All the Things That Are Lost - Ch. 9
Summary: Post-NFA. When Buffy discovers that Spike survived the destruction of Sunnydale, she heads to L.A. looking for answers; however, her search leads her to a strange place that is more than a world away.
Previous chapters here
Author's Sad Note of Apology: Better late than never, right? Right? (Eep. I'm sorry.)
This chapter's title "The Dragon and the Undying" is borrowed from the title of a poem by Siegfried Sassoon. The poem doesn't have anything in common with this story, except that I like Sassoon's poetry, and thought, "Hey, that would be a good chapter title."
And then I was hit by a car and lapsed into a coma for 6 months, which is why this chapter is so late. Okay, so that's a lie. The truth is, I just live in a slow timezone... :-) Actually, life got busy, I got stressed out and stopped writing, and then had a hard time starting up again. I'm sad to say I don't have a better excuse than that.
Large chunks of italicization = flashback.
Disclaimer: The characters of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Angel” belong to Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy. The original characters are my fault. No copyright infringement intended, and as this is posted for free, and read for free, nobody is losing any money. Suing me won’t make you any money either (wah! see my puny bank account!), so let’s just not.
All the Things That Are Lost
Chapter 9: The Dragon & The Undying
The strobe light of memory - the cold rain-slicked, blood-slicked alleyway that was awash with death; the expansive, explosive pressure of the portal appearing above, around, beneath them; blinding, swallowing them whole.
Raw. An almost incomprehensible raw-edged tattered state of being... as if caught up in a saw-toothed jaw, beneath the crushing bite of a molar not meant to tear. Friend and foe were packed together in some dark, tiny, voiceless nightmare corner of the universe. Compression, ribs beginning to splinter and crack. No room for blood, air, marrow or memory. Flatten and fold and pressed smaller, always smaller. Pushed to the very edge, to the end of self. End of everything.
And then - pop! - back into existence, back into wholeness, back as if everything that had just happened had been only one instant’s bad dream, and they were through the portal - it was spitting them out into a place he didn’t know - to a place where the earth shuddered and pitched in angry tremors beneath them, and the dark sky rippled with sheets of unnatural lightning - elsewhen, elsewhere.
Hordes of demons. Hordes. All the hosts of hell, all screaming bloody murder.
Gunn, stumbling and falling for the final time, struck down, spitting blood and breathing his last - killed by a swordstroke and the night’s accumulation of injuries. Humans were fragile, Illyria said. They lived for but a moment, and died in the blinking of an eye. She was angered, she declared, grieved; she was not herself. And she left Gunn’s side and waded out into the onslaught, killing with her bare hands, lethal destruction, and the chaotic throng of demons parted briefly like waves below her then swallowed her from sight.
And Angel... Angel seemed to go mad, insane with grief. Perhaps he’d lost too much and too many in his cause; perhaps he’d decided his holy crusade against Wolfram & Hart was the only thing he had left. Dark indomitable ferocity - steel and fang and fist - he turned in the other direction and fought his way to the dragon. Dragon. Mad. Insane. No one could defeat such a thing. A brief remembrance of history and legend flared in his mind - Saint George. Yes, Saint George slew the dragon. But they were none of them saints. Angel said soul or no soul, they were all damned - all of them - but he would not go down without a fight.
Spike followed him. Steel and fang and fist, he followed Angel. What else could he do? And the great beast lifted head, beat wings, a terrifying intelligence sparking in those cold-fire eyes. Chilled the blood. But Angel marched forward, his sword held high and righteous against it as the dragon roared, and Spike moved to follow, only at the last second catching sight of that great barbed tail sweeping toward him from the side, too swiftly to evade, and-
The world exploded within him and around him. Felt a dizzying rush of movement, even though his body was no longer capable of movement, a blur as he tumbled through the air and came crashing down to land on his broken back upon the ground, bleeding out from his punctured sides. Agony. Almost unendurable. Couldn’t staunch his wounds, couldn’t move fingers, couldn’t move legs, couldn’t turn his head, couldn’t even howl out his pain, because the voice needed air from the lungs to function, and those were paralyzed too. Useless. Lay there in a perfect imitation of undead death, while Angel fought on, screaming in rage, in bottomless fury, the hacking movements of his sword as he fought only just visible from the corner of Spike’s fixed gaze. The dragon loomed overlarge, a hulking giant that towered over its sole opponent.
Angel cried out. A different cry. Pain, desolation, ruination. “Spike...!”
Spike couldn’t see him. Couldn’t see. The dark shadow that was the dragon moved, the wind from its wings whipping great gusts of dust and sand that blustered over the corpses on the battlefield - the dragon took to the sky and flew away. Whole and undefeated.
Devastation. Utter and complete.
Strange demons stalked slowly through the carnage of the battlefield. One paused to consider him, then thrust a sword through his sternum. No movement, no sound, not even a twitch of the eyes to betray him, and they continued on their way, leaving him for dead while his few undamaged nerve endings were screaming such excruciating torment that he wanted to be able to die.
The hush that began to settle around him was broken only by the choking, moaning death rattles of the fatally wounded left to perish. Soon enough, they all fell silent. Sand rained into his face and his eyes, the night wind blowing, and the small coherent corner of his mind still functioning wondered if he could possibly endure this until morning, when the sunrise would mercifully put an end to him.
He’d lost track of time, was scarcely aware of anything outside his own pain, when footsteps came rustling through the sand, another shadow drawing near.
Illyria leaned overtop him. “You exist still,” her clear tones crisp and biting. “I have retrieved Angel’s sword,” she said, lifting the bright, bloodstained blade into view, “but he is gone. They must have taken him. I know not where.” She reached down, and some of the dirt and the sand fell away as she turned his head towards her. Her own face and form marked all over with blood and ruin, but the intensity of her gaze was undimmed. “You are wounded, vampire. But I will bring you with me, and you will heal.”
And the last thing he recalled before his senses shattered completely was Illyria leaning forward to pick him up.
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A small hand pressed firmly upon the side of his face, a voice commanding him to wake and listen. Power and demand. He fought the lethargy, his eyes opening to a hazy blur he could not quite comprehend, and listened.
“You are not healing as you should.” Illyria’s voice, full of censure and displeasure. “Time passes and you do but linger in this fashion. Why?”
Why? The question trickled slowly through his consciousness. Why? Because he’d lost too much blood to retain his strength, and his injuries were too severe to heal without blood. He was trapped in that futile state of half-life where all his remaining energy was expended on merely existing, with none left to spare for healing. “Bl... blood,” he whispered, having to force his lungs to expel enough air to make the words audible, and even that small task exhausted him. “Can’t heal... without...”
“You require blood.”
Of course. A vampire could go on for a long long time without falling into dust, but some injuries were too extreme to overcome without sustenance. And he remembered the dragon - massive, monstrous, with sharp shiny teeth and long bony pikes lining that serpentine tail that twitched back and forth... Twitched, and cracked like eggshells, all the bones in his back. What had become of Angel, he wondered distractedly, and tried, irrationally, to call his name. Angel. Angelus. Why aren’t you here? Where-
A firm grasp at the back of his neck. Illyria, he realized. Illyria. ‘You break so easily,’ she’d told him once, maybe not so long ago, as she knocked him to the floor during one of their sparring sessions with a single negligent gesture. ‘Why do you bother getting back up?’ He knew he couldn’t have got up now, not on his own, because now he was broken... well and truly broken...
But Illyria lifted him up and held him close without chastising. Though the touch of her hands on his ruined back was near torture, her body was a contradictory blend of softness and steel. He breathed to catch the scent of her - a peculiar intermixture of human and an exotic otherness. The body itself was still nominally human, but that scent was overlaid with a dissimilar essence - not the familiar demonic pungency, but the disconcerting sensation of something far older, puissant...
She tipped his head, turned it toward her and pressed it firmly against the vein she had opened on the side of her neck.
A spasm of shock. Not at all like the honey-sweetness of human blood, but fraught with a potent corrosive strength that seized him and rattled against his nerve endings to the point of sensory overload. He couldn’t tell whether he was drinking it in or drowning in it. Blood and fire and the end of the world...
He lost himself in that chaos, until her voice came again, like the sound of thunder in his veins. “Rest now,” she ordered with stern authority, as she let him loose, laying him down once more, and his head was whirling, sinking him swiftly back into unconsciousness. “I will tend to you until you are healed.”
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That dream again - the memories of the battle that had brought them here - why was he dreaming of that again? Spike wondered, stirring as he began to regain consciousness, and falling still when his pained limbs protested a little too strongly.
No matter how much time had passed, it seemed that night’s memories still haunted him, that dragon prowled relentlessly through his restive mind. Illyria - the taste of her - like metal and fire, forged in a white-hot furnace, and burning painfully against his sharpened teeth. The harrowing torment of his shattered spine. Angel’s despair. That sound he had made in his throat, before he disappeared, vanished, was carried away or eaten or whatever had become of him. Always, Angel’s despair, unfurling like black wings that shadowed everything.
And... “...Buffy?” Opening his eyes in the same moment that he mumbled her name, he woke to find himself alone. Strange that he’d dreamt of her... of Buffy. He didn’t so much anymore - tried not to, anyway. And when he did, it was usually distant and regretful.
But there’d been such a surreal vividness to this dream - not taking place in her happy little world of white picket fences, she’d been here, fighting a losing battle against demons in the scorching heat of the Kotulka deserts; she’d been leaning over him, speaking to him, smiling down at him. And for a delirious instant, some small piece of him had almost expected to open his eyes and find that it was true.
No Buffy, which was not surprising.
No Illyria, which was a bit surprising. But, catching sight of Puffin’s barbellate form hunched unobtrusively by the entrance, he felt his tension ease somewhat. He recognized the surroundings. This was one of the abandoned ruins at Chutna - it was one of Illyria’s more secretive hiding places, which she used sparingly - too close, she always said, to other nexus of power, too near to enemy eyes. If they were holed up here, things must still be a bit dicey. On the other hand, if she’d left Puffin on watch, the situation couldn’t be too dire. And she was never gone for too long, anyway.
Deciding to wait for Illyria to come back and update him on current events, Spike let his head drop back down, briefly closing his eyes.
“Must have given me a double-dose this time,” he muttered to himself, trying to suppress the headache buzzing around his skull. Illyria’s blood was a powerful restorative - maybe more than a little too potent for him, but it wasn’t like he had a lot of alternatives.
Even so, the fever-dreams and resultant hangovers were a bit of a drawback. At this point, if he were given a choice, he’d rather not remember the past quite so clearly: Fred’s tragic and senseless death, Angel’s doomed crusade... What had they been thinking, to choose to go out and die in a battle they couldn’t possibly win? They hadn’t died, but they hadn’t won either.
More to the point, why did he keep doing it? Going out to be broken on the battlefield, and pieced back together, again and again, by Illyria, who was the only unbreakable thing left in his life. Thoughts of Prometheus and Sisyphus passed through his unsettled mind, and Spike briefly wondered if perhaps Angel had been right; if they had all been doomed to hell, then maybe this was it, and each of them was now walking that road.
And then gave a derisive snort, which sent a spasm of pain rippling through his midsection. “Ow! Bloody hell, that hurts...” Served him right. All that philosophical moodiness had always been Angel’s bit - in Spike, it was a sure sign of a concussion. If he didn’t snap out of it and get off his sorry arse before Illyria returned, she’d get to yammering on about the feebleness of vampires and all of the other not-God-King-like creatures of the world, and his head ached too much at the moment to even consider listening to that speech again.
Spike groaned as he slowly coaxed his body up into a sitting position - muscles strained and twinged complainingly, but nothing tore. Couldn’t ask for much more than that. And then stopped and stared with goggling incomprehension at the bandages wrapped efficiently about his arm and his side. A long, ragged swath of lace-trimmed fabric, looking almost as if it had been ripped from a piece of women’s clothing. He hadn’t seen lace since-
Taking a deep breath, he scented the air. “Buffy...?!” That wasn’t possible... was it? Tried to look every which way at once, which only made him dizzy, and he cursed as he toppled clumsily onto one elbow. “Puffin,” he yowled pugnaciously, “where in the sodding hell are my clothes?!”
The small creature shifted at the sound of its name, turned to regard him with black glittering eyes, and chittered something in response. The curt reply either meant “right where you left them” or “stop yelling, you wanker.” Spike hadn’t quite got the hang of the finer points of its language yet, but for the time being, he didn’t have anyone else to shout at.
Spying his clothing piled up in the corner, he clumsily pulled out his boots and his pants, struggling to get dressed. But his balance wasn’t right, and the little shimmers of pain running along his nerve endings were threatening to cramp if he moved too quickly. Trying to ignore all of that, he focused on the thought of Buffy. Could it really be her? Didn’t seem possible... but that maddening scent still lingered in the air. Where was she? If she were here, then why wasn’t she here? He had to go out there and find her - damn it, if anything had happened to her...
Puffin bounced down from the steps, chattering again, and this time Spike understood perfectly. But he shook his head. “You can’t stop me,” he said, even as Puffin’s needlelike quills lifted and spread outwards like a giant bristly blowfish that was going to be more than a little difficult to get past. “It’s Buffy,” he insisted, as if that would mean anything to the small creature. “If she’s out there, I’m going.”
The sibilant hiss that came in response was a very definitive “no.”
Spike shifted his stance, letting his eyes flash golden, a rush of ferocity running through his veins as his body morphed into its more potent vampire form. Trying to draw strength from that giddy onrush of demonic power, even though he knew that in his present state that it wouldn’t be enough, he roared a challenge at the small creature.
Puffin did not give way, either sensing that there was very little substance beneath Spike’s bravado, or else simply determined to comply with whatever directives Illyria had placed upon it before leaving: most likely “protect” and “prevent.”
Damn babysitter.
Of course, if Puffin insisted on barring the way, there was little he could do about it. In his current condition, catching even a few of the poison-tipped quills would likely knock him flat. Nothing for it but to try to find another way out of here.
Unexpectedly, however, Puffin deflated, lowering its quills and sidling out of the way. Seizing his chance without question, Spike bounded past it and into the tunnel leading upward.
A deceptively slender figure barred the way, descending the stairs with imperious attitude. “Your caterwauling,” Illyria stated, “is clamorous enough to waken even the deaf and dead still slumbering within the Deeper Well. And it is,” she added with a disdainful sniff, “most ill befitting.”
“Spare me the sodding lecture, Miss Manners! Where is she? Where’s-” The demanding question died in his throat as he saw movement in the shadows behind Illyria. The unspoken words hissed out between his teeth like breath. No words.
In shocked surprise, he slipped back into human form, the sudden loss of his vampiric strength nearly toppling him. Even so, he scarcely noticed.
Almost illusory as she moved through the gloom, Buffy looked as insubstantial as any one of his memories: small and slim-limbed, the pale glow of her hair, and wide luminous eyes fixed on his... god, those eyes of hers. Expressive and unguarded in a way he hadn’t seen in ages - not closed - not veiled.
“Hey,” Buffy said, the subtle sound of a smile more than half-hidden in the odd brittleness of her voice. “You’re finally awake.”
Was he? The thought crossed his mind that he might be dreaming. That he’d obviously cracked his skull during the latest skirmish with the bad guys, and all of this was only a fragment of his muddled blood-fed fever-dreams. Might be. Must be.
But Illyria felt substantial enough beneath his grip as he pushed past her, moving up the narrow staircase.
And Buffy, when he caught disbelievingly at her hand, didn’t wither away as he touched her, didn’t vanish into a puff of wistful memory. Her skin was a bonfire beneath his fingertips, her pulse fluttering like a bird’s wings. His own heart seemed to lurch in response, as if recalling a distant memory of beating. “Buffy. I... can hardly believe it... You’re... here? I thought I was... I mean, how did you... How...”
Mercifully, Illyria interrupted his tongue-tied stammerings with a deeply irritated declaration: “You are obstructing the stairwell. It is irksome. Come in or go away.” And her footsteps stalked off in a firmly disapproving staccato.
“And I used to think that Kennedy was temperamental,” Buffy remarked in a perilous tone of voice that was tipping somewhere between amusement and aggravation. “Where did you find her?”
“We didn’t; she found us. Story for another time,” he said, cutting himself short as he abruptly registered the tremor running through Buffy’s limbs, and only then realized how pale she was. Bloody idiot. Too busy gawking like a fool to notice that she was injured. “Come on. Let’s get you inside.”
“I’m okay,” she murmured, but did not refuse his assistance, which meant she wasn’t. “Mostly okay,” she amended faintly. “Just waiting for the patented Slayer strength to kick in again. I’m expecting it... any minute now actually...”
What happened? He almost asked the question aloud, but his sluggish brain finally whirred back into action, suddenly starting to connect the dots. Abruptly, he recalled the quiet, still morning - couldn’t have been more than a day or two ago now - but it had been just after daybreak, and everything was bright and gleaming and oddly peaceful. They had been making their way through the wilds, hoping for a quick and uneventful crossing, when Illyria had suddenly halted in mid-stride, pivoting around as if in response to a summons only she could hear. “The door has opened,” she had said, with something like shock in her voice, “someone has come.”
He hadn’t grasped the import of her words, and his own questions had been unremarkable. “Which door? Where?”
“My door.” Such solemn emphasis. “The entrance into this plane of existence.” Her glassy eyes focused on invisible things. “The enemy has sent emissaries to attend to it.” With barely a pause, she then voiced her customary strategy: “We will intercept and destroy them.”
“Could be a trap,” he’d reminded her. Could be... but then again, the two of them were a bad influence on each other - she’d always been far too overconfident for her own good, with an appetite for destruction that greatly outstripped her size, and he’d never been able to resist a good brawl and the chance to settle a few scores. “Oh, what the hell,” he’d conceded, casting caution aside with a rakish grin. “Okay, let’s go bust some skulls. Lead on, MacDuff.”
Illyria had favoured him with the exceedingly skeptical look she reserved for his more baffling statements, but had said nothing. Merely stalked forward and gestured, ripping a glittering blue-white portal in the air - and once again he’d had to marvel at her effortless skill, at how much more powerful she’d grown here, in this place, as if it were a hothouse of mystical energy. Sometimes it worried him - sometimes he thought of her power outstripping her body, as it had once before, with nearly devastating results - and how would he save her, then? Wesley, like all the others, was gone...
But for now, anyway, her power was utterly within her control, and the portal she’d opened had dropped them into the midst of a pack of Grushnalk soldiers - hardy, hulking brutes that were sent out when bashing and smashing was the only diplomacy intended.
And Buffy had been there, fighting them.
Buffy. Impossible. Not her, and not here. Couldn’t be. Illusion or deception. Some kind of trap. And yet, even if it had been, he knew he’d still have walked right into it just the way he had. Because... Buffy. She’d always been his fatal flaw, and he’d never ever quite been able to turn his back on her.
Most of his adrenalin-charged memories of the battle had by now dissipated into a disorderly haze, but he didn’t need them to see that Buffy hadn’t escaped unscathed. Even in the shadow, he glimpsed the smudges of bruises marring her cheekbone and her jaw, a few scratches on her neck and many more on her arms. A bulky swath of fabric was bunched overtop her flimsy, shredded shirt in a makeshift bandage, and another wrapped around her leg; he could feel the shivers of exhaustion running through her as he helped her sit down.
“Are you all right, Buffy?”
“I’ve had better days,” she admitted after a pause, “but it’s nothing I can’t handle. I’ll get by.”
For a long moment he stared at her, disbelief still trying to overcome him. “Buffy... Buffy...” He was dumbfounded, mumbling her name over and over, and made an attempt to form a coherent sentence. “How did you get here, Buffy? Why did you come?”
“She is searching for Angel,” Illyria stated.
Some part of him was faintly amazed that those words didn’t cause him greater pain, but it had been a long time now, hadn’t it?, and maybe he’d finally accustomed himself to living without her. All he felt was a distant, muted ache. “Yeah. Aren’t we all,” he said, the words dry as dust in his throat.
“Angel?” Buffy repeated fuzzily, her voice lifting into a question. “Is he here?”
“No. No, he’s... not.” He dared to touch his hand lightly against her face, found it burning. “You’re feverish - shouldn’t be up and about like this.” His narrowed eyes flicked towards Illyria. “What were you doing? Where did you take her?”
“She required water,” Illyria replied evenly. “She had already consumed all that there was here.”
He thought of the long crumbling stairway winding upward in the dark, and an ailing Buffy having to climb it. “What, and you couldn’t just go on your own and bring some back here?”
“I do not stoop,” Illyria said very precisely, “to feed her.”
“We’re on a mountaintop,” Buffy interrupted in a vague confusion, not seeming to have noticed their quiet side conversation, and her voice sounded thready and stifled in the long darkness of the room. “I saw outside, it’s all cloud and stone - it felt cold. But there was a desert - what happened to the desert?”
“Illyria brought you here, to keep you safe,” he explained gently. “Don’t you remember?”
“But... what is this place?” Buffy persisted.
Spike hesitated, not sure whether she were asking about the cavernous chamber they’d temporarily settled in, or the larger frame of the world she’d fallen into.
Illyria, however, chose to answer only in the most concrete terms: “For the moment, it is sanctuary from prying eyes.”
“We think... it might have been some kind of temple,” he tried to explain, “or a place of learning, but whatever it was is a long time ago now...”
“Wise ones and holy fools,” Illyria agreed, her head swiveling round to gaze at the crumbling columns only just holding aloft the heavy roof overhead. “Here they sang songs of power, painted gaudy sigils and consulted with the stars. But now they are naught but bone and dust, and all their pale paintings are tarnished with the grime of many years.”
“Okaaay.” Buffy’s voice was uncertain. “And so you come here... why?”
“The stars still burn bright in the night sky,” Illyria replied stolidly, as if that were explanation enough. “I see the old ways.”
“Some of the protections still seem to hold,” Spike translated. “This place - seems like it’s a bit of a blind spot on the map. At any rate, the bad guys haven’t yet found us out here. But we don’t usually stay too long-”
“We have lingered overlong already,” Illyria chastised.
“Bad guys,” Buffy echoed, still seeming a little disoriented. “And just who are they?”
“You are replete with ignorance, and your enquiries are tedious. Is this your usual state, or were you damaged in combat?”
Buffy’s gaze sharpened noticeably, a spark of irritation momentarily overriding her fatigue. “You’re blue and funny-looking. Is that your usual state, or was there some big accident at the cosmetics factory?”
“Impertinent,” Illyria stated.
“Arrogant,” Buffy retorted.
“Right, then,” Spike interrupted, quickly moving to stand between them. A little too quickly, and tried not to flinch at the warning flash of pain in his side - had to try to remember he wasn’t anywhere near healed yet. “Glad to see that you two are getting on like houses on fire,” he said sourly. “Now that everyone’s just met, how about we try to not kill each other for a while yet? We’ve got more than enough to worry about as it is.”
“I am in no danger,” Illyria scoffed haughtily.
“Yeah? You bloody well will be if Gresalk’s people come kicking down the door,” he answered sharply. “Come on, Blue - you said it yourself: I’m not a hundred percent, and she’s not either. So let’s just find a safe place to bolt to, get there in one piece, and then we can argue about-”
“Wait.” Buffy caught a handful of his shirt as he started to move away from her. “Spike. We have to talk.” Her fingers shaking as they knotted in the fabric.
Words he wanted to ask: Are you sure? Are you ready? Not now. Later. You need rest. You need to get better. And the way she looked now, he could almost pretend that he meant it all for her sake, and not for his... It had been a long time since he’d seen Buffy quite so pale, so unnaturally faint and unsteady, not at all the indomitable spitfire he remembered - but he also knew this weakness must be transitory, a passing thing. It was the stain at her side, the flush of her skin; a combination of loss of blood and heat exhaustion, and nothing more. She’d recover soon enough, given time - and food and drink, he realized with an unexpected sense of alarm - two things that he and Illyria needed so sparingly that it seldom held any urgency for either of them.
“Talk,” he echoed dumbly. “That can wait. Look at you, Buffy - you’re exhausted.”
“No. No, I’m not.” The halting shortness of breath in her voice belied her words. “I need to do this now, Spike.”
“Why?”
“Because... because I just do, that’s all.”
“Okay. Okay. What is it, then?” He swallowed past the lump in his own throat. “Angel, is it? Don’t worry. We’re going to find him.”
“Yes. No. I mean...” Her voice was agitated. Buffy shut her eyes for a long moment, seeming to catch her breath. “Wait. What do you mean you’re ‘going to find him?’ You don’t know where he is?”
Put bluntly, that was the gist of it - but Spike tried to find softer words, to offer her something that wouldn’t dash her hopes.
Illyria was not nearly so restrained. “Angel is lost.”
Her wide eyes blinking surprise, Buffy drew in a sharp breath, then winced with pain, pressing a hand against her chest. “But... lost? I don’t understand. How can you have lost him...?”
Whether intended to or not, the words stung, and Spike flung out flippant words to deflect his own sense of failure: “Yeah, well, you know how it is, when you don’t put the big lummox in the same damn place every time...” And then couldn’t help but cringe at how callous it sounded.
Buffy stared at him, uncomprehending.
“We’ll find him, Buffy. I promise.” Mouthing the words, even though he didn’t know when or how he’d be able to make them come true. He and Illyria had been looking now for a long time - almost as long as they’d been running - and they’d found nothing, not even ashes-
An awkward hush followed, tension crackling in all the unspoken words that flooded the silence.
When Buffy spoke again, the change of subject was not much easier to bear. “What happened after Sunnydale? Why didn’t you tell me you were alive?”
“I’m not alive. I’m a vampire.”
“You know what I mean.” The clear tones of her voice ringing like condemnation. He wished it weren’t such a familiar sound.
“Yeah, Buffy, I do.” And what was the point of saying it, what was the point of going through all of it again. Unlife wasn’t life. Undead was dead, and it was never ever going to be good enough. Never going to be anything more. Given enough time, even he’d been able to work that through his thick skull. No white picket fences and no happily ever after. Just a dead end. An ending. And that was what Sunnydale had been.
From the corner of his eye, he realized Illyria was still watching the two of them attentively, the hint of a smile on her lips that was equal parts mockery and amusement.
“Hey. Do you mind, Blue?”
“I do not mind,” she replied with oblivious precision, as if it made perfect sense that this scene was being played out solely for her entertainment. “Continue.”
“Illyria,” he growled warningly.
“Spike,” Buffy spoke again, recapturing his attention. Her voice imploring - and maybe it was just her weakness speaking, her injuries, but still... that hint of neediness captured him, made him want to give anything to ease it away - as she murmured, “Spike, please...”
And that instinctive, unspoken reply in his own heart: Buffy...
His jaw tightened, and there was a tremor within him. Still aching, still not quite healed, and perhaps he wasn’t as over her as he wanted to believe.
“Later.” His voice hard and unyielding, because he knew that strength was the only thing that she ever listened to. “When we’re away from here, somewhere else, somewhere safe - but not now. Illyria and I need to plan a way out of here - it’s dangerous for us to stay put too long, and I don’t have time to argue with you right now. Just... trust me. All right?”
For a moment, he thought Buffy wasn’t going to concede - she seemed to want to protest further - but then, it was a quirk of her nature, wasn’t it, to fight him every step of the way. However, she surprised him by giving an awkward nod of her head that looked a little too much like lightheadedness. “Okay,” she breathed shakily, wary and reluctant and so obviously tired - too tired to press any further.
All the same, she didn’t exactly back down, either - Buffy’s eyes trailed after him, and even in this darkness, there was a brilliancy in her gaze that went beyond fever. She was a sunlight that could burn him to ashes, back in her world. And just behind her, Illyria was standing like a dark shadow, her watchful eyes glimmering like the moon reflecting off of cold blue waters.
A summer’s day, and the night wind; an impossible combustion of frost and flame - bloody hell, he thought, with a prescient shudder, this is gonna be a train wreck.
Chapter 10
Previous chapters here
Author's Sad Note of Apology: Better late than never, right? Right? (Eep. I'm sorry.)
This chapter's title "The Dragon and the Undying" is borrowed from the title of a poem by Siegfried Sassoon. The poem doesn't have anything in common with this story, except that I like Sassoon's poetry, and thought, "Hey, that would be a good chapter title."
And then I was hit by a car and lapsed into a coma for 6 months, which is why this chapter is so late. Okay, so that's a lie. The truth is, I just live in a slow timezone... :-) Actually, life got busy, I got stressed out and stopped writing, and then had a hard time starting up again. I'm sad to say I don't have a better excuse than that.
Large chunks of italicization = flashback.
Disclaimer: The characters of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Angel” belong to Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy. The original characters are my fault. No copyright infringement intended, and as this is posted for free, and read for free, nobody is losing any money. Suing me won’t make you any money either (wah! see my puny bank account!), so let’s just not.
All the Things That Are Lost
Chapter 9: The Dragon & The Undying
The strobe light of memory - the cold rain-slicked, blood-slicked alleyway that was awash with death; the expansive, explosive pressure of the portal appearing above, around, beneath them; blinding, swallowing them whole.
Raw. An almost incomprehensible raw-edged tattered state of being... as if caught up in a saw-toothed jaw, beneath the crushing bite of a molar not meant to tear. Friend and foe were packed together in some dark, tiny, voiceless nightmare corner of the universe. Compression, ribs beginning to splinter and crack. No room for blood, air, marrow or memory. Flatten and fold and pressed smaller, always smaller. Pushed to the very edge, to the end of self. End of everything.
And then - pop! - back into existence, back into wholeness, back as if everything that had just happened had been only one instant’s bad dream, and they were through the portal - it was spitting them out into a place he didn’t know - to a place where the earth shuddered and pitched in angry tremors beneath them, and the dark sky rippled with sheets of unnatural lightning - elsewhen, elsewhere.
Hordes of demons. Hordes. All the hosts of hell, all screaming bloody murder.
Gunn, stumbling and falling for the final time, struck down, spitting blood and breathing his last - killed by a swordstroke and the night’s accumulation of injuries. Humans were fragile, Illyria said. They lived for but a moment, and died in the blinking of an eye. She was angered, she declared, grieved; she was not herself. And she left Gunn’s side and waded out into the onslaught, killing with her bare hands, lethal destruction, and the chaotic throng of demons parted briefly like waves below her then swallowed her from sight.
And Angel... Angel seemed to go mad, insane with grief. Perhaps he’d lost too much and too many in his cause; perhaps he’d decided his holy crusade against Wolfram & Hart was the only thing he had left. Dark indomitable ferocity - steel and fang and fist - he turned in the other direction and fought his way to the dragon. Dragon. Mad. Insane. No one could defeat such a thing. A brief remembrance of history and legend flared in his mind - Saint George. Yes, Saint George slew the dragon. But they were none of them saints. Angel said soul or no soul, they were all damned - all of them - but he would not go down without a fight.
Spike followed him. Steel and fang and fist, he followed Angel. What else could he do? And the great beast lifted head, beat wings, a terrifying intelligence sparking in those cold-fire eyes. Chilled the blood. But Angel marched forward, his sword held high and righteous against it as the dragon roared, and Spike moved to follow, only at the last second catching sight of that great barbed tail sweeping toward him from the side, too swiftly to evade, and-
The world exploded within him and around him. Felt a dizzying rush of movement, even though his body was no longer capable of movement, a blur as he tumbled through the air and came crashing down to land on his broken back upon the ground, bleeding out from his punctured sides. Agony. Almost unendurable. Couldn’t staunch his wounds, couldn’t move fingers, couldn’t move legs, couldn’t turn his head, couldn’t even howl out his pain, because the voice needed air from the lungs to function, and those were paralyzed too. Useless. Lay there in a perfect imitation of undead death, while Angel fought on, screaming in rage, in bottomless fury, the hacking movements of his sword as he fought only just visible from the corner of Spike’s fixed gaze. The dragon loomed overlarge, a hulking giant that towered over its sole opponent.
Angel cried out. A different cry. Pain, desolation, ruination. “Spike...!”
Spike couldn’t see him. Couldn’t see. The dark shadow that was the dragon moved, the wind from its wings whipping great gusts of dust and sand that blustered over the corpses on the battlefield - the dragon took to the sky and flew away. Whole and undefeated.
Devastation. Utter and complete.
Strange demons stalked slowly through the carnage of the battlefield. One paused to consider him, then thrust a sword through his sternum. No movement, no sound, not even a twitch of the eyes to betray him, and they continued on their way, leaving him for dead while his few undamaged nerve endings were screaming such excruciating torment that he wanted to be able to die.
The hush that began to settle around him was broken only by the choking, moaning death rattles of the fatally wounded left to perish. Soon enough, they all fell silent. Sand rained into his face and his eyes, the night wind blowing, and the small coherent corner of his mind still functioning wondered if he could possibly endure this until morning, when the sunrise would mercifully put an end to him.
He’d lost track of time, was scarcely aware of anything outside his own pain, when footsteps came rustling through the sand, another shadow drawing near.
Illyria leaned overtop him. “You exist still,” her clear tones crisp and biting. “I have retrieved Angel’s sword,” she said, lifting the bright, bloodstained blade into view, “but he is gone. They must have taken him. I know not where.” She reached down, and some of the dirt and the sand fell away as she turned his head towards her. Her own face and form marked all over with blood and ruin, but the intensity of her gaze was undimmed. “You are wounded, vampire. But I will bring you with me, and you will heal.”
And the last thing he recalled before his senses shattered completely was Illyria leaning forward to pick him up.
<<><> <><><> <><>>
A small hand pressed firmly upon the side of his face, a voice commanding him to wake and listen. Power and demand. He fought the lethargy, his eyes opening to a hazy blur he could not quite comprehend, and listened.
“You are not healing as you should.” Illyria’s voice, full of censure and displeasure. “Time passes and you do but linger in this fashion. Why?”
Why? The question trickled slowly through his consciousness. Why? Because he’d lost too much blood to retain his strength, and his injuries were too severe to heal without blood. He was trapped in that futile state of half-life where all his remaining energy was expended on merely existing, with none left to spare for healing. “Bl... blood,” he whispered, having to force his lungs to expel enough air to make the words audible, and even that small task exhausted him. “Can’t heal... without...”
“You require blood.”
Of course. A vampire could go on for a long long time without falling into dust, but some injuries were too extreme to overcome without sustenance. And he remembered the dragon - massive, monstrous, with sharp shiny teeth and long bony pikes lining that serpentine tail that twitched back and forth... Twitched, and cracked like eggshells, all the bones in his back. What had become of Angel, he wondered distractedly, and tried, irrationally, to call his name. Angel. Angelus. Why aren’t you here? Where-
A firm grasp at the back of his neck. Illyria, he realized. Illyria. ‘You break so easily,’ she’d told him once, maybe not so long ago, as she knocked him to the floor during one of their sparring sessions with a single negligent gesture. ‘Why do you bother getting back up?’ He knew he couldn’t have got up now, not on his own, because now he was broken... well and truly broken...
But Illyria lifted him up and held him close without chastising. Though the touch of her hands on his ruined back was near torture, her body was a contradictory blend of softness and steel. He breathed to catch the scent of her - a peculiar intermixture of human and an exotic otherness. The body itself was still nominally human, but that scent was overlaid with a dissimilar essence - not the familiar demonic pungency, but the disconcerting sensation of something far older, puissant...
She tipped his head, turned it toward her and pressed it firmly against the vein she had opened on the side of her neck.
A spasm of shock. Not at all like the honey-sweetness of human blood, but fraught with a potent corrosive strength that seized him and rattled against his nerve endings to the point of sensory overload. He couldn’t tell whether he was drinking it in or drowning in it. Blood and fire and the end of the world...
He lost himself in that chaos, until her voice came again, like the sound of thunder in his veins. “Rest now,” she ordered with stern authority, as she let him loose, laying him down once more, and his head was whirling, sinking him swiftly back into unconsciousness. “I will tend to you until you are healed.”
<<><> <><><> <><>>
That dream again - the memories of the battle that had brought them here - why was he dreaming of that again? Spike wondered, stirring as he began to regain consciousness, and falling still when his pained limbs protested a little too strongly.
No matter how much time had passed, it seemed that night’s memories still haunted him, that dragon prowled relentlessly through his restive mind. Illyria - the taste of her - like metal and fire, forged in a white-hot furnace, and burning painfully against his sharpened teeth. The harrowing torment of his shattered spine. Angel’s despair. That sound he had made in his throat, before he disappeared, vanished, was carried away or eaten or whatever had become of him. Always, Angel’s despair, unfurling like black wings that shadowed everything.
And... “...Buffy?” Opening his eyes in the same moment that he mumbled her name, he woke to find himself alone. Strange that he’d dreamt of her... of Buffy. He didn’t so much anymore - tried not to, anyway. And when he did, it was usually distant and regretful.
But there’d been such a surreal vividness to this dream - not taking place in her happy little world of white picket fences, she’d been here, fighting a losing battle against demons in the scorching heat of the Kotulka deserts; she’d been leaning over him, speaking to him, smiling down at him. And for a delirious instant, some small piece of him had almost expected to open his eyes and find that it was true.
No Buffy, which was not surprising.
No Illyria, which was a bit surprising. But, catching sight of Puffin’s barbellate form hunched unobtrusively by the entrance, he felt his tension ease somewhat. He recognized the surroundings. This was one of the abandoned ruins at Chutna - it was one of Illyria’s more secretive hiding places, which she used sparingly - too close, she always said, to other nexus of power, too near to enemy eyes. If they were holed up here, things must still be a bit dicey. On the other hand, if she’d left Puffin on watch, the situation couldn’t be too dire. And she was never gone for too long, anyway.
Deciding to wait for Illyria to come back and update him on current events, Spike let his head drop back down, briefly closing his eyes.
“Must have given me a double-dose this time,” he muttered to himself, trying to suppress the headache buzzing around his skull. Illyria’s blood was a powerful restorative - maybe more than a little too potent for him, but it wasn’t like he had a lot of alternatives.
Even so, the fever-dreams and resultant hangovers were a bit of a drawback. At this point, if he were given a choice, he’d rather not remember the past quite so clearly: Fred’s tragic and senseless death, Angel’s doomed crusade... What had they been thinking, to choose to go out and die in a battle they couldn’t possibly win? They hadn’t died, but they hadn’t won either.
More to the point, why did he keep doing it? Going out to be broken on the battlefield, and pieced back together, again and again, by Illyria, who was the only unbreakable thing left in his life. Thoughts of Prometheus and Sisyphus passed through his unsettled mind, and Spike briefly wondered if perhaps Angel had been right; if they had all been doomed to hell, then maybe this was it, and each of them was now walking that road.
And then gave a derisive snort, which sent a spasm of pain rippling through his midsection. “Ow! Bloody hell, that hurts...” Served him right. All that philosophical moodiness had always been Angel’s bit - in Spike, it was a sure sign of a concussion. If he didn’t snap out of it and get off his sorry arse before Illyria returned, she’d get to yammering on about the feebleness of vampires and all of the other not-God-King-like creatures of the world, and his head ached too much at the moment to even consider listening to that speech again.
Spike groaned as he slowly coaxed his body up into a sitting position - muscles strained and twinged complainingly, but nothing tore. Couldn’t ask for much more than that. And then stopped and stared with goggling incomprehension at the bandages wrapped efficiently about his arm and his side. A long, ragged swath of lace-trimmed fabric, looking almost as if it had been ripped from a piece of women’s clothing. He hadn’t seen lace since-
Taking a deep breath, he scented the air. “Buffy...?!” That wasn’t possible... was it? Tried to look every which way at once, which only made him dizzy, and he cursed as he toppled clumsily onto one elbow. “Puffin,” he yowled pugnaciously, “where in the sodding hell are my clothes?!”
The small creature shifted at the sound of its name, turned to regard him with black glittering eyes, and chittered something in response. The curt reply either meant “right where you left them” or “stop yelling, you wanker.” Spike hadn’t quite got the hang of the finer points of its language yet, but for the time being, he didn’t have anyone else to shout at.
Spying his clothing piled up in the corner, he clumsily pulled out his boots and his pants, struggling to get dressed. But his balance wasn’t right, and the little shimmers of pain running along his nerve endings were threatening to cramp if he moved too quickly. Trying to ignore all of that, he focused on the thought of Buffy. Could it really be her? Didn’t seem possible... but that maddening scent still lingered in the air. Where was she? If she were here, then why wasn’t she here? He had to go out there and find her - damn it, if anything had happened to her...
Puffin bounced down from the steps, chattering again, and this time Spike understood perfectly. But he shook his head. “You can’t stop me,” he said, even as Puffin’s needlelike quills lifted and spread outwards like a giant bristly blowfish that was going to be more than a little difficult to get past. “It’s Buffy,” he insisted, as if that would mean anything to the small creature. “If she’s out there, I’m going.”
The sibilant hiss that came in response was a very definitive “no.”
Spike shifted his stance, letting his eyes flash golden, a rush of ferocity running through his veins as his body morphed into its more potent vampire form. Trying to draw strength from that giddy onrush of demonic power, even though he knew that in his present state that it wouldn’t be enough, he roared a challenge at the small creature.
Puffin did not give way, either sensing that there was very little substance beneath Spike’s bravado, or else simply determined to comply with whatever directives Illyria had placed upon it before leaving: most likely “protect” and “prevent.”
Damn babysitter.
Of course, if Puffin insisted on barring the way, there was little he could do about it. In his current condition, catching even a few of the poison-tipped quills would likely knock him flat. Nothing for it but to try to find another way out of here.
Unexpectedly, however, Puffin deflated, lowering its quills and sidling out of the way. Seizing his chance without question, Spike bounded past it and into the tunnel leading upward.
A deceptively slender figure barred the way, descending the stairs with imperious attitude. “Your caterwauling,” Illyria stated, “is clamorous enough to waken even the deaf and dead still slumbering within the Deeper Well. And it is,” she added with a disdainful sniff, “most ill befitting.”
“Spare me the sodding lecture, Miss Manners! Where is she? Where’s-” The demanding question died in his throat as he saw movement in the shadows behind Illyria. The unspoken words hissed out between his teeth like breath. No words.
In shocked surprise, he slipped back into human form, the sudden loss of his vampiric strength nearly toppling him. Even so, he scarcely noticed.
Almost illusory as she moved through the gloom, Buffy looked as insubstantial as any one of his memories: small and slim-limbed, the pale glow of her hair, and wide luminous eyes fixed on his... god, those eyes of hers. Expressive and unguarded in a way he hadn’t seen in ages - not closed - not veiled.
“Hey,” Buffy said, the subtle sound of a smile more than half-hidden in the odd brittleness of her voice. “You’re finally awake.”
Was he? The thought crossed his mind that he might be dreaming. That he’d obviously cracked his skull during the latest skirmish with the bad guys, and all of this was only a fragment of his muddled blood-fed fever-dreams. Might be. Must be.
But Illyria felt substantial enough beneath his grip as he pushed past her, moving up the narrow staircase.
And Buffy, when he caught disbelievingly at her hand, didn’t wither away as he touched her, didn’t vanish into a puff of wistful memory. Her skin was a bonfire beneath his fingertips, her pulse fluttering like a bird’s wings. His own heart seemed to lurch in response, as if recalling a distant memory of beating. “Buffy. I... can hardly believe it... You’re... here? I thought I was... I mean, how did you... How...”
Mercifully, Illyria interrupted his tongue-tied stammerings with a deeply irritated declaration: “You are obstructing the stairwell. It is irksome. Come in or go away.” And her footsteps stalked off in a firmly disapproving staccato.
“And I used to think that Kennedy was temperamental,” Buffy remarked in a perilous tone of voice that was tipping somewhere between amusement and aggravation. “Where did you find her?”
“We didn’t; she found us. Story for another time,” he said, cutting himself short as he abruptly registered the tremor running through Buffy’s limbs, and only then realized how pale she was. Bloody idiot. Too busy gawking like a fool to notice that she was injured. “Come on. Let’s get you inside.”
“I’m okay,” she murmured, but did not refuse his assistance, which meant she wasn’t. “Mostly okay,” she amended faintly. “Just waiting for the patented Slayer strength to kick in again. I’m expecting it... any minute now actually...”
What happened? He almost asked the question aloud, but his sluggish brain finally whirred back into action, suddenly starting to connect the dots. Abruptly, he recalled the quiet, still morning - couldn’t have been more than a day or two ago now - but it had been just after daybreak, and everything was bright and gleaming and oddly peaceful. They had been making their way through the wilds, hoping for a quick and uneventful crossing, when Illyria had suddenly halted in mid-stride, pivoting around as if in response to a summons only she could hear. “The door has opened,” she had said, with something like shock in her voice, “someone has come.”
He hadn’t grasped the import of her words, and his own questions had been unremarkable. “Which door? Where?”
“My door.” Such solemn emphasis. “The entrance into this plane of existence.” Her glassy eyes focused on invisible things. “The enemy has sent emissaries to attend to it.” With barely a pause, she then voiced her customary strategy: “We will intercept and destroy them.”
“Could be a trap,” he’d reminded her. Could be... but then again, the two of them were a bad influence on each other - she’d always been far too overconfident for her own good, with an appetite for destruction that greatly outstripped her size, and he’d never been able to resist a good brawl and the chance to settle a few scores. “Oh, what the hell,” he’d conceded, casting caution aside with a rakish grin. “Okay, let’s go bust some skulls. Lead on, MacDuff.”
Illyria had favoured him with the exceedingly skeptical look she reserved for his more baffling statements, but had said nothing. Merely stalked forward and gestured, ripping a glittering blue-white portal in the air - and once again he’d had to marvel at her effortless skill, at how much more powerful she’d grown here, in this place, as if it were a hothouse of mystical energy. Sometimes it worried him - sometimes he thought of her power outstripping her body, as it had once before, with nearly devastating results - and how would he save her, then? Wesley, like all the others, was gone...
But for now, anyway, her power was utterly within her control, and the portal she’d opened had dropped them into the midst of a pack of Grushnalk soldiers - hardy, hulking brutes that were sent out when bashing and smashing was the only diplomacy intended.
And Buffy had been there, fighting them.
Buffy. Impossible. Not her, and not here. Couldn’t be. Illusion or deception. Some kind of trap. And yet, even if it had been, he knew he’d still have walked right into it just the way he had. Because... Buffy. She’d always been his fatal flaw, and he’d never ever quite been able to turn his back on her.
Most of his adrenalin-charged memories of the battle had by now dissipated into a disorderly haze, but he didn’t need them to see that Buffy hadn’t escaped unscathed. Even in the shadow, he glimpsed the smudges of bruises marring her cheekbone and her jaw, a few scratches on her neck and many more on her arms. A bulky swath of fabric was bunched overtop her flimsy, shredded shirt in a makeshift bandage, and another wrapped around her leg; he could feel the shivers of exhaustion running through her as he helped her sit down.
“Are you all right, Buffy?”
“I’ve had better days,” she admitted after a pause, “but it’s nothing I can’t handle. I’ll get by.”
For a long moment he stared at her, disbelief still trying to overcome him. “Buffy... Buffy...” He was dumbfounded, mumbling her name over and over, and made an attempt to form a coherent sentence. “How did you get here, Buffy? Why did you come?”
“She is searching for Angel,” Illyria stated.
Some part of him was faintly amazed that those words didn’t cause him greater pain, but it had been a long time now, hadn’t it?, and maybe he’d finally accustomed himself to living without her. All he felt was a distant, muted ache. “Yeah. Aren’t we all,” he said, the words dry as dust in his throat.
“Angel?” Buffy repeated fuzzily, her voice lifting into a question. “Is he here?”
“No. No, he’s... not.” He dared to touch his hand lightly against her face, found it burning. “You’re feverish - shouldn’t be up and about like this.” His narrowed eyes flicked towards Illyria. “What were you doing? Where did you take her?”
“She required water,” Illyria replied evenly. “She had already consumed all that there was here.”
He thought of the long crumbling stairway winding upward in the dark, and an ailing Buffy having to climb it. “What, and you couldn’t just go on your own and bring some back here?”
“I do not stoop,” Illyria said very precisely, “to feed her.”
“We’re on a mountaintop,” Buffy interrupted in a vague confusion, not seeming to have noticed their quiet side conversation, and her voice sounded thready and stifled in the long darkness of the room. “I saw outside, it’s all cloud and stone - it felt cold. But there was a desert - what happened to the desert?”
“Illyria brought you here, to keep you safe,” he explained gently. “Don’t you remember?”
“But... what is this place?” Buffy persisted.
Spike hesitated, not sure whether she were asking about the cavernous chamber they’d temporarily settled in, or the larger frame of the world she’d fallen into.
Illyria, however, chose to answer only in the most concrete terms: “For the moment, it is sanctuary from prying eyes.”
“We think... it might have been some kind of temple,” he tried to explain, “or a place of learning, but whatever it was is a long time ago now...”
“Wise ones and holy fools,” Illyria agreed, her head swiveling round to gaze at the crumbling columns only just holding aloft the heavy roof overhead. “Here they sang songs of power, painted gaudy sigils and consulted with the stars. But now they are naught but bone and dust, and all their pale paintings are tarnished with the grime of many years.”
“Okaaay.” Buffy’s voice was uncertain. “And so you come here... why?”
“The stars still burn bright in the night sky,” Illyria replied stolidly, as if that were explanation enough. “I see the old ways.”
“Some of the protections still seem to hold,” Spike translated. “This place - seems like it’s a bit of a blind spot on the map. At any rate, the bad guys haven’t yet found us out here. But we don’t usually stay too long-”
“We have lingered overlong already,” Illyria chastised.
“Bad guys,” Buffy echoed, still seeming a little disoriented. “And just who are they?”
“You are replete with ignorance, and your enquiries are tedious. Is this your usual state, or were you damaged in combat?”
Buffy’s gaze sharpened noticeably, a spark of irritation momentarily overriding her fatigue. “You’re blue and funny-looking. Is that your usual state, or was there some big accident at the cosmetics factory?”
“Impertinent,” Illyria stated.
“Arrogant,” Buffy retorted.
“Right, then,” Spike interrupted, quickly moving to stand between them. A little too quickly, and tried not to flinch at the warning flash of pain in his side - had to try to remember he wasn’t anywhere near healed yet. “Glad to see that you two are getting on like houses on fire,” he said sourly. “Now that everyone’s just met, how about we try to not kill each other for a while yet? We’ve got more than enough to worry about as it is.”
“I am in no danger,” Illyria scoffed haughtily.
“Yeah? You bloody well will be if Gresalk’s people come kicking down the door,” he answered sharply. “Come on, Blue - you said it yourself: I’m not a hundred percent, and she’s not either. So let’s just find a safe place to bolt to, get there in one piece, and then we can argue about-”
“Wait.” Buffy caught a handful of his shirt as he started to move away from her. “Spike. We have to talk.” Her fingers shaking as they knotted in the fabric.
Words he wanted to ask: Are you sure? Are you ready? Not now. Later. You need rest. You need to get better. And the way she looked now, he could almost pretend that he meant it all for her sake, and not for his... It had been a long time since he’d seen Buffy quite so pale, so unnaturally faint and unsteady, not at all the indomitable spitfire he remembered - but he also knew this weakness must be transitory, a passing thing. It was the stain at her side, the flush of her skin; a combination of loss of blood and heat exhaustion, and nothing more. She’d recover soon enough, given time - and food and drink, he realized with an unexpected sense of alarm - two things that he and Illyria needed so sparingly that it seldom held any urgency for either of them.
“Talk,” he echoed dumbly. “That can wait. Look at you, Buffy - you’re exhausted.”
“No. No, I’m not.” The halting shortness of breath in her voice belied her words. “I need to do this now, Spike.”
“Why?”
“Because... because I just do, that’s all.”
“Okay. Okay. What is it, then?” He swallowed past the lump in his own throat. “Angel, is it? Don’t worry. We’re going to find him.”
“Yes. No. I mean...” Her voice was agitated. Buffy shut her eyes for a long moment, seeming to catch her breath. “Wait. What do you mean you’re ‘going to find him?’ You don’t know where he is?”
Put bluntly, that was the gist of it - but Spike tried to find softer words, to offer her something that wouldn’t dash her hopes.
Illyria was not nearly so restrained. “Angel is lost.”
Her wide eyes blinking surprise, Buffy drew in a sharp breath, then winced with pain, pressing a hand against her chest. “But... lost? I don’t understand. How can you have lost him...?”
Whether intended to or not, the words stung, and Spike flung out flippant words to deflect his own sense of failure: “Yeah, well, you know how it is, when you don’t put the big lummox in the same damn place every time...” And then couldn’t help but cringe at how callous it sounded.
Buffy stared at him, uncomprehending.
“We’ll find him, Buffy. I promise.” Mouthing the words, even though he didn’t know when or how he’d be able to make them come true. He and Illyria had been looking now for a long time - almost as long as they’d been running - and they’d found nothing, not even ashes-
An awkward hush followed, tension crackling in all the unspoken words that flooded the silence.
When Buffy spoke again, the change of subject was not much easier to bear. “What happened after Sunnydale? Why didn’t you tell me you were alive?”
“I’m not alive. I’m a vampire.”
“You know what I mean.” The clear tones of her voice ringing like condemnation. He wished it weren’t such a familiar sound.
“Yeah, Buffy, I do.” And what was the point of saying it, what was the point of going through all of it again. Unlife wasn’t life. Undead was dead, and it was never ever going to be good enough. Never going to be anything more. Given enough time, even he’d been able to work that through his thick skull. No white picket fences and no happily ever after. Just a dead end. An ending. And that was what Sunnydale had been.
From the corner of his eye, he realized Illyria was still watching the two of them attentively, the hint of a smile on her lips that was equal parts mockery and amusement.
“Hey. Do you mind, Blue?”
“I do not mind,” she replied with oblivious precision, as if it made perfect sense that this scene was being played out solely for her entertainment. “Continue.”
“Illyria,” he growled warningly.
“Spike,” Buffy spoke again, recapturing his attention. Her voice imploring - and maybe it was just her weakness speaking, her injuries, but still... that hint of neediness captured him, made him want to give anything to ease it away - as she murmured, “Spike, please...”
And that instinctive, unspoken reply in his own heart: Buffy...
His jaw tightened, and there was a tremor within him. Still aching, still not quite healed, and perhaps he wasn’t as over her as he wanted to believe.
“Later.” His voice hard and unyielding, because he knew that strength was the only thing that she ever listened to. “When we’re away from here, somewhere else, somewhere safe - but not now. Illyria and I need to plan a way out of here - it’s dangerous for us to stay put too long, and I don’t have time to argue with you right now. Just... trust me. All right?”
For a moment, he thought Buffy wasn’t going to concede - she seemed to want to protest further - but then, it was a quirk of her nature, wasn’t it, to fight him every step of the way. However, she surprised him by giving an awkward nod of her head that looked a little too much like lightheadedness. “Okay,” she breathed shakily, wary and reluctant and so obviously tired - too tired to press any further.
All the same, she didn’t exactly back down, either - Buffy’s eyes trailed after him, and even in this darkness, there was a brilliancy in her gaze that went beyond fever. She was a sunlight that could burn him to ashes, back in her world. And just behind her, Illyria was standing like a dark shadow, her watchful eyes glimmering like the moon reflecting off of cold blue waters.
A summer’s day, and the night wind; an impossible combustion of frost and flame - bloody hell, he thought, with a prescient shudder, this is gonna be a train wreck.
Chapter 10