywhere else. When the gunshot ripped her out of her body, she knew what would come as surely as if she were looking at a map. She watched Willow fall, using her death as an excuse, tumbling over the edge, then being pulled back again.
She’d cried tears of relief that day.
But time passed, and while she watched, things changed. She saw Kennedy arrive, and there was the map laid before her again. It was like a train wreck. She wanted to turn her face away, but couldn’t.
November 7, 2004:
At first Spike didn’t believe it was happening. It went against every rule of logic. Vampires are dead. The dead don’t get sick. Ergo, vampires don’t get sick. Drusilla was simply having one of her spells.
But she lost weight, and her appetite disappeared. One night she collapsed in the middle of a street and was nearly run over by a truck, and he knew the truth.
It wasn’t the same illness, but it was leading down the same road. After his mother, he swore it wouldn’t happen again. If it took moving earth and hell, his Dru would live.
Giles is gazing intently into an ancient volume, eyes sweeping over the page with dizzying speed, searching for the phrase or woodcut or footnote that holds the answer to the riddle Buffy must solve.
Spike regards him while trussed up like a Christmas turkey on the sofa, gagged because he was serenading the Watcher with the Sex Pistols’ greatest hits. He’s reminded of Prospero ordering everything for the benefit of his beloved child Miranda. Spike doesn’t want to admit those thoughts can fill his mind, but he knows that somewhere in a corner of his mind, William is still alive.
Jane couldn’t understand why she had become weak. Churning butter tired her, and carrying water buckets made her ache. The last thing she recalled was lying down to sleep, her Watcher studying her from the doorway.
She awakened in darkness, the dank smell of earth surrounding her. Why was she in the cellar? She climbed the steps and pulled on the doorhandle. It was locked. Turning around, she saw yellow eyes flickering to life.
Two hours later, the Council unlocked the door and sent the newly-called Slayer to dispatch the vampire. Jane’s eighteenth birthday had passed, but she had not.
Berta should have been dead. Plague had destroyed her tiny village like a wave of molten death. No one was left alive save her. Travelers had seen her hiding in shadows that smelled of decay. They called her a witch child, shuddered piously, and passed by.
When the gray-cloaked Council found her wandering the town’s empty streets, they knew better. The wide-eyed, silent child of five had the birthmark, and it told all.
Ten years later she died in battle. She had slain over fifty vampires, killed nearly thirty demons, and stopped Armageddon.
She had never uttered a single word.
Cora believed good and evil never overlapped. One side was honor and victory through her or those called after. The other was filth and defeat in this life and the next.
She was sent to Chicago to slay a pair of vampires. As the smoky jazz club pulsed, the two swayed obliviously together, easy marks. He smiled at the female with an adoration Cora couldn’t doubt.
The stake fell from her fingers.
Years passed before the Council learned Spike and Drusilla survived. Cora told the couple of their supposed demise, and they’d all laughed while hunting for their next victims.
Of all the things he’d thought she might say, this wasn’t one of them. He’d considered a thousand variations of hell, or even the void, the ultimate destruction of those she’d lost. He’d never expected to hear she’d been in heaven, only to be yanked out by selfish kids barely out of their teens.
But she had trusted him with it. In that moment, he knew both heaven and hell.
He knew now why she trusted him. Telling him was like telling a ghost, a thing, no more dangerous than confiding in her teddy bear. He had become her one relief because to her, whatever she did, whatever she said, dissolved into nothingness the moment she stepped back into the light.
He was a figment of her imagination. A figment that could stroke her hair or drive her body crazy enough to block out the world for hours at a time, but nothing more.
Sometimes, he wished he really was nothing but a thing. Things don’t weep in the dark.
The world was ending. Again. The repetitiveness of Armageddon would be comic if it weren’t for the blonde staring at him with eyes too large in the darkness of a bedroom that wasn’t hers, wasn’t his, wasn’t anyone’s anymore.
Her sister, her mentor, her friends, the refugees she’d taken into her own home had lost their faith in her. They’d turned her out because she hadn’t been perfect. She’d failed.
As he held her, he saw through the self-assurance she wore like those ridiculous shoes: painful, but necessary for the image. He saw her deepest secret: her uncertainty in herself.
The confessional walls were close around her, the darkness reminding her horribly of the dark fate her soul could expect if this curse wasn’t lifted from her. She had prayed through more nights than she could count, fasted until she had fainted from hunger, heaped humiliations on her spirit and flesh, but it only seemed to make it worse.
Here, in the holy church, she could at last safely relieve her soul of its burden. This was her last bastion of hope. Drawing a shuddering breath, Drusilla crossed herself and told her secrets to the one who would damn her.
Angelus thought she was being silly again. She could tell. His mouth always quirked when she said or did something he couldn’t understand. Grandmummy had stakes and sunlight dancing around her head, aimed at her, but she pretended not to see it.
Only William understood her. He knew the stars spoke to her, telling her the secrets of the universe, showing her in their light the twisted cords of fate that bound the world together and split them apart in turn.
“If Drusilla says a kitty and hawk are going to make brothers fly someday, I believe her,” he said.
She’s been saying horrid things to the stars, but then the stars said horrid things to her first. They whisper about Grandmother-Daughter, turned to ash by a baby boy; Daddy is lost and found and lost and found and hates his loving childe and will never come home; sweet Spike’s eyes burn with flame as he’s turned to cinders through service to the beast who has scrawled her name on his heart in blood, sex and soul.
Drusilla looks at the shrieking stars, and she knows Mother was right. To know secrets that shouldn’t be told is to be cursed.
“We’re fleeing from a god,” Spike asked, “in a Winnebago?”
“Don’t start,” she snapped. “We’re not stealing a sports car.”
“Oh, come on! That thing should be driven by an old geezer!”
“You are an old geezer,” she said icily.
“Fine,” he said, defeated. “I’ll get it out of here and meet you in an hour.”
She left. He wouldn’t tell her he couldn’t steal something that big this fast without more trouble than they could afford. Sighing, he walked into the manager’s office.
“The decrepit Winnebago for a vintage Desoto,” he offered grimly to the first salesman he saw.
Faith used to wonder why her mother had chosen her name. There were thousands of other names in the world, yet she had picked one that screamed irony.
Her mother had never darkened the doorway of a church, never spoken a word about God or mentioned that whole “do unto others” thing. Instead, there was booze and needles and men who never stayed long and beatings for reasons that weren’t reasons at all.
In jail, after months of thought, she came to a conclusion. Whatever her mother’s intentions were, the name fit. Faith eventually learned to have faith in herself.
The cross burned deeply into his flesh, but the pain couldn’t obliterate decades of acts that damned him. Buffy’s face appeared before his eyes, half-hidden in shadows.
“Kill yourself. He doesn’t want you. He has no use for you. No one ever has,” she whispered. “It’s the only rest you’ll ever find.”
Something clicked in the back of his mind, something from childhood screaming this wasn’t right. With an immense effort, he pulled his seared skin from the cross and stared at her.
“Get thee behind me,” he croaked through lips covered in his own blood, and the thing departed.
Buffy had both won and lost. Her life was always like that. She’d saved the world, but she’d lost her home. The place she had fought for was now a hole, the definition of nothing.
Sometimes a flash of guilty happiness fluttered in her heart at that, but more often sadness descended, insulating her from the world.
For now, she was in Madrid, listening to the unknown language like continuous background music. She was on vacation. If she had no home to return to when it was over, it only meant she belonged anywhere as much as the next place.
The London house was squeezed between two others, so thin it barely seemed wide enough for a broom. Then again, there had never been much width to Buffy. Sometimes she thought she was trying to be so small no one could expect her to carry the burden.
The Council was rebuilt two blocks from where she and Dawn now lived. New Slayers arrived every day, but each had the same look of confusion and, after an interpreter had explained what the blonde girl behind the reception desk had done, anger.
It was never home, and she was glad to leave.
It felt like time to return to America, to coffee instead of tea and footballs that weren’t round. Maryland seemed as good a place as any. The Council had reported an increase in demons, and Buffy had herself transferred. Dawn stayed in London, in college now, her face accusatory. Buffy knew what she was thinking: my sister, the grown-up runaway.
Buffy found she didn’t care anymore.
It seemed unfair after countless days of London rain she arrived in Baltimore to a series of thunderstorms, leaving her apartment gray. The pattering on the glass was almost as lonely as she was.
Baltimore had been too quiet, she told herself. After slaying the demons, she stayed less than five months. Although Baltimore was larger than Sunnydale had been, she felt too separate, isolated. She needed something warmer.
She moved to Miami, a sun-drenched city stalking to a Latin beat. The clubs pounded away until sunrise, and she found many companions who told her she was hot, sexy, fiery, a string of them countless as beads in a broken pearl necklace.
When she found herself standing on the beach one dawn, wishing it would burn her to cinders, she grabbed her suitcase again.
Nebraska was so flat that it looked like it had been ironed. She had an actual house again, her first since Sunnydale, complete with a picket fence and two rosebushes outside the front door.
It took her only a couple weeks to kill the roses, but she left them there, prickly, thorny sculptures of brown, dead twig and crumbled leaf. She’d never gotten the chance to see them bloom, and sometimes she wondered what their perfume would have smelled like.
Perhaps this time it was that it looked like it should be a home that drove her away. It wasn’t.
After her request for active duty, Giles told Buffy about a group of vampires in Indianapolis. He’d thought it would be a weekend trip, but she uprooted herself again, leaving the Nebraska house vacant, its windows empty eye-sockets.
She defeated the vampires, then found herself living in a motel. She could have afforded better on her Council salary, but she preferred living somewhere with a luggage rack. The manager assumed she’d come in for the race, to watch the cars moving in fast circles but not really going anywhere.
Before she moved on, she’d memorized every crack in the ceiling.
She needed to feel the scorching brightness of sand scalding her eyes. She told the Council she’d heard rumors of shape-shifters in the Nevada wilderness, but she knew they were probably false. She was certain Giles knew, too.
She lived in run-down trailer park, the lawns littered with beer cans. Her view was endless sand, an occasional cactus piercing skyward like a tortured vision of the trees she had once sat beneath.
At night, she heard wolfsong, the shared notes screaming in her ears.
The beer cans on her lawn became so numerous the scraggly grass could barely be seen.
One morning her mirror reflected lines etched into her bloated face, looking like death. Something finally cracked inside her.
Buffy got in her car and drove, trying not to think of her destination.
She had to stop at a gas station to ask for directions, but she eventually pulled into an alley, the Hyperion long since torn down and turned into a parking garage, but this spot remaining strangely untouched.
She stared through the windshield at the occasional weeds pushing through cracks in the pavement.
And she wept at what could have been if she’d had the courage to love.
She left California. She never saw the trailer again. She drove until the car died, then walked. Buffy had spent too much time alone, but none with herself. The steps she took were a journey of more than miles. She listened to her heartbeat, stared at stars bright as departed souls, cried and laughed as she saw fit.
People thought she was a little crazy.
When she reached Alaska, she called Dawn, inviting her to visit. Then she bought a home overlooking the ocean.
Despite the wind, the snow, and the harshness of the world, the rosebushes she planted survived.
“Welcome to Doublemeat Palace. May I help you?” Buffy half-screamed into the microphone.
“Gimme a big merger with… barge size… stalk of silk quake, and… blue stick and pan glitches.”
“Okay,” she said, concentrating hard, “that’s… a hamburger, large fries, chocolate milk shake, and… um, sorry, could you repeat that part?”
“Idiot! Blue stick and pan glitches!” he hollered.
“Sorry, sir,” she yelled politely. “Two chicken sandwiches. That’ll be $9.42. Please pull up.”
After the man left, Buffy smiled serenely. His burger’s special sauce was now extra special. She’d added Gravnok nail clippings, guaranteed to cause spontaneous bouts of Riverdancing.
Ike “Ironsides” MacSteven was tough. A D-Day vet, he had become a driving instructor.
Perhaps it was because he drove better than any other instructor. Perhaps it was because he never lost his command of a student. Perhaps it was because everyone was too terrified of Ironsides to retire him. Whatever the reason, he was still teaching the day Buffy Summers showed up for lessons.
One hour later, the car lurched to a stop in a parking lot. The blonde smiled weakly.
“How’d I do?”
Ike opened the door, walked two firm steps to a ditch, and threw up.
“Oh.”
Buffy’s Halloween costumes were made by her mother. The used patterns litter the compartment beneath Joyce’s sewing machine. It’s easy to trace the progress of the little girl. Wonder Woman, Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood and a cheerleader, all are stacked neatly. Finally, she had chosen a dress from the Halloween store that had made her look like the princess she dreamed of being when she was small.
Joyce put them away and sighed, staring at the door and hoping in vain her college student would burst through it. It seemed she’d chosen a new costume lately: the invisible girl.
Angelus never needed sight to know Darla was near. The soft rustling of satin announced her presense. On the hunt, she could be as quiet as death, but he could hear the whisper of sleeve against skirt.
She would spend hours at the dressmaker’s, pouring over patterns from Paris. After the final fittings were complete, she would decide whether to kill the seamstress. When Darla had finally found one who suited her tastes perfectly, she had turned her, and the new vampire was producing dozens of beautiful gowns.
Angelus couldn’t be more bored. He preferred Darla lacking in clothing altogether.
Krevlorneswath of the Deathwok Clan was about to go out of his mind. His mother assumed that had happened years ago, but that was beside the point. He’d grown so tired of the clothing everyone wore, with its bland colors and clunky shapes, that he’d done something drastic.
He’d created a pattern for something he thought would be more interesting, and he’d dyed the wool vivid pink with berrybush flowers. At last, it was ready.
“Son, is it not enough you shame me? Must you blind me too?”
Okay, that was one reaction. Somebody out there had to have taste.
It’s sedate, traditional, predictable. Herringbone tweed now forms the main staple of Giles’s wardrobe, and sometimes he can almost hear his younger self screaming at him for his pedestrian, conformist style. What happened to leather and an earring?
But he can answer that question as readily as his alter ego can form it. Back then, he’d had to create drama in his life. Now, it’s become such a part of him that he doesn’t need to play dress-up, and what’s more, he really doesn’t want to. Knowing what comes next, even from his closet, is a luxury, not a drudgery.
Tara’s magic has never held the explosive, almost frightening power she’s seen in Willow’s incantations. Instead, her spells tend to grow up from the earth naturally, sometimes feeling like the opening of flowers in May. It’s unheard and soft, something that isn’t noticed as it’s happening, only after the fact. It’s simplicity itself.
She dresses in the hues of her thoughts, soft earth tones and pastels that radiate the gentle warmth of a spring day, and she unapologetically loves wearing florals, not caring what’s fashionable this season. Arrayed like a quiet Flora, her wallflower life is at last in bloom.
Lorne’s place in the world is precarious. Caritas is a bastion of peace, but peace isn’t always the right response. The demons and humans who bare their souls are not necessarily benevolent. He sees blood-soaked crimes in their melodies. What’s worse, he can see intents, and he knows murders have been committed soon after some of them leaving his door.
Lorne doesn’t judge. That’s why he wears colors on opposite ends of the spectrum together: red with green, orange with blue, yellow with purple. He glances at his garishly checkered shirts and hopes, in the end, it all balances out.
Angelus loves all the senses to distraction. That hasn’t changed since he was human. Liam had drunk, eaten, seduced and stolen to feed his senses with as much stimulation as possible. Nothing had mattered except feeling good.
It’s nice that some things stay the same.
William, Drusilla’s little brat, scoffs at him for drinking fine brandy and wanting a waistcoat of the best jacquard silk, laughing uproariously at him when the Irishman’s thick fingers caress the material absently, soothing his sense of touch. William called Angelus soft.
Angelus particularly enjoyed the sounds and sensations of his knuckles cracking William’s ribs.
Cordelia always knew her family was rich. Her earliest memory is of toddling into her mother’s black and white marble bathroom and tracing the stone’s patterns with a chubby baby finger.
Cancel that. Cordy, even as a baby, never had chubby anything.
Fast forward fifteen or so years, and things change. She lives in an apartment that could have fit inside that marble temple. Her bathroom, by some cosmic joke, is covered in tattered, badly printed wallpaper that is supposed to look like black and white marble. Security deposit or not, she grimly delights in ripping it off the walls.
Rain spattered the windowpane as wind lashed the dormitories with a sound like distant gunfire. Wesley sat in a nook facing the gray expanse of moor. His breath steamed the old-fashioned, mullioned windows, warm against the bitter cold.
The Watcher’s Academy had been his destiny from childhood, and he always knew he would go there eventually, just as everyone had to die eventually. Now that he was there, he felt he had died as all other paths for his future were ripped away, the only proof he still lived the clouds on the glass, crisscrossed by a net of lead.
Dawn loved ice cream. A soft serve stand was a couple streets away from their house in L.A., and she used to bother her sister to take her there for a cone every day in the summertime. Usually, after the mandatory squabbling, Buffy would cave in and walk her there. Dawn would always order the same thing: chocolate and vanilla swirl. That way she could have it all.
After she found out she was the Key, Dawn remembered the swirly cones, realizing how much they had in common. She wasn’t really one thing or the other, but both at once.
Spike loved Chicago in the 1930’s. The music was pure sin, the gin joints served up just the right mixture of booze and violence, women he’d never spoken to flashed their knees at him just walking down the street, the Depression laced people’s blood with tantalizing desperation, and he knew his pinstripe suit made him look as handsome as the devil himself.
Still, there was something in the tiny, miniscule lines of white radiating through the black of his suits that made him feel strange. Dru would look at him and sigh, “What’s outside is inside,” in the oddest tone.
In seventh grade, Xander’s mother had forced him to wear to school the brown and green paisley shirt his grandmother had sent him. He had dreaded walking in the door, knowing he looked like a fool. The kids already gave him a hard time about his drunken father and not having enough money in the lunchline for anything but salad.
He’d been right. They’d hurled so many cruel jokes at him about his shirt they didn’t have time to pick on him for anything else.
From then on, Xander’s wardrobe was filled with the most tasteless things he could find.
Prison life isn’t what Faith expected from cartoons. In old Warner Brothers shorts, cons wore black and white stripes and played harmonicas to cover up the sounds of someone digging through a wall with a toothpick.
They didn’t mention hours of haunted silence. She could have broken out, no toothpick and harmonica orchestra necessary, but chose not to. There aren’t any striped uniforms, but her soul is striped black and white. Every day she forces herself to pay for what she’s done, she hopes those white stripes get a little wider, the black a little thinner, but they’ll never disappear.
There’s a point when something is so overdone it becomes subtle. Darla was going for exactly that with the schoolgirl look. Sweet gray and blue plaid paired with a pristine white blouse, demure kneesocks and saddle shoes radiated so much purity it was obscene. Every high school boy she passed smelled so strongly of hormones she had to fight to keep from laughing.
Men had changed so little over the centuries it was almost endearing. Show them what they want, and they’d drool. Keep it covered, and they’d drool so much they’d almost die of dehydration before she could bite.
“How’s that, m’lady?” Spike asked as he held up one of the invitations. The printer had thought he was crazy, but then he had tragically died in a “freak barbeque fork accident” after the order was filled.
“Pretty,” Drusilla said. “Now the angels won’t weep over us living in sin anymore.”
“Nope. They’ll scream instead,” Spike chuckled
Years had passed since Giles had last seen Buffy. There were calls and letters, but visits between Rome and Bath had become less and less frequent, stopping altogether until one fine April evening.
The knock at the door was light but firm, and Giles shrugged on a bathrobe and peered through the peephole to see Buffy’s smile. He fumbled with the locks, suddenly eager to see his protégé, feeling a loneliness he hadn’t realized he’d possessed.
“What a lovely surprise!” he said, grinning. “Do come in!”
“Thanks, Giles,” she said, her smile changing as her face transformed. “I needed that.”
Almost a year had passed since the battle outside the Hyperion had ended in victory. The daily job of living had returned, helping the hopeless, trying to make sense of the world.
Angel held his breath when he saw the envelope in his morning mail. The handwriting, though he’d rarely seen it, was almost as familiar to him as his own. Carefully, he opened it, finding a brief note.
Angel,
Father’s Day is Sunday, and I wondered if maybe you’d like to grab dinner or something.
Connor
For one moment, the world actually seemed to be spinning the right way.
The full moon looked unusually close. It bathed the cemetery in cool, silver light, making the air seem chilled, closer to the bone. Buffy sat on a tombstone, listening intently for something to be wrong.
Quiet pressed the cold into her heart.
Why had they brought her back? They avoided her. No demons were threatening the world. She wasn’t needed.
Looking heavenward, she saw a halo around the moon, bright as a coin. Suddenly, she remembered high school science: a ring around the moon means rain.
She walked home, trying not to think that for her it was always raining.
Spike tried to pretend Drusilla wasn’t crazy. He’d call her eccentric, psychic, quixotic, even artistic, and many other words ending in -ic, except, of course, lunatic. She was his sire, and nothing was wrong with her. Granted, he’d never really believed it, but he’d done his best to try.
But couldn’t deny this proof of her insanity. Biting his lip, he tried the question once more, hoping for a different response. After all, it was multiple choice, and any of three answers was acceptable.
“Pet, which Beatle do you find most attractive again?”
“Ringo!”
Nuttier than a jar of Jiff.
“Let me get this straight, Giles,” Xander said in disbelief. “’Ring Around the Rosie’ was written by the Council to train Slayers?”
“Yes,” Giles responded, looking up from his book. “The ‘ring around the rosy’ is the bite mark found on the victim’s neck, ‘a pocket full of posies’ refers to a good Slayer always carrying an arsenal of stakes, ‘ashes ashes’ is rather obvious, and…”
He drifted off uncomfortably.
“’We all fall down,’” Buffy said, glancing at her Watcher, “means Slayers die. Right?”
He nodded. “That was the idea.”
Buffy looked at him, determined. “I always hated that game.”
Giles hated his glasses. He was eighteen when his eyesight had slipped
. Out of vanity, he’d rarely worn them through college, his days with his fellow black magic junkies often blurred, and he liked things that way.
Later, when he’d received his first assignment and been sent to Sunnydale, the glasses had seemed as much a necessity for the job as his books or his ever-present tweed. They no longer felt like a burden, but rather the last line of defense, the only shield he sometimes had between a world that seemed ultimately unfair and his own roiling inner thoughts.
William’s glasses weren’t with him when he awoke in the confines of his coffin six feet below ground. The surge of panic that had gone through him at first didn’t truly leave, but it took him a long time to break free, and his mind poured over small details.
Even as he pushed his way through the soil, a feat that obscenely mimicked birth in some way, he missed the comforting weight on the bridge of his nose. When he reached the surface and saw with perfect clarity the mysterious woman standing before him, he knew things had changed forever.
Cordelia was twelve when she heard the doctor say those fateful words: “You need glasses.” She remembered crying, throwing a tantrum, shrieking until she was hoarse, but it was no use. She’d gotten a pair of designer frames that she knew made her look as mousy as that nerd Willow.
The glasses disappeared into her purse every day on her way into school. She faked her way through the hallways, blaming collisions on whomever she’d hit, saying taking notes from the board was for losers. When she got contacts at sixteen, she gleefully ran those glasses over with Daddy’s Porsche.
Wesley stopped wearing his glasses when things fell apart. He didn’t know exactly why he’d chosen to suddenly begin wearing contacts. His eyes had rebelled at first, turning bloodshot and stinging as though he’d rubbed sand in them. He only knew that it was necessary. The Wesley who had worn glasses had been beaten to a bloody pulp in the schoolyard countless times, been kidnapped by demons and quailed before them, been a ridiculous fool and a useless little boy. Without them, his naked stare seemed to hold more weight than before. And he needed every weapon he could get.
Fred’s eyeglasses were her signature in high school. She’d owned half a dozen pairs, and each one was quirky. There were her black cat’s eye glasses, straight out of Lisa Loeb’s video, and a pair with pink flamingos for arms and palm trees around the eyepieces. There was one that was plaid, another in psychedelic paisley, and even a pair studded with fake rubies, her birthstone. The last pair were plain gray metal frames, understated but classic. Those were the ones that she had kept with her through Pylea, and it was those Wesley kept on his desk in memorial.
It’s a quiet summer evening in Sunnydale. No vampires are rising, no ghosts rampage, no nameless evils roam the streets tonight. Just this once, the world is at rest, and the Slayer is too.
It’s not an extraordinary moment. Buffy, Xander, and Willow are curled on the couch in the Summers’ living room, sharing a bowl of popcorn and watching a Charlie Chaplin film festival on late night TV, laughing, just being teenagers. Buffy knows how rare the simple times are, and the knowledge casts a brief shadow over her heart. This lull is only the eye of the storm.
Her face is set into an unmoving mask, dead-looking and inhuman. If she is to succeed, there can be no moment of weakness. Not again. Since Jenny’s death, Buffy has spent almost every sunlit hour drilling her skills, loading and reloading her crossbow, pulling the trigger with absolute precision.
After the sun sets and the Slayer has left, Willow cautiously comes out from the stacks and sees the dartboard Buffy has used. A ruined, scarred picture of Angel hangs from the target, one dart left dead center.
“Bull’s-eye,” she whispers softly, and sheds the tears the Slayer can’t afford to.
The butcher has known Spike since he started showing up a couple years ago, always with the same order: blood. The butcher is no idiot. He doesn’t ask questions.
“Evening,” he calls when the bell rings the arrival of a late-night customer. “Geez… what happened?”
Spike slouches forward painfully, his face a mass of purple.
“Nothing,” Spike says through shattered lips.
The butcher stares, then bags twice the usual amount and a steak.
“Put the rib-eye on your face; it’ll help.”
“Don’t have enough…”
“On the house.”
Spike looks away, ashamed at the charity, but takes the package and leaves.
Angel remembers his mother being terrified of her children falling under the gaze of the evil eye. It was a common belief in Ireland. No child was ever to be treasured too openly or the fairies would be tempted to steal the baby and replace it with a changling. Of course, he’d thought it all nonsense.
Angel opens the photo album again and sees his infant son smiling up at him. He had adored Connor, his beautiful, impossible, precious little boy, lavishing him with all the love in his heart.
He should have known it could end no other way.
Wolfram and Hart is a luxurious trap, and Angel knows it. It’s too easy. Money flows like wine, and every material wish they have is granted, in many cases before they can even think of it. He’s seen the changes happening. Lorne is obsessed with Hollywood. Gunn has become so power-hungry he’s let them inside his brain. Wesley has retreated inside himself, never letting anyone within arm’s reach. Fred remains relatively untouched, but Angel wonders for how long.
He remembers the saying about it being easier to pass through the eye of a needle. He knows he’s going to hell.
Angel used to go to the hospital and watch over Cordelia in the small hours of the morning. He never told the others where he went, but he suspected they knew. For long hours, he stood perfectly still at her bedside, a statue draped in black, looking at her equally still form.
He used to will her eyes to open, concentrating all his mind on the closed eyelids that hid her warm brown eyes from him. But he left each morning, defeated. It was months later when he stopped coming altogether, convinced they would never open again.
He was right.
Buffy’s eyes were green. Not the color of the grass or seafoam, they were a blend of blue viewed through a thin layer of yellow. Sometimes she wonders if that’s the Slayer in her. If she were ever simply human, would her eyes become the sky-blue her mother told her they were at birth? Does being the Slayer veil her life, making her see things others couldn’t or wouldn’t in different shades?
As a teenager, she had looked in the mirror and wished that her eyes were pure blue. Later, she wished her eyes would turn yellow as a cat’s.
The kick is immediate. Willow doesn’t know when doing magic started to feel so utterly right, more real than anything else she did. Slowly, the times when she wasn’t using magic seemed more and more gray, while each time she uttered a spell, the world burst into firework colors, the more powerful the spell, the stronger the shades.
But the colors are an illusion, a lie that doesn’t truly deceive her. The blackness of her eyes mirrors the reality in her soul, and the ever-present gnawing for more is the craving of the ravening beast she has born within herself.
Xander never liked Spike’s eyes. They were a blue that drew in everything around him. Xander had wondered if it was some kind of thrall, and he was never really sure it wasn’t. After all, Spike had survived the Initiative, had slept with Buffy, had seduced Anya, had even managed to come back from the dead. What Spike wanted, it seemed he got.
But dreams of those blue eyes, piercing and sweet, hovering above him even on the other side of the world, terrify him. No matter what the vampire does, Xander won’t submit. He won’t admit he wants him.
A vampire will never see first-hand what he or she looks like in demon face. No mirror will ever hold that sight, and even videotapes tend to blur the features, making them flat as a doll’s.
Angelus had drawn them all, except himself, of course, and the portraits were all each of them had ever known of their other faces. Drusilla’s in particular fascinated him. The lines of her demon’s face were different from the others, her eyes glowing a demonic gold he hoped she’d inherited from him. They obliterated any sense of humanity. To him, they were utterly beautiful.
Lorne doesn’t dress in the morning without putting on a rainbow, and he prefers his settings to be dashed in crayon-box colors. His eyes, perfectly ruby red, sparkle at the thought of glitter and glamour.
Of all of them, he looks least human, even after Illyria’s arrival. But if anyone wants an ear to bend, it’s Lorne they come to. Whether it’s a tale of heartbreak at the hands of a Slayer or of a girl whose death has left them all stunned, it’s the red eyes that will soften, and listen, and shed the most human tears of sympathy.
“We need time away from all this stress,” Drusilla had said languidly as she watched Spike pace back and forth, his brow knitted together.
“But…” he said.
“It’s true,” Drusilla assured him. “The minions are underfoot, the dollies refuse to dance, and the metal horses in the street tap-tap-tap in my brain.”
“I understand, but…”
“The delicious travel agent was very informative and got us lovely tickets. We’ll have a splendid time.”
“Pet, I’d have splendid time with you anywhere, but…”
“But what?”
Spike sat down beside her, trying to order his words gently. “The Sahara has a few problems…”
Spike hadn’t thrown up in 150 years. However, his iron-clad stomach was threatening to spew all over the judge. Angel looked at him, concern written on his features, and his expression was enough to act like miraculous Mylanta, calming Spike’s nerves instantly.
“You okay?” Angel asked, lightly pressing his hand.
“I’m fine!” Spike snapped. “Your hair’s sticking straight up again. It’ll ruin the wedding pictures.”
“Not if we match,” Angel grinned, pulling his fiance into a kiss, rumpling the blond’s hair. “Let’s get the I do’s done so we can get to the wedding night.”
“Best plan you’ve ever had.”
“Read, set, go!” Xander yelled, his fingers working feverishly.
Willow turned the plastic cube like mad, clicking the squares into place, lining up the green side, the red, the white. Blue gave her trouble, as it always seemed to do, but she slid the pieces home, completing it and the orange side simultaneously, holding the toy high above her head and calling “Time!”
Xander stared from her to the half-finished cube in his hands.
“I told you I’d do it the right way faster than you could peel off all the stickers,” Willow grinned. “You owe me a Chocolate Hurricane.”
“Pet?” Spike whispered, careful not to startle her. The last time he’d done that when she was in an arcade, he’d gotten a cracked rib. “The sun will be up soon. We should get going.”
“But I haven’t won yet!” she whined, jerking the joystick madly. “The ghosties are floating about, and the energy pellets blink like fireflies!”
“Yes,” Spike agreed, “they do, but you can come back tonight and try again.”
As her little yellow munching circle died, she smashed her fist through the screen.
“Or not,” Spike said, quickly ushering her through the backdoor of the pizza parlor.
Giles stared at the mysterious object before him that glowed with red, green, blue, and yellow light. It lay dormant, silent and forbidding. Then, abruptly, it lit, the colors flickering in random patterns like a bad drug trip, and he strained to memorize the sequence.
“Give up, Ripper,” Ethan drawled from the couch, reeking of vodka. “Admit defeat.”
Giles scowled at the other man, his hands going through a wild, well co-ordinated ballet. When he was done, the toy went silent momentarily, then played a victory tune.
“I believe you owe me a forty-year-old bottle of scotch,” Giles said, grinning.
“Three,” Joyce said, moving her marker, “Arts and Entertainment or Sports. I choose Arts.”
“But you’re terrible at art,” Hank said as his sister took a card from the box.
“No, I’m not,” Joyce said, hurt.
Hank shrugged as Gladys read, “Name the artist known for his Blue Period.”
Joyce grinned: Picasso. Then she heard her mother’s voice in her head, saying “Boys don’t like girls who are smart.” She glanced at Hank, then the floor.
“Dali,” she said, not looking up.
“Wrong!” Gladys crowed, and Hank shook his head, smiling fondly. She smiled back, trying to swallow her self-loathing.
Fred straightened the pink and white gingham dress on Audrey Rose, whose honey-blonde yarn hair was braided into two pigtails that mirrored her mommy’s. Carefully, Fred set her on the picnic blanket. Cups of lemonade had been passed out already, and a stack of chocolate chip cookies sat on a plate nearby. The shady patch under the big oak tree had a nice view of the meadow, and Fred nodded happily, certain her daughter was having a good time.
“Alright now, settle down,” she said, balancing her glasses on the end of her nose, “and I’ll read to you. Ahem. ‘Once on a dark winter's day, when the yellow fog hung so thick and heavy in the streets of London that the lamps were lighted and the shop windows blazed with gas as they do at night, an odd- looking little girl sat in a cab with her father…’”
The record store clerk gave the familiar couple a glance over his Rolling Stone. Spike gravitated to the punk bins while Dru gathered albums randomly.
“Isn’t this name pretty?” she said, gliding beside him.
“Tears for Fears? Yeah, but that’s all they’re good for.”
“Oh,” said Dru, face falling. “What about this one?”
“U2? Anyone who does a song titled “Sunday, Bloody Sunday,” sounds promising.”
“Ah-ha!” Dru yelled, startling him.
“What?”
“Ah-Ha! The lead singer is pretty,” she said, showing him the album.
Spike grimaced but kept mum. He’d find a way to “accidentally” break it on the way home.
Spike didn’t know what about Prince did it for Drusilla. The Purple Rain soundtrack hadn’t been off their bedroom turntable for a week, and he’d barely been upright for a week. Well, most of him hadn’t been upright. Dru had become… extremely creative. The use she’d found for the shower curtain rod yesterday had actually made his jaw drop.
“Do you hear the doves cry?” she cooed into his shoulder. “They’re checkered and peach and black.”
“I don’t care if they’re doing the cha-cha, just keep doing whatever the hell it is you’re doing! I think I love this man.”
“Spike?” Drusilla asked, staring at MTV. “Is that a demon?”
“No, princess,” he said, glancing at the video. “That’s Michael Jackson. Looks right stupid in those yellow contacts.”
“Is he the one who wants some poor girl’s sex? That’s a very rude song,” Drusilla sniffed primly.
“No, that’s George Michael, not Michael Jackson.”
“I thought that one had braids and eyeliner?”
“No, that’s Boy George.”
“That was a boy? This decade is confusing,” Drusilla said, turning off MTV. “I want your sex.”
“Thought you said that was rude,” Spike grinned.
“But you’re a rude, bad man. That makes it okay.”
Spike’s heart was in his throat as he burst through their apartment door. Drusilla was on the floor, rocking back and forth, wailing inconsolably. Almost everything in the room was smashed to pieces.
“Pet, what’s wrong?” he said, throwing himself next to her, ignoring the jabs of glass in his legs. “Are you hurt?
“The police,” Drusilla sobbed helplessly on his shoulder.
“The police were here,” he asked, confused.
“The Police broke up,” Dru cried. “The radio said so!” She pointed an accusatory finger at the disemboweled radio.
“The group?” Spike said, patting her back. “Damn. I might cry myself.”
“Spike?” Dru asked lazily as she painted his nails. “Is every little thing I do magic?”
He chuckled, blowing lightly on the hand she’d finished. “To me? Yeah.”
“So, is what I’m doing right now magical?” she asked earnestly, looking at the bottle of polish.
He caught her lightly under the chin and gave her a sweet kiss, smudging black polish on her skin.
“Dru, you could run the garbage disposal and it’d be magical,” he said, and she suddenly began to laugh. “What?”
“I guess I am magic,” she said with a naughty smile. “That kiss made you levitate!”
Cordy looked critically in the mirror before she left for second grade Picture Day. Her permed hair was gathered into a side ponytail with a teal scrunchie. Her matching teal shirt with a peach and black geometric pattern had the newest, plumpest shoulderpads. Her black lace skirt looked like something from Madonna’s closet, and she wore three pairs of bright socks, each rolled down to reveal the ones underneath. Her color-coordinated Swatch completed the effect. Nodding certainly, she headed out the door.
Years later, when Willow and Xander showed Buffy the photograph, they’d laughed so hard they’d nearly passed out.
“I like the big pinwheel.”
“Do you?”
“Mmm. It waves its arms in the air and makes me want to dance. Will you dance with me, sweet boy?”
“Love to.”
“Will you stop it! People are staring!”
“Maybe they’re staring at your neckline, Darla. I think I can see your navel.”
“I will not be seen with two crazy demons who waltz in front of windmills on miniature golf courses! I’ve had it!”
“Actually, I’d say she hasn’t had enough of it of late.”
“Misses Daddy. Can we do naughty things inside the little castle?”
“Sounds good to me, Princess.”
“She’s pretty.”
“On that much we agree. She’s pretty.”
“Bite her.”
“No.”
“Aw, come on! One little sip.”
“You’re not going to be satisfied with a sip and you know it.”
“Probably not. Which means you wouldn’t be either. So go on. Do it. Maybe turn her. She’d make a hot vampire.”
“No.”
“If you’re going to act this way, don’t take us to the Bronze!”
“It’s not my choice. Buffy wanted to meet here and…”
“Here she comes. Tender. Sweet. You know she’d be delicious.”
“Will you shut up!”
“Uh, hey Angel. Who’re you talkin’ too?”
“Just myself, Willow.”
“Ready for Disney magic, Dawnster?”
“You don’t have to stay. I can be home alone.”
“We know, but since your sister splatted all over the pavement, everyone feels guilty unless they’re with you. But when we’re here, we still feel guilty. Xander, why do we come here again?”
“Remember that talk we had about you not saying certain things?”
“Yes. I think that’s stupid. Dawn, you like Pinocchio, right?”
“Yeah…”
“Good. We rented it. You stay here and watch it, and Xander and I will leave to have sex. See? Everyone will be much happier!”
“Anya?”
“Yes?”
“Go make popcorn.”
“Buffy?”
“Shut up. I’m trying to sleep.”
“Ehm, Buffy…”
“Quiet down or I’ll stake you.”
“But, Buffy…”
“For crying out loud, Spike! I don’t care how hot and double-jointed you are! I’m trying to sleep, and if you don’t stop, it’ll be weeks before you’re in a position to wake me up again! Now shut up!”
“Buffy!”
“Oh my gosh. Uh, sorry?”
“Don’t suppose you have a reason why you were murmuring that albino vampire’s name in your sleep? I thought it might have been a nightmare, which was why I was trying to wake you.”
“Oops. Nothing personal, Riley.”
He felt as out of place as a vampire in an ice cream parlour, probably because that’s what he was. The cheerful colors on the walls and the smiling children made him want to crawl inside himself.
“Help ya?” asked the grandfatherly man behind the counter.
Angel pointed at the flavor in question.
“One scoop or two?”
“One is enough,” he said in a dead voice.
Staring at the dark brown ice cream heaped on top of the cone, he tentatively licked it, trying to recapture the taste from that one day he had given back, but he never could.
Spike had never been a delicate eater, even when mortal. His mother had berated him for putting his sleeve in the butter dish or getting soup stains on his cuffs. As a vampire, Darla had wailed at his haphazard biting technique that ruined not only his own, but her entire outfit on occasion.
However, bloodlust was nothing compared to chocolate ripple hunger. As Spike stuck him tongue into the bottom of the cone like a five-year-old, intent on licking out the last remnants of ice cream, Dawn laughed hysterically.
“What?” he asked, highly offended, smeared ice cream on his chin.
Willow was in a seriously bad mood. The witch tried not to make noise as she walked through Buffy’s house, the floors completely carpeted in young girls.
The kitchen, however, remained unoccupied. Sighing blissfully, she opened the door to the freezer, extracting her saving grace.
The carton of chocolate ice cream was suspiciously light. She opened the lid and gazed horrorstruck at the empty tub someone had replaced in the freezer.
Willow’s eyes turned dark as her Haagen Das should have been. The following explosion was more effective at reducing the number of potentials than any foray by the First.
She’s beautiful. There’s no other word for it as Spike watches the Slayer from across the cemetary on a cool night in December. The freak snow of yesterday has almost disappeared, but he can see the vapor of her breath as she fights three newly risen fledges.
It’s poetry, the reach of her arm, the impossible curve of her back as she flips to face another opponent, the play of moonlight on the leather encasing her legs.
Yep, Spike thinks, crushing out a cigarette on the sole of his shoe, Sunnydale is a hellhole, but this Faith is worth it.
When Buffy took Poetry 250: Forms and Themes, it had been something of a joke. It had either been this or Great Novels in History, and she’d assumed poems were shorter. She hadn’t yet tangled with Paradise Lost.
However, haiku were pretty, and brief, and capable of being read on patrol without getting interupted. Shakespeare wasn’t as unfathomable as she’d been led to believe. She even found she liked Whitman in spite of his beard giving her a wiggins.
She had not, however, expected to weep like a child in class when the professor had covered Sonnets from the Portugese.
Xander Harris was a moron, as Cordelia had proclaimed to anyone within hearing distance since they were ten. It was amazing he could tie the chocolate-syrup-stained laces on his dorky running shoes. He made the stupidest comments possible for a human being in any situation, from romantic to apocolyptic. He was an idiot.
But Giles knew differently.
The boy’s references were sometimes a touch too classical, his wit slightly too sharp. When Xander fell asleep over the library table, clutching a tattered comic book, Giles looked inside it and found, to his complete lack of surprise, a copy of Tennyson.
Dawn is going to college soon, returning to the States. Though Dawn took to Italian well, it would be too difficult for her to take a university-level class in Rome. Buffy always knew it was only a matter of time before Dawn returned to America.
But Buffy won’t. There is too much work with the new Slayers. What had started as a temporary outpost quickly became permanent. Dawn will be half a globe away, and her friends are scattered to the four corners of the world. Or dead.
With only herself for company, she wonders how quickly she’ll go mad.
Here am I,
Angelus looked around the home he had turned into a nightmare. The parents had been easy, no challenge at all. Her elder sister seemed to have some sense and had run at him with a flaming log from the fire. Of course, he’d used it on her instead. The younger one had tried crawling out the window, and he’d allowed her to fall to her death.
But Ann, a child of three years, had escaped his notice until now as the child toddled into the room.
“Well, well,” he said, a grin creeping across his face, “don’t you like… sweet.”
Ladybird, ladybird,
“You’re outta Doritos!” Xander called.
Again, Giles’s home had been invaded by teenagers. Well, Anya and Spike could hardly be considered teenagers, but that was beside the point.
“Giles!” screamed Buffy. “If Spike keeps staring at me, I’m gonna rip his eyes out, ‘kay?”
“Try it, Miffy!” Spike yelled back.
Suddenly, the house was plunged into darkness.
“Oops,” Willow said quietly. “I think my computer blew a fuse... for the block.”
“Great! Xander and I can have sex here without anyone seeing!”
“ANYA!”
“Actually, I would.”
“SPIKE!”
Just now, whipping them soundly and sending them to bed sounded bloody wonderful.
There was an old woman who lived in a shoe
“Like my poetry, do you mate?” Spike mumbled to himself, grinning as he slipped a paper into each meeting handout for the day, sandwiching it between “Expenditures in Mystical Stenography” and “Report on Standards in Demonic Executions.”
Angel began automatically to read aloud from the page in front of the full board, stopping as soon as he recognized the meter, but he saw everyone’s lips moving silently to finish the verse.
There once was a young lad from Galway
The steno pool was laughing, Spike noted, and since he hadn’t humiliated Angel in the last ten minutes, he had a suspicion something was wrong.
Spray-painted in letters two feet tall on the breakroom wall was Angel’s response to Spike’s meeting debacle.
There once was a poet from London
“I’ll get him back,” Spike vowed, secretly beginning to enjoy the battle of wits, though he suspected his opponent was an unarmed man.
It was noon in the cafeteria of Wolfram & Hart when the intercom crackled to life with a loud “Testing, testing, Angel is a poof, one, two.”
Angel groaned and put his mug of blood on the table, preparing for the inevitable.
“Ahem. This is for our beloved CEO.
“There once was a vamp who was so thick
Laughter erupted around him until the others saw Angel had turned purple in rage.
By three o’clock Spike began to worry. Angel had done nothing as yet, and he was getting paranoid, jumping at small noises.
That’s when the opera singer arrived, setting up camp in the Wolfram & Hart atrium. Spike stared in disbelief as the man’s powerful voice sang in a sing-song tune that practically shook the windows out of their casements.
"Spike is a vamp with hygiene so bad
A low growl filled the air.
Angel was listening to his usual classical music radio station during dinner that evening, when suddenly he heard the announcer, in obviously terrified tones, introduce a guest DJ for the program.
“Right then. I’ll be bringing you an evening of punk, acid, and possibly recordings of dental drills, but before that, I have but one thing to say:
The head of Wolfram & Hart in L.A.,
“I’m going to kill him,” Angel said calmly. “Slowly.”
All night, obscene phone calls kept him awake, but Angel smiled at the new billboard outside his window.
A vampire named Spike who was very drunk
A huge photograph circa 1974 showed Spike passed out in a forest glen. Or rather, it showed Spike’s naked backside and a pile of burning clothes.
The scream was audible for blocks.
“Fine! You win!”
Angel grinned. Never get into a game of limericks with an Irishman.
She remembers how much she liked haiku, and for some strange reason, she feels drawn to poetry after his death. Still, it startles her when one day in Italy she puts pen to paper and instead of a grocery list, the poem comes out.
Blue eyes that looked
Buffy stares at the poem for a minute before saying, “Okay, so maybe there is one poet worse than he was.”
The brown sludge they drink in the morning doesn’t resemble a beverage so much as axel grease. The telly is filled with drivel series about twenty-somethings who have the intelligence of laundry soap. The food is… well, truthfully, not all that much better than at home, but the language has been so badly mangled that he barely recognizes it as his own, and yet no one even realizes how far things have sunk. They simply accept the onslaught of cultural decay.
But on the day Giles woke up cheerily humming a tune by the Backstreet Boys, he knew real fear.
Tiny. That’s what Jenny called Buffy when she found out the girl was the Slayer. In truth, Giles had thought the same thing when he’d first seen the blonde California teenager standing in the library. The photograph the Council had given him was accurate, but it hadn’t conveyed how small she seemed for the burden she had to bear.
Now he stands in a house full of girls, all possibly Slayers one day. And he thinks the same thing each time he looks at them: too young, too innocent, too small to have to shoulder the burden. But one will.
He lies beside her after she has finished with him, and he longs to whisper what he feels. The soft rise and fall of her chest as she breaths, a novelty for him, hypnotizes him, but even in sleep her features are drawn, tense. He wants to make those harsh lines fade away, but when they’re together, she wants nothing but violence, his screams and hers blending in a carnal music with no beauty in it.
He parts his lips to tell her he loves her, but her eyes flutter open on instinct, and she silences him with a look.
Xander stared at Cordelia across the library table. She was wearing an outfit he’d never seen before, though, granted, he’d never seen her wear the anything twice. This was a red dress, the neckline square, showing off a diamond pendant: probably a present from some ex. She was tired of reading and had taken to filing her nails, dust blowing across the pages. Giles looked absolutely livid. And she looked…
“Cordy, if you were any more useless, you’d be…” Xander began.
“You?” she finished, giving him an icy look.
He glared back and tried not to think about broom closets.
Buffy watched as his tail lights disappeared down Revello Drive. He’d insisted on driving her home, and though neither had said so, both knew it had more to do with not wanting to leave her standing by her mother’s grave than worrying about her safely.
“Forever,” she’d said, and his eyes had become haunted. Even with an eternity of life, the word frightened him. He’d left her many times, and though she knew some weren’t his fault, she wondered if he would ever realize the image that came to mind, unbidden, every time she saw him, was him leaving again.
Here I sit, alone, except for Whinathon, who shouldn’t count, in a jail full of criminals. Okay, so there’s one guy, and he’s here for being kinda drunk, but still, it’s jail. My life is gripped in a series of bad decisions and stuff. I’m like Lex Luthor now. I’ve gone over to the dark side of the Force. Cool.
Except, you know, I didn’t think it’d turn out this way. It was supposed to be fun, and now things aren’t fun at all. They stopped being fun a long time ago.
I wonder if I can get a harmonica...
It was cold, dark, dank and several other words that Darla wouldn’t say in the Master’s presense. It wasn’t just from a sense of fear, although she wasn’t stupid. He seemed honestly proud of his Court, and he had been kinder to her than anyone else.
She’d accepted she would never see sunlight again. But to live here, with the earth bearing down upon her and the air scented in decay, seemed too much to her. He said she would adapt in time and think of it as a paradise. She found herself hoping her taste never sunk that far.
Angel knew he’d never survive this battle. The desperate plan would maybe win the world a brief respite, but his survival seemed unlikely.
The images that went through his mind were single moments that hadn’t seemed significant at the time. He remembered the smell of his mother’s perfume when she’d tucked him in at night, the way Darla’s eyes had glowed when they danced in Paris, the sound of the engines of the boat that took him to America, the taste of ice cream and the feel of his infant son in his arms. He never felt the final blow.
“Ow, Jonathon, let go!” Andrew yelled as the shorter boy got him in a headlock, trying to snatch the freeze ray.
“You let go, you stupid,” he struggled to come up with an insult bad enough, “nerf herder!”
“Yeah, well you’re… Lobelia Baggins!” Andrew shot back.
Warren stared at his cohorts, rapidly going insane.
“If you guys will stop squabbling like the pair of Jawas you are,” Warren said in a forced-calm voice, “you’d realize you don’t know how to work the ray yet.”
“Huh?”
“Oh… yeah.”
“First of all, the lever goes up for heat, and down for freeze,” Warren said, wishing he could freeze them. Permanently.
When she was seven, a boy in Mrs. Forrest’s third grade class told Dawn people sometimes swallowed spiders in their sleep. For weeks, she’d slept with tape over her mouth, but even so, whenever she thought about it she’d get a feeling in her belly like something was in there, alive and not part of her.
It’s been two years since she found out she was the Key, and sometimes she has that feeling again, wondering if there’s something alive inside her that isn’t her at all. And sometimes she wonders if the monks made that memory for a reason.
Sleep was pulling at Tara’s fingertips and toes, but in a good way. This day seemed to have gone on forever: her family and the Scoobies squaring off against each other, secrets revealed, acceptance, and a party that was almost dreamlike in its happiness. But now, this was the best part. Her arms were wrapped around Willow, not clinging tightly but gently, holding her in warmth and peace. She could feel the other witch smile against her shoulder. When their feet left the floor, they both knew, but neither was surprised. After all, their hearts were already dancing on air.
Wesley’s first schoolboy crush on a celebrity was unusual. Other boys had pictures of Raquel Welsh or Brooke Shields or Olivia Newton John hanging next to their beds or pasted into the front of their driest textbooks to gaze at when the teacher got boring. Wesley, though, had fallen head over heels for an engraving of Athena from a Victorian collection of mythology. Her wavy brown hair and wide eyes paired with her delicate figure and intelligence had undone him completely.
Years later, when he was reading the Iliad, he realized his vision of Athena had acquired a Texan drawl.
“It tasted like lion’s blood,” Drusilla had said.
It was years since she’d thought of dear Joe. Spike had taken her to a circus as a treat for being very bad. She’d been enraptured by the acrobats and cotton candy, but when the lion act began, she cried pitifully despite Spike’s assurances she was safe.
Later, she’d nimbly slipped between the lion cage’s bars. The lion had come to her slowly, his eyes sad.
When Spike found her over the dead lion and scolded her for being reckless, she shook her head. He didn’t understand, but he would one day.
He’d told Dawn he had things to do, but the reality of the situation was much less colorful. After she’d left, he pulled out his “To Do” list… and was immediately ashamed he actually had a list.
1. Repaint fingernails
He decided to get drunk instead.
She was uncertain what had happened. Her body shook, and her breathing was labored. Carefully, she got to her feet. She was in a small, dark cave, though her eyes could see quite well.
Suddenly, with shrieks of rage, three creatures pounced on her. Instinct snapped into action, and she clutched a fragment of wood on the cave floor. An hour later, bleeding and howling pitifully, the girl stood over their dust, knowing she was no longer what she had been, that she was Other.
From the shadows, the wisemen nodded. She had passed the test. The Slayer was born.
Few people in town were as beloved as the toymaker. The lines of his face formed a map of the smiles he bestowed on the children who visited him.
One night, as a thunderstorm lashed his windows, a traveler pounded on his front door.
“Come in,” he cried in pity. “Warm yourself by the fire and have something to eat.”
“I will,” said the vampire, who quickly bit the old man. For a lark, he opened one of his own veins, feeding him.
“I wonder what sort of vampire he’ll make,” said the demon, and thus the Master was made.
Washing day had come, and Drusilla stirred the clothes with a long stick, her arm aching with the work as the water bubbled in the small kitchen. The shimmering steam became thicker, and with a start she saw a figure staring at her out of the vapor: a man with eyes as yellow as a cat’s and a face disfigured with bumps. Above his head, written in blood, was the word “DEATH.”
Drusilla’s scream brought her family around her, but she said she had fallen asleep standing up and had a nightmare. With clammy hands, she returned to her work.
The movers had left, and Buffy and her mother were alone in this place that held no memories and nothing familiar. Surveying the sea of boxes, Buffy knew none of them contained a trace of her father, and the gaping hole added to her doubting this place would ever be home.
She climbed the stairs for what felt like the thousandth time that day and went to her room. Sitting on her bed, she tried to imagine the past was behind her and a future full of normal days lay before her.
The weapons trunk stared back at her silently.
As dust filled the air, Xander thought of pollen. When they were kids, he, Jesse and Willow had played hide and seek in the park. Several times he had swatted Jesse with a pine branch, raising clouds of yellow dust, in retaliation for being found. Then Jesse would chase him around the park, screaming bloody murder.
“I didn’t mean to,” he said as he stared at where his friend had just been. He knew this was the first of many vampires he would kill. He wondered if each time he would think of those clinging clouds and feel this pain.
Willow stared at the zit the size of Greenland decorating the tip of her nose. It seemed to throb with malevolence, and she could already hear Cordelia’s insults.
“Stupid chocolate bar,” she moaned as she tried in vain to cover the blemish with concealer.
A light came into her eyes as she remembered the spell she had seen on one of Miss Calendar’s webpages. Biting her lip in concentration, she stared in the mirror and bent her thoughts on covering the pimple.
Her eyes briefly darkened, but Willow didn’t notice as she delightedly watched the spot disappear behind a glamour.
The Watchers Academy was the most boring building Rupert had ever seen. It blended in with other buildings in London, but its gray stone exterior screamed no nonsense would be tolerated here.
He hefted his trunk, filled only with basic necessities for his austere life-to-be, onto his shoulder and went up the lift to his dormitory. He slammed his trunk at the end of the bed, hurriedly opening the lid.
In relief, he realized no one was the wiser that he had chucked his textbooks and replaced them with his complete collection of Pink Floyd, Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix.
“What in tarnation have you done!” yelled Mr. Burkle as he stepped into his daughter’s bedroom.
Fred hung her head, the blue crayon still clutched in her hand declaring her guilt. Her wall was covered as high as she could reach with scrawlings.
As her father peered closer, he realized they weren’t random doodles. Numbers, letters and Greek symbol popped out at him, and he wasn’t sure he was ready to realize the truth.
“Fred? What is all this?” he asked.
“Theory of relativity,” the seven year old said as she scuffed the toe of her shoe on the carpet.
Oz was a private person, more used to showing his presence through a nod than a spoken thought. However, with his cousin, he could be remarkably different.
Today, he sat with the little boy on his lap, reading him “Little Red Riding Hood.” As the green-haired bass player got to the part when the wolf gobbled up the grandmother, he impishly tickled his cousin, earning squeals of disapproval which soon turned into a loud “OW! from the teenager.
“Okay, so no tickling. Ever. Got ya,” Oz said as blood poured from the small cut on his finger. Jordy smiled innocently.
The cement of the basement bites viciously into his back. The floor is littered with debris, the remains of something irretrievably broken.
Mistake cannot begin to describe what happened, and he knows it. Granted, it wasn’t his choice. She took what she wanted, the key word being what, not whom. For months he’d dreamed of her, obsessing over what it would be like to have her. Then, in the darkness of her absense, those dreams were hopeless, the soft feel of her skin and her loving murmurs mere painful phantoms.
He’s had the dream now, except it was a nightmare.
“I can’t believe it’s over,” Xander said.
“Yeah,” Buffy agreed morosely. “It’s hard to believe it went so fast.”
“This can’t be the end,” Willow said sadly. “It can’t!”
“Willow,” Giles said, patting her hand, “all good things must come to an end.”
The clacking of high heels on the library floor broke through their grief, and they looked up to see Cordelia glaring at them.
“Oh, please! It’s a box of donuts! If you’re that bummed about running out, go buy more!”
“They’re closed until tomorrow,” Xander said tearfully.
Cordelia blinked and walked away, muttering “losers” under her breath.
“Uh, guys? What just happened?” Gunn said in confusion.
“I am unsure where we are,” Illyria said, cocking her head to one side. “It is unlike any dimension I have visited.”
Angel and Spike were also completely baffled by the blank, grey world. The demons had disappeared, but so had everything else.
“Are we dead?” Gunn asked.
“No,” Spike said firmly. “There’s more burning with that.”
“Demon,” Angel said in a matter-of-fact voice as he spotted a strange creature heading towards them.
“Grrr. Arrgh,” it said nonchalantly, followed by “Gyah. Agh,” as Angel cleaved it in two with his sword.
Reality shifted, threatening to hurtle him into oblivion. It wasn’t an unknown feeling for him. One like it had occured when he had stood over her motionless body, comprehending the unthinkable.
But that had been unadulterated horror, and this time he wasn’t sure what he felt. She was standing before him, a telltale rhythm telling him she was alive.
Carefully, as though the air might shatter, he touched her hands, and his fingers didn’t pass through her skin like mist.
But he knew as he touched her wounds that this unnatural miracle would have consequences beyond what he could foresee.
Spike stares at his bandaged-covered hands. He can’t feel them, but the numbing drugs will wear off. Oddly, he’s thinking of the Tin Man.
Dru loved Baum’s book, and he read it to her hundreds of times. The horrifying story of the Tin Man’s creation fascinated her: an enchanted ax carving away at him piece by piece, the parts replaced with ones of tin. Finally, he was nothing but metal, without even a heart.
Spike thinks of the things he has done with these hands, lives they’ve ended, and he half-wishes they’d given him ones of tin in their place.
Angel sits in his office at Wolfram & Hart, bathed in the sterilized glow of sunlight, the door barricaded against intruders with a simple statement to Harmony that if she let anyone in he’d fire her… with actual fire.
The quiet sound of pencil scratching against paper fills the office like whispered prayers in a church. They come readily from the lead: the slant of Buffy’s nose and the bow of Cordy’s grin, Fred’s wide eyes and Doyle’s rumpled hair, pages and pages of a baby smiling in delight. He makes with his hands the worlds that have fallen away.
“You haven’t done your homework, William,” the schoolmaster said severely.
That morning, Archibald and his followers had come across the boy’s new route to school. The usual scene transpired: Archie threatened to pound the smaller boy senseless, and William fought back, trying to tug his slate away from his tormentors. They’d let him pull hard enough so that when they released it, the momentum sent him into a puddle along with the slate. With horrified eyes, William saw his homework fade away as the boys guffawed.
“Hold out your hand,” he was instructed as the schoolmaster brought out the cane.
Gunn stared at the ceiling, willing the demon to finish carving his heart out. In these moments he remembered who he was. He soon became the fake husband and father once more, but for now he could recall his life.
He saw her brown eyes laughing. Part of the torture, he supposed, but after seeing Fred’s image, he could willingly submit to having his heart removed, hoping someday she could forgiveness him.
One day, the image threw aside his demon, and his heart leapt. But when her cold blue eyes turned on him, he knew his punishment would never end.
The bloodloss is so bad he knows soon he’ll faint. But they’re there, the shadows, shapes with voices of metal. The girl from the club in the twenties, her eyes enormous with fear, urges him onward. The man from Istanbul at the turn of the century, his throat bleeding rivers, screams for retribution. The little boy from Vienna, the one he handed to Dru as though he were a jam tart, smiles evilly.
So Spike sinks the knife into his chest again, knowing he could scrape to bone and they will never be appeased, but helpless to do anything else.
As all the pain and desperation to complete his mission happened, a little part of Doyle’s brain stood back and watched.
He kept his back to Angel and Cordelia. Any sight of them would be too much: Cordelia’s eyes brimming with tears, or Angel’s broad shoulders slumping (he was a little attracted, after all). But he could glimpse the demons, and mixed with their faces were those of ones he should have saved. It was fitting he give his life for not saving theirs.
As the beacon calmed, the last thing he saw was those ghostly faces smiling in welcome.
I am bored beyond mortal comprehension. Infomercial-watching bored. This guy never does anything fun. He won’t eat chocolate because it’s too fatty, and the world might end if he doesn’t finish his damn anatomy essay on time.
Okay, I was naughty. I made the other hellgods sorta nervous with the maiming and the boiling in oil and the maiming and the wanton destruction of life and the maiming. God, I miss the maiming… But did they have to stick me inside Mr. Goody Two Shoes? I mean, come on. There’s no way I was ever evil enough to deserve this!
He knew she was dead. The tilt of her neck was a little wrong, her legs slightly askew, her eyes windows with no light behind them.
An image of one of his teachers leapt to mind, stating words he had once considered ludicrous.
“While Watchers may have loved ones, even marry if they desire, becoming close to others is perilous and can even prove fatal.”
The bottle slipped to the floor, smashing into a thousand pieces, the wine soaking the floor like blood. This was his punishment for his selfish desire to love. He had killed Jenny, no one else.
In Pylea, images never filled Lorne’s mind, but no one sang there. It’s the one thing he misses: silence inside his brain.
Yesterday, he was getting a Coke when a woman with earphones jogged past, singing along to the B-52’s. Immediately, he knew she was an alcoholic. A guy in an elevator hummed tunelessly, and he knew he was cheating on his wife. A secretary whistled Springsteen, and he knew she’d be dead tomorrow.
Lorne loves music, but when his brain is reeling from the messages screaming from unexpected directions, he wonders what horrible thing he’s done to deserve this.
Xander’s dreams don’t forgive him. During the day, he builds things or e-mails his friends funny stories of his hunt for Twinkies in Madagascar.
But at night, he can’t keep the dreams away. She comes to him in her wedding dress, her hair a blaze of gold bright as sunlight. It burns his eyes, but he can’t look away. He reaches for her, desperate to hold her again.
“You’re the one who turned me away,” she says, her eyes full of tears.
In the mornings, he gets up, pretends to be happy, fun, lovable Xander, while dreading the coming night.
Okay, Buffy thought, I got myself into this. I promised I’d spend more time with Dawn, and I did say she should start doing more chores. She’s showing initiative. That’s of the good, right?
I just really should have specified exactly what chores she’s supposed to do.
“Uh, Dawn?” Buffy asked in what she hoped was a warm, loving, and nurturing tone of voice. “What the hell are we eating?”
“Duh. It’s cereal!” Dawn said with an eyeroll.
“Oh. Right. Of course.”
Buffy poked the blackened, quivering mass on her plate, smiled wanly, and prayed they had Pepto in Italy.
A run of unimaginative wishes requiring the deceiving man to drop dead without fanfare had given Anyanka a case of ennui. Her creativity was blocked. Then this little gem had happened her way.
“Sheep number 345, step right up!” she called merrily as the shepherd’s face, already blanched white, began to turn green. “Oh, cheer up,” she said, displaying uncharacteristic camaraderie with her victim because of her pleasant mood. “She could have wished for it to be every sheep in the village. You’ve got only 39 to go!”
Wendell, the shepherd with the wandering eye, swayed slightly and passed out.
Faith knows she’s done wrong. She had murdered and revelled in it. She had tossed aside every law like a candy bar wrapper. She’d lied and stolen, seduced and beaten, walked away from her sacred duty and joined the team of the forces she’d been put on this earth to fight.
She accepts she has punishment coming. That was why she’d turned herself in, knowing that jail would be the outcome. She wants to make amends. But there is a limit.
Still, as she stands in the chow line, she can’t help repeating mentally, “Please, not the butterscotch pudding again.”
There is no time in hell. Perpetual torment erodes the senses like a glacier erodes a mountain, wearing it away until nothing is left, creating grooves so deep that the mind falls into them and becomes lost.
Angel has known torture ever since the sword pinned him against Acathla, but at first he held up bravely. Blood, bruises, smashed bones, all had little effect.
That is, until the demons got nasty.
Now he lies on the floor, hands clutched over his ears, wailing in misery as Richard Nixon launches into yet another rendition of “Hit Me Baby One More Time.”
Tara was dead. Dawn had trouble grasping it even after all she had experienced. She had spent hours staring into the lifeless eyes of the young woman who had seemed so strong yet fragile. Later events had distracted her from the harsh reality.
Now, with Willow in England and Buffy at work, Dawn was alone, and for the first time she noticed the worn bag in the living room. Tara’s. Inside were textbooks: biology, chemistry, history. Her hands reached out to stroke them, and a few pages of notes in Tara’s curved handwriting fell to the floor.
And Dawn wept.
Angelus had dealt with the Slayer. The hurt in her eyes was ambrosia, more delicious than the virgin blood of a saint. And he’d know.
Afterwards, he scavenged through the soul’s belongs, shoving cash into his pocket, grabbing a bottle of whiskey, and he was about to leave when he saw the book.
The Confessions of St. Augustine had been Angel’s favorite, and the dog-eared pages testified to his desperate hope he could find his own path to some sort of salvation.
Angelus’s disjointed laugh split the air as he drew his nails across the pages, shredding them to ribbons.
The contents of the Sunnydale High School library had been saved, and the boxes littered Giles’s living room. And kitchen. And dining room. And bath. And stairs.
“You kinda have a problem here,” Xander said, cracking his back. “There’s no floor left and twenty boxes to go.”
“So, which ones do we chuck?” Buffy asked, sweating from the hauling.
“Chuck? No! We’ll move these back to the van and procure a rental locker,” he declared, clearly thinking Buffy’s idea blasphemy.
“Move them again?” Xander said, turning pale.
“Of course,” he said, but when he turned around, he was completely alone.
For a minute, Spike looked at Drusilla’s form on the bed, her limbs curled around her body as though fending off an attack. He knew the truth: she was worse. In spite of his desire to break everything in sight, his voice was gentle when he spoke.
“Luv? What will you have tonight?”
Her eyes fluttered open, and a weak smile played on her lips. “The Twelve Dancing Princesses, my sweet.”
He took the slim volume from the shelves crammed with children’s books, sat on the edge of the bed, and read in a soft, clear voice, his heart breaking.
Buffy had left him yet again, telling him for the thousandth time they were over. She’d be back. He might mean nothing to her but a cold body to release her frustrations on, but for that much he was worth something.
She’d return. She had to. He had nothing else.
He pushed aside the shattered remains of his record collection to expose an indentation in the wall. He pulled out his book, the one he had kept for decades without anyone, even Dru, knowing it existed.
His poetry fell apart in his hands, riddled by bullets. There was nothing left.
Angel spent hours trying to find the perfect gift, desperate to tell Buffy what lay in his heart but couldn’t be spoken. He’d finally remembered Elizabeth Barret Browning’s Sonnets from the Portugese. It was perfect, he’d thought.
Elizabeth and Robert were forced to wait, their love forbidden. It seemed they would never be together, but at long last they married, and Elizabeth had given Robert these poems, written in secret during their sometimes hopeless courtship, showing her constant love. Silently, he begged her to understand.
And his heart fell when she saw nothing but paper and ink in her hands.
“This is what I call a party!” Spike yelled to Drusilla over the loud jazz. Illegal gin practically flowed from the front door of the posh East Egg estate, and the boisterous guests had drunk enough to be extremely giddy.
As the Charleston ended to raucous applause, he pulled his pretty flapper close, kissing her with an unselfconscious lust that perfectly fitted the debauched scene.
“Naughty boy,” she growled, relishing the night as much he. “Shall we eat?”
“Okay, Luv,” he agreed, grinning. “But not this Gatsby bloke. Gotta respect hospitality that’ll leave me snockered for at least two days.”
“Okay,” Xander stared at the strange visitor. “You were in the woods one minute, and the next you’re here?”
The figure nodded politely, turning his gaze back to Giles.
“Do you know how I have come to be here?” he asked.
“Probably a portal,” Giles said uncertainly. “We’ll work on fixing things. It’s lucky Xander found you.”
“I am most grateful,” he said.
“Giles?” Willow called, running through the library doors. “What’s up? You said there was… oh my…”
Legolas took one look at the red-headed witch and reconsidered the situation.
“There is no rush, Lord Giles,” he said, smiling.
Angel had been in embarassing situations. A Xyltxc demon set the seat of his trousers afire in the middle of Broadway. Spike took photographs of him in the shower and wallpapered the steno pool’s lounge with them. None of them compared to this.
The Powers had said the apocolypse would come from this dimension, and if he was going to stay, he had to follow the rules.
“Gryffindor! No… Slytherin! No… Gryffindor! Slyth… Griff… Oh, Dumbledore, I give up!” the Sorting Hat shrieked.
The wizard smiled at Angel. “I think perhaps you should just share Hagrid’s cabin during your stay.”
He’s here! How did he get an invitation? I’m sure Archibald did it. That man has the worst sense of humor, and this reeks of being one of his jests. I am, however, most certainly not amused. One poor guest can ruin a party, but William? William being invited to one of my gatherings could ruin my reputation for a week.
I won’t look at him. If I don’t look, he’s not there. Why can’t that moronic, gawkish egghead just disintegrate into dust?
Blast. He’s seen me. I swear, if he’s brought one of those ridiculous poems, I’ll kill him.
I knew he would come, but when I see William’s eyes practically worshipping me from the bottom of the stairs, I wish he hadn’t.
If I told him the truth, that since I was ten Father has had my marriage arranged to a man whom I do not love, though another does hold that place, I know what William would say. But I can’t allow myself to be swayed. It would mean being disowned, breaking Mother’s heart, abandoning my family.
But I shant have him pity me. Instead, I shall make him hate me. May God forgive me, my love.
I usually leave the spurned-woman thing to Anyanka, but a justice demon does what a justice demon must. When Rosalie fell in love with William’s father only to have him marry Anne instead, she wished about the most fabulous wish I’ve ever come across.
“I wish Leroy would drop dead, and if he has any children with that little witch first, may they drop dead at least twice!”
Looks like it’s time to cue up that first death.
These people are crazy. Last week, I got a telegram saying I’m a carrot killer. That made no sense. They re-translated it; I’m actually a vampire slayer, which still made no sense. However, the demons with no eyes made perfect sense, and I understood the Englishman when he said “safe,” so I came here.
“Here” is a house with seventy people… and one bathroom. A vampire who may or may not be crazy lives in the basement. The Slayer makes long speeches though three-quarters of us do not speak English.
I’m considering working for the demon-people. They seem more reasonable.
Aud was trouble. My father told me it would be so. Anyone who liked rabbits as much as she was wrong in the head, he said. She proved to be a most aggravating little thing.
Not saying it wasn’t worth it. The wench had zest.
Now the blasted witch has managed to send me somewhere, and I am whirling through empty space. At least I will not be trapped in another rock.
Abruptly, I hit solid ground, but there is something strange about it. It is too spongey. I look around in confusion as I stare at endless fields of…shrimp?
Angel and Spike walked into a room. There may or may not have been a bed in it. Perhaps there was some sort of scent in the air. Some things started to happen. Then more things happened. After that, still more things happened. It was very pleasant. Then they fell asleep. Then they woke up, and more of those things happened again. After that, they ate something for breakfast, possibly involving chocolate. As they couldn’t stay in the room that may or may not have had a bed in it forever, they then left the room. They were rather happy.
Willow stared at the pattern of ceiling cracks overhead, willing herself not to think about what had happened. Unfortunately, a nearby snore anchored her all-too-firmly in reality.
Kennedy was next to her. Kennedy was next to her and naked. Kennedy was next to her and naked and Willow was naked. None of that was unexpected, really. It had been bound to happen sooner or later.
What was unexpected was the loneliness pervading her. For the first time, sex had brought not closeness but emptiness. Rolling onto her side, distancing herself from the other girl, she quietly sobbed herself to sleep.
Spike was staring at Angel, and it was getting annoying .
“Say something or get out,” he said, shuffling papers importantly.
“Have we shagged?”
Angel blinked. “What?”
“You. Me. Shagged,” Spike said. “People want to know. Me too, comes to that.”
Angel sighed. “If I say anything, the subtext dies.”
“Come on! I just want to know my own orientation!”
“If you don’t know whether we’ve ‘shagged,’ how would I?”
Spike frowned. “Good point. Guess we’ll never know.”
“No. Now go gaze in a possibly lustful manner at Gunn or Wesley while I may possibly be obsessing over Lindsey.”
“Right.”
Buffy has died so often that the word is meaningless, she sometimes thinks. The Master, Glory, even Warren made her cross from life into something else. Those times were simple. Other deaths mark her, and those have been more terrifying. The death of trust when Angel turned. The death of belief in justice when she killed him. The death of innocence when she tried to take Faith’s life. The death of security when her mother died. But of all her deaths, the one that destoyed her was when she was pulled back to life. That was the death of joy.
Anya knows she’s dead. There’s her body, practically in two pieces, laying on the floor, but she’s still here. Andrew is peering down at her during a pause in the onslaught, and she realizes he’s turning white and a telltale green. “For pity’s sake!” she yells soundlessly. “Don’t throw up on me!” When the enemy comes at him again, he shoulders the sword once more, and though he completely misses every one of them, he never sees the spirit sword wielded invisibily around him, driven by one whose spirit was too strong to give up the battle even in death.
No one asks about her. She blends in like cracks in the tabletops or burns in the upholstery. She arrives each day on time, and the boss thinks that’s a little unusual, but she does as she’s told and never makes a fuss. But some things don’t fit. There are no tracks on her arms unlike the other girls he hires under the table, yet sometimes it seems to take all her strength just to keep breathing because something inside hurts too much. He’ll be surprised if Anne lasts another month in this place without leaving, one way or another.
Giles checked her chart and was releaved to see she had died almost three days ago. She would not rise. Frowning, he saw the cause of death listed as “heart attack.” With a pitying look at the corpse, he closed the vault once more.
Angel stared in disbelieving wonder at Buffy, who was sleeping soundly. This was not what he intended. His dreams of making of love to her had been full of candlelight and soft music. He had never expected her first time to happen in his cinderblock basement apartment as Armageddon approached. But it had. His trembling hand brushed a strand of hair from her forehead. She stirred slightly, and, still sleeping, nestled closer to him in perfect trust. It was in that moment he realized he had at last been accepted as he was. It was in that moment bliss came.
The sheets were rough, and the bed didn’t smell like her own. A series of images flashed through her mind’s eye: a flaming hand, a desperate race across rooftops while the world fell in behind her, and a crater yawning where home had once been. Yesterday, she had thought of tomorrow with hope. Today, she could only think of yesterday with despair.
This wasn’t how he planned to spend his evening. Things had started out average enough: pints, prostitutes, a plot to filch his father’s silver.
But then that girl whose skin glowed like living pearl appeared, and things ran wildly outside the normal path. Even when she’d bitten him and fed her blood down his throat, he’d felt he was moving in some dream.
But then she dropped him to the pavement, her laughter in his ears. She left. The cobbles, wet with his lifeblood, bit into his cheek, and as lay there, he had only one thought.
“I’ll be damned.”
She stared at the chain. Its rust had stained her hands. She knew she should run; her mind was screaming at her to move, but she felt paralyzed.
Ben lay at her feet, bleeding, which she kept telling herself was a good thing. But what if he was dead? What if she’d killed him? Then she saw the smallest of movements in his hands, and for a moment relief flooded her before she realized what else that might mean.
She turned to run, but it was too late.
“Ow!” she heard from too near. “That really hurt, you little puke.”
Buffy couldn’t help the dispairing laugh that crept from her lips, accompanied by a bubble of blood. Nine years ago exactly she had been called. There had been thousands of vampires since, most now dust. Sometimes it seemed all her life had played itself out in alleys. Now it was going to end in a tiny, centuries-old one in the worst part of Rome.
She lay on the ground, her hand gripping the dust of her vanquished attacker, clutching it in her fist.
“I’m sorry it had to be me, Dawnie,” she said softly, “but at least we went together.”
Many years have passed since she last held a baby to her breast. She caresses the blonde head, remembering her other one, older now, off on his own.
But this little one needs all she can give. She croons to her, supporting the head, eyes shining as she nourishes her, chasing away the shadows.
She’d wanted to feed her sooner, but Daddy wouldn’t allow it. Even now he’d stop her if he could. His would tear her little one’s head from her breast, but she meets his gaze. As Darla’s laps falter, her mummy knows they are a family again.
“For a mega-evil corporation, you think they’d have better sushi,” Lorne said, slamming his tray down in disgust across from Spike. “How’s the blood? Taste like styrofoam?”
Spike looked up, stunned the demon was talking to him. He’d always been friendly enough, but Lorne had never sought out his company.
“Terrible. Besides, I don’t trust where it comes from. The hot chocolate isn’t bad, though,” he said, smiling uncertainly.
“Hey, they’ve got little marshmallows? I just love those. Back in a jiff,” Lorne declared as he jogged to the cocoa machine.
So began their afternoon ritual of chocolate and bonding.
When Buffy was little, Joyce always baked her a triple-tiered chocolate birthday cake and iced it with homemade fudge frosting, sandwiching banana slices between each layer. The smell was heavenly, and it was forever associated with happy times when birthdays meant presents and laughter, not impending doom.
Buffy’s birthday has come again. Maybe it’s because she’s lost every landmark of her old life, but she finds herself missing her mother even more than ever. She stares at the lopsided chocolate cake she’s baked, iced with canned frosting, and she begins to laugh until she throws it against the wall, sobbing.
He'd heard about it once in an off-handed remark made by someone he barely tolerated: a shaman with power to work miracles.
Now he found himself standing before two glowing eyes in a dark African cave. He wasn't entirely sure how he'd gotten there, but that didn't matter. He cleared his throat, trying to speak without stammering.
"You'll hold up your end of the deal, right? I mean, hey, not my fault somebody already killed your bugs and your flame guy. You'll grant my wish?"
"Very well," chuckled a deep voice. "We will return to you the human called Anya."
Nina looked around the Wolfram & Hart cafeteria warily. First dates were always awkward, but this? Was dating a puppet even legal?
After they'd passed through the line, a mushroom omelette on her tray and a sippy cup of blood on Angel's, he sat in a booster chair to see over the table.
"So..." she said, staring at the cup, then Angel's lack of a throat.
"Uh," he responded. "Maybe I should have ordered those styrofoam cookies puppets always seem to eat."
Nina giggled as the frowning mouth broke into a pseudo-grin. She'd had worse first dates... but none weirder.
"I tell ya, Archie, if we don't get some decent-sized tuna soon, the boss'll have our hides," said the old man as he piloted his boat towards what he hoped was a better fishing site. Archie nodded gruffly.
However, when they pulled in their nets, they were stunned.
"Well, they're plenty big," Archie said sensibly. "And they're sure not dolphins. Whaddaya say?"
"I say lop 'em up and bring 'em in," he declared as they headed towards shore.
Soon, several tuna fish cans sat innocently on a supermarket shelf. And that was the end of the Sunnydale High swim team.
William was worried. Each evening when he awoke, Drusilla would be staring at him, heartbroken and weeping. Burns marked her forehead, her right hand, her shoulders, but she refused to tell him where they came from.
"I'm a bad girl and must be punished," she would repeat, inconsolable.
Finally, he feigned sleep one day. Through slitted eyes he saw her open one of the bottles on her dresser, and he nearly screamed when he smelled charred flesh as she crossed herself repeatedly.
"I love a man in carnal pleasure. Forgive me my disobedience to Daddy. Forgive my most grievous fault."
For ninety years, Angel never slept in a bed. Instead, he would lay on the floor, preferrably one of bare earth. Barring that, he slept in the filth of the alleys, always rising with grime on his face.
His guilt screamed at him, the faces of countless thousands he had murdered with a kiss swarmed around him, and when at last weariness became too great and he had to endure his nightmares as penance, he pillowed his head against the dirt.
It was his one hope: that someday he would do as the priest had said, and return to dust.
Darla stared out the window of Lindsey's office, listlessly watching the sunset. It was beautiful, full of reds and oranges, the sun reflecting off countless panes of glass and bits of metal in the city, creating a thousand tiny, diamond-bright replicas of itself that hurt her eyes. She should be burning now, her mind thought in some faraway corner.
But whether she meant that as a vampire she would have incinerated in this light she hadn't seen for centuries or that her soul belonged in a pit of hell as ruby-colored with eternal flame as the sky, she didn't know.
Der Kinderstodd was now dead. Buffy, however, felt like she was about five seconds from joining him.
Why couldn't "immunity to up-chucking" be part of the Slayer package? Her stomach was doing back flips more acrobatic than anything she'd ever pulled off even in her most intricate battles, and the green gelatin she'd had for lunch today kept floating before her eyes, its green color slowly painting her cheeks.
"Buffy? You're not gonna yak on me, are ya?" asked Xander nervously.
She shook her head in determination, but three steps later..
"I'll take that as a big, icky, owe-me-a-new-pair-of-shoes yes."
The basement is cold and dark like what's been inside his head and heart for a hundred and some years. Things swish above his head, angels with black-feathered wings and the disembodied screams made visible in puffs of murder-colored mist.
And the basement is hot as hell where he was told he'd burn for stealing a stick of licorice from the candy store. He'd cried all night, afraid his heart would stop beating and the devil would come to take him, for that's what happened to naughty boys
He's here now.
"Better late than never," he calls to empty air.
It was a long day for everyone, but perhaps longest for her. She stood beside her girls, telling them she still loved them, but the clouds of grief were too thick to pierce.
Buffy stands beside her grave, and for the first time Joyce is happy to see Angel. She blesses him for saying what she cannot.
Turning to go, she notices something tiny and unassuming beside her grave. A ragtag cluster of daises tied with frayed string sits on the upturned earth. She remembers telling Spike she loved their simplicity and friendliness. Smiling at this heartfelt gift, she leaves.
The Hyperion was always too large for them. Dozens of rooms made up each floor, and most sat empty as forgotten tombs.
Angel's room was different. It felt less like a hotel room than a place with history behind it. In time, new history was written over the old: the return of a woman he'd thought dead, and the place where he cradled his unexpected son in sleep.
They're leaving today. He takes one last look, remembering events that took place here, and dwelling finally on the butterscotch voice of one who has fallen asleep. Then, he shuts the door.
Once upon a time, there was a little girl. She learned to spell her name with quavering letters in pink crayon, proudly declaring who she was.
Once upon a time, there was a young girl. She discovered her name wasn't hers. She was a timebomb of too many possibilities. She bled, and she cried, and she accepted who she was.
Once upon a time, there was a young woman. She found her sister again, but she couldn't find herself. Not the child of imagination, not the portal to Armageddon, the door still looms before her of who she will be.
He doesn't understand what's happened yet. He stands outside the door of his home, unable to enter, confusion written on his face. Through the open frame, he can see the clock on the mantle, ticking away minutes that have lost all meaning. His ears hear each click of the gears clearly, but despite his new-found strength, his body refuses to cleave the air standing between him and the hearth. In frustration, he rams the barrier repeatedly, each time repulsed, and a terrible feeling of comprehension dawns.
"Silly boy," his companion answers his unasked question, smiling knowingly, "you aren't welcome anymore."
"Harmony!" yelled Angel over the intercom. "In here! Now!"
"Righty-oh, Boss," she said hopelessly.
When she arrived, he took a deep breath-- never a good sign.
"Today, my blood was so hot it burned my tongue, you disconnected the president of the Demon Peace Summit, got nail polish on a sacrificial urn, and you're breaking the dress code with that... thing...," he gestured emphatically at her minidress.
Harmony's face screwed up, then she shrieked, "You're so... captious!" while running from the room.
As Harmony patted her Word-A-Day calendar, Angel tried to decide whether to buzz Harmony and ask for a dictionary.
Rome is the eternal city, but to Buffy it's the end of an eternity of wandering. Sunnydale was the place she had protected, even if it cost her life, the place that held her happiest memories, and plenty of sad ones too, the place she and her friends had been bonded together.
Scattered to the winds, the Scoobies are living on separate continents. She'd tried London but felt she was intruding on Giles's life. France, Spain, Switzerland, even Luxemburg: nothing was right. When the wayworn sisters felt they couldn't go another step, they settled in Rome.
But it isn't home.
He's been hanging about like that one lonely guy in every bar at closing time, he thinks. Dennis moved on long ago. After he'd died, the other ghost had helped him adjust, and Cordy never realized there were really two phantoms. Around Christmas, Dennis left. He'd been the one to care for Cordelia when the visions hit... and occasionally gawk at her in the tub.
But it's time. Her eyes have been closed for a year, and he doesn't feel his place is here anymore.
"Love you, gorgeous," Doyle says as he presses a kiss to her forehead and dissolves.