Chapter 11 of Edge of Sorrow, Heart of Truth (Spike, Buffy, Tara, R)
Title: Chapter 11. To Do Me Due Delight
Author: feliciacraft
Chapter Rating: R
Characters (for this chapter): Spike, Buffy, Tara
Summary: AU S6, Buffy is resurrected.
Betas: The absolutely brilliant EffulgentlyDani and All4Spike.
Length: 3,600 words
Feedback: Yes, please!!
Title taken from the 16th century song "Come Again, sweet love doth now invite" by John Dowland:
Come again! sweet love doth now invite
Thy graces that refrain
To do me due delight,
To see, to hear, to touch, to kiss, to die,
With thee again in sweetest sympathy.
Come again! that I may cease to mourn
Through thy unkind disdain;
For now left and forlorn
I sit, I sigh, I weep, I faint, I die
In deadly pain and endless misery.
[Read previous chapters on LiveJournal, at AO3, and at Elysian Fields (EF requires login)]
Chapter 11. To Do Me Due Delight
Spike cranked up the radio with a generous twist of the volume dial and filled the night air with the unreserved howls of the Ramones. Fucking station had the nerve to call itself the “Oldies,” as if classics like the Ramones would ever age. He liked the song, too, an underrated latter day number called, ironically in hindsight, Too Tough to Die. It took only a moment for him to recall the lyrics, and he roared along with not a shred of self-consciousness, the demon in him too cool for wasted emotions as social anxieties.
Main attraction in a freak side show
Down in the basement where the cobwebs grow
On my last leg just gettin' by
Halo round my head too tough to die
For all his audacity, Spike was disappointed that there was not a soul around to witness his karaoke mastery. Bloody shame. Fact was, the closer he got to Sunnydale, the deader it got on the two-lane road. Sunnydalitis notwithstanding, people consciously or unconsciously avoided unnecessary trips out of the safety of their homes at night.
I am a tu tu tu tu tu tu tu tu tough tough guy
Halo round my head too tough to die
Too soon, the song proved not too tough to die after all, and it segued into a commercial. He switched off the radio, the better for continuing his solo of the chorus, fingers drumming on the steering wheel on beat.
Some other rhythmic tapping tripped his vampire hearing, not quite “tu tu tu tu,” more of a scritch scratch thumpity thump, but no less energetic. He went on instant alert, engaging all of his predatory senses and pulling the car to a gradual stop where he thought the sound came loudest through the trees. The repetition sped up, seemingly growing desperate by the second.
Spike looked about him. It was the outskirts of Sunnydale, no real landmarks to speak of. Just a roadside cultivated wood that no doubt led to a cemetery, the first of so many that spread through the town like a game of divide and conquer with the undead challenging the living. Whoever was out here at this hour was either up to no good, or about to be turned into dead meat. He might’ve let it go, except he’d been bored out of his mind by the hours of pointless driving that achieved sodding nothing besides sending him on a premature return-to-sender loop like a problem package.
Right. He got out of the car with vampire stealth and approached the source of the sound. Friend or foe, he wanted in on the action. Bust a demon and rescue a damsel, break the conjuring circle of a dark witch or warlock, or forcibly end an ill-conceived teenage dare. Anyway, he’d get to stretch his legs and hopefully swing his fist a few times, easy peasy. After the fun, he’d take care of the unpleasant but necessary business of paying Anya a visit to make her ‘fess up about this fool’s errand.
An overwhelming sense of dread and confusion stopped him dead in his tracks when he got to the edge of the cemetery. His vampire senses were going haywire. Demon, vamp, human, god...nothing fit, nothing felt right, yet every cell in his reanimated body was screaming for attention.
He listened, half expecting to hear his own heartbeat for the violent wave of energy he felt pulsing through his body. The rhythm of the strange sound felt so close he could almost feel its impact under his feet. It’d slowed to long strokes punctured with sharp hits, like wood being struck with varying objects and strengths. A ritual of some kind, perhaps? He sniffed hard, and was greeted with the acrid scent of power in the air. Dark magic.
Welcome back to Sunnydale, indeed.
If he was smart, he’d hightail out of there, but, well, curiosity killed more than the cat. And he’d been many things, but never a coward, even when he hadn’t been much. So he resumed his cautious approach, bracing for an incoming attack while preparing to launch an ambush of his own.
A tombstone gleamed in the moonlight, coming into sight so suddenly it might as well have been dropped from the sky, and so close he stumbled a step back to make out the inscription. It bore words long since etched in his heart but somehow refused to form before his eyes just now, until with effort he sounded them out: “Bu-ffy Summers. Beloved sister, devoted friend. Sh-she saved the world. A lot.”
The remains of a bouquet of roses he’d left there a couple of weeks ago laid on disturbed soil, and he forced down blinding rage. He circled the tomb to better inspect the damage. What kind of a poxy pillock of a demon dared defile the tomb of the-
Tortured cries, feeble like the choked back sobs of a trapped animal, raspy like the crunch of dried leaves, added to the tapping, scratching, rattling, and kicking noises. They came from below, straight down the mushrooming soil under his feet, echoing in his ear. There was something familiar in the bone-dry voice-a woman’s, he realized in time-and recognition descended like a mental fog, a tick after the horror dawned. It was impossible, and yet-
Buffy?
It was the most peculiar and disturbing sensation, novel and violent like death. Only instead of the comfort of dissolving into a surcease of struggle, it progressed in intensity and simply went on, despite her protest. She had the feeling of being simultaneously summoned and dispersed, extracted and consumed, condensed and stretched, blasted into countless fragments to be distilled into a purer concentration, then poured into a new form, to fill a void that didn’t used to exist. The perverse separation of self from self. The crystallization of a pristine identity from the retelling of an old tale. What was leaving, and what would remain?
Then she was dropped into a prison, or a prison was forged around her, and she found herself (for that was all she had, what she was, right, herself?) struggling for comprehension, straining for freedom. The sense of loss was immense in her chest, and she became aware of her physical form that embodied all of its limitations and none of its power. It bound instead of enabled. It took from her instead of gave.
An urgency, something new-or maybe it’d always been there, she wasn’t sure of anything anymore-compelled her to inflate her lungs. The air that she anticipated rushing forward to greet her never materialized. Instead, she became aware of the vacuum around her, attempting to engulf her, breathe her in. Stars flashed behind her eyes (how strange-shouldn’t stars be in...Heaven?) while reality pressed in closer, with dirt and mold and damp full of the smell of death and decay and dread-
Screams died in her throat before she could mould them into sounds, shape them into words, transform intent into action. She lashed out at the confines of her prison, hands and knees and shoulders and feet, willing atrophied muscles into awkward efforts of self-preservation.
She came away with decomposing wood under her nails and fabrics dissolving in her grasps like spider silk. But the walls of the prison held, ironclad for all of her desperate attempt, despite the passage of time (and all the worms) that had been eating away at its defenses. Did she manage to call for help? Was there a response to her call at all? Certainty was such a luxury when she doubted her own existence, questioned her own identity.
Just before she succumbed to the fog of confusion that had settled over everything like a bell jar of frosted glass, a thought or a memory, a dream or a prophecy, flashed behind her eyes and brought with it a measure of peace:
Death is your gift.
Reason abandoned him. Coherence was beyond reach. No space for thought or hesitation, only instinct. With a roar that split the night air, animalistic and raw, Spike threw himself onto the soil that trapped his Slayer, unable to bear the separation a second longer. With ferocious force and a demon’s tenacity, he attacked her grave with his bare hands. Fingernails, no match for the dry soil, first peeled back from the trauma then broke away; rocks and other uninvestigated sharp objects tore at his hands and arms. But he remained undeterred, his motion a rush of blur even for his vamp vision. If there was any chance, any at all…
Dirt was everywhere: in his clothes, his hair, his eyelashes, his flared nostrils, his opened mouth, even between his gritted teeth. At some point he tasted blood, and had to force himself to unclench-he’d been biting the inside of his cheek to prevent himself from crying out loud.
He didn’t think a sobbing mess of a rescuer would help calm what must be a scared and confused Buffy.
He spat out a mouthful of dirt to make himself audible, and managed to slur out, “Hang on!” He’d regained enough of his senses to remember to say something reassuring. “Hang on, love, Gonna get you out!”
No response reassured him in return.
His vision became obstructed, blurred, then resolidified, cleared by tears he didn’t realize were streaming down his face. Memories of the shock of awakening to discover his own entombment and fighting his way out of the coffin as a newly risen fledgling overlaid his vision. They brought back a wave of nausea and dizzying flashes of subsequent nightmares of being buried alive that’d taken him decades to shake off.
“Fuck!” Frustration mingled with fear, and panic swept through him like he was dust in an arctic wind. Fear that he’d fail this rescue attempt too, that giving his all wouldn’t be enough, that just when he’d made peace with Buffy’s death, he’d found more to lose. Even with vamp strength, digging a grave with one’s bare hands was apparently slow work. Time was not on his side. How the Hell did she end up coming back to life in her own sodding grave?
He kicked the ground in a blinding fury, and it dipped with a muffled crack. Inspired, he rained a series of kicks that’d intimidate the best of martial arts masters on the same squishy spot, until one foot met a sharp resistance that shattered a second later, and his leg sank down to his knee. Breakthrough.
“Buffy!” he managed to choke out. Retracting his leg, Spike dropped down flat on the coffin lid to peer through the hole made by the substantial heel of his Doc Martens, then stuck one hand in. It unclenched and flexed with unnatural stiffness, something he didn’t have time to investigate then.
He reached into the coffin and felt around for...what? Oh, God, was he expecting the touch of the fabrics of her clothes? Human flesh? Of course she’d be human, wouldn’t she? Otherwise what exactly had been stirring in her coffin? He realized that he’d been dodging rightful questions, delaying their answers. Because if any of it was Buffy, then he wouldn’t- He couldn’t- Nobody should expect him to-
“Slayer!” He clamped down on his mutinous thoughts. Not bloody now. Not nearly helpful. “Buffy!” he tried again. Silence was his only response, which only twisted another round on the knot in his stomach. Now that he had a jagged edge to apply leverage, he made short work of the remaining lid, smashing most of it and sending pieces of wood airborne. One of his fists emerged looking like a pincushion, with sharp fragments of wood sticking out in every which way. He shook it like dismissing a nuisance; it was a small price to pay for the rescue of his unlife. For Buffy, he’d move the sun and the moon, let alone a mound of earth.
When, on his hands and knees, he finally managed to get an unconscious but definitely alive Buffy out (her heartbeat irregular but detectable), he couldn’t break his reverent silence. There she was, small and frail and barely alive and deathly still, a former ray of vibrant sunshine reduced to a ghostly shadow in the moonlight. Yet somehow, she still appeared to shine a dazzling brilliance. And he knew without a sliver of doubt, by the way his unbeating heart twisted and seemed to lurch in his throat, that he loved her-loved her before, and would go on loving her still-with every fiber of his being, demon and human.
He wanted to commit the night to memory. Demon recollection was both a blessing and a curse: no dying brain cells meant no deteriorating memories. Long after she was gone-after a ripe, long third lease on life, of course-he’d still be carrying this moment in his heart. It wouldn’t be nearly enough as having the real, living, breathing Buffy by his side, but it would be the next best thing. And one day, it would have to do.
But not now. Now… Overcome with emotion, he sputtered, but words remained impossible. He mouthed her name and shook her gently. Her heartbeat was uncomfortably low, but for something whose existence was a miracle to begin with, Spike thought it was the most hypnotizing music, set to the rhythm of the universe. When he realized he’d been holding his breath, he took quick, greedy gulps to fill his lungs in an imitation of life, letting the cold night air wash over and infuse him.
The pungent scent of fresh human blood assaulted his senses. He vamped out, unable to reign in the demon whose fury had powered him through the excavation with a boost in strength. A quick full-body inspection of his sleeping beauty revealed only superficial injuries: battered knuckles and fingers, bruise on the head, some cuts and scrapes here and there-injuries consistent with trying to bust out of one’s own coffin. He should know. Introspective thoughts over his loss of control were edged out by an overwhelming elation: human blood meant human body, and that meant-Buffy was back! She wasn’t a zombie or a vampire or a demon. She was human, and she was alive!
Beaming at her with unadulterated joy, he smoothed the tangled waves of her hair, brushed loose dirt off her shoulders, cupped her bloodied, broken hands with his, and drank her in with his hungry eyes all the way down to her toes (he’d lost her shoes in the scuffle).
“Oh, Buffy!” he murmured her name, the highest exaltation of his heart. His fingers felt magnetized to her; he needed to touch her, craving with desperation the physical confirmation of a vision made corporeal, a dream come true.
For all his adoration, he was slow to notice the unusual cool in her skin, the disturbing quiet of her chest, her ashen complexion, her blue lips.
Already, like the elusive dream that she embodied, lying inert, unconscious next to her open grave, so soon after her violent return to this world, Buffy was slipping away.
Tara came to with a shiver down her spine. The world was sideways, and dark. Not the kind of happy, fallen-asleep-in-her-mother’s-arms sideways darkness, but the kind that was disoriented and cold, with a chill that was soul-deep. She sat up and absentmindedly brushed off sand that’d been stuck to her temple, looking all around-
And her eyes widened at the sight of the unconscious forms of Willow, Xander and Anya, also on the floor of what she just realized was the back room at the Magic Box. She rushed to her friends and shook them, one by one, calling. None of them stirred.
Her mind racing, she tried to figure out how the four of them had come to be passed out at the Magic Box, with the lights off, but couldn’t begin to unravel her memories. They felt…tampered with, and trying to recall what happened was like trying to find a door while blindfolded. She knew it was there somewhere, but it continued to elude her. She had the frustrated suspicion that it stayed just out of touch, taunting her, snickering at her clumsiness.
Tara tried to rouse Willow again, and her fingers came away slick and sticky. Raising her hands right up to her face, she almost screamed when she realized that it had to be blood. A quick investigation of the source of the crunches beneath her shuffling feet uncovered shards of broken glass-the old-fashioned, non-safety kind. Had Willow cut herself in an accident? Too dizzy to stand, she scrambled on all fours into the hallway to reach the phone, struggling with leaden legs that dragged. She leaned on the wall to pull herself up in order to reach the wall-mounted receiver, wobbling unsteadily all the while. It took an inordinate amount of effort, but she managed to dial 9-1-1 on the keypad before she felt her legs give out from under her.
Clutching the phone to her chest like her last hope, Tara watched helplessly as the rest of the world dissolved around her.
In time, she grew aware of another invasion, the insistent nudging of life. Of the ebb and flow of breath, blowing away the previous heaviness in her chest. She had the distinct sensation of rising. Not the merciful transcendence of cease-to-be, more like the helplessness of a puppet being pulled by her strings. Like a Buffy puppet. Puppet Buffy. Buffy. That was her name, wasn’t it? Who she used to be.
She was too tired, too weak to be anything other than compliant, anything more than perfectly malleable. So she ceded control to the universe, and imagined herself as the everlasting pulse of the waves, a side effect of the moon’s orbit around the sun, a part of nature. With no designs of her own, no worries to-
A sound penetrated the roar of the ocean’s back-and-forth cycles, a voice, and she listened without interest. Clinging to the comfort in her passivity, she observed the mysteries of the universe without curiosity.
“Breathe, dammit! One one-thousand, two one-thousand, three one-thousand, four one-thousand, five bloody-thousand.”
She felt the tides rush in again, and waited for them to recede. Back and forth, a calming pattern.
But the voice took on a familiar shadow behind her eyes. A tingling of recognition gnawed at her consciousness. It awakened a mix of emotions battling for dominance. Strong ones, like fear, and a sense of safety, hate, and...not hate. The waves fell back, leaving behind fragments of memories, like shells glistening on the beach.
“Breathe, Slayer! You’re stronger than this! You’re the strongest bloody fighter I’ve ever met. Five one-thousand!”
This time when the tides came in they carried with them the awareness of cold lips pressing into her own, sealing around them, of oxygen being breathed into her mouth, of her cheeks inflating, of her nose being pinched closed, of the same oxygen flowing into her lungs, of her chest rising in response. Then the lips around hers were gone, and a sigh escaped from her parted lips.
“Come on, Buffy! You’re not going to fucking die on me. Not again! If a vampire can breathe against the laws of Nature, so can you!”
The mystery shattered, and dumbfounded by the discovery, she gasped, and took in a shaky inhale.
“There’s a good Slayer! Breathe! Buffy, can you hear me? Buffy?”
The waves receded for the last time, and reality rushed in. She felt a hand shake her by the shoulders, felt fingertips ghost the contour of her face. She felt the wind whip through her hair, ticklish around her chin. She felt the cold earth against her back and a hand snaking beneath her neck to cradle her body into a gentle recline. She felt sharp pain shooting down her body, all the way to her toes. She missed being the tides. But if she wasn’t a derivative of a physics equation, then she was…
Her eyes shot open. Inches away from her face, a pair of amber eyes resolved from twin blurs of light. They watched her with burning intensity from a demented face with a bumpy forehead and fangs that protruded from quivering lips, stretching them into a menacing smile. The face glistened with muddy tear tracks, a confusing picture of sharp angles and soft expression in the pale moonlight. The vampire choked back a cry, shaking loose some of the dirt covering his mop of shocking platinum curls in the process. He raised a mangled and bloodied hand to her face, then withdrew it after her eyes widened at the sight of it.
“Oh, thank God!” he said, trying to conceal his sniffles. His voice was thick through his fangs, thicker with emotion. And all too loud in the quiet night. “Gave me a right fright, you did! Thought my heart was going to burst!”
She was immobilized on the spot. He swallowed, letting out a shaky laugh. “You’ve dusted how many vampires now? Stake, fire, beheading, crossbow...bet you’ve never scared one to dust!”
Vampires. Demons. Monsters. She was back in this hopeless world. Back to this endless, thankless, inescapable, ultimate short-end of a destiny. Not even death had shielded her, had saved her.
She took a deep breath, the chilly night air burning all the way down, like needles. She was still getting used to having to breathe repeatedly, regularly, not just for now or for a little while, but for the rest of her life. Then the one after that.
So she did the only thing that made sense. She summoned all of her strength, and screamed.
~ To be continued... ~
End note:
Read the lyrics for “Too Tough to Die” at:
http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/ramones/tootoughtodie.html
Listen on YouTube at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRAha8VLs4E
Author: feliciacraft
Chapter Rating: R
Characters (for this chapter): Spike, Buffy, Tara
Summary: AU S6, Buffy is resurrected.
Betas: The absolutely brilliant EffulgentlyDani and All4Spike.
Length: 3,600 words
Feedback: Yes, please!!
Title taken from the 16th century song "Come Again, sweet love doth now invite" by John Dowland:
Come again! sweet love doth now invite
Thy graces that refrain
To do me due delight,
To see, to hear, to touch, to kiss, to die,
With thee again in sweetest sympathy.
Come again! that I may cease to mourn
Through thy unkind disdain;
For now left and forlorn
I sit, I sigh, I weep, I faint, I die
In deadly pain and endless misery.
[Read previous chapters on LiveJournal, at AO3, and at Elysian Fields (EF requires login)]
Chapter 11. To Do Me Due Delight
Spike cranked up the radio with a generous twist of the volume dial and filled the night air with the unreserved howls of the Ramones. Fucking station had the nerve to call itself the “Oldies,” as if classics like the Ramones would ever age. He liked the song, too, an underrated latter day number called, ironically in hindsight, Too Tough to Die. It took only a moment for him to recall the lyrics, and he roared along with not a shred of self-consciousness, the demon in him too cool for wasted emotions as social anxieties.
Main attraction in a freak side show
Down in the basement where the cobwebs grow
On my last leg just gettin' by
Halo round my head too tough to die
For all his audacity, Spike was disappointed that there was not a soul around to witness his karaoke mastery. Bloody shame. Fact was, the closer he got to Sunnydale, the deader it got on the two-lane road. Sunnydalitis notwithstanding, people consciously or unconsciously avoided unnecessary trips out of the safety of their homes at night.
I am a tu tu tu tu tu tu tu tu tough tough guy
Halo round my head too tough to die
Too soon, the song proved not too tough to die after all, and it segued into a commercial. He switched off the radio, the better for continuing his solo of the chorus, fingers drumming on the steering wheel on beat.
Some other rhythmic tapping tripped his vampire hearing, not quite “tu tu tu tu,” more of a scritch scratch thumpity thump, but no less energetic. He went on instant alert, engaging all of his predatory senses and pulling the car to a gradual stop where he thought the sound came loudest through the trees. The repetition sped up, seemingly growing desperate by the second.
Spike looked about him. It was the outskirts of Sunnydale, no real landmarks to speak of. Just a roadside cultivated wood that no doubt led to a cemetery, the first of so many that spread through the town like a game of divide and conquer with the undead challenging the living. Whoever was out here at this hour was either up to no good, or about to be turned into dead meat. He might’ve let it go, except he’d been bored out of his mind by the hours of pointless driving that achieved sodding nothing besides sending him on a premature return-to-sender loop like a problem package.
Right. He got out of the car with vampire stealth and approached the source of the sound. Friend or foe, he wanted in on the action. Bust a demon and rescue a damsel, break the conjuring circle of a dark witch or warlock, or forcibly end an ill-conceived teenage dare. Anyway, he’d get to stretch his legs and hopefully swing his fist a few times, easy peasy. After the fun, he’d take care of the unpleasant but necessary business of paying Anya a visit to make her ‘fess up about this fool’s errand.
An overwhelming sense of dread and confusion stopped him dead in his tracks when he got to the edge of the cemetery. His vampire senses were going haywire. Demon, vamp, human, god...nothing fit, nothing felt right, yet every cell in his reanimated body was screaming for attention.
He listened, half expecting to hear his own heartbeat for the violent wave of energy he felt pulsing through his body. The rhythm of the strange sound felt so close he could almost feel its impact under his feet. It’d slowed to long strokes punctured with sharp hits, like wood being struck with varying objects and strengths. A ritual of some kind, perhaps? He sniffed hard, and was greeted with the acrid scent of power in the air. Dark magic.
Welcome back to Sunnydale, indeed.
If he was smart, he’d hightail out of there, but, well, curiosity killed more than the cat. And he’d been many things, but never a coward, even when he hadn’t been much. So he resumed his cautious approach, bracing for an incoming attack while preparing to launch an ambush of his own.
A tombstone gleamed in the moonlight, coming into sight so suddenly it might as well have been dropped from the sky, and so close he stumbled a step back to make out the inscription. It bore words long since etched in his heart but somehow refused to form before his eyes just now, until with effort he sounded them out: “Bu-ffy Summers. Beloved sister, devoted friend. Sh-she saved the world. A lot.”
The remains of a bouquet of roses he’d left there a couple of weeks ago laid on disturbed soil, and he forced down blinding rage. He circled the tomb to better inspect the damage. What kind of a poxy pillock of a demon dared defile the tomb of the-
Tortured cries, feeble like the choked back sobs of a trapped animal, raspy like the crunch of dried leaves, added to the tapping, scratching, rattling, and kicking noises. They came from below, straight down the mushrooming soil under his feet, echoing in his ear. There was something familiar in the bone-dry voice-a woman’s, he realized in time-and recognition descended like a mental fog, a tick after the horror dawned. It was impossible, and yet-
Buffy?
It was the most peculiar and disturbing sensation, novel and violent like death. Only instead of the comfort of dissolving into a surcease of struggle, it progressed in intensity and simply went on, despite her protest. She had the feeling of being simultaneously summoned and dispersed, extracted and consumed, condensed and stretched, blasted into countless fragments to be distilled into a purer concentration, then poured into a new form, to fill a void that didn’t used to exist. The perverse separation of self from self. The crystallization of a pristine identity from the retelling of an old tale. What was leaving, and what would remain?
Then she was dropped into a prison, or a prison was forged around her, and she found herself (for that was all she had, what she was, right, herself?) struggling for comprehension, straining for freedom. The sense of loss was immense in her chest, and she became aware of her physical form that embodied all of its limitations and none of its power. It bound instead of enabled. It took from her instead of gave.
An urgency, something new-or maybe it’d always been there, she wasn’t sure of anything anymore-compelled her to inflate her lungs. The air that she anticipated rushing forward to greet her never materialized. Instead, she became aware of the vacuum around her, attempting to engulf her, breathe her in. Stars flashed behind her eyes (how strange-shouldn’t stars be in...Heaven?) while reality pressed in closer, with dirt and mold and damp full of the smell of death and decay and dread-
Screams died in her throat before she could mould them into sounds, shape them into words, transform intent into action. She lashed out at the confines of her prison, hands and knees and shoulders and feet, willing atrophied muscles into awkward efforts of self-preservation.
She came away with decomposing wood under her nails and fabrics dissolving in her grasps like spider silk. But the walls of the prison held, ironclad for all of her desperate attempt, despite the passage of time (and all the worms) that had been eating away at its defenses. Did she manage to call for help? Was there a response to her call at all? Certainty was such a luxury when she doubted her own existence, questioned her own identity.
Just before she succumbed to the fog of confusion that had settled over everything like a bell jar of frosted glass, a thought or a memory, a dream or a prophecy, flashed behind her eyes and brought with it a measure of peace:
Death is your gift.
Reason abandoned him. Coherence was beyond reach. No space for thought or hesitation, only instinct. With a roar that split the night air, animalistic and raw, Spike threw himself onto the soil that trapped his Slayer, unable to bear the separation a second longer. With ferocious force and a demon’s tenacity, he attacked her grave with his bare hands. Fingernails, no match for the dry soil, first peeled back from the trauma then broke away; rocks and other uninvestigated sharp objects tore at his hands and arms. But he remained undeterred, his motion a rush of blur even for his vamp vision. If there was any chance, any at all…
Dirt was everywhere: in his clothes, his hair, his eyelashes, his flared nostrils, his opened mouth, even between his gritted teeth. At some point he tasted blood, and had to force himself to unclench-he’d been biting the inside of his cheek to prevent himself from crying out loud.
He didn’t think a sobbing mess of a rescuer would help calm what must be a scared and confused Buffy.
He spat out a mouthful of dirt to make himself audible, and managed to slur out, “Hang on!” He’d regained enough of his senses to remember to say something reassuring. “Hang on, love, Gonna get you out!”
No response reassured him in return.
His vision became obstructed, blurred, then resolidified, cleared by tears he didn’t realize were streaming down his face. Memories of the shock of awakening to discover his own entombment and fighting his way out of the coffin as a newly risen fledgling overlaid his vision. They brought back a wave of nausea and dizzying flashes of subsequent nightmares of being buried alive that’d taken him decades to shake off.
“Fuck!” Frustration mingled with fear, and panic swept through him like he was dust in an arctic wind. Fear that he’d fail this rescue attempt too, that giving his all wouldn’t be enough, that just when he’d made peace with Buffy’s death, he’d found more to lose. Even with vamp strength, digging a grave with one’s bare hands was apparently slow work. Time was not on his side. How the Hell did she end up coming back to life in her own sodding grave?
He kicked the ground in a blinding fury, and it dipped with a muffled crack. Inspired, he rained a series of kicks that’d intimidate the best of martial arts masters on the same squishy spot, until one foot met a sharp resistance that shattered a second later, and his leg sank down to his knee. Breakthrough.
“Buffy!” he managed to choke out. Retracting his leg, Spike dropped down flat on the coffin lid to peer through the hole made by the substantial heel of his Doc Martens, then stuck one hand in. It unclenched and flexed with unnatural stiffness, something he didn’t have time to investigate then.
He reached into the coffin and felt around for...what? Oh, God, was he expecting the touch of the fabrics of her clothes? Human flesh? Of course she’d be human, wouldn’t she? Otherwise what exactly had been stirring in her coffin? He realized that he’d been dodging rightful questions, delaying their answers. Because if any of it was Buffy, then he wouldn’t- He couldn’t- Nobody should expect him to-
“Slayer!” He clamped down on his mutinous thoughts. Not bloody now. Not nearly helpful. “Buffy!” he tried again. Silence was his only response, which only twisted another round on the knot in his stomach. Now that he had a jagged edge to apply leverage, he made short work of the remaining lid, smashing most of it and sending pieces of wood airborne. One of his fists emerged looking like a pincushion, with sharp fragments of wood sticking out in every which way. He shook it like dismissing a nuisance; it was a small price to pay for the rescue of his unlife. For Buffy, he’d move the sun and the moon, let alone a mound of earth.
When, on his hands and knees, he finally managed to get an unconscious but definitely alive Buffy out (her heartbeat irregular but detectable), he couldn’t break his reverent silence. There she was, small and frail and barely alive and deathly still, a former ray of vibrant sunshine reduced to a ghostly shadow in the moonlight. Yet somehow, she still appeared to shine a dazzling brilliance. And he knew without a sliver of doubt, by the way his unbeating heart twisted and seemed to lurch in his throat, that he loved her-loved her before, and would go on loving her still-with every fiber of his being, demon and human.
He wanted to commit the night to memory. Demon recollection was both a blessing and a curse: no dying brain cells meant no deteriorating memories. Long after she was gone-after a ripe, long third lease on life, of course-he’d still be carrying this moment in his heart. It wouldn’t be nearly enough as having the real, living, breathing Buffy by his side, but it would be the next best thing. And one day, it would have to do.
But not now. Now… Overcome with emotion, he sputtered, but words remained impossible. He mouthed her name and shook her gently. Her heartbeat was uncomfortably low, but for something whose existence was a miracle to begin with, Spike thought it was the most hypnotizing music, set to the rhythm of the universe. When he realized he’d been holding his breath, he took quick, greedy gulps to fill his lungs in an imitation of life, letting the cold night air wash over and infuse him.
The pungent scent of fresh human blood assaulted his senses. He vamped out, unable to reign in the demon whose fury had powered him through the excavation with a boost in strength. A quick full-body inspection of his sleeping beauty revealed only superficial injuries: battered knuckles and fingers, bruise on the head, some cuts and scrapes here and there-injuries consistent with trying to bust out of one’s own coffin. He should know. Introspective thoughts over his loss of control were edged out by an overwhelming elation: human blood meant human body, and that meant-Buffy was back! She wasn’t a zombie or a vampire or a demon. She was human, and she was alive!
Beaming at her with unadulterated joy, he smoothed the tangled waves of her hair, brushed loose dirt off her shoulders, cupped her bloodied, broken hands with his, and drank her in with his hungry eyes all the way down to her toes (he’d lost her shoes in the scuffle).
“Oh, Buffy!” he murmured her name, the highest exaltation of his heart. His fingers felt magnetized to her; he needed to touch her, craving with desperation the physical confirmation of a vision made corporeal, a dream come true.
For all his adoration, he was slow to notice the unusual cool in her skin, the disturbing quiet of her chest, her ashen complexion, her blue lips.
Already, like the elusive dream that she embodied, lying inert, unconscious next to her open grave, so soon after her violent return to this world, Buffy was slipping away.
Tara came to with a shiver down her spine. The world was sideways, and dark. Not the kind of happy, fallen-asleep-in-her-mother’s-arms sideways darkness, but the kind that was disoriented and cold, with a chill that was soul-deep. She sat up and absentmindedly brushed off sand that’d been stuck to her temple, looking all around-
And her eyes widened at the sight of the unconscious forms of Willow, Xander and Anya, also on the floor of what she just realized was the back room at the Magic Box. She rushed to her friends and shook them, one by one, calling. None of them stirred.
Her mind racing, she tried to figure out how the four of them had come to be passed out at the Magic Box, with the lights off, but couldn’t begin to unravel her memories. They felt…tampered with, and trying to recall what happened was like trying to find a door while blindfolded. She knew it was there somewhere, but it continued to elude her. She had the frustrated suspicion that it stayed just out of touch, taunting her, snickering at her clumsiness.
Tara tried to rouse Willow again, and her fingers came away slick and sticky. Raising her hands right up to her face, she almost screamed when she realized that it had to be blood. A quick investigation of the source of the crunches beneath her shuffling feet uncovered shards of broken glass-the old-fashioned, non-safety kind. Had Willow cut herself in an accident? Too dizzy to stand, she scrambled on all fours into the hallway to reach the phone, struggling with leaden legs that dragged. She leaned on the wall to pull herself up in order to reach the wall-mounted receiver, wobbling unsteadily all the while. It took an inordinate amount of effort, but she managed to dial 9-1-1 on the keypad before she felt her legs give out from under her.
Clutching the phone to her chest like her last hope, Tara watched helplessly as the rest of the world dissolved around her.
In time, she grew aware of another invasion, the insistent nudging of life. Of the ebb and flow of breath, blowing away the previous heaviness in her chest. She had the distinct sensation of rising. Not the merciful transcendence of cease-to-be, more like the helplessness of a puppet being pulled by her strings. Like a Buffy puppet. Puppet Buffy. Buffy. That was her name, wasn’t it? Who she used to be.
She was too tired, too weak to be anything other than compliant, anything more than perfectly malleable. So she ceded control to the universe, and imagined herself as the everlasting pulse of the waves, a side effect of the moon’s orbit around the sun, a part of nature. With no designs of her own, no worries to-
A sound penetrated the roar of the ocean’s back-and-forth cycles, a voice, and she listened without interest. Clinging to the comfort in her passivity, she observed the mysteries of the universe without curiosity.
“Breathe, dammit! One one-thousand, two one-thousand, three one-thousand, four one-thousand, five bloody-thousand.”
She felt the tides rush in again, and waited for them to recede. Back and forth, a calming pattern.
But the voice took on a familiar shadow behind her eyes. A tingling of recognition gnawed at her consciousness. It awakened a mix of emotions battling for dominance. Strong ones, like fear, and a sense of safety, hate, and...not hate. The waves fell back, leaving behind fragments of memories, like shells glistening on the beach.
“Breathe, Slayer! You’re stronger than this! You’re the strongest bloody fighter I’ve ever met. Five one-thousand!”
This time when the tides came in they carried with them the awareness of cold lips pressing into her own, sealing around them, of oxygen being breathed into her mouth, of her cheeks inflating, of her nose being pinched closed, of the same oxygen flowing into her lungs, of her chest rising in response. Then the lips around hers were gone, and a sigh escaped from her parted lips.
“Come on, Buffy! You’re not going to fucking die on me. Not again! If a vampire can breathe against the laws of Nature, so can you!”
The mystery shattered, and dumbfounded by the discovery, she gasped, and took in a shaky inhale.
“There’s a good Slayer! Breathe! Buffy, can you hear me? Buffy?”
The waves receded for the last time, and reality rushed in. She felt a hand shake her by the shoulders, felt fingertips ghost the contour of her face. She felt the wind whip through her hair, ticklish around her chin. She felt the cold earth against her back and a hand snaking beneath her neck to cradle her body into a gentle recline. She felt sharp pain shooting down her body, all the way to her toes. She missed being the tides. But if she wasn’t a derivative of a physics equation, then she was…
Her eyes shot open. Inches away from her face, a pair of amber eyes resolved from twin blurs of light. They watched her with burning intensity from a demented face with a bumpy forehead and fangs that protruded from quivering lips, stretching them into a menacing smile. The face glistened with muddy tear tracks, a confusing picture of sharp angles and soft expression in the pale moonlight. The vampire choked back a cry, shaking loose some of the dirt covering his mop of shocking platinum curls in the process. He raised a mangled and bloodied hand to her face, then withdrew it after her eyes widened at the sight of it.
“Oh, thank God!” he said, trying to conceal his sniffles. His voice was thick through his fangs, thicker with emotion. And all too loud in the quiet night. “Gave me a right fright, you did! Thought my heart was going to burst!”
She was immobilized on the spot. He swallowed, letting out a shaky laugh. “You’ve dusted how many vampires now? Stake, fire, beheading, crossbow...bet you’ve never scared one to dust!”
Vampires. Demons. Monsters. She was back in this hopeless world. Back to this endless, thankless, inescapable, ultimate short-end of a destiny. Not even death had shielded her, had saved her.
She took a deep breath, the chilly night air burning all the way down, like needles. She was still getting used to having to breathe repeatedly, regularly, not just for now or for a little while, but for the rest of her life. Then the one after that.
So she did the only thing that made sense. She summoned all of her strength, and screamed.
~ To be continued... ~
End note:
Read the lyrics for “Too Tough to Die” at:
http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/ramones/tootoughtodie.html
Listen on YouTube at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRAha8VLs4E